Trinity Catena 2a

Love is the union of a lover, a beloved, and of their mutual love. When we, following scripture, assert "God is love," we confess that God is a plurality in unity; God is love.

***

It is Augustine who observes that God is love (in chapter eight of his wittily titled The Trinity). He doesn't do it as a philosopher, but as a pastor. Even while he is outlining how the Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the father, and the intensity of their love is the Spirit of love itself, he reminds that love draws us out. Love requires us and compels us and irresistably changes us. Love is loving; it acts. Loving makes us lovers, bone of its bone, every more able to see and be what loving requires. Our flaming hearts accept nothing less. And in the center of its unity we strain to glimpse the form itself-–the lover, what is being loved, and love–-and that is God.

The gaze catches so completely that I can only stammer some mystical poetry: a few lines from San Juan de la Cruz's love poem La noche oscura del alma ("Dark Night of the Soul") and from Mechthild of Magdeburg's Das fließende Licht der Gottheit (The Flowing Light of the Godhead):

"In a dark night,
With anxious love inflamed
Forth unobserved I went,

In darkness and in safety,
By the secret ladder, disguised,
Without other light or guide
Save that which in my heart was burning.

That light guided me
More surely than the noonday sun
To the place where He was waiting for me,
Whom I knew well,

O, guiding night;
O, night more lovely than the dawn;
O, night that hast united
The lover with His beloved,
And changed her into her love."

---

"I cannot dance, O Lord,
Unless You lead me.
If You wish me to leap joyfully,
Let me see You dance and sing—-

Then I will leap into Love—-
And from Love into Knowledge,
And from Knowledge into the Harvest,
The sweetest Fruit beyond human sense.

There I will stay with You, whirling."

***

Anyway, then--looking out from contemplation--there's something else that this sight of God as love does to us. That God is love itself sets the tone for what Christians mean when they talk about our deepest ideas of unity and community. The Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff called the Trinity the communion of life and love. “Solitude is hell,” he said. “No one is an island. We are surrounded by persons, things, and beings on all sides.” The loving community of the Trinity calls us “to maintain relationships of communion with all, giving and receiving.”

Only persons can be in communion. It means that one is in the presence of the other, different from the other but open in a radical mutuality. For there to be true communion there must be direct and immediate relationships: eye to eye, face to face, heart to heart. The result of mutual surrender and reciprocal communion is community. Community results from personal relationships in which each is accepted as he or she is, each opens to the other and gives the best of himself or herself.

We will pick up this theme again.

Trinity Catena 2

The shalom of the persons is the eschatological shalom of the people of God, which we are called to and long for, which we await with all creation, and to which we summon our neighbors.

***

Humanity is not peaceful. Groups negotiate, press, compete, and conflict. “The thunder of many peoples, they thunder like the thundering of the sea. The roar of nations, they roar like the roaring of mighty waters!” (Isa 17.1) There is no peace in politics. And individuals fare no better. As Søren Kierkegaard said, “There is not a single living human being who does not secretly harbor a disharmony.” What we want is a garden; what we have is a flood.

Shalom (שָׁלוֹם) is the Hebrew word for peace. It is a rich, rich word that means more than the absence of hostility. Pastor Timothy Kellner defined shalom as “a multidimensional, complete well-being—physical, psychological, social, and spiritual; it flows from all of one’s relationships being put right—with God, with(in) oneself, and with others." Shalom is what Jesus offered when he pitied the discord of the crowd and said, “Come to me, and I will give you rest.” And shalom is what Jesus procures for his people by his death and resurrection.

The hymn of praise in Colossians 1 says that the cross made such a peace as to affect the reconciliation of all things “whether on earth or in heaven” to God. The embrace of Colossian’s shalom extends from the individual, to the household, to human communities, to thrones, dominions, rulers, and powers, and to all of creation. “He himself is our peace.” (Eph 2.14a) It is the joy of the church to summon the world’s peoples to this peace. But it is a shalom begun, yes, but not fulfilled–not yet.

So, as we wait between the roar of the nations and the harmony of peace, we search out the very vision and archetype of the shalom we hope for. That vision is the quiet unity of the persons of God. All other definitions of peace, peace of self, of community, of nations, of creation, are a thousand reflections. The pure oneness of the godhead is its very seat. "You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you" (Augustine). "When I am united to you, there is no more sorrow or toil. Only you, my God" (Gregory of Nyssa).

Trinity Catena 1

The story of redemption is the perfect and absolute love of the persons for each other being separated (for our creaturely sake) like light through a prism on the wall of history. The Godhead does as it is.

***

This paragraph transports us to a shadowy room in 1666. Across the space is a man, Sir Isaac Newton, standing beside the only window. The sun shines eagerly through the panes. And in its light, Newton holds a prism of glass. He stares at the opposing wall. There, the reflected light divides into a band of glowing colors. The sunlight outside is colorless of itself, but when Newton splits it with a prism, we see it is full of colors.

Here, Newton’s light experiment sets the table for a short exploration of what the church means when it says God is triune. The life-giving and illuminating light from the sun stands for how God is in himself, where the unity of God is so prominent. When they talk about the theology of the Trinity, theologians call this side of Newton’s experiment the immanent Trinity. The immanent Trinity refers to God as he is in himself, independent of creation. Now, there is also the other wall of Newton’s experiment, where light has passed through the prism and is divided for all to see into many colors, from red to violet. This is called the economic Trinity, and that is the Trinity as we look at it in time.

When Christians look at God in time, they are looking at the story of redemption. A long time ago, people called this the “economy of salvation,” where economy refers to something as an ordered list of tasks–the house-law (eco-nοmοs). The economy of salvation is how salvation gets accomplished over the events of history. The economic Trinity is the doctrine of the Trinity considered from our time-and-space bounded point of view. From our point of history stretched over the moments of time and space, the unity of God divides (not really--it is a metaphor) so that we can see what is always there but is made visible: that God is a godhead, a unity and a trinity. We can see the persons as God the Father, the creator, God the Son, our Redeemer who does the will of the Father, and God the Spirit, who through the action of the Son brings about the Father’s purpose. The colors are always there in the light, the colors do not cease to be the light, nor is the light something without the colors. The prism has allowed us to see and understand. So, the story of redemption, the story the Bible tells, helps us see and understand. God does not have to tell us anything about himself. But he loves us, he wants to tell us about himself, and he is glad to bring us closer so that we can confess him as three persons in one unity.

The final point of our guiding paragraph is “The Godhead does as it is.” Karl Rahner, a Roman Catholic theologian who taught in the mid-twentieth century said it like this, “The immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity and the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity.” What he means is that the persons as we see them acting in redemption–the economic Trinity–tell us how God really is–the immanent Trinity. What the triune God tells us about himself and how he acts demonstrably to save us is a revelation of who the triune God is. God acts how he is.

A Trinity Catena

1. The story of redemption is the perfect and absolute love of the persons for each other being separated (for our creaturely sake) like light through a prism on the wall of history. The Godhead does as it is. [Explain]

2. The shalom of the persons is the eschatological shalom of the people of God, which we are called to and long for, which we await with all creation, and to which we summon our neighbors. [Explain]

2a. Love requires a lover and a beloved and the love itself. When we, following scripture, assert "God is love," we confess that God is a plurality in unity; God is love. [Explain]

2b. The life of the church--in all its varied practices--tells and participates in the Father's sending of the Son and the Spirit for the sake of the world. The church community is the imago Dei and its spirituality is no exercise in individualism since God is a fellowship, not a monad.

2c. To state in another way: the Great Commission is a repetition of the sending of the Son, which is itself a reflection of the eternal begetting of the Son in history. But this time, the church is invited.

3. The people of God whose head is Jesus of Nazareth are invited to participate by grace in the loving oneness of the persons. By grace, not by nature. The flesh of Jesus is forever scarred. This is the doctrine of theosis, the foundation of Christian anthropology. In the words of the early church fathers: He became like us so that we can become like him.

4. Christian spirituality is inside out: an always moving current into God and into the community. There is a holy and joyful eros to it as we, through the Son and by the Spirit, are caught up into the perichoretic dance to the Father.

4a. Christian spirituality is triune from the foundations.

5. The Doctrine of the Trinity, revealed just in the light of awareness as we became no longer servants but friends, is a summing up of the whole. And, together with the two-natures of the Son, tells the whole thing in a glance.

6. Afterthought: Do not get overcome by how are there three in one. Sometimes you emphasize the oneness; sometimes the threeness. Heresy cannot be avoided. So, sin boldly!

Beauty is a form of Hope

"When we make beauty, it is a form of hope." ~Anne Hathaway casually uniting aesthetics, eschatology, and ethics.

Human beings are priests; our value is worship

LLMs are causing all sorts of angst and discussion these days, most noteably in the recent encyclical Magnifica Humanitas which I have yet to read. There is a duality of doom on one side and evangelical fervor on the other. For now, these thoughts from from author L. M. Sacasas in his Substack "The Convivial Society" point me forward in a laudable way:

We’ve made machines that can fly faster and farther than the swallow-tailed kite, but in no way does it follow that the kite should cease from its flight or that it is somehow diminished because of the advent of flying machines. That there is something else in the world that flies tells us nothing about whether the kite ought to fly.

It seems to me that we would be better off if we were less preoccupied with the question of human uniqueness, if we took for granted that we are creatures of certain sort making their way in the world with a distinct set of capabilities and potentialities and that we ought to exercise these capabilities and develop these potentialities not because they make us special but because they make us happy.

I will set aside for a moment the question of whether machines, LLMs specifically, can think or reason or use language in a manner that corresponds to the human use of language, etc. But let us grant for arguments sake that they can. They can certainly generated passable simulations of such things. But why should this mean that I ought not to think for myself and with others? Why should I cease from inhabiting the playground of language because a machine can pretend to play in it as well? Why should I abandon the exercise of judgment or the pursuit of knowledge? We must pursue these things not because the dignity of our humanity is on the line, but because our joy is.

This is a good turn, but it is not turn enough. Human beings were not made for what we do. Certainly what we do is marvelous. But we were made to be priests. Priests receive their value from the calling they receive from their god and from the personal and corporate worship they do and produce for their god. This river of value flows from the Source of value and go back again to that Source.

So let's get our anthropology set and calm down about these new tools we've invented. The ability of the greatest LLM or robot may meet or surpass that of human beings, but we do not receive value from those abilities. The joy of the Lord is our strength. I rejoiced when I heard them say, 'Let us go to the house of the Lord.'

__________

[1] An adjacent though unrelated idea. "AI is not a unitary actor." wrote Joanna Bryson. "It is not unitary, and it does not act. . . It is a set of software engineering techniques and digital services. Thus it is meaningless to discuss what AI will do, or to look for singular solutions about how to govern it."

[2] Microsoft's post "Towards Humanist Superintelligence" written in November 2025 should not be forgotten. "Technology’s purpose is to help advance human civilization. It should help everyone live happier, healthier lives. It should help us invent a future where humanity and our environment truly prosper. . . . Any technology that doesn’t achieve this is a failure. And we should reject it."

Graeme Goldsworthy asks how we can know what is true

What follows is a summary of Graeme L. Goldsworthy's essay "'Thus Sayeth the Lord': The Dogmatic Basis of Biblical Theology" printed in the festchrift God Who is Rich in Mercy (Lancer, 1986). I hope to add my own comments after.

Reworking Goldsworthy's Essay

How can human beings know what is really true? False presuppositions produce false results. So any philosophy constructed of human reason, such as the Thomism of Roman Catholicism, cannot help but err. "Thomism along with liberalism and Arminianism establishes human knowledge, reason and logic" as the means by which human beings can know what is real. As Aquinas, following Aristotle, taught, "By what is evident to the senses, man is capable of developing a philosophical framework within which revelation is defined and understood." But natural methods can never describe true reality because the human beings that use them are blind. Human beings not only deny but actively suppress the truth. Therefore, "common humanity and human interests in themselves provide no real common ground for understanding truth."

Certainly believers and unbelievers can and do "work side by side in the sciences, humanities, arts, and politics. But they can never agree on the ultimate meaning" of it all. For most, the measure of truth is the autonomous self. But for a believer--one who has been healed of his or her blindness--there is access to truth; the cornerstone of reality is made available. Yes, for those who can see, truth's measure is Jesus, the God-man, announced by the father and attested by witnesses inspired by the Spirit.

John Calvin, the last of the first wave of Protestant reformers, taught with his fellows that it was the Easter light of the Holy Spirit that opens the eyes of human beings to see the truth embodied in Jesus of Nazareth. And this is no mystic truth, but a historical one. The historical sweep of the Bible and all of history with it makes up the witness by which human beings understand the birth, life, death, resurrection, ascension, and enthronement of the man Jesus. The historical arc of Jesus' incarnation fits historiography into its proper frame. It is a jigsaw set right within the redemptive arc of time that begins in creation and goes on into the everlastingness of the age to come.

Not wishing this to take all day, I asked Gemini to create a summary of the essay. I'm going to paste it below and pick up my commentary after.

LLM Summary: The Core Thesis

Goldsworthy argues that biblical theology is not a neutral or purely descriptive discipline[cite: 124, 130]. Instead, it must be rooted in a Reformed dogmatic framework that recognizes the self-authenticating authority of Jesus Christ and Scripture[cite: 98, 134, 135]. He rejects the notion of "common ground" between believers and unbelievers based on autonomous human reason[cite: 73, 90].

Main Ideas

• Epistemological Reformation: Goldsworthy contrasts the "nature-grace synthesis" of Thomism with the Calvinist view that sin has corrupted human cognition[cite: 33, 44, 71]. He argues for noetic regeneration, where the Holy Spirit enables the believer to accept Scripture as God’s self-authenticating word[cite: 49, 144, 146].
• Rejection of "Common Ground": While believers and unbelievers share the same universe, they interpret reality through fundamentally different presuppositions: the sovereignty of God versus the autonomy of man[cite: 79, 118].
• Christ as the Hermeneutical Center: The Old Testament cannot be fully understood on its own terms or through purely historical evidence[cite: 209, 210]. Only after accepting Christ as Lord can the OT promises be correctly interpreted as speaking of Him[cite: 215, 224].
• The Role of Biblical Theology: Goldsworthy defines biblical theology as being concerned primarily with the dynamics and progression of revelation across redemptive history[cite: 229, 230].

Supporting Ideas

• Scriptural Conflict of Epistemologies: The author uses Jesus' dialogues in the Gospel of John and Paul’s writings in 1 Corinthians to show that belief and unbelief are radical opposites with no rational middle ground[cite: 153, 164, 168].
• Critique of Evangelical Empiricism: Goldsworthy challenges theologians like Clark Pinnock, arguing that historical "evidences" do not validate God’s word; rather, God’s word provides the necessary interpretation for historical events[cite: 242, 273].
• Faith vs. Evidence in the OT: He cites the lives of Abraham, Noah, and Moses to demonstrate that their faith often operated against historical evidence, sustained solely by the authority of God's word[cite: 254, 259, 261].

---

Argument Outline

I. The Presuppositional Roots

• Historical Context: Biblical theology often emerges as a revolt against excessive dogmatism or extreme liberalism[cite: 26, 27].
• The Reformers' Contribution: True biblical theology finds its impetus in the Reformation's attack on the presuppositions of medieval scholastic theology[cite: 29, 30].
• Calvin’s Epistemology: Knowledge of God is innate (sensus deitatis) but suppressed by sin[cite: 44, 75]. Therefore, a "true Christian epistemology" requires the witness of the Holy Spirit to the Word[cite: 34, 47].

II. The Conflict of Two Worldviews

• Sovereignty vs. Autonomy: Every thought assumes either the sovereignty of God or the autonomy of man[cite: 118].
• The Dogmatic Framework: Goldsworthy outlines a five-point summary of the Reformed method, starting with the idea that every datum in the universe is theistic and ending with the need for the Holy Spirit to bring the rebellious reason to faith[cite: 80, 81, 85].
• Noetic Sanctification: The believer must strive for "intellectual and epistemological sanctification," bringing every thought into submission to Christ[cite: 113, 114].

III. Christological Foundation of Biblical Theology

• Failure of Neutrality: Biblical theology can never be "merely descriptive" because the theologian's a prioris always govern the results[cite: 125, 128].
• The Word-Event Relationship: God speaks through a "sinless, saving word" (Christ), who is the perfect divine-human relationship[cite: 220].
• New Testament Priority: The NT establishes the dogmatic basis (Jesus is Lord) through which the OT is interpreted[cite: 216, 331].
• The Final Norm: Christ is the "Alpha point" and "Omega point" of all theological endeavor[cite: 142, 333].

---

Comparison of Epistemologies

Feature	Thomism / Empiricism	Reformed Presuppositionalism
Common Ground	Human reason and logic [cite: 72]	None (except the suppressed sensus deitatis) [cite: 90, 92]
Role of Evidence	Historically validates the Bible's truth claims [cite: 242, 245]	Interpreted and given meaning by the Word [cite: 109, 273]
Starting Point	Sensory data and philosophical frameworks [cite: 38, 42]	The self-authenticating Christ [cite: 67, 98]
Effect of Sin	Weakened the "likeness of God" but left the image unscathed [cite: 71]	Radical dislocation of the relationship between God and His image [cite: 70]

Of the late Greek theologian Chrysostomos Stamoulis

Orthodox theologian, university professor, and musician Chrysostomos Stamoulis passed into the Lord's keeping in mid-August 2025. I'd not heard of him until I read a tribute by the World Council of Churches, which led to further research. I really like Dr. Stamoulis's ideas. So, here's a place to put what I know about him and his work.

“The aesthetic theology of Professor Chrysostomos Stamoulis is a holistic one. For him, the distinction between the holy and the unholy, the sacred and the profane, is false. Music, poetry, theatre, film, the novel, philosophy, and science are not ‘secular’ endeavors, but attempts to give significance to the world and especially to its most critical questions about love, life, and death. The rejection of the distinction between holy and unholy applies equally to the distinction between the familiar and the strange. The stranger should be a part of my own life. He invites me to dialogue, he challenges me and he is the chance for an authentic self-knowledge. Christ is the supreme criterion for judging the ecclesiastical life. The members of the Church, in order to be authentic, must follow Christ’s paradigm. They must be open to the unfamiliar, to the wholly different one. But He is also the assumption of concrete man and reality. As a consequence, the Christian must embrace real life, as it is, without nostalgic flight towards an idealized historical past. Professing a living theology, Stamoulis urges us not to lose the beauty of the present by overloading it with the chimerical beauties of the past, or indeed of the future. His thinking is, in its way, a theological version of Carpe diem.”

Bibliography

• Texts on the diologue of Orthodoxy with the city, politics and culture publishes by Armos, Athens 2016.
• Love and sexuality. Interdisciplinary narrative, from antiquity to the present day, from microorganisms to humans (ed.), Armos Publishing House, Athens 2014.
• Test for a culture of incarnation published by Akritas, Athens 2009.
• Lot's wife and modern theology published by Indictos, Athens 2008 and Armos 2014.
• The saint is beautiful. Probers in the hospitable aesthetics of Orthodoxy. Akristas, Athens 2004, 2005, 2008, 2010.
• About light. Personal or physical energies? Contributions to the modern problematic Holy Trinity in the Orthodox space, published by "To Palimpsiston", Thessaloniki 1999, 2007.
• Theotokos and orthodox dogma. Study in the teaching of Saint Cyril of Alexandris, published by "To Palimpsiston", Thessaloniki 1999, 2003.
• Holy Beauty: Prolegomena to an Orthodox Philocalic Aesthetics (Kallos to hagion). James Clarke. London, 2022.
• Broken Bridges: An Introduction to Orthodox Fundamentalism. trans. Constantine Lerounis. Sebastian Press. Alhambra, California. 2021.
• We got run over: Essays on Orthodoxy's self-entrapment. Athens 2021.
• What the Fox seeking in the Fair? Essays on the Dilogues of Orthodoxy with Politics, Culture, and the City Athens 2016.
• As if I were a Stranger and a Wanderer, or Incarnation: the Migration of Love. Athens 2011.
• Love and Death: An Essay on the Incarnation. Athens 2009.
• Lot's Wife and 20th Century Theology. Athens 2008.
• Sacred Beauty: An Introduction to the Philocalic Aesthetics of Orthodoxy. Athens 2004, 2005, 2008.

Links

In memory of Chrysostos Stamoulis
World Council of Churches
Author bio from James Clarke
Why theology needs the arts
Stamoulis on COVID-19
The Theater of a Dialogue in Three Acts
Holy Beauty: book review

The Genre of the Lord's Prayer

Let me add this to my notes around the Lord's Prayer: The genre of the prayer is lament. Here's how you get there. (1) By the time the disciples ask Jesus to "teach them to pray", they have hundreds of years of world-literature-level devotional tradition and practice behind and around them, which they've imbibed from infancy. (2) So, "teach us to pray" is more like asking a martial arts master to "sum up the essence of your take on the tradition." (3) The context of the Prayer is absolutely that devotional tradition--and chiefly the psalms. (4) Therefore, to understand the prayer, one must look to the psalms. (5) Psalms come in several genres. (6) The Prayer is without doubt functioning in the genre of lament. (7) The genre's of the psalms, from royal victory to the deepest despair, fall along the spokes of a cycle, where each genre is aware of the others. So, (8) lament psalms are on-the-way to psalms of absolute praise, even as absolute praise is aware that human life is going to include despair eventually as well. But the whole of the five books of psalms does, nevertheless, slowly lift as a whole into priestly adoration of Yahweh. (9) Back to #2, the Prayer defines the Messianic call in the context of the psalmic devotional tradition. (Anyone who wants to know more about this praise -> lament and repeat cycle should consult the work of OT scholar W. Bruggemann.)

The Meetup of Divine Intent

Driving in to work this morning, I was listening to a lecture on St. Bonaventure. I have always been fascinated by the mystics of Christian history, and I have read many of their works and summaries of their lives. The problem for me, though, is the explicit Neoplatonism that informs their ideas. The mystic way is not something I would have learned from the lips of the apostles. Its descent into the soul to find God is not the kind of spiritual advice that I read Jesus encouraging his followers to practice. So, as much as I admire these devout men and women of the church, I respectfully believe them misguided with respect to their Biblical theology. And that is no hidden scar.

But this morning I realized that I have come to find myself at the door of a better mystic way. This way is not a ladder of divine ascent. It does not struggle inward to God. Instead, it journeys outward--soul and body together--into the lives of one's neighbors and the needs of our communities. Instead of the cloud of unknowing, the self disappears into the river of God's selfless, overflowing love. One is carried in the eucharistic direction, to be broken and distributed for others. Perhaps there is still the threefold pattern of purgation, illumination, and union. Purgation of the self. Illumination about the people and communities in which one lives. And union with the Spirit as it pours itself kenotically into the world setting apart the name of God, living out the kingdom rule of God, and seeking to do the will of God.