Prayer to the Blessed Trinity

The Father is my hope. The Son is my refuge. The Holy Spirit is my Protector. Glory to the holy and undivided Trinity, now and forever. Let us praise the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; let us bless and exalt God above all forever! Almighty and everlasting God, to whom we owe the grace of professing the true faith, grant that while acknowledging the glory of the eternal Trinity and adoring its unity, we may through Your majestic power be conrmed in this faith and defended against all adversities; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with You in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.

Trinitarian Persons and Actions

By: Crystal Ramirez Erica Fulton Holly Schulte Kristine Mortola Shannon McGawtha

The three subjects are aware of each other through one consciousness which is possessed in a different way by three of them.
Bernard Lonergan, A Second Collection

When it is asked Three what? then the great poverty from which our language suffers becomes apparent.
St. Augustine of Hippo, De Trinitate

Outline
Three Persons (a) Challenges (b) Trinitarian Persons The Trinitys Actions

Introduction
Problems can be solved, but divine (and human) mysteries are to be pondered. When we ponder a mystery and refuse to dismiss it as either an irrational contradiction or a mere problem, it inevitably deepens. Nowhere else does such deepening happen more dramatically than in the case of the mystery of the divine Trinity.

Three Persons

Challenges

Challenges
How does our nite language of personhood fare when applied to God? St Augustine, De Trinitate: For in truth, because the Father is not the Son, and the Son is not the Father, and the Holy Spirit, who is also called the Gift of God, is neither the Father nor the Son, then certainly there are three. Therefore it was said in plural number: I and my Father are One. (Jn 10:30). But when it is asked Three what? then the great poverty from which our language suffers becomes apparent. But the formula three persons has been coined, not in order to give complete explanation by means of it, but in order that we might not be obliged to remain silent.

Challenges (cont.)
Applying to our God is not a straightforward affair. If, however, we refuse to describe God in personal language we run the risk of understanding God to be less and not more personal. Personal language for God makes our prayer and deep relationship to God possible.

Challenges (cont.)
In the Old Testament, the nature of tripersonal God is foreshadowed with the demonstration of God the Father, which expressed his deep involvement in the story of Israel. The name conveyed the steadfast commitment and compassionate love of God in protecting, cherishing, and nourishing a people whose indelity could also call for discipline.

Challenges (cont.)
Naming God as Father, Son (Word or Wisdom), and Spirit found its roots in the OT. Both in the history of Israel and beyond, the OT understood Wisdom, Word, and Spirit to serve as personied agents of divine activity. As personications that were not yet formally recognized as persons, they operated with personal characteristics. God is utterly beyond our world. The creation and conservation of everything as well as the divine activity within the history of salvation must take place through the agency of Wisdom or the Logos.

Challenges (cont.)
Like Lady Wisdom, the Word is with God and is powerfully creative from the beginning. (Gn 1:1-2:4). At times, the OT scriptures set word in parallelism with spirit or breath as instruments of creation. Spirit shows up frequently as a third way of articulating the creative, revelatory, and redemptive activity of God. In their creative, revelatory, and redemptive involvement, Wisdom, Word, and Spirit took on divine roles, while staying clearly within Gods control.

Challenges (cont.)
The most valuable feature of Wisdom, Word, and Spirit as expressive of the divine activity toward the human race (and the whole world) lay in their being not abstract principles but vivid personications- something that was particularly true in the case of Wisdom. Wisdom called on men and women to listen to its message and to follow it, thus preparing the ground for the visible coming of Jesus and his Spirit.

Challenges (cont.)
The vivid personications of Wisdom/Word and Spirit, inasmuch as they were both identied with God and the divine activity and distinguished from God, opened up the way toward recognizing God to be tripersonal. Without these OT personications (and the Father/Son language applied to God), the acknowledgement of the Trinity would have been so well and providentially prepared- by foreshadowing and by an already existing terminology.

Challenges (cont.)
In order to know a personal language for the Trinity an account for the meaning of person is necessary.

Challenges (cont.)
A trajectory of development that led from Boethius (480-524 or 525 AD) to the Middle Ages arrived at St. Thomas Aquinass (1225-1274 AD) classical description of a person in his Summa Theologiae as a distinct subsistent in a rational nature (subsistens distinctum in natura rationali).

Challenges (cont.)
The philosophical input from Rene Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and John Locke in the 17th century leading into the Enlightenment led to the emergence of a (but not the) typically modern notion of person as the subject of self-awareness and freedom-person as a conscious and autonomous self. The notion of personhood when applied to the doctrine of the Trinity produces what looks like tritheism: three autonomous subjects living and working together in quasi social unity.

Challenges (cont.)
The rational worldview and method of Enlightenment thinkers reversed the Augustinian axiom of believe in order to understand (crede ut intelligas), and made it read If you believe, you will not understand. Belief in the tripersonal God revealed denitively in Jesus death and resurrection was put aside as an obstacle to honest though and true understanding.

Challenges (cont.)
German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels (1770-1831) identication of an Absolute Spirit embodying oneness while simultaneously full of contradictions in the dialectical progression of history was at the time the richest treatment of the Spirit ever found in Western philosophy.

Challenges (cont.)
The centrality of history in Hegelianism throws into question the redemptive and communal reality of the Spirit. If God is the world itself, then God cannot bring salvation to the world through the intratrinitarian dialogue and the life which humans share with it. Nevertheless, Hegel encouraged notable theologians to think of the Trinity in historical terms, and to examine the Christology in the Trinity.

Challenges (cont.)
In the twentieth century, various other forces, both beyond Christianity and within Christian scholarship and life, have exercised their impact on the latest developments in Trinitarian theology.

Challenges (cont.)
With the emergence of personalist philosophers, human beings were conceived as existing in and constituted by their relations to other self-aware objects.

Challenges (cont.)
Martin Buber (1878-1965) and others have offered theologians the language of I, Thou, and We when speaking about the relational reality of God. When I relates to the Thou, another person who addresses me and responds to me in love, a We emerges to unite us. This experience hints as the I of the Father, the Thou of the Son, and the We of the Spirit.

Challenges (cont.)
C.G. Jung (1875-1961) drew on the human experience of psychological growth. Jung associated Trinitarian belief with a threefold account of human development: submission (to the Father, self- assertion (of the Son, and then selfsurrender (to the Spirit).

Challenges (cont.)
Karlfried Graf Durckheims (1896-1961) studies the experiences and longings of people for Life, Meaning, and Love can be likened to the tripersonal God.

Challenges (cont.)
19th and 20th century emancipatory movements have had their impact on Trinitarian reection. Moral thinkers can point to Trinitarian faith as ultimate encouragement for those who cherish a true unity in diversity. The loving interrelatedness of the divine persons can vitalize human beings who seek the grounds for respecting one another and the natural world in a healing and wholesome way.

Trinitarian Persons

Trinitarian Persons
What Denes a person? A person is: Conscious Free

Trinitarian Persons (cont.)

The relational aspect of our humanity dispels the misunderstanding that the nature of personhood is autonomous, are self-sufcient centers of consciousness and free activity, or self-absorbed.

Trinitarian Persons (cont.)

So what is personhood? A person is not:
someone who shuns serious relationships or interdependence one person being the ultimate law unto himself derived from ones own private experience

Trinitarian Persons (cont.)

Understanding rst what a person is not helps us to comprehend what a person is. According to OCollins, a person: contributes to his lasting human growth and well-being through relationships is an interpersonal subject, not self-contained shares and gives himself in love with others becomes a true individual by existing in and for others

Trinitarian Persons (cont.)

OCollins points out that our being is not dened by our relationship with others; rather, relationships define our
being.

Trinitarian Persons (cont.)

The relational aspect is paramount in our understanding of the Trinity. Otherwise, we fall into the trap of misunderstanding the indivisible unity that exists between the Three Persons.

Trinitarian Persons (cont.)

In the case of the tripersonal God, the distinctness of interrelated persons is not constituted by a separation of consciousness and free subjectivities.

Trinitarian Persons (cont.)

We must accept that the Trinitys essential properties- knowing, willing and acting- are identical and shared in common (page 178).

Trinitarian Persons (cont.)

So as our being is dened by our relationships, so, too, is are the three persons of the Trinity distinctly who they are because of their relations to each other.

Trinitarian Persons (cont.)

Relational Quality Knowledge that three persons are persons in different ways: God the Father Provider, Protector God the Son Salvation, Redeemer God the Holy Spirit Comforter

Trinitarian Persons (cont.)

Divine Life Unity in Koinonia Greek root eng Fellowship A loving Christian fellowship or communion with God or with fellow Christians; said in particular of the early Christian Community A blissful communion of love presents itself as the ultimate ground and goal

Trinitarian Persons (cont.)

Divine Life Koinonia in Action The Koinonia mission: They are Christians called to live together in intentional community sharing a life of prayer, work, study, service and fellowship. They seek to embody peacemaking, sustainability, and radical sharing. While honoring people of all backgrounds and faiths, they strive to demonstrate the way Jesus as an alternative to materialism, militarism and racism. Founded in 1942 by Clarence Jordan Koinonia Partners: 1324 GA Hwy 49 S, Americus, GA 31719

The Trinitys Actions

The Trinitys Actions

A person discloses himself in his actions, and better we know the person, the better we understand his actions, so it is with the Trinity.

The Trinitys Actions (cont.)

We must understand the action of the Trinity and how the inseparable character of trinitarian operations relates back to personhood. Athanasius & Cappadocians J.N.D. Kelly Early Church Doctrines Catechism of the Catholic Church Fifth Lateran Council

The Trinitys Actions (cont.)

OCollins uses divine action ad extra and the term of such an action, in understanding the actions of the Trinity Johannine Themes in the Early Church Councils, David Arias OCollins Catechism of the Catholic Church

The Trinitys Actions (cont.)

OCollins reemphasizes the specicity of the Spirits functional mission and ontological presence. hypostatic or personal union The Mission of the Spirit and the Mission of the Church: Towards A Trinitarian Mission, Adam Dodds Catechism of the Catholic Church Acts 10:38

The Trinitys Actions (cont.)

OCollins references signicance of the throne of grace. iconography representation of the Trinity shows distinct actions of the Trinity Catechism of the Catholic Church

The Trinitys Actions (cont.)

The divine persons are communicated each in their own particularity and with a diversity that stems from and reveals their mutual relations.

Various Depictions of the Throne of Grace

Conclusion
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