Life In God

The Nicene confession has enshrined the fact that all things were made through Christ. Consequently, through the Creed - Christ, the Apostles, the Church Fathers, and the Church Councils teach 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 this divine act of creation, we find God’s desire to make room for created persons in the communion of the uncreated Persons of the Blessed Trinity through an adoptive participation in Christ. In short, God has made a way to share himself with those whom He has created, and thus He has constructed all things to facilitate that end. This truth should help us conclude then that the whole cosmos exist with the stage for communion with God in mind. The cosmos are designed then as a means of entry into this interrelationship God by way of an adoption by one who is part of the Trinity, the Son, and our Lord Jesus Christ. The point being that while we all walk around on the stage we call 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, and the actors are those in who are in Christ.

The proclamation of the gospel is the doorway which opens the path that leads to this adoption, and thus to participation in the divine drama. By believing the gospel and thus believing that God not only is, but as the Psalmist says, that He is a rewarder of those who seek (look for) Him, we become not stage hands but true actors and participants in the life of the Trinity which allows us to know God.

It is this participation in the life of God that gospel presentation must expose to those of us in the west who have heard of another kind of salvation. The gospel should expose to us that salvation is a life lived in the drama which we know as the life of the Trinity. It is that life alone which enables us to know God experientially, and that life alone which restores us to the reason we were created.

Noetic Mystery

The universal belief of all Christians is that the “one faith” originates with God the Father, becomes available to mankind through Christ the Son, and is apportioned to persons by God the Holy Spirit. However, ask the question, "for what purpose?" or, "what is this faith inteded to produce?" And the answers start to diverge. St. Paul tells the Ephesians:

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ- by grace you have been saved- and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. Eph 2: 4-7.

According to St Paul, the purpose for this one faith is to enable us to experience God both in the present through Christ, and in the age to come through Christ. The goal of this faith is nothing less than to produce our participation in the life of God through Christ, and thus a participation in mystery. The church uses the term mystery because we have no words that adequately convey what it means to know and be known by God, this experience is something that can only be poorly described. The term for this kind of knowledge attained by our description is called cataphatic knowledge.

The goal of faith goes beyond catapahtic knowledge to noetic knowledge. Through noetic knowledge the God of mystery made known by the fullness of experience, and by the intimate interaction that can only occur between one person and another person. When this is reality is understood our theological debates take on a completely different tone. Can we debate God with someone who does not know God? Obviously not, however, many Christians have fallen no the trap and they have done so because they believe that they can make a better argument for their points than those who do not know God. Perhaps they can make a better argument, however, the problem is that no amount of knowledge transmitted by a debate can produce intimacy with another person, especially when it comes to the God who is mystery.

The sum and substance of Christianity’s one faith is the personal experiential knowledge of the mysterious God. Why do we believe? We believe because we know God and are known by God. What do we believe? We believe what God has said. All of this shifts the emphasis from the intellect to the noetic knowldge regarding a mystery. Not that the intellect serves no purpose, it does, but its importance is small by comparison.

One Faith of Mystery

I began this blog page with the intention of first speaking on the oneness of God. While the subject has by no means been exhausted, I hope that it has been made abundantly clear that the oneness of God is central to the Christian faith, any misstep with regards to that great truth and we plunge headlong into a religion that is something other than Christianity.

Next, I intend to touch upon the “one faith”. The Christian faith is “one whole faith”. Add any parts to it (post-schism west) or leave any parts out (post-protestant west), and we fall into the same trap as those who fail to apprehend the one God, and end up with another religion.

The first point I want to stress is that this one faith is first and foremost a mystery. What I mean by mystery is that it begins and ends in another dimension, one for which our present dimension has no means to explain fully. Nevertheless, we are created by God to experience and know that dimension. Let us call that dimension the heavens; the place where time is marked out by kairos or eternity, and not chronos or temporality. This dimension is also the place where in the spiritual is as apprehendable as the physical, therefore the place wherein the “One God” dwells with clear perceptibility.

That faith requires both knowledge and participation, the sum of which I want to call experience. Nevertheless, the kind of experience can only be called mystical experience (an experience in the mystery of God’s realm). Unfortunately, in the post schism west we have reduced the Christian to the knowledge of dogma and the practice of virtues. Important as these two may be, they are meaningless without an experience of God. Therefore, the one faith to which I refer is a particular gift that Jesus Christ gives to mankind throught the Holy Spirit so that they can experience God in his ohterwise mysterious existence. The one faith must lead to the expereince of God.

In the blogs to follow I will address various aspects of the one faith that leads to an encounter with the God of mystery.