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The Trinity and Human Love

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2024

G. F. Mackrell S.M.M.
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‘Batter my heart, three-Personed God’, wrote the poet John Donne. However, it has been the mind, not the heart, which has been battered by this most unfathomable of all mysteries. Centuries of long and painful battering of Unitarian hammer on tritheistic anvil eventually forged a statement which expressed the mystery: three persons in one nature. And ever since the Council of Florence there has echoed down the centuries a thunderous ‘So what?’. For the riddle of the Trinity is not merely that of the Three-in-one, but the revelation of it. Not ‘how?’, but ‘why?’. What is its relevance?

Karl Rahner, in his Theological Investigations, is exaggerating only slightly when he notes:

‘One might almost dare to affirm that if the doctrine of the Trinity were to be erased as false, most religious literature could be preserved almost unchanged throughout the process. And it cannot be objected that the Incarnation is such a theologically and religiously central element in Christian life that on that account the Trinity is always and everywhere irremovably present. For when the Incarnation of God is spoken of, theological and religious intention is today concentrated on the fact that “God” has become man, that “a” person of the Trinity has assumed flesh—but not on the fact that this person is precisely that of the Word, Logos.’

In the attempt to make the Trinity relevant one is beset by problems which appear insoluble. The most obvious of these is the danger of falling into the error of ‘tritheism’.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 53 , Issue 625 , June 1972 , pp. 270 - 275
Copyright
Copyright © 1972 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

page 270 note 1 Theological Investigations, Vol. IV, Ch. 3, pp. 78–79.Google Scholar

page 271 note 1 The Furrow, January, 1970.

page 271 note 2 Catholic Education Today, May 1969.

page 271 note 3 The Trinity and God the Creator, p. 5, London 1952.

page 272 note 1 Op. cit., pp. 8‐9.

page 274 note 1 For a further discussion of this, see Erich Fromm, The Art of Lovitlg (Unwin), pp. 13‐33.