My last entry, What is the Task of the Theologian?, came to a screeching halt when an obviously poisonous gall bladder made its presence known loud and clear; so off I went to the hospital. Sorry for the delay.
What is the task of the theologian? It is to talk about God. The word theology means God-talk; Christology means Christ-talk; ecclesiology means church-talk. Bruce Marshall of Southern Methodist University, writing in an excellent periodical “Nova et Vetera”, Spring 2013, offers a most helpful reflection which has as its focus the erudite German theologian Matthias Joseph Scheeben, prominent German Catholic theologian in the second half of the 20th Century. Marshall writes – “Scheeben habitually talks about God. He exhibits, to put the point more precisely, an intense focus on the supernatural mysteries of God’s own nature and life, the full range of divine mysteries at the heart of all Christian faith and teaching. This is the area of theology often designated as ‘dogmatic’. Of course,” as Marshall adds, “not all statements about God belong uniquely or properly to dogmatic theology. There are so many other interests that a theologian has – moral theology, spiritual theology, the whole realm of Christian ethics and the like.” Following Marshall we can distinguish two ways of talking about God. One way is to reflect on God as communicating and imparting his own divine nature, communicating his own divine self. This is the realm of dogmatics. The second way to explore theological truth focuses on the creature upon which God freely bestows creaturely existence. All these questions obviously involve God. They indicate truths about God since God is the source from which every creature receives its existence and nature and the goal every creature aims at according to its nature.
My purpose at this time in this blog, which is offered primarily to the parishioners of the three parishes first mentioned in an earlier blog, will be to focus on dogmatics, that is, talk about God and to talk about God communicating his own divine nature. These are the truths that Thomas Aquinas addresses when he explores the mysteries of faith; these are the truths that Matthias Scheeben sought to explore so deeply that he won for himself the title “theologian of the supernatural”; these are the truths Bruce Marshall has recently called our attention to – truths communicating and glorifying the divine nature; these are the truths, divine revelation tells us, that such communication takes place in three irreducibly distinct ways. What are these three distinct ways of God communicating his own divine nature? First of all, there is the eternal and necessary mystery of the divine Trinity. This is the great and primordial truth the Lord Jesus has revealed to us as he has made know to us the mystery of the Father and the mystery of the Holy Spirit. As the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church has put it – “Jesus Christ revealed to us that God is ‘Father’, not only insofar as he created the universe and mankind, but because he eternally generated in his bosom the Son who is his Word.” Who is the Holy Spirit revealed to us by Jesus Christ? The Compendium responds – “The Holy Spirit is the third Person of the Blessed Trinity. He is God, One and equal with the Father and Son. He proceeds from the Father (John 15:26), who is the principle without a principle and the origin of all trinitarian life. He proceeds also from the Son by the eternal Gift which the Father makes of him to the Son. Sent by the Father and the Incarnate Son, the Holy Spirit guides the Church ‘to know all truth’ (John 16:13).” How then does the Church express her Trinitarian faith? The Compendium tells us – “The Church expresses her Trinitarian faith by professing a belief in the oneness of God in whom there are three Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. These three divine Persons are only one God because each of them equally possesses the fullness of the one and indivisible divine nature. They are really distinct from each other by reason of the relations which place them in correspondence to each other. The Father generates the Son; the Son is generated by the Father; the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.” The second mystery one would have to study in talking about how God communicates his own divine nature is the mystery we call the “Incarnation”. This means what Saint John tells us in his gospel – “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God and the Word became flesh and pitched his tent in our midst.” In this mystery our three-Personed God joins a created human nature, a created existence, our own human existence, to the divine nature in the person of the Son so that we can truly affirm with the saints and scholars down through the centuries that God is this human being Jesus and this human being Jesus is truly God. It’s important to stress the meaning of this word “Incarnation”. As the Compendium tells us – “The Church calls the mystery of the wonderful union of the divine and human natures in the one divine Person of the Word the “Incarnation”. To bring about our salvation, the Son of God was made ‘flesh’ and became truly man. Faith in the Incarnation is a distinctive sign of the Christian faith.” How does the Church set forth the mystery of the Incarnation? The Church confesses that Jesus Christ is true God and true man, with two natures, a divine nature and a human nature, not confused with each other but united in the Person of the Word. Therefore, in the humanity of Jesus all things – his marvelous signs, his suffering, and his death – must be attributed to his divine Person which acts by means of his assumed human nature.” In the Byzantine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom we read – “O only-begotten Son and word of God, you who are immortal, you who deigned for our salvation to become incarnate of the holy Mother of God and ever-virgin Mary…, you, while one with the Holy Trinity, glorified with the Father and Holy Spirit, save us.” The mystery of the Trinity is what we call a necessary mystery. God must be and God must be God for all eternity. The mystery of the Incarnation is called a free mystery – it didn’t have to happen. God the Father was not necessitated in any way, except by his love and mercy, to send us his divine Son. Trinity and Incarnation tell us about God communicating the divine nature within the Godhead. A third mystery involves ourselves. It is another free mystery which did not have to be. Thanks to the Lord’s death and resurrection, God the Father communicates a share in his own divine nature to all who have been redeemed by the work of God through Jesus and the Holy Spirit. This means the life of grace which is our sharing in God’s nature and life this side of the grave; it means sharing in God’s glory beyond the grave. Thus, grace is divine glory in exile; divine glory for us is divine grace gone home. This is the mystery we will be concentrating on in subsequent blogs – the mystery of divine grace involving the mystery of human justification, the mystery of predestination, the mystery of the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit. As we say at the heart of Gospel teaching – We are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.
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