QUOTE:The Nicene confession that all things were made through Christ teaches us that the cosmos are the stage upon which the Triune God enacts a great drama of communion by sharing the divine life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with persons who are not God.
At the heart of the divine act of creation is the divine desire to make room for created persons in the communion of the uncreated Persons of the Blessed Trinity through adoptive participation in Christ.
Through the eyes of divine faith, then, the likeness to divine nature that is enjoyed by spiritual creatures with intellect and will, turns out to be a likeness to the divine Trinity enjoyed by created persons, who, in grace, know the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as well as one another in them. (Nicene Christianity, J Augustine Di Noia, 2002)
COMMENTARY:
Father Di Noia present us with three very basic foundations necessary for a proper Christian understanding of reality. The first principle is that the main goal of God the Trinity in the act of creation was to receive from that creation, an inter-relatedness to His creatures. In short, God wants to share himself with those whom He has created, and thus He has constructed all things to facilitate that end. This should help us conclude then that the whole cosmos exist with the stage for communion with God in mind.
The second principle shows us that the designed means of entry into this interrelationship for which the cosmos are designed is an adoption by one who is already in the Trinity, the Son, and our Lord Jesus Christ. The point being that while we all walk around on the stage we cal the cosmos, we never enter into the ongoing play as full participants until we become united to Christ by adoption. In other words, there are the stage hands and the actors.
The third and final principle is that the way to see that doorway that leads to adoption is using the eyes of faith. The eyes of faith are the opera glasses by which the play becomes visible. Without rightly adjusted glasses, the whole play will appear as a blur.
Thus, the stage where the play called “the inter-communion of the blessed Trinity” is occurring is the cosmos, the means by which mankind enters into participation in that play come to us by an adoption that we receive from Christ, and this reality only becomes visible through a new kind of understanding, which we know as the eyes of faith.
If the church’s gospel presentation always began this way, our reputation in the contemporary west might be completely different than it is today.
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