Wednesday, January 23
Proclamations of Mystery
"Or consider this: God is love, St. John tells us. (Be sure to get this right: don't say "love is God," or you'll end up running away with your neighbor's wife. Hugs are not enough; we need theology, too.) It sounds trite at first, but a little thought reveals that those words can't mean simply that He loves us--we're too limited to receive such love, much less return it adequately. Does He love himself? That can't be it. If you're going to love, there has to be somebody else to love. In fact it's the elseness that makes for the joy of love--the going out of yourself. The dogma of the Holy Trinity is the only 'explanation' I have ever heard of that allows us to have both monotheism and a God who is love.
"I put the word 'explanation' in quotation marks because it's not really an explanation at all but the statement of a mystery. In fact, all those complicated doctrinal definitions and impassioned disputes over words in the history of the Catholic Church are not what they seem to people: attempts to 'put God in a box.' What they are is proclamations--announcements of what God has revealed."
--from Marilyn Prever, "Shouldn't Religion be Simple?: A Housewife Dabbles in the Theology of the Trinity." Second Spring, vol. 9.
"I put the word 'explanation' in quotation marks because it's not really an explanation at all but the statement of a mystery. In fact, all those complicated doctrinal definitions and impassioned disputes over words in the history of the Catholic Church are not what they seem to people: attempts to 'put God in a box.' What they are is proclamations--announcements of what God has revealed."
--from Marilyn Prever, "Shouldn't Religion be Simple?: A Housewife Dabbles in the Theology of the Trinity." Second Spring, vol. 9.
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