Our Lord of the Miracles (“El Señor de los Milagros”) became a great devotion in Peru after the great earthquake of October 20, 1687 destroyed the Lima church but the mural remained intact. The painting vividly shows that God is love, i.e., Christ’s ultimate sacrifice for each one of us. It also shows the Holy Trinity…….the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, it shows the dual nature of Christ as both divine and human. We invoke this image when we make the Sign of the Cross, really a profession of faith and also a prayer. “The juxtaposition of Trinity and cross is by no means accidental. For the cross is the moment when the tensive unity of the three divine persons is on most vivid display.” Mary is present as her heart is pierced by a sword. Mary Magdalene is there as a faithful disciple. See
http://lordofmiraclesbrotherhoodraleighnc.weebly.com/history-of-the-lord-of-miracles.html
With Christmas, Holy
Week, Easter, the Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity Sunday, Corpus Christi, and
living with Christ during the rest of the liturgical year, we must become awestruck
on occasion at the mystery of God. This
is particularly the case in regard to Pentecost and Trinity Sunday 2023, which
we celebrate today.
Bishop Robert Barron
and His Word on Fire apostolate published an excellent series of DVDs on “The Mystery
of God". Thus I would like to share the highlights with the readers
of my blog articles. I wrote it all up when we presented it to the
Catholic Newman Club at the University of Rio Grande a couple of years ago.
The highlights
include: 1) What We Mean By God; 2) St. Thomas Aquinas & the Paths to God; 3)
the Divine Attributes; 4)Providence & the Problem of Evil; 5) Exploring the
Trinity; and 6) the God Who is Love.
1. Atheism and What We Mean By “God”
There are lots of views about God.
Some see him as a mythical fairy in the sky, others as the Supreme Being. Some
consider him a threat to our freedom. But for Christians, God is not one being
among many. He's not a competitor to our flourishing. God is that than which
nothing greater can be thought, the strange and unique source of being itself.
Before discussing anything about God we must become clear about one question:
who is God?
In this episode Fr.
Barron reviews the views of such atheists as Hitchens, Feuerbach, Marx, Freud,
Sartre, etc. as well as mythological beliefs in the ancient gods and contrasts
them with the beliefs of Christianity.
They look upon God as fantasy, a threat to freedom, an opiate for one’s
misery to feel better about life. You
can get more insights on Fr. Barron’s website, www.mysteryofgod.com.
Jesus
Christ. The true God is not
one being among many, not a competitor to our flourishing, not invasive or
intrusive. He is one over whom nothing
greater can be found. Christianity is so
distinctive because it believes that God became one of us as Jesus Christ,
i.e., taking on our human nature in the Incarnation…….having two natures come
together…..being truly divine and truly human, yet maintaining the integrity of
each nature without any mixing of the divine and the creature. God took on our human nature to be an icon of
His person. After centuries of debate
this was resolved and defined in the year 451 at the Council of Chalcedon. We find our deepest identity in God because
we are created according to His image and likeness.
The
Catholic intellectual traditions about God are very rich, but we must do a much better job of
presenting the Christian view of God in the New Evangelization (to be done by
all of us). St. Thomas Aquinas
brought out that God is not a being as such; He is being itself. He is the source of finite existence. St. Anselm said that God plus the
world is not greater than God, while Zeus plus the world would be greater than
Zeus. The true God is greater than
anything we could possibly imagine. The
atheist will never be able to find God as a being in the world because God is
other than the world. God is everywhere
in the world because everything depends upon God in a causal dependence. Everything in the universe depends upon His
power of being; God is the unique source of being itself. St. Augustine brought out: “God is closer to me than I am to
myself. Yet He is higher than anything I
can imagine.”
God does not compete with the world. The closer that God comes to the world, the
more He allows it to be itself. This is
the basis for Christian humanism. God is
beyond human comprehension. The glory of
God is a human being fully alive. God appeared
to Moses in the burning bush which was not consumed and that made him
radiant. God makes people more radiant,
more beautiful, more luminous while not consuming them. God does not come invasively or
competitively, but gently. His presence
makes the world radiant. The burning
bush has the fullest expression in the Incarnation without ceasing to be God,
nor undermining the creature He becomes.
The God of the burning bush is the true God.
2. St. Thomas Aquinas and
the Paths to God
In the thirteenth
century, St. Thomas Aquinas composed his famous five paths to God. His proofs
don't depend on the Bible or divine revelation. They simply start from the
world around us—trees, birds, buildings, and even ourselves. Thomas noticed
that none of these things have to exist. But if that's the case, there must be
some cause behind them, something grounding their existence. For Thomas and all
Christians since, we know this source of all being by its ancient name—God.
“The Paths to God” was formulated by St. Thomas Aquinas as five
arguments without the use of the Bible or revelation, using the world around
us. He said that nothing in this world
contains in itself the reason for its own existence. Things are, but don’t have to be or
exist. Everything in this world is
contingent or dependent upon something else, a cause. And that cause is contingent upon a set of
other causes which in turn is contingent upon even more causes. Finally one must come to a reality whose
nature is “to be”…….Ipsum esse – the sheer act of being itself or to be in itself…….in
other words, God. That’s why in Exodus
3:14, God identified Himself to Moses as “I am who I am” And Christ could say
to the Jews: “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58).
Fr. Georges Lemaître,
Father of the Big Bang Theory giving a scientific lecture.
The Big Bang. For
example, this summary of Bishop Barron’s talk is contingent upon me…….my doing
it. I am contingent upon being a college
professor, which is contingent upon my education, which is contingent upon my
parents, who are caused by their parents, etc., etc. They are all contingent or dependent upon
matter, which goes back to the “Big Bang” that originated at a point. The
theory of the origin of our expanding universe with the “Big Bang”, now
commonly accepted, was formulated by a Belgian Catholic priest, Fr.
Georges Lemaître in 1927 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre)
He saw the big bang as a creation like event and saw no conflict
between science and theology although he avoided mixing up the two.
Did
you know that the originator of the Big Bang Theory was a Catholic Priest and a
contemporary of Albert Einstein, the originator of the Theory of
Relativity? Fr. Georges Lemaître
is pictured with Einstein above. Faith
and reason, faith and science are very compatible with no contradiction…….truth
is truth under the dominion of God, the creator of all things. Any apparent contradiction is due to human
error and lack of understanding. The
Church has been very hospitable to Science in the many colleges and
universities it has founded over the centuries.
Albert
Einstein, a contemporary of Fr. Lemaitre, is considered to be a genius and an
atheist, was awestruck by the great order in the universe. Thus he believed in an intelligent designer
of the universe, who planned it all. He
said: “A spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, a spirit vastly
superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers
must feel humble”. It stated the same in
other words that there is a great designer of the universe, “in comparison to
whom, I am insignificant.” However, he
did not believe in a personal God.
Matter is contingent
on being itself, who is God. Matter
could have different forms and can be shaped into innumerable forms that we use
in our everyday lives. When the atheist
goes through the chain of contingent causes from object to person to matter, he
will eventually have to stop and throw up his hands and say: “That’s the way it
is”, thinking that it just popped out into being. The believer will continue to the “uncaused
cause”……..God……a reality not contingent on anything, whose nature is to
be. By reason, any being would
eventually have to be contingent upon being itself…….God.
The
Human Mind. According to Bernard
Lonergan and Karl Rahner, Jesuit theologians, both born in 1904 and died in
1984, postulated that the human mind asks questions, gathers knowledge, and
ultimately seeks God, the glorious mystery.
St. Augustine observed: “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our
heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”
St.
Augustine
The ultimate horizon
of all that can be known or can be is ipsum esse, being itself, God. The desire for God is behind every act of
knowing. God’s existence is co-known
implicitly. Nothing greater can be
thought, not simply one being among many.
3. The
Divine Attributes
What is God like? God is higher than anything we can
imagine. When Adam & Eve (Genesis 3)
committed the original sin, they tried to hide from God. God cannot be hidden from because He is
everywhere (omnipresence). God is
closer to me (and you) than I am to myself.
Don’t run away from God; surrender to Him in love.
In Exodus 3 Moses encountered God in the Burning Bush that would
not be consumed. God calls Moses by name
and knows everything about the suffering of his people (omniscience): “Remove your sandals for you are standing on
holy ground.” God is in control and
intimate. When Moses asked for His name,
God answered; “I am who am” (Exodus 3:14).
To be God is to be to be. God’s
existence (to be) and essence (to be) coincide.
Simplicity is another divine attribute. Each one of us exists as human beings with a
name in a particular but limited way.
You can be grasped. However, God
cannot be defined even with the highest degree of abstraction. God is being itself (ipsum esse); He is infinite
without any limit. There is no
restriction on God’s manner of being and existence.
God is inexhaustible and cannot be put into a category of being;
He cannot be completely described, analyzed, or characterized. God is incomprehensible; as the great genius
of theology said, “In Heaven I will infinitely explore the infinite God”. We will have to spend all eternity learning
about God, who is inscrutable, who we cannot understand. There is no limit to His freedom. The ascetic aspect of God is awesome……supremely
beautiful and sublime. To obey God is to
come fully to life and find one’s own deepest self. Disobedience is a fundamental problem
throughout salvation history…….i.e., the Bible.
Surrender to Him and you will find out who you are.
God is self-sufficient. He does
not need the world. God plus the whole
world is not greater than God alone. Our
prayers of thanksgiving add nothing to God, but adds to us, making us grow in
grace. We cannot add to God’s
greatness. God gains nothing from loving
us. This shows His great love for the
world…….i.e. He wills our greatest good.
He wants us to flourish; He wants our good for its own sake.
Some of the attributes of God can be summarized in Psalm 139, a psalm of David,
specifically God’s omnipresence, being everywhere. He is available wherever you are; He is
unavoidable. Jonah discovered that He
could not run away from God. There is no
place to go where God is not. God
brought Jonah back to where He wanted him to be. It’s the same with us when we feel limited,
depressed, etc.
Psalm 139 vividly shows that God is omniscient, knowing all
things. God knows us into being. He knows all about us, through and
through. To know ourselves as God knows
us is true self-knowledge. He knows what
we are doing and thinking. It’s not
surveillance; He just knows. We know by
observation and reading; that’s passive.
God simply knows. Things exist
because God knows.
God is omnipotent, being able to do all things without limit. God won’t make a square circle because that’s
a contradiction. He presses His great
love upon the world with His creation and help.
In God’s omnipotence lies His lordliness and kingliness. He is transcendent beyond time, imminent, and faithful. Knowing God is to know ourselves.
4. Providence and the Problem of Evil
Why does God allow
evil? If He is all good, all knowing,
and all powerful, why is the world marked by so much pain, loss, and
suffering? The ultimate answer is the
entry of the Son of God into suffering itself…..the cross. According to Thomas Aquinas, all good in
creation comes from God. The order of
things to their end is good. The being
of creatures is good.
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The great theologian, St.
Thomas Aquinas.
Providence. Everything is moving to some purpose by His
guiding hand. The idea of that guiding
hand, which is pre-existing in the mind of God, is called providence. God places purpose in His creatures (in
animals it’s instinct). His providence
is not only in the important, but also in the particulars…..the little things
because of God’s manner of causality that extends to all things. My causal influence is real, but
limited. Because of me, you are here
thinking about God. But I have no
influence on your being.
But God is the act of being itself in whom all things come to be
and maintains everything in being. He
sweetly orders all things. That we’re
gathered here is part of God’s providence.
God is personally involved in every detail of creation. Everything is subject to God’s providence,
i.e., the ultimate cause. We can
attribute the weather to specific causes, but God controls all. There are many causes (ingredients) to an apple
pie, but God is the ultimate cause, in making all of these secondary causes
possible. God is involved in the
totality of things in a non-competitive way as the universal ultimate
cause. St. John Paul II stated that for
people of faith, there are no real coincidences. We are all part of God’s perfect finished
plan.
Pilgrims come to the Lourdes Shrine in France in search of
healing. They at least obtain spiritual
healing and the presence of God.
Why does God permit evil
and suffering? A wise provider tries to eliminate as many
defects as possible, but there are many defects in creation. Evil is the absence of the good that
ought to be there. Evil is a defect in
the good as blindness. God is omniscient
(knows that evil exists), omnipotent (can correct evil), omnibenevolent (wants
to correct evil). Yet there is an
abundance of evil. Thus atheists
conclude that God does not exist. God
does not create or cause evil. However,
we have free will to do evil. As St.
Augustine said, “God allows evil to bring about good that would not otherwise exist”. Without the cruelty of the tyrant, there
would be no virtue in the martyr…….no Hitler, no St. Maximillian Kolbe. God can make good come out of evil or
suffering…….virtue and heroism.
Failure can be a turning point if one learns from it. Because I lost my job, a new and better job
opened up. The Lord used a lousy
previous job as a stepping stone or training for something better. One door closes and God opens another. God permits suffering and we don’t understand
why. Read the Book of Job in the Bible
where Job undergoes every possible form of suffering. God explains it to Job in His longest speech
in the Bible (Job 38). We tend to look
at suffering from our personal perspective, not God’s. He has the overall picture.
Trust and He will get you through it all, making good come out of
it. God permits suffering in our lives
for a reason that we cannot understand now.
God doesn’t explain why we might have to suffer, but His only Son became
one of us, who also had to suffer on the cross.
God often does not take our suffering away, but transforms it with His
presence as he did with Job. That is
God’s answer to the mystery of suffering.
Suffering
as a mystery becomes meaningful when
we join our suffering or cross with the Lord’s cross of suffering and offer it
up to the God as a dynamic prayer for the Church, our country (God knows how
much our country needs prayer), for a better world, for our loved ones, etc. That’s a very effective form of prayer. Suffering then becomes productive and thus
easier to take. Patients that can
spiritualize their suffering do better in hospitals. God may permit suffering and use it to
develop virtue and make us better people.
When we suffer, we tend to go to God and thus become closer to Him. There’s an old saying: “Just as the fire
purifies gold, so also does the fire of suffering purify us.
5. Exploring the Trinity
Christianity not only claims that God loves us and love is one of His attributes. It asserts that GOD IS LOVE. In the Old Testament God reveals Himself as I am who am……being itself. In the New Testament God goes a giant step further in revealing Himself……that He is love within the unity of the monotheistic God. But love must be shared.
From all eternity the infinite love of the Father begets His Son. That intense shared love between the Father and the Son is the Holy Spirit. That is the Holy Trinity…….an interaction among the lover (the Father), the beloved (His only begotten son), and shared love between them in the Holy Spirit……a union of three persons, but one God. The Holy Spirit is the love that connects the Father and the Son.
Christ was sent by His Father, but so were the prophets who speak
for God. Christ is not only a prophet, but
speaks and acts in the very person of God.
“Your sins are forgiven” (only God can forgive sins). “You heard it said in the Torah (the
court of final appeal, the ultimate expression), but I say……” (He spoke
with authority). “Heaven and Earth will pass away,
but my words will not pass away”.
Only God can make such statements.
“You have here something greater than the temple” (which is the
abode of God and nothing is more sacred in Jewish belief). Only God can say that.
Christ’s resurrection
from the dead is a ratification that He is who He said He was……the Son of God……an electric charge
that runs through the entire New Testament.
St. Paul, well versed in the Old Testament and trained in Jewish
tradition, was enthralled by the fact that Jesus Christ is Lord (God) and was
willing to go to the ends of the earth to proclaim and share that revelation
and even die for it. The other apostles
were willing to do the same.
God, the non-contingent source of contingency, so loved the world
that He sent His Son, who Himself is divine so that we can find love in His
name. God sent Him into our human
condition, which included suffering, sin, even death. Although God, He humbled Himself and became a
servant, a being in the likeness of men.
The apostles were shocked when Christ washed their feet because even a
slave was not expected to do that. Then
Christ offers His body and blood, soul and divinity to take into ourselves.
The Passion. In the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus takes upon
Himself the sins of the world and the suffering due to sin. He enters into the experience of the sinner
as savior. Then God, the judge is being
judged first by the high priest, Caiaphas and then by the Roman procurator,
Pontius Pilate. Thus Jesus enters into
our dysfunction. On the cross, Christ’s
suffering was not only physical, but also psychological in experiencing the
feeling of being abandoned by His Father.
Crucifixion was considered horrific in the Roman Empire.
The beauty of the Incarnation is that the Son of God goes down
into our limitations, down into our sin, our suffering, and into our
death. Holy Saturday is the bottom of
the trajectory of the incarnation where the Son of God’s body is but a cadaver
in a tomb. Christ shows his solidarity
with the dead.
In the Resurrection the Father draws His Son back to Himself
through the love and power of the Holy Spirit.
We also come back to the Father with Him. This love of the Holy Spirit gathers the whole
world including us back into the divine life.
Christ went all the way down into the depths to bring everyone of us
back, even those who have wondered far away, through the love of the Holy
Spirit. We can all be drawn back into
the love of God through the power of the Trinitarian love.
We don’t pray to God out
there somewhere. We pray to God in the
name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit so that we may be gathered
into the love of the Holy Spirit…….i.e., the spiritual life. That’s what prayer, the Mass, and the
Christian life is all about. The
flexibility of the God of love is found in the monotheism and unity of God in
the Old Testament and the diversity of God in the Trinity who is love in the
New Testament.
6. The God Who is Love
The image of “El Señor
de los Milagros” (Lord of the Miracles) within the Holy Trinity in procession in Lima, Peru in the month of October.
According to Genesis
1:26, each one of us is created according to the image and likeness of
God. Christ came down to become one of
us and sacrifice Himself to make reparation for the sins of the world. This sacrifice opened the gates of Heaven to
us and draws us back to God through Trinitarian love.
St. Augustine: Analogy of the Trinity. The intense love of the Father begets the
Son. The self-knowledge of the Father is
the Son, a perfect replication of the Father.
The Father and the Son see perfection in each other, resulting in great
mutual love. This great mutual love is
the Holy Spirit. They breathe forth the
Holy Spirit or holy breath to each other so to speak. There is a constant interaction among the
lover (the Father), the beloved (the Son), and love (the Holy Spirit). This gives great unity and yet diversity with
three persons, but one God.
St. Thomas Aquinas refined St. Augustine’s Analogy and added
greater precision, emphasizing the unity and simplicity of God. He overcame the apparent contradiction
between unity & simplicity and diversity.
All is so perfect that it does not compromise the perfect unity of God
in three persons. “In the beginning was
the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). That is one God and one essence.
There are three persons and two
processions. The Son proceeds
from the Father; the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son
together. They are not three separate
beings, not really persons as we know it.
St. Thomas Aquinas called it a subsistent relation (not dependent upon
space and time). The relations
themselves are active generation and are subsistent since God is love.
There are four relations: the Father is the
relationship to the Son (active generation); the Son is the relationship to the
Father (passive generation by acceptance); the Holy Spirit is the relationship
between the Father and the Son (active spiration); the Father and the Son is the
relationship to the Holy Spirit (passive spiration). The overall relationality is subsistent in
the Trinity. In sum we have one God, two
processions, three persons, and four imminent relations.
Joseph
Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI. This great theologian added to our understanding with his three
theses. 1) The Trinity is absolute with
one essence, but three persons……a paradox.
God has the perfection of both unity and plurality. 2) The three persons look at each other and
speak to each other……..The looker (the Father), the looked at (the Son), and
the look (Holy Spirit). 3) The divine
absoluteness of the relative. The
Trinity is self-contained and God is love.
The
Christian doctrine of God can be summed up in the Sign of the Cross. God is
a family of relationships, a play of lover, beloved, and love. Relationality goes to the level of the
absolute. God is love. In making the sign of the cross, let’s
remember the power of the cross, the ultimate act of love; that God is love, a
Trinitarian play of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in love. That’s the message with which we go to a
hungry world to draw people back to God.
A
Brief Summary. Christianity not only claims that God loves us and love is
one of His attributes. It asserts that
GOD IS LOVE. In the Old Testament God
reveals Himself as “I am who am”……being itself.
In the New Testament God goes a giant step further in revealing
Himself……that He is love within the unity of the monotheistic God. But love must be shared. From all eternity the infinite love of the
Father begets His Son. That intense
shared love between the Father and the Son is the Holy Spirit. That is the Holy Trinity…….an interaction
among the lover (the Father), the beloved (His only begotten son), and shared
love between them in the Holy Spirit……a union of three persons, but one
God. The Holy Spirit is the love that
connects the Father and the Son. See http://catholicism.org/the-relations-in-the-blessed-trinity.html
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