The Holy Trinity as the Dynamic of the World’s Salvation in the Greek Fathers

John Anthony McGuckin

(Chapter 5 in: P Phan (ed). The Cambridge Companion to the Trinity. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge & New York. 2011. pp. 49-69.)

A Theology in Crisis?

The doctrine of the Trinity has been said by many scholars throughout the latter part of the twentieth century to be one that is in crisis. This, if true, is a serious state of affairs, since the Holy Trinity is the substrate of our faith, the bedrock of our salvation, the foundation and pillar of the church, the very meaning of the Christian experience. Can it possibly be true, as we are told, that the doctrine of the Trinity is in crisis? The Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, assessing this issue in the years immediately following the Second Vatican Council, concluded that, in his opinion, most Catholics in his day professed a simple and unreflective tritheism. By this he did not actually mean that they were all irredeemably heretical; rather, he thought they confessed their belief in God as sublime Triunity with their voices and gave assent to it with one part of their mind, but in their actual practices of prayer, and the rituals of piety they most engaged in, the reality was a monophonic focus on one of the Persons of the Trinity at a time: trinitarianism, therefore, flattened down as radically successive hypostatization. Rahner’s diagnosis 1 was that when the Father was addressed, one type of theological vision was adopted (with a corresponding form of subordinationism in relation to the conceived roles of the Son and the Spirit); when the Son or Spirit was addressed directly in prayer, each was hailed as a divine agent, on his own terms, with specific “characteristics” (the Son being more “approachable” in the imagination of piety than the Father, as enhominated divinity as distinct from immaterial transcendent; “the Spirit” being a preferred form of invocation for those wishing to imagine God as endorsing their own inspirational feelings or practices, considered somehow as God’s energy or activity in the world at present). This Rahner characterized as a sad state of affairs, a kind of trinitarian somnolence muffling the vision of the church at large. It is an environment where the doctrine of coequality of hypostases is given overwhelming precedence over the concept of Trinity as divine outreach of creation and salvation.

Now this is hardly sufficient as a synopsis of Rahner’s own contribution to trinitarian thought (which would be a worthy study for another occasion as being the most significant contribution to the essence-energies distinction since the time of St. Gregory Palamas); but I am raising the example here simply as one of his more famous “diagnoses” in the Theological Investigations.

In the Protestant world it is more difficult to find a commentator who could make such a telling generic diagnosis. I remember my own interest a few years back as I motored for the first time through New England and found, in a succession of towns, several notice boards outside beautiful clapboard churches announcing: “First Unitarian Church: Now Worshipping as Trinitarian.” I am sure that this might have had something to do with holding on to endowment. But the concept of trinitarian Unitarianism did strike me at the time as a sign that something may be happening. My own limited sense since those innocent days of first arriving in America is that the movement may in fact be in the opposite direction: a turning away from trinitarian theological language as not having much, other than formalist, relevance in the life of the Protestant churches. I do not exempt the Pentecostal movement from this observation, despite their lively interest in pneumatology, on the grounds that the Spirit devotion there so often hearkens back (in historico-theological discussions at least) to archetypes from the Montanist movement, rarely to the fourth-century trinitarian fathers; and thus perhaps to an implicit monism inherent in the very notion of particular devotional focus on one of the three Persons as a primary vehicle of faith. This mono-optic focus has often been diagnosed as operative in, for example, the “Sacred Heart” devotion of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Catholicism, or the “Spirit devotion” of the charismatic movement.

In an exchange a few years ago I was advised by a Protestant contemporary theologian that the Orthodox Church needed to reform. Always eager for reform, I asked how. “Remove the sexist patriarchal language of its prayer” was the answer. When I pressed for details, it seemed that the person, who was a pastor as well as a theologian, had led the way in her own tradition, by replacing the doxological invocation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with the titles of Parent, Child, and Nurturer. When I suggested that this might be more viable in her context than ours since we were a trinitarian church, and hers might not be, she took umbrage 2. When I pressed the point and went on to ask how this liturgical change had actually been received over time by the people of God in her assembly, she did admit that it was only with a lukewarm response, and it eventually dropped off altogether after a year or so, and God was thereafter customarily referred to genderlessly. I suppose that meant generically—without mentioning the Trinity, without ever using the holy names. Most recently, one professional, professorial, theologian said to me at a very high-level ecumenical discussion, on an occasion when I had said that Christian discourse really had to begin in a shared understanding of the Trinity: “Who cares about that? It is élitist theology, not rooted in the real lifestyles of the people of God.” Well, this is a major issue.

Trinitarianism in the Church’s Confession

The initial approach to trinitarian theology can cause problems, perhaps. But consider these words of one of the great systematicians of the church:

There is one essence, one divinity, one power, one will, one energy, one

beginning, one authority, one dominion, one sovereignty, made known in three

perfect subsistences [hypostases] and adored with one single adoration;

believed in and worshipped by all rational creation; united without confusion

and divided without separation, a thing which surely transcends thought. 3

Now, as a catechesis this is clearly not of the same order as the Islamic theology of monism. Here in the Damascene is the careful setting of boundaries, so necessary to the intellectual tradition but not all-inclusive of Christian experience and passion, and one that ends by appealing to the need for caution, for silence; for the very thought itself eludes thought; and not only by quintessentially transcending the power of thought, but even by its fundamentally paradoxical nature as kataphatic statement. His debt is primarily to St. Gregory the Theologian and to St. Maximus the Confessor, with clear resonances of context additionally supplied by the Chalcedonian settlement and its famous adverbial way of depicting complex conjunction. The patristic doctrine of Trinity that St. John articulates here, in other words, is not really a straightforward catechesis at all, although it is a synopsis of catechetical utterances carefully assembled into a reference compendium. Whether most trinitarian confession has the required force and energy of a truly catechetical statement of faith is an important question. One of the elements that I would always identify as the true mark of the genre, proving its capacity to bear the weight of a truly central dogmatic statement of the faith, is that it can demonstrate its liturgical origin. Take, for example, the manner in which the great Creed of Nicaea, however it was catechetically extended and developed through the Arian and Macedonian crises, still retained its fundamental character as a baptismal confession, and still fulfills that role in the approach to the holy anaphora of the contemporary liturgy.

What would stand as Orthodoxy’s direct antithesis to the Islamic confession of monist theology is our liturgy’s doxology itself: + “Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.” And it is no accident that this confession of praise, by using the prefatory word “Doxa,” is meant to evoke the simultaneous prayer of the angels, who afford God heavenly doxa, in a manner completing that of the earthly church. It is also no coincidence at all that the doxology is traditionally accompanied, always, by the physical making of the sign of the cross over the body of the believer who utters it. These three things describe the profession of the Trinity in the life of the church: first, the knowledge that calls upon the true triadic Name of God, for the power that is within the Name itself; not the “names,” rather the Name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Second, the life-giving grace that is within the confession of praise of God and which elevates us to the taxis (order or rank) of the angels in our worship. Third, the embodiment of all that this means in the victory of the cross; an embodiment that sums up all that is meant by the utterly transcendent Father, and the mysteriously indefinable Spirit, by reference to the perfect articulation of who both are in the crucified Lord of Glory, Jesus. These three dynamic characteristics, I would suggest, are at the heart of the patristic theology of the divine triunity, and mark this off from what has often passed as “the patristic doctrine of the Trinity” as the latter has been represented across several generations past in theological text books of a historicist nature.

The Patristic Theology of Glory

In these three elements the patristic understanding of the Trinity emerges as a dynamic mystery of salvation, a living theology of praise, not a set of theological conundra that gather dust in the history books. We should note first the claim to sing God’s praises in a harmony of voice—not the monophonic tone of earthly believers stating theology, but the stereophonic voice of a confession that rises to equal that of the angels, which is not available as a mere insight of a generically religious nature 4 but is an essential mark of the true church as the mystical bride of the Lamb. In other words, the praise of God as Trinity cannot be uttered outside the marriage chamber of the church as a fully functioning heavenly mystery and reality. The utterance of God’s praise is at once proof that the believer is illuminated. This illumination is all that allows the believer to utter it in praise. The ecstatic confession is, itself, the understanding. The transcendent understanding gives wings of fire to the praise.

We note second, the manner in which the confession is doxa, not simply “praise,” but the technical word of the New Testament for the very Shekinah light itself. Such confession is not a descriptor of the kabod of God, that unapproachable power of holiness and presence from which Israel was always excluded (whether on Sinai or in the temple); it is, rather, entrance to the presence into which the New Israel has been admitted through the mercy of our triune salvation. As the apostle Paul put it: “It is through him, by faith, that we have obtained access [prosagoge] to this grace in which we stand, and are confident of the Glory of God” (Rom. 5:2). 5

Third, we note the enfleshment of this in the sign of the embodied cross; not just in the life of the enhominated Logos of God, Jesus, but precisely in the embodiment of the crucifixion, whereby he allowed his glory to be seen on the earth; in that moment of dissonance and failure, typified by the betrayal of Judas at the very heart of the new-covenantal gift of the Eucharist, whereupon we note how Jesus himself proclaimed the trinitarian doxology: “And having received the piece of bread, Judas immediately went out. It was dark. When he had departed Jesus said: ‘At this moment is the Son of Man glorified. And in Him God is glorified’” (John 13:30–31). The awe-inspiring initiations of the Lord into the nature of the Triunity are given to the apostles in the context of the failure (in a certain sense) of the reconciling power of the sacrament of love. They are given in the very next breath after the departure of Judas to deliver Jesus’s address in Bethany to the police of the high priest, a tactic meant to ensure that all the disciples could be surrounded and arrested in the early hours of that morning, but one that was foiled by the agonized compassion of the Christ, who prayed through the night in the garden to his Father precisely because he did not want to go home to his lodgings in Bethany and was determined to see the liturgy of his sacrifice through to its envisioned end. This solitary end, we note, not accidentally secured the literal salvation of all his disciples, for not one was arrested, not one executed alongside Jesus—a most peculiar phenomenon that has often escaped the notice of historians but that may help us, as theologians, to begin to understand the seed of what germinated in them in the light of the resurrection, as a theology of the cross that recognized that same cross as their liberation and forgiveness.

This context of the triunity of God as experience, within the illuminated church, of glory given through the cross, makes steady our claim as Orthodox that the theology of the Holy Trinity remains among us as a living force, a dynamic way of understanding and proclaiming our confession of God’s salvation, not merely a theological formulation that has little grounding in practice, or small basis in the contemporary understanding of the body of present-day believers. It is not to say that the average Eastern Orthodox believer could articulate high patristic theology of the Trinity any better than his or her Western counterparts, but it is to claim that the manner in which the faith of the Trinity functions in the Orthodox world is significantly different, eschatologically charged and mystically dynamic in character, and that this is preserved to be witnessed in every page and prayer of its worship tradition, and thus of its authentically articulated theology. Trinitarian orthopraxis is thus critical for the Orthodox as they exegete the patristic tradition. We may not fully comprehend the greatness of the God who has revealed his own life, and demonstrated his great love by offering to share it with humanity, but we can certainly celebrate it. By doxology the individual Christian grows slowly in the power of the Name and in the comprehension of its saving power. This orthopraxis is critical and is why, within the church, the tree of trinitarian doctrine is both massive and alive with green leaf. It shall always be so. It is one of the supreme marks of the living church. Where faith in the Trinity is static, dead, or formalist, doxology of the True Name of God cannot occur, and the gifts of power and grace begin to wither.

A Call to Reorientation

This context of the triunity of God as lived experience also makes another specific claim, on which I will focus for the rest of this essay: that, this being so, as I would argue it is, it follows that we may have been reading the fathers wrongly about the theology of the Trinity, because we have been reading them in piecemeal fashion as cut up and atomized in handbooks of patristic dogma, with the latter understood as a scholastic branch of the Religionsgeschichte school, which has held such a sway over late modern intellectual life, especially from the eighteenth century to the present in the academy. I am not here speaking against the historico-critical method. I have used it extensively in my own career, and value its rigor and its richness. But I am issuing a warning that it is not the be all and end all. Mircea Eliade, when at Chicago, was renowned for issuing a warning that, perhaps, has been too much forgotten in Christian analytical circles: that when steeped in Religionswissenschaft (that fevered attempt to persuade ourselves and other academic colleagues that religion is a pure science), the practitioner must take great care to ensure regular periods of “de-provincialization,” so as to restore a balanced perspective. What he meant by that was to remind his advanced students that the often-unspoken premises of scholarship tended to blind as much as they illumined. He wanted his researchers to step outside their Euro-centric hierarchies of judgment over what constituted religious significance—such as the way we so often presumed that European philosophy of history ought to be the standard mode for analytical discourse. Not much of a help, Eliade thought, when dealing with nontextualized Mayan ritual. Maybe not a profound help, either, in our mapping of the transcendent.

The history-of-dogma approach has not been uncritically swallowed in every hallway of the intellectual patristic tradition, of course; far from it. It came into the academic world as a child of liberal Protestantism of the nineteenth-century type. But into the wider and generally more Catholic culture of patristic circles there came the other shining meteorite of nineteenth-century theory about Christian origins, exemplified most succinctly by John Henry Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. And in this schema of approach, which had achieved a high level of acceptance by the mid-twentieth century in the Catholic world, the history-of-religions approach was nuanced by a tendency to “read” the doctrine of Trinity in terms of how it “developed” toward its high-water statement: namely, in terms of the fourth-century patristic dogmas of Athanasius and the Cappadocians. This is an unfortunate way of proceeding, however, if the high-water statements of the church’s trinitarian initiation happen to be the Johannine and Pauline apostolic catechesis (as Origen and others had intimated several times) and if the generic variform patristic tradition of the Trinity is merely an extended exegetical commentary on it. Whether or not the method was problematic, however, it has certainly dominated the field for more than a century past now.

Taking a typical trajectory to study the doctrine of the Trinity in this environment means, more or less, to begin with New Testament Trinity examples of Christology and Pneumatology, move on to the apologists’ embryonic models of Trinity, and resolve the matter in the high patristic age when the fully developed model of trinitarian confession is alleged to have been fashioned as a response to the Arian and Macedonian controversies. It follows as a certain form of postlude to this model of thinking that, because the Trinity appears to have been an emergency reaction to high Arianism, then once it had been stated, then the need to restate it accordingly diminished; and this might explain why the notion was elaborated (albeit with such opacity) in the patristic age and was then left without much further comment throughout the medieval, Reformation, and modern periods.

This is a rapid pen sketch, perhaps too much of a caricature, though I could defend its substance by reference to more or less any curriculum (of those that do exist) dealing with the Trinity in Christian tradition. It stands duty here to raise for us the question: “If we have been reading the fathers wrongly on the doctrine of the Trinity, how might we stand to correct our reading?” If we take St. Augustine’s monumental De Trinitate as an example of a high-level discussion of the Trinity that was not actually precipitated by a crisis, it may serve to underline the point that “problematic” has been falsely elevated as the chief key of interpretation. For although the De Trinitate stood in for some of the highest level of thinking on the subject that the later church engaged in, it is nevertheless, in its original context, clearly the attempt of an African provincial bishop to make sense of a received and, for him, problematized understanding of a central matter of the faith. That in this great treatise Augustine makes so much use of Late Antique logic and rhetoric, psychology and imagination, to retell the trinitarian story of the church, and so little use of the prior theological heritage he has received, indicates how a powerful intellect could overcome a difficult narrowness of base when seeking a deeper self-education without recourse to a significant Christian library. In passing on his solutions to the Latin world that came after him, in all innocence Augustine also passed on the peculiar method he had adopted in the relative isolation of his North African see. As well as his solution, he thus passed along too his fixing of the Trinity as this certain domain of problematic.

St. Photios, among others in the Eastern tradition, would point the finger of blame at that part of the great African’s system where he clouded the waters over the fundamental term of the procession of all being from the Father alone: the monarchia of the Father understood as triunity by seeing him as the single Aitios (cause) of the Godhead. And Photios would, further, point to what that really meant in practice: that the being that is expressed by the Son and Spirit equally is not “divine being” as such, some form of a common set of attributes or properties that they command or possess as coequal deities, but is rather, and by contrast, the very being of the Father in particularity. The Son and Spirit have no other being than the Father’s own, and singular, being; and this is exactly why the Greek church professes that there is but one God, not three gods.

The bond of the triunity is, in the Greek church, identity of essence, not commonality of substance. The particular diffractions of the triunity are hypostatic, or distinct personal, expressions of that being of the Father in the manner in which the Father’s life-creating presence is celebrated. This is true both within the deity and without; or, to put it better, it is true both to God Himself as Father, Son, and Spirit (more than which I cannot say, without saying what cannot be said) and to God’s beloved creation, wherein the Triune God stands both as the fundamental celebration of life at the root structure of all created being and as the fundamental energy of therapeutic healing, for all that part of the creation (the sentient or noetic part of it) that needs remedy and rescue. In short, the triunity is, for God, pure celebration of being, the vitality of which we cannot imagine, yet we sense the conflagration of the light as we are drawn to it in the patterning of our existences; and for us, the angelic and human church of the Elect, it is the celebration of reconciliation. In a word, the Trinity is the dynamic of our salvation. Metropolitan John of Pergamon expressed it in the following way, which brings out the uniqueness and radicality of the high patristic doctrine as stated (for example) by St. Gregory the Theologian: “Outside the Trinity there is no God, no divine substance, because the ontological ‘principle’ of God is the Father. The personal existence of God (Father) constitutes His substance, makes it hypostasis. The being of God is identified with the person.” 6 Most recently Christopher Beeley 7 has done a marvelous job in demonstrating how this dynamic, in the hands of Gregory the Theologian, makes sense of his passion for the Trinity: “My Trinity,” as he so often called his God.

To read the Greek fathers rightly on the Trinity, therefore, I would suggest we scale back the apologetic context of our analysis, reduce the urgency of our need to see patterns of development, and become more ready to accept eschatological utterance on this theme for what it was, a commentary on the glory of the living God manifested in the creation or in the act of salvation (the song of the angels, or the song of the cross). It was this, far more than ever it was “this or that apologia”; for the apologetic element was merely its occasion, not its cause. It is only by approaching the mystery of the Trinity in this way, as the mystery of our salvation, and God’s life-giving outreach to humanity, that it can be saved from becoming, for us, a mere conundrum, of the type where all the facts of the Trinity can be rehearsed as if they were mathematical formulae: three Persons in one God, each Person wholly divine, making not three gods or three parts of one God, but all who are one God, possessed of the selfsame nature in three coequal hypostases and expressing a single power, glory, and will. This, the solemn high patristic doctrine of the Trinity, is a mystery full of significance and symbolism. It is not a schoolroom problem but the song of the church. But the words of the verses are not entirely exhausted by the fourth-century patristic consensus. It is this element of the Trinity as canticle of glory that I suggest should be restored to our global reading of the Greek fathers; and not least on the grounds that they were often pastorally rooted saints before they were subtle theoreticians. If it cannot be rescued from its presentation among the schools as merely a problematic, the concept of Trinity will not simply be a conundrum for Islam or Judaism, and de facto even more so for other religious systems, but will increasingly become a matter of profound difficulties of future communication with Western Christendom.

This perspective also suggests that the doctrine of the Trinity from all patristic eras matters—that the Irenaean nonformulaic trinitarian conceptions, for example, are in no sense merely embryonic because they are pre-Nicene, and that the imagery of the apologists is not necessarily defectively drawn because it is not logically watertight. Nothing, in fact, could be purer to take as a final example than that earliest of theologians, who is so rarely cited as a trinitarian teacher, Polycarp, the martyr and bishop of Smyrna who prophetically uttered at his execution in 156

O Lord, Pantocrator, Father of your Beloved and Blessed Son Jesus Christ,

through whom we have received the perfect knowledge of You, ... I bless and

glorify You through the eternal and heavenly High Priest, Jesus Christ your

Beloved Son, through whom be glory to You, with Him and the Holy Spirit, both

now and for the ages to come. Amen. 8

If I had time—and it would certainly be a fruitful exercise for someone to do this systematically—all the major patristic statements about the trinitarian relations could, and should, be reexegeted as liturgical doxologies. It will have to suffice simply to draw attention to a few of the major thinkers who never depart from the liturgical matrix, the poetic élan that always characterizes even the most abstruse defenses of trinitarian thought in the fathers. We can begin with Athanasius, who, exegeting the Johannine Discourse, 9 lifts up the powerful, and beautiful, image of radiance: life-giving illumination as what the Trinity essentially means, the invisible Father given in the features of Christ’s face:

The whole being of the Son belongs to the Father’s substance, as radiance from light, and stream from spring; so that he who sees the Son sees what belongs to the Father; and knows that the Son’s being is in the Father just as it is from the Father. For the Father is in the Son as the sun is in its radiance, the thought in the word, the spring in the stream. 10

Or we may take the two beautiful prayers in St. Basil’s De Spiritu Sancto, which many have seen to be an imagistic core of the work. In the first, he speaks of the illumination that is the Trinity as given by the enlightenment of the Spirit of God, like a light falling onto a transparent vessel. It is a supreme example of what Gregory the Theologian would articulate, almost simultaneously, when defining the scope of Theologia as akin to that of poetry. St. Basil says:

Shining upon those that are cleansed from every spot, [the Spirit] makes them

spiritual by fellowship with Himself. Just as when a sunbeam falls on bright and

transparent things, they themselves become brilliant too, and shine out a fres

brightness from themselves; so it is with souls in which the Spirit dwells. Being

illuminated by the Spirit, they themselves become spiritual, and then send forth

their grace onto others. 11

In the second prayer, Basil approaches the deity of the Spirit by means of an extended commentary on 2Corinthians 3:18, using the image of sunlight spreading color cast in a room to represent the lucent character of the soul of a saint. This passage comes after chapter 19 of the treatise, which makes its major dogmatic statement on the basis that the church’s experience of God demands we give a doxology that triadically includes the divine Spirit. Here he says:

Just as objects which lie adjacent to brilliant colours are themselves tinted by

the brightness which is lucent around them, so is the person who fixes his gaze

firmly on the Spirit transfigured by the Spirit’s glory somehow into even greater

splendour. For such a person’s heart is lighted up, as it were, by a kind of light

that streams from the truth of the Spirit. And, this is what is meant by being

changed from “glory into glory,” that is, by the glory of the Spirit into His very

own glory, not in any partial degree, or as it were dimly and indistinctly, but

rather in the fashion we might expect of any one who has been enlightened by

the Spirit. 11

Gregory the Theologian, an exegesis of whose trinitarian theology ought not to be attempted by those who do not have years on their hands, also shows himself never to have lost the doxological context of what he has been so able to expound metaphysically when necessary. The following short words from his Orations have the force of poetic imagery that rises into prayer; however complicated the thought, the sense of it communicates easily, and rises like incense at the time of worship. The same point could be made more forcefully, and more extensively, by expounding his trinitarian theology from out of his corpus of poetry:

Adorable unity in trinity,

trinity recapitulated in unity;

entirely venerable, entirely regal,

of the same throne and glory,

transcendent and timeless,

uncreated, indivisible,

untouchable, uncircumscribable. 12

Or consider the deftness and richness of this exposition of perichoresis: “That single radiance of the single Godhead, personally distinct in a way that that unites, and united together in a way that keeps its distinctions: all of which is a paradox.” 13

I will conclude with the whole richness of the Orthodox patristic trinitarian theology as expressed in this prayer, from the Vespers of Pentecost Sunday, attributed to the Emperor Leo, whom no textbook would even list as a theologian. This troparion begins with a liturgical catechesis and ends with a skillful set of variations on the Trisagion. I shall use it to bring full circle this consideration of how we conceive of what the patristic tradition of Trinity is, and how we always need to contextualize it in Christian doxology:

Come all you peoples and let us worship the Divinity in three hypostases:

The Son in the Father with the Holy Spirit.

For the Father timelessly begot the Son,

who is coeternal, sharing the same throne as he;

And the Holy Spirit who is in the Father, glorified with the Son.

There is one power, one essence, one deity,

Which we all worship in words such as these:

Holy God,

who created all things through the Son,

with the co-operation of the Holy Spirit;

Holy Mighty,

through whom we have known the Father,

and through whom the Holy Spirit came into this world;

Holy Immortal,

the Comforting Spirit, who proceeds from the Father,

and abides in the Son;

O Holy Trinity, glory to you. Doxa soi.

Notes.

I In most of his philosophical thinking Rahner argued that God could not possibly be a direct object of human thought, in the way that a thing or person within the world order could be. Even so, when a human mind thought about or related to any given object, or willed any particular value, it could grasp that object, or will that end, only as the object or end related (each and every moment) to a whole complex of being in which the particular object or end made sense and was situated—only, in other words, as a particular in the “whole of being.” So it was, for Rahner, that all living sentient beings had an awareness of God, in so far as by their existential interactions they not only grasped individual entities in the world, but in that very act reached out invariably also to the “whole of being” that was beyond the invidualities: reached out to God, therefore, whether they knew this in such terms or not. Rahner also posited throughout his theology an important new iteration of the relationship between “transcendental” and “categorical” experience: that God, in dealing with his Creation, did not give revelations about himself, rather that he characteristically gave Himself, communicated Himself, to the world. The Trinity is the prime instance of what this might mean in terms of the Christian doctrine of God.

2 Orthodoxy holds strongly to the belief that the “names” of the hypostases of God are part of the deposit of divine revelation. For this reason it regards the titles as more than merely formalist and socially constructed. The titles Father, Son, and Spirit, since they are the revealed names of the hypostases of the divine, are, as such, worthy of adoration. The name carries the power of God within it, as the Scriptures of the old covenant rightly sensed, and its invocation endows prayer with the power of holiness. The Orthodox of both sexes will thus never cease to use the threefold and correct name of God in all their prayer and invocation.

3. John of Damascus, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith 1.8.

4. In other words, the “religious” confession that all faiths speak of the same God cannot possibly be true if confession of the Trinity, as Orthodoxy confesses its Living God, is a confession peculiar to the apostolic catholic Christian faith.

5. Also Eph. 2:18: “Through him we have access in one Spirit to the Father”. See also Eph. 3:8–18.

6. John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 41.

7. Christopher Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).