It is said that a people’s
values can be seen in
the god they worship.
For Christians, “God is
love” (1Jn 4:8). But a
God who is love seems
like a philosophical
impossibility. How can
one God, who is
perfect, lacking nothing
in
Himself
and
possessed
of
no
dependence
on
creatures, be love when
love necessitates a
relation to another?
The resolution of this
paradox God Himself
has revealed to us: God is perfect unity, but a unity of three
Divine Persons – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – who are
each equally divine. The Father, Son and Spirit exist from
all eternity. None precedes the other in time, but each are
related to the other by a relationship that orders them with
respect to the other’s.
The ever-living, all-knowing, almighty God the Father exists
from all eternity and is the source of all perfection created
and uncreated. The self-conception and self-expression of
the perfect Being is so complete that it is another person:
God the Son, the image of the invisible Father, “the only-
begotten Son of God, begotten from the Father before all
the ages, light from light, true God from true God, begotten
not made, consubstantial with the Father, through whom all
things came to be” (Nicene-Constantipolitan Creed). The
love between the Father and the Son is so perfect that it
too is another person: the Holy Spirit “the holy, the lordly
and life-giving One, proceeding forth from the Father [and
the Son] co-worshipped and co-glorified with Father and
Son” (ibid.).
But if the Holy Spirit is the love between the Father and the
Son, how can God as a whole be called Love? Each
Person shares equally in the divine nature, so that each
Person shares equally in the perfections of the Other’s.
The only distinction between the Person of the Trinity is
Their mutual relations. None of the Persons exists in
respect to Himself alone, but Each exists relatively to the
Other two:
…the “three Persons” who exist in God are the reality of
word and love in their attachment to each other. They are
not substances, personalities in the modern sense, but the
relatedness whose pure actuality …does not impair unity of
the highest being but fills it out. St. Augustine once
enshrined this idea in the following formula: “He is not
called Father with reference to himself but only in relation
to the Son; seen by himself he is simply God.” Here the
decisive point comes beautifully to light. “Father” is purely a
concept of relationship. Only in being-for the other is he
Father; in his own being-in-himself he is simply God.
Person is the pure relation of being related, nothing else.
Relationship is not something extra added to the person, as
it is with us; it only exists at all as relatedness.