Transcript
But first, let us recall what happens under the old dualist approach, where we operate within a context of dualism, epistemological and cosmological. First, we saw that this does involve a doctrine of the immutability and impassibility of God, and what I called a deistic disjunction between God and the universe. Hence, when we try to relate that kind of God to the universe, we do so in terms of what science has come to call an inertial system. That
is equally true of the medieval approach with its doctrine of the unmoved mover, and with its notion of God as impassively or inertially containing the universe through his absolute time and space. But it is also true, as we noted in passing, of the so-called process theology with its doctrine of the unmover, a concept that comes from Colin Gunton. And b, within the context of a dualist approach, however, there takes place a radical bifurcation in the
doctrine of God. We saw the difficulties produced by Newton's bifurcation of the two roles of God in relation to the world he had made. But in traditional theology, and above all in Roman Catholic theology, dualism leads to a radical bifurcation between the doctrine of the one God and the doctrine of the triune God. And so the Romans produced two separate treatises, De Deo Uno and De Deo Trino, as you can see in the two treatises of
Lonergan, that now at last are being translated from Latin into English. Now, it was this basic split in the concept of God that troubled Karl Barth and prompted him, among other things, to attack it in rejecting the bifurcation of theology into natural theology and revealed theology. Into natural theology, the ground of the doctrine of the one God, and revealed theology, the ground of the doctrine of the triune God. As I pointed out earlier, the problem was
the same as that between Euclidean geometry, conceived as an antecedent conceptual system on its own, and physics, actual knowledge of the universe. Barth rejected any idea of natural theology in the form of a preamble of the faith. And so he rejected any doctrine of the one God developed apart from and antecedently to the doctrine of the triune God, for that would posit a schizoid state of affairs in the foundations of theology. Now, basically, the same bifurcation
is to be found in much reformed and especially Westminster theology, in its bifurcation between the covenant of works and the covenant of grace, which works out in the same way. What happens now when we do away with that dualism and the bifurcation in our basic approach and our basic concepts with it, and the bifurcation in our basic concepts which it inevitably involves? If God really is triune in his nature, then really to know God means we
must know him in accordance with his triune nature from the very start. It is certainly scientifically objectionable to develop a doctrine of the Trinity on ground other than that on which we develop our actual knowledge of God or the one God. But further, if we operate not with some kind of epistemological dualism between form and being or structure and substance, but with the unity of form and being or structure and substance, then to know God we
must know him in accordance with the form or structure of his own being, that is, in terms of God's inner divine relations. And that means to know him as the triune God, who within himself has relations between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, so that for us to know what God means, we must know him in a mode of understanding on our part appropriate to the Trinity of persons in God. Now, there must be a Trinitarian character
in our knowing of God corresponding to the Trinity of relations in God. Now, that was certainly the insight of St. Augustine, but it will not do on Augustine's dualist approach to operate with a Trinitarian structure which we have in our minds independent of or apart from our knowledge of God, as St. Augustine claims, for that would be to develop an independent conceptual structure of psychological relations in human nature in terms of which we interpret the doctrine
of the revealed God as we meet him in Holy Scripture. A similar mistake, of course, is regularly made in modern theology of the phenomenological and sociological or psychological types. It's basically the same mistake as you have in Augustine. Now, it's precisely this Augustinian dualism that we need to get rid of, whether in its medieval Thomist or Aristotelian form or in its Protestant Newtonian form and its phenomenological offshoots. But what do the Jews do who do not
believe that God is triune? Now, this is a particularly exciting question today, especially after the work of Martin Buber and especially in light of the fact that Jews are forced, especially in Israel, to relate God, the living, active God, to suffering, forced upon them not only by their history in Europe but also by the fact that everywhere they look they see a cross. Now, Buber saw through the problem of modern Protestant thought which he attached for
what he called a conceptual letting go of God. That conceptual letting go of God was the result of the Kantian dictum that we cannot know anything in itself but only what appears to us in its external relations, and so we cannot know God, let alone Jesus, as he is in himself. But actually we can only grasp anything in our thought and hold what we grasp in thought if we grasp it in its internal relations. Think of
a mountaineer trying to climb up the face of a rock cliff. If it's sheer and utterly smooth without any cracks in it, it's impossible. And as he can get his fingers or spikes into the rock and thus make use of the interstices or intrinsic relations in the face of the rock, then how could Buber grasp God if he is ineffable, the God of Judaism, entirely one in that way? How can Buber claim to grasp God and
not let him go conceptually? At this point, astoundingly, Buber appears as a secret Trinitarian, for he had to appeal to relations of love within the being of God, which he took over from Spinoza, Spinoza's doctrine of the rational love of God in which God loves himself within himself, who in turn had been influenced at this point by Christian teaching. There is a kind of meeting in love within God, and it is when our knowledge of God
latches onto that internal structure or relation in God that we can really conceive him and know him in accordance with his intrinsic relations. And that is the ground, as Buber shows, for a conceptual grasp of God. It is precisely what we are concerned with in classical theology. And so let us move on and ask, how are we to approach the self-revelation of God and the self-communication of God, which we meet in the New Testament
Gospel, and do that within the context of what I have called the scientific revolution in the foundations of knowledge, in accordance with which dualism between the empirical and the theoretical has been abolished, and likewise, therefore, the bifurcation between form and being or structure and substance. We develop pathological inquiries then in movements of thought in which we seek to know God in accordance with his nature and in accordance with his own internal relations as they become disclosed
to us. Now let us take our starting point here from Athanasios and the doctrine of the Inousios Logos refers to the word reason inherent in the ousia or the being of God, and the energia refers to the activity, the motion, the act of God inherent in his being. Now A, if God's Logos inheres in his own being eternally and that Logos has become incarnate in Jesus Christ, then it is in and through Christ that we have
access into the inner being of God, into his inner divine intelligibility or Logos or word. For example, the argument against Judaism in the latter part of the second chapter of Ephesians. There is a parallel to that in the way in which we now seek to understand nature or the universe in accordance with its internal rational order or intrinsic intelligibility. Hence we speak of apprehending natural relations in terms of their intrinsic structures and if you like, in
terms of their intrinsic reason. St Anselm in developing this actually spoke of, and this is the one medieval theologian who has penetrated more deeply here than others on the ground largely of the work of Athanasios and Hilary, of an intima locutio, an intimate locution embedded in being, created being and in supreme being, and that's right, for in theology particularly the Logos is not simply intelligibility but word. It's a locution, a rational locution, a mode of the
divine rationality expressing itself in word. But second, if God's energia or act inheres in his being, this is not so clear in Anselm, and that act has taken the form of Jesus Christ in the incarnation so that he is identical with the action of God and thus identical with the eternal decision or election of God, then we know God in accordance with the acts of his being, in accordance with his activity in disclosing himself to us.
Here then we have a double difference of theology from natural science. A double difference with the operations of natural science forced on us scientifically by the nature of the subject matter in the field of theological inquiry, nature of God himself. A. The doctrine that God's Logos inheres in his own being means that God's being is essentially eloquent being, speaking being. Now, it is not being which also speaks, but being which as being speaks. Its being and
its Logos are inseparable, they're one. Therefore, there can be no knowing of God in his bare being apart from his Logos of word, behind the back of his eloquent reality in God, just as there can be no real knowing of nature apart from its internal Logos or Locutio, its internal relations. B. The doctrine that God's Energia or act inheres in his being means that God's being is in his act and his act is in his being,
not that God's being also acts, but that his being is intrinsically acting being, active dynamic being. Hence, there can be no knowledge of God behind his acting being, behind God's back, apart from his dynamic active being and its bearing upon us. Now, contrast what this means with our inquiries in natural science. In natural science of any kind, we direct our questions to nature in order, as the scientists say, to let nature disclose itself to us in
its inner relations so that we know it, we grasp it truly as we allow our minds to fall under the power of those inner relations and think as we are compelled to think of nature in terms of those inner relations. But in theological science, we direct our questions to this God whose very being is eloquent with word. In nature, we are up against realities which are dumb. While they have an inherent intelligibility, the logos there is
only logos in the sense of intelligibility. It is not word. Therefore, nature is dumb. It can't talk to us. But in theological science, we are concerned with an inquiry of God whose very being is eloquent with word, whose being bears upon us in its creative activity the word spoken, it was done. So that here we have to do with the living God who reveals and communicates himself to us in a creative way, and yet who communicates
himself to us in such a way that he takes us into the inner fellowship of his divine being so that we are given knowledge of God as he is in himself within the innermost communion, the innermost relations of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Further, this God reveals and communicates himself to us where we actually are in our error and wrong and sin, in our misunderstanding and self-centeredness, in such a way as to strike
into the very heart of our being and to turn us inside out, in such a way as to redeem us from our sin and reconcile us to himself, assimilating us into the communion of love between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That is why the divine revelation penetrates into our inquiries, taking the initiative in questioning us, and so turns our questions upside down and inside out and shapes them creatively under the impact of his eloquent being,
his active word, very different from what we have in natural science, so that here we have to listen in a way that even the scientist is not forced to listen, and here we have an objectivity, profounder than any objectivity that any scientist operates with, for here we have the Lord of all space and time encountering us as the word-being, the being-word, the word-act, the being-act, who cannot be tamed by us but who
remains transcendent reality over against all our questions and controls them from his own side. Here then on the one hand we are concerned with eloquent and creative being of God himself, whom we know only in accordance with the steps he has taken in revealing himself to us and in reconciling us to himself. This creative and redeeming and reconciling activity of God in Christ and through the Spirit actively shapes and forms our understanding, as our minds fall
under the impact of his revelation, enabling us to apprehend God in himself beyond anything that we are capable of in ourselves. In that sense it is an ecstatic operation. We are forced to think of God not from a centre out of ourselves but from a centre in God, and so outside our natural centre in a centre in God's own active self-communication. Now to know this God, the living, active, speaking and redeeming God, is to know
him as the triune God so that knowledge of the Holy Trinity enters into the fundamental fabric of all our genuine knowledge of God, shapes it and constitutes the Trinity as the basic grammar of our worship and of our knowledge of God. Now I am not concerned today with the content of this triune knowledge of God, but with the way in which our knowing of God and the formulating of our knowledge of him operates within the context
which has occupied our thoughts in these lectures. When we look at it in this scientific way, we find that our knowledge of God as triune reveals a stratified structure on the ground of divine revelation, which is the actual ground on which our knowledge of God arises, not unlike the stratified structure which we develop in a rigorous scientific account of our knowledge in any field of investigation. And this stratified structure, incidentally, bears some relation to the actual
historical progress of knowledge of God that we see in the basic or at least the early basic ecumenical councils. Now let me describe this stratified structure. Now first, or A, we have our basic level of experience and worship in which we encounter God's revealing and redeeming activity in the Gospel. This is the evangelical and doxological level. This takes place not privately but within the context of the life and activity of the Church, that is, along with
others who share with us this common experience. And its focal point is encounter with Jesus Christ within the structures of our space and time, and therefore within the structures, rationalities and objectivities of our subject-subject, subject-object, and object-object experiences in this world. That's why demythologization is irrational. It's an attempt to take it all out of there. But we encounter Christ within those structured objectivities of this world to which we belong, where we are summoned
to live and act and think as intelligible beings who ourselves are part of the intelligible but contingent creation. Now this basic level is one in which empirical and theoretical factors are inseparably interwoven with one another, so that from the very start of our experience, form and being, structure and substance, are indivisibly united in the realities with which we have to do and in our rational and empirical responses to those realities. So I shall call this A,
and this is what I call the empirical and doxological level, the basic level of our ordinary worship and encounter with God and studying the Holy Scriptures, worshipping in church, and in that context, the inseparable interconnection of the empirical, the theoretical, the experiential, and the theological. Now B, as we direct our inquiries of God in this field of experience, we find that God reveals himself to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in a three-fold movement
or activity of revelation and redemption, in which we come up with basic concepts, that is, Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit. But they are concepts of distinctively personal modes of being, what Mark calls Seinsweiser, ways of being if you like. But they are more than modes, for the mode is inseparable from the reality of which it is, the distinctive mode or way of being. Now this is the level, then, in which we speak of the economic
trinity, the level on which we are concerned with the act of God and his being, with the personal acts of God in his personal reality as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who has come to save and redeem us. So that we have here a second level, which I speak of as the economic. Economic, of course, is the patristic term for the orderly way in which God communicates himself to us within the structures of space and time.
Now the decisive point for our theological science is here. Where we press from this first scientific level to a higher scientific level, we press into the inner relations disclosed in the economic self-revelation and self-communication of God to discern the intrinsic relations of God in himself. So if I call this the first scientific level, then we have to press into a third scientific level. Well, we are concerned with the inner relations disclosed to us in
God's economic self-revelation and self-communication. We are concerned with the intrinsic relations in God himself. And I shall show you a moment, this is what we normally call either the ontological or the immanent. Either the ontological or immanent doctrine of the trinity in relation to the economic doctrine of the trinity. So the decisive point in theology comes when we pass from that to that. The movement from that to that is undoubtedly the movement of Nicaea.
Because the Nicaean theology was written by the fathers on their knees, face to face with Jesus Christ. They are concerned with a God who so communicates himself to us in Christ that Christ is himself the embodiment of the God who comes. So that they not only worship God through with, but in Christ they worship God face to face with Christ. And he is the face of God toward them, he is the God whom they worship. So
it's the natural, evangelical and doxological approach so that Nicaea moves toward this point. Now it is here that cross-level reference is of the utmost significance. The relation between that level and that level and that level and that level. As in all science, this is the fundamental part. How we think, as I said the other day, the levels conjunctively together and refer from one level to the other level, going deeper and deeper into the inner relations
and thoughts. Now it is at this point that the Nicene homoousion is of fundamental importance. The word homoousion says the Greek term for of one being with the same being with God. That in Jesus they came up against the being of one whom they were forced to acknowledge was of the same being as God himself. He is one with the being of God, God of God in that way, that is the doctrine of the homoousion. It
rises here in a doxological form and then it is pressed in a more rigorous form to carry from the first scientific level to the second scientific level. The homoousion then is the ontological and the epistemological linchpin of the whole operation. Now what does this mean? The homoousion stands for the basic insight which we derive under the creative impact of God's self-communication upon us here. That what God is toward us in this economic activity as Father,
Son and Holy Spirit, he is antecedently and eternally because inherently in himself. Now the focal point is again Jesus Christ himself and it is this that the homoousion expresses. Now looked at in regard to natural science, this is the point where we break entirely with Immanuel Kant. We are concerned at this point therefore in natural science with penetrating through the level of our empirical and early theoretical understanding of reality into the internal relations because somehow if
nature is not in itself that which we claim to know of it, then we do not know nature, we are simply playing a game or we are simply operating with convenient conventional symbols or convenient conventional arrangements of observational data. And this is the decisive point again of Einstein in which he has to break right through that. It is theologically speaking the homoousion of physics. How do we penetrate into and break into the internal structures of reality?
And so it is epistemological revolution that is of staggering significance. Now in theology the homoousion means this. Jesus Christ is the logos inherent in the being of God and he is the act inherent in the being of God. So that the homoousion speaking of this tells us that the incarnation falls within the life of God. Now that is the staggering fact. The incarnation, this Jesus, falls within the very life of God. He is not just a
symbol of God. He is God and his own being come to us within the structures of space, time, humanity and communicating himself to us in this way so that here we have a movement of the life and being of God outside of God, as it were, toward us which does not leave God. And therefore looked at in the other way the incarnation is seen to fall while within space and time, within the life of God himself.
And that is the staggering fact that forced the early church to reconstruct the foundations of ancient thought about time and space, which I write of in Space, Time and Incarnation. And if you are interested in a more detailed patristic article in the festive for the great Georges Florovsky who lives here in Nassau Street. It's in the three-volume work edited by Andrew Blaine. God is then inherently in himself what he is toward us. And the God
who comes to us in and to him in himself what he is toward us. We find we have to think in the same way and say the same things about the Holy Spirit. And this is the great significance of Athanasius' letters to Serapion, which do the same thing. And here also we operate with the principle of the homoousion and God's self-communication to us in the Spirit, which takes place through the sun in one indivisible movement.
Now in this way, as we move in this way from B to C, from the economic trinity to the ontological trinity, or from the trinity ad extra to the trinity ad intra, as we make that movement we are compelled to acknowledge that what God is toward us in the three-fold economic activity of his revelation and redemption as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, he is inherently in his own eternal being in the Godhead. When we reach
that point, we have reached the point of the ultimate, to borrow an Einsteinian term, economic simplicity of relations in the being of God, which govern and control all our knowledge of God from beginning to end. Now in natural science, Einstein speaks of this, I think a little dubiously, as the ultimate logical structure of psychological knowledge, which is ultimately simple, though it may be complicated to get at it. But if we speak of that as the ultimate
logical structure, we're using logic in a profound material sense, it's the inner logic, what Carnap, if you'll forgive some of his positive aside, called asach logik. Now in that sense, this would be true. Here then in the trinity, the ontological trinity, we have the ultimate logical structure of all theology, or what I call the basic grammar of Christian theology. And that's why people like Athanasius or Cyril speak of the trinity in the strict sense as theologia,
theology. That is theology in its strict, pure sense. The pure science of theology episteme dogmaticae has to do with the trinity, and everything relating to it, and the trinity relating to everything. Now, how do we move scientifically from the relations in the economic trinity to through the homoousion, to the relations within the ontological trinity? Now in order to help us at this point, let us take another side look at what happens in a rigorous science like
physics, where we are certainly operating with a different field of reality, but where we are concerned with careful scientific procedure. I take my cue here from Einstein's essay, Physics and Reality. Now when we move from the realm of ordinary thought, and let us think for the moment of this as an ordinary thought in physics, the realm of ordinary thought close to experience to the scientific level, moving back to that, we seek to order our understanding by
connecting up our basic concepts into a theory, which allows us to penetrate into the interior connections in reality. These are of course levels of our understanding in thought, but in science they refer to actual structures eventually that are inherent in reality. In theology we are concerned with levels of doctrine, but the levels of doctrine have a function of directing us to actual relations in God through the actual relations that we have with God in space and
time. Well then here we are moving from the ordinary level of experience to this. Now one side word here, this is the vast difference between the new science and the old science. The old science was abstractive. It tore this apart. It tore certain ideas apart, certain forms of structures, realities apart, and then tried to develop them in an abstract way. That's why the old abstractive science is the enemy of man, an enemy of humanism. That's why
ecological chaos comes about. It's destructive because it's abstract. But the new science is not. It's a refinement, as Einstein says, of our ordinary ways of behaving and knowing, so that we are not here destroying this, but on the contrary developing it. Just as general relativity explains our common experiences far better than Newtonian and Galilean relativity, so here this way of thinking is much more closely related to our ordinary worship and our ordinary life. I'm sorry, I'm
digressing. Let's get back to the scientific activity, which I'm using as a kind of side clue. Now here, Einstein says, we operate with certain basic concepts, and I shall talk about these as B1, B2, B3. Now our task is to connect up these basic concepts in such a way that we see how they are interrelated in an orderly way in terms of the material logic I've been concerned with. Now how do we do that? What we
do is we freely think up, under the compulsion of reality, direct, intuitive apprehension of reality, certain creative ideas or fluid axioms, free axioms, and I shall call these A1, A2. Let's just operate with two in the meantime. Now through these axioms we then develop a kind of understanding of the connection that we find at this level. So we organize these basic concepts into a connected coherent formulation, and in this way we are able to penetrate into
the inner order more clearly than we can without them. So we now then develop B1, B2, B3, our basic concepts, in a closer interrelation, and the order becomes simpler. But what happens when we move from that to that? Now when we connect these up with the basic axioms, we develop certain theorems, certain theoretic connections, and they enable us for a while to grasp the inner realities, and as they do that we start shedding the theorems, and
we get a deeper grasp of reality, and indeed the fluid axioms may themselves change or partly fall away, so that we have a simpler structure and a deeper structure here. Now further, we press this up to a higher level in which we reach what Einstein would call the economic simplicity, the ultimate structure. Now take for example the way in which he developed the concepts of invariance. In this process he develops the kind of mathematical invariance, which
is an instrument through which we apprehend an invariant relatedness in nature. So there are two kinds of invariance. There's the kind of invariance which is a mathematical instrument through which we apprehend invariant relatedness in nature, and which is under the control and the questioning of and the refinement of that object of reality. And so when we come to the ultimate relatedness in nature, that's what relativity is basically an epistemological side about. Here we come up against
connections in nature which are as firm as two times two equals four. How we use it in the constructs of our theories of gravity, that is still a problem. But we're up against some fundamental connections upon which science cannot go back, because here we're up against realities of connections in nature which belong to the ultimate structure, as far as we can see, just like light of all that we experience in the world. Now the interesting thing
is this. I'm going to borrow a term at the moment from Second Vatican Council. Here we have a kind of hierarchy of truths, or a pyramid of truths. Actually it does have that kind of a shape, because while we have a broader basis, we narrow our concept, our connections, until we reach the ultimate, we can't get beyond it, but this is the ultimate grammar, the ultimate structure. And from that we can then relate that to that,
and so we can relate classical physics to the limiting case of field physics, and field physics, as related to quantum physics, carry us into a deeper relation. That's what we're coming to now. Well, that's the side look. What happens then in the doctrinal formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity? Now the decisive point is undoubtedly Jesus Christ himself. The decisive point is always Christ himself on these levels. Our understanding of the relations in him, namely the
doctrine of the hypostatic union, let's say, how will we concern within Jesus Christ at both these levels of how divinity and humanity are related, which is a separable problem, but from the vertical relation of the homoousion. And it is by penetrating, as far as we can, into the inner relations in Jesus, into the inner relation of the logos and energia inherent in Jesus Christ, that we get the fundamental clues, the fundamental letters, so to speak, through
which by the homoousion we penetrate from level to level. And it is remarkably similar to the operations we have, say, as described by Einstein in physics and reality. Now here we operate not only with these concepts which are created under the impact of divine revelation, like homoousion and hypostatic union, but we operate with a number of other concepts. So I simply want to take one of the, at the moment, illustration of the problem and the excitement
that comes out of this. This is the concept of the perichoresis. Now the word perichoresis comes from the Greek word chora, which means space or room, and it has to do with the kind of mutual involution in room, mutual containing of realities. Now this concept of perichoresis or co-inherence was first formulated like a fluid axiom, to use a modern term from mathematics, a fluid axiom to help us understand how divine and human natures can interpenetrate
each other without the integrity of either nature being damaged. Now in the course of this, there's no time to explain, some form of hypothetical deductive argumentation is in place to clear the ground, but not to establish the connections. Thought then pushes to the higher level through the economic trinity to the ontological trinity by means of the homoousion, and here the notion of perichoresis, which we develop here, is refined and now comes to, now comes to describe
the interrelation, the neutral interpenetration of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But once the perichoresis is taken up and redefined to apply to the trinity, it can no longer be applied to Christology. And when you apply it to Christology, then you have ultimate problems, and this is really the problem of Lutheran Christology. And the constant danger of Lutheran Christology, going back into some form of eutichianism, is what it tries to do there. But we can see in
the early church that once this axiom is developed and enables us then to understand the relations between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, it is still refined and changed. It cannot be applied anymore at another level, at the lower level. It is then in terms of this refined notion that Christian theology develops its doctrine of ontological, ontorrelational concepts. Now the ontorrelational concept that we make most of is person. Person is an ontorrelational concept. And here we see
how the Fathers already did something that was really of profound significance in overcoming Greek atomistic thinking and overcoming also the logical analytical kind of thinking that we derive from the Greeks, where we have to think of in terms of individuals and the relation of individuals to their external relations. But when they developed, through the use of peripheresis, the concept of Father, Son and Holy Spirit as ontorrelational concepts, they were trying to show how Father, Son and
Holy Spirit contain one another. And the word contain is now very different. The word is horine, I grant you, and they use it in a very changed sense. There's no container notion here. How they contain and interpenetrate one another. Now this is very difficult. It's not derived logically, it's derived ontologically out of the inner relations in the deity. But although it is difficult, it produced the concept of person, which both has applied to God himself and
has applied to man, has had the profoundest impact on all world thought and especially that in Western culture. It's a distinctively Christian concept and it's a concept that derives out of these ontorrelational ideas. But why is this ontorrelational way of thinking difficult for us? Not because it is inherently difficult, but because of the habits of mind and the habits of language with which we Westerns operate in the Latin Greek type of language. But the ontorrelational way
of thinking is not difficult for the man too. He thinks primarily in terms of relational concepts, and the ontorrelational concept is not really a difficult one for him. It's difficult for us because of habits of thinking in our Western culture. And we find exactly the same problems in physics. I'm coming to that right now. The staggering thing is that in modern particle theory and quantum theory, we've been forced to develop ontorrelational notions. There are also, for
example, where we find that the interrelations between particles as dynamic space-time entities or energy knots interpenetrating through exchanges with one another are more significant than the so-called particles. So that within the indivisible connection of particle and field, we operate no longer with discrete particles and fields, but with ontorrelational realities in which the difference between particle and field is now so far done away with that they are fused together. And yet it's well now impossible
to express what we have here. As you can see in article after article in the Scientific American, for example, in trying to express the so-called Haddon Bootstrap theory, theories of quantum theory, it's impossible to express this in classical language. I'll give you an illustration of this. A physicist of London University who operates also in Stanford wrote to me one day after having read my paper published in Science, Medicine and Man on integration of form and
natural and theological science to say that this was precisely his problem and he was working with this in the same way that I was and he showed me the difficulties he had to bring the kind of ideas they were developing in modern particle and quantum theory to expression. And so he said he was forced to go to Buddhist and Hindu thought in order to do that because there he found relational ways of thinking which he couldn't
find in the classical and Latin structure. And I said to him in letter, but the relational thinking of Buddhists and Hindu thought is not in any way really correlated with nature, with physical reality. It cannot be. But what about the doctrine of perichoresis? You talk about particles containing and interpenetrating one another the very language they use and you cannot bring that to expression. But this is precisely the concept we have developed in classical Christian theology and
the perichoretic connection which is an onto relational one is what you're after and it may well be that perichoresis, perichoretic connection can be applied in your field with of course adequate and proper change in relation to the subject matter of the field in such a way that it can help quantum theory. And in fact that is being done. Here then we have a case where theology in its rigorous scientific formulation can be of real help again
even to natural science where it is concerned with the almost inexpressible, intricate, intelligible exchange relations in the microphysical field, be that as it may. What I'm concerned with here is to indicate the kind of cross play and cross fertilization between theological and natural science even when we are concerned with a profound and difficult doctrine like that of the Holy Trinity. But let me conclude by saying this. Several years ago, in my suggestion, the International Academy of
Religious Sciences held a seminar on the doctrine of the Trinity in which we started with Karl Rahner's Aufsatz contribution on the Trinity in Mysterium Salutis. We studied the Trinity in this kind of way. I presided over it and I did my best to guide it in this kind of scientific way and we had among us scientists as well as theologians. But we had theologians from the Roman Catholic, the Reformed, the Lutheran, Anglican and Congregational traditions and
the Orthodox Church. And we found ourselves coming to a remarkable unity in the approaches of East and West that came together of Evangelical and Catholic theology. And we found ourselves very highly critical of Rahner. But we found ideas of Rahner and Barth coming very closely together on the foundations, God bless him, of the great Athanasius and Cyril. And we published our results in French and German journals. Now the lesson from this which we can learn is
this, that when we seek to pursue theological themes on their own proper ground but with the same kind of scientific rigor which we use in the natural sciences and within the context of thought in which dualist modes of thinking are transcended, we achieve remarkably profound unity which undercuts our other differences and establishes new foundations for the future. And that is, I believe, as it ought to be. We are, of course, in a difficult transitional period in
which those of us who are middle-aged, and in science middle-aged means over 30 or older, will find this new auto-relational way of thinking extremely difficult because it conflicts with our habits of mind. But soon we shall have new generations of minds which will be, and already are, at home and at ease in auto-relational thought, whether in natural or in theological science. For auto-relational thinking of this kind is only a refined form
of our ordinary and natural modes of connection with nature and in nature itself. The future, therefore, seems to me full of promise and excitement. This is the greatest day in which to engage in theology that we have had since the fourth and the fifth centuries. And it's up to us, when the ground has been cleared for us in the most remarkable way by the overcoming and transcending of the dualist habits and atomistic analytical habits of thought,
it's up to us to develop as theologians our own theology on its own ground in this context, because this is the only kind of theology that will really be relevant to and speak to the whole world as it, through science, comes closer and closer to its understanding of the creation that came from the hand of God.