@Halcon
Thank you
for your thoughtful and gracious response. I deeply appreciate your willingness
to engage not only the “technicalities” of theology, but the heart of Christian
faith—the lived, loving encounter with the God who reveals Himself. Your point
about the diversity of attempts to describe the Trinity among believers is both
honest and, I think, instructive. Indeed, human language, even at its best, can
never exhaust the mystery of God; the most profound truths of faith inevitably
draw us beyond our concepts and images, inviting us into a humility that is
itself an act of worship.
Yet, within
this humility, we hold that God’s revelation is not self-contradictory or left
so utterly open that “all explanations are equally correct.” The very reason
the Church has, across the centuries, carefully defined the doctrine of the
Trinity is precisely because some explanations, though well-intentioned, subtly
undermine the reality of God’s self-gift in Christ. This is not about “solving”
a metaphysical puzzle, but about remaining faithful to what God has done and
said in Christ and the Spirit.
You are
quite right: love, as a spiritual reality, eludes strict definition. And yet,
in revelation, love is not left for us to invent or define by our own
standards; God has shown us what love is by giving Himself in the Son and the
Spirit. To encounter the Son is to encounter the very heart of the Father, not
a lesser emissary or exalted creature, but the one who is “of one being with
the Father” (as the Nicene Creed confesses). Here the Church’s confession is
not meant to restrict the soul’s encounter with God, but to safeguard the
fullness of what God has freely revealed: that the love poured out in Jesus is
nothing less than the love of God Himself, not an intermediate being. To say
otherwise, as the early Church realized, is not only to risk misunderstanding
Christ, but to risk losing the full consolation and power of God’s self-giving
love.
On John
17:3 and the divinity of Christ: you ask, with great sincerity, why calling
Jesus “only the Son” (in a non-divine sense) should “negate everything he did
for mankind.” From the human perspective, as you note, even the title “Son of
God” sounds exalted; but the Church’s concern, rooted in the New Testament and
the earliest Christian experience, is that only God Himself could redeem
humanity, overcome sin and death, and restore us to communion with Himself. No
matter how exalted, a creature—no matter how unique—cannot bridge the infinite
gap between Creator and creation. The incarnation is not just God sending a
special messenger, but God Himself entering our history to heal us from within.
To say that Christ is truly God is to affirm that salvation is not a work from
afar, but the intimate self-giving of the divine life to humanity—a union which
alone can deify us, as the Fathers loved to say (“God became man so that man
might become God,” as Athanasius taught).
This is why
the question is not about abstract metaphysics, but about the very substance of
hope: are we united to God Himself, or only to an exalted creature? Is the love
poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit the love of the Creator, or merely of
a mediator? The early Church insisted on Christ’s deity not out of
philosophical rigidity, but out of fidelity to the living experience of
redemption and communion. Anything less was found, in the end, to be an
impoverished gospel—a “different Jesus,” not by human judgment, but by the
logic of revelation itself.
Of course,
as you wisely observe, no human being can fully understand or define God. The
Trinity remains, as Augustine said, “the supreme mystery of the Christian
religion,” and Paul himself reminds us that “now we see in a mirror, dimly” (1
Cor 13:12). The Church does not demand perfect comprehension, nor does it claim
to possess it; rather, it calls us to accept, in humble faith, the truth God
has shown us—even as we know that our grasp is partial and our words always
inadequate. The unity of faith is not uniformity of human explanation, but a
shared assent to the revealed mystery, protected against those distortions
which would finally cut us off from the fullness of God’s love.
In the end,
the doctrine of the Trinity is not a barrier to God, but His gracious
invitation to share in the life and love that He is. Even as we stumble for
words, even as Christians sometimes differ in their ability to articulate the
mystery, what matters is our openness to receive what God gives: the very life
of the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. The Church’s teaching aims
not to limit our approach to God, but to ensure that, in seeking Him, we do not
settle for anything less than the fullness of the divine self-gift offered in
Christ.
I am
grateful for your openness, your humility, and your evident desire for truth
and love. May that desire always draw us deeper into the mystery, not only in
thought, but in the lived reality of faith, hope, and love, until at last we
know even as we are known.
