Читать книгу Only One Way? - Gavin D'Costa - Страница 30

For Christians, to speak of the one God is not possible without speaking of the more-than-one God. The oneness of the divine Mystery does not exclude – indeed, it includes – the manyness of the divine Mystery. I know that sounds like polytheism (as my Muslim friends gently remind me). But it’s not. Rather, it’s a way of affirming and holding on to the Christian conviction that the unity that makes up the divine nature (and therefore the nature of the world) does not exclude – indeed, it absolutely requires – diversity. No diversity, no unity. No manyness, no oneness.

How do Christians know that? How can they dare to say anything about the inner nature of God? Rahner’s answer is as simple as it is profound: the only way we can venture assertions about God’s inner trinitarian nature (what he called the ‘Trinity ad intra’) is because that’s how we experience God in our own lives and in the world (what he called the ‘Trinity ad extra’).12 In other words: if this is how God seems to act in creation, we can assume that that’s how God acts in the divine nature. The old theological slug makes common sense: ‘agere sequitur esse’ – the way one acts flows from the way one is. We know what a person is like from the way she interacts with us. If that doesn’t apply also to God, we have no way of knowing anything about God. (This is what Catholic theologians call ‘the analogy of being’, and it forms the basis for all Catholic theology: finite being serves as a reflection pond for Infinite Being.)13

And after experiencing God in the way Jesus of Nazareth lived and died, in what he taught, and in the way his Spirit lived on in their communities after his death, the early Jesus-followers, through the course of the first four centuries after Jesus’ death, came to conclude that the one God is also the triune God. Now there are different ways of ‘unpacking’ what it means to assert that ‘three-ness’ is part of God’s oneness. Broadly and basically, we can put it this way: based on the way they encountered God through Jesus, Christians came to realize that God is a creating Mystery (therefore they used the symbol Father or Parent), a communicating Mystery (therefore the symbol of Word or Son/offspring), and an animating Mystery (thus, Spirit). The one divine Mystery acts, and therefore exists, in these three really different but essentially related ways.