Day: June 12, 2022

“Behold, a door was opened in heaven”

It is really a dance, the dance of the understanding. It is wonderfully and powerfully expressed in the Athanasian Creed. It is nothing less than the dance of kataphatic and apophatic theology. These are the theological terms for positive and negative theology, the forms of thinking the mystery of God revealed in the witness of the Scriptures to Christ. God is and God is not like anything else. God is, in short, no thing.

Positive theology affirms something of the idea and nature of God by analogy to created things; negative theology recognizes that God is utterly beyond and other, even not other, non aliud. This is the strongest possible counter to the problem of reducing God to any of the forms of human reason, which would make God a construct of our thinking. The dance of the understanding is the circling around the mystery of God as revealed yet revealed for thought. “He therefore that would be saved, let him thus think of the Trinity”; think of the Trinity in this way of affirmation and negation. This is Thou and this is not Thou. Such is the dance of the understanding.

The Trinity is the central doctrine and teaching of the Christian Faith, but is equally the teaching which provides for and requires a respectful engagement with other philosophical religions. Hegel in the 19th century notes that the doctrine of the Trinity is in some sense adumbrated or shadowed forth in all religions. It is not by accident that the first article of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion is “Of Faith in the Holy Trinity”. The first hymn in our Hymn Book, too, is a hymn to God as Trinity; the tune is called Nicaea after the Creed and Councils that determined the terms of our thinking the Trinity. Our thinking the mystery is our life. We cannot not think the Trinity. But how? Only by entering into what is revealed for our thinking and in the ways in which we have been given to think it.

“A door was opened in heaven,” John in Revelation tells us; a door not a window. One of the so-called “I am” sayings of Jesus is “I am the door” (Jn. 10.7). We go through the door and into the mystery of God revealed in Christ, at once the Son of man “that came down from heaven” and “who is in heaven.” To think this is to be born again, literally born upward into the things of God as signaled in the Gospel story of Nicodemus coming to Jesus by night.

(more…)

Print this entry