Sentences with phrase «own divine person»

Elsewhere, I have indicated how this field - approach to Whiteheadian societies allows for a trinitarian understanding of God in which the three divine persons of traditional Christian doctrine by their dynamic interrelatedness from moment to moment constitute a structured field of activity for the whole of creation.6 Here I would only emphasize that thinking of Whiteheadian societies as aggregates of mini-entities with one entity providing the necessary unity for the entire group is reductively much more impersonal and materialistic than the approach sketched in these pages.

Our Lord is the fulfilment of ancient typology, and as a truly divine person.

In a line that John Paul never tired in quoting, we read that there is «certain similarity between the union of the divine persons and union of God's children in truth and love.

When we talk about the actions of Jesus we need to be careful because He has two natures — He is fully divine and fully human — even though He is only one, divine Person — God the Son, the second Person of the Trinity.

If Jesus is a divine person, since no two substances can occupy the same space at the same time, then the human Jesus must be removed to let the divine Jesus in!

On the societal model, however, the primordial nature becomes the defining characteristic of the divine person.

The human nature of Christ was predestined by God to that highest glory of the beatific sharing in the inner life of the divine persons.

Traditional dogma affirms that Christ is one divine person but that there is a clear distinction of natures in Christ, human and divine.

He is thus against natural law theory but for a DCT in which God, by creating rational creatures, is bound to make their highest end a relationship with the divine persons, but free to pursue that end via any number of routes.

It is not as if divine Persons are mere masks of God; they are who and what the divine True Self actually becomes, for us.

Perhaps the best way of thinking about this is to distinguish between the loving unity that the three divine Persons experience, on the one hand, and the loving unity that defines God's eternal essence, on the other.

that individuality in creation is always the dynamic unity of a plurality of parts or members (pp. 40 - 46), hence that God too must be a dynamic unity in plurality, or in other words a Trinity, of coequal divine persons (p. 415).

Applying Royce's understanding of community to the doctrine of the Trinity, one could say that the three divine persons are one God by reason of their common participation in an ongoing process of interpretation which is their life in community.

Moltmann, Mühlen and Jüngel insist that three divine persons are intimately involved in Jesus» passion, death, and resurrection.

But the process in question is not the concrescence of an actual entity, but rather an interpersonal process involving three divine persons.

In any case, he does not conceive the three divine persons as members of a community along the lines which I propose in this article.

Hence, only in virtue of their relationship to one another within the structured society which is the divine community are the three divine persons truly God, i.e., the Supreme Being, than which nothing greater can be thought.4

Thornton, for example, does not envisage change or development in God, whereas I postulate that the three divine persons undergo change in their relationships to one another as a result of their involvement with their (rational) creatures.

Or, seen from the opposite perspective, creation (and with it all of human history) is a partial expression of the exchange of love between the three divine persons from all eternity.

Hence the democratically organized structured society of three divine persons would be reductively three gods acting in close cooperation, not one God in three persons, as tradition maintains.

Only if a Whiteheadian society can be said to exercise agency proper to itself could one use the more specialized category of structured society to describe the interrelation of three divine persons within the Godhead.

Thornton's vision both of the Trinity and of the relation of the three divine persons to creation is closely akin to my own hypothesis, as will be evident later in this article, There are, however, significant points of difference between the two theories.

What seems to be lacking in his exposition is an explicit equation between process in God and community, such that the community life of the three divine persons is understood to be a process, partly identical with the process of human history but also partly distinct from it.

The process of creation, including all of human history, is then part of the subject matter for the never - ending dialogue or process of interpretation between the divine persons.

I shall not endorse Royce's own conception of the Trinity in this book, since it is more Sabellian or modalistic than genuinely Trinitarian.3 Rather, my intention is first to summarize Royce's understanding of human community, then to make clear how it corresponds to a democratically organized structured society within a Whiteheadian perspective, and finally to apply this understanding of community to the Trinity in order to clarify the notion of God as a community of divine persons.

3 In the only passage from The Problem of Christianity where the doctrine of the Trinity is discussed at length, Royce does not make clear whether he affirms an ontological triunity of persons within the Godhead or simply a distinction of divine persons within the religious experience of the believer (PC 135 - 39).

4 Here one could counterargue that a divine community consisting of four or five persons would be «greater» than one containing only three persons, that a community of ten persons would be greater still, and so on ad infinitum, with the net result that the notion of God as a community of divine persons would be completely discredited.

Maximizing relativity as well as absoluteness in God enables us to conceive him as a supreme person... but it is the divine Person that contains the Absolute, not vice versa.18

Hence the three divine persons experience no contradiction in always thinking and acting alike.

Another point about the common tradition that requires note if we are to make progress toward sorting out the relation between authority and office is that, within it, authority is a term that is applied in a proper sense only to persons, either the divine Persons of the Trinity or human persons who act on God's behalf.

For Mark's «theological idea» was not so much the present reality of the divine person, the exalted Lord of his community, nor yet was it the glorious and unique historical person, Jesus of Nazareth, but the mysterious, half - divine, apocalyptic «Son of Man» who had lived incognito upon earth, died, and risen again.

If we then understood philosophy as committed to rational thinking, we could see its necessary irrelevance to considerations of both the human person and the divine Person.

Then God's act in revealing himself is no longer an encounter between the divine Person and the human person, but an act worked upon a purely passive entity that insight equally well be a dog or a stone.

[8] This is not to imply that Chalcedon was innovating in understanding Christ as having divine and human natures united by a divine person («hypostatic union»).

In that book, Neusner explains why he can not accept what Jesus and the Church say about his divine person and mission.

Apart from Christ, who is an eternally existing divine person who took human nature, a human being is a human person and what makes someone such a human being is the human soul.

By postulating the existence of two natures in this one person, the Doctrine of the Incarnation allowed one to say that the suffering of Jesus as reported in the Gospels was experienced by the one human - and - divine person through his human nature, which avoided a run - in with the prevailing wisdom of the time.

From this creative will comes a human nature taken from Jesus» human mother that is personified by, exists in, is «enhypostatised» by the divine person of the Logos.

The full human nature, his body, his soul and his human will exists in the divine person of the Logos.

He remembers in that connection the divine person who, far from insisting on his rights, completely surrendered them for others; and before he knows it Paul is launched on the greatest christological statement he makes anywhere.

It is hard to resist the conclusion that Paul is thinking of this divine person in contrast to the mythological Lucifer (see Isaiah 14:12 ff.)

Between the cultures, as in the mystery of the Trinity, the same principle has to be ruling: the radical being - in - relation between the three divine persons.

In the fullness of time, they will reach their culmination in the divinity and humanity of Christ, united in the divine person of God the Son, which shines out on Mount Tabor.

A mere man is placed side by side with the divine person, and the contrast jars.

This is not to parcel up Christ, as if Leo did not equally stress the oneness of Jesus» divine person, but merely an exercise in seeing how these distinct natures work.

Leo's teaching brilliantly balances the human and divine natures existing within the one divine person in Christ without mixing, separating or diminishing the integrity of the natures, but the problem for biblical theologians lies in Leo's use of non-scriptural terminology, most notably «person» itself.

However, the main stream of theology preferred to think of Jesus Christ as a divine person, one who was not the bearer of God's Word but was, ontologically, the Word or Son, one who was God concretely manifested.

Israel was acquainted with the manifestations of God as his Spirit, but this did not suggest that God in his inner being constituted one divine person distinct from the Spirit of the Lord.

In the new metaphysics that developed as the Church wrestled with the revelation of God's character in Scripture, the communion of divine Persons came to be understood as a «primordial ontological concept and not a notion which is added to the divine substance or rather which follows it.»

My own trinitarian conception of the God - world relationship, as expressed in previous publications, lends itself even more dramatically to a field - oriented understanding of the God - world relationship since it makes clear how the three divine persons of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity can be said to possess a field proper to their own divine being which likewise serves as the «matrix» or ontological ground for the field of activity proper to creation (see, for example, The Divine Matrix 52 - 69 and «Panentheism from a Process Perspective»).