The Divine Universe

In AD325, the leading intellectuals of the Church met in Nicea, at the command of the recently converted Emperor Constantine, to settle once and for all the problem of Jesus. The outcome has left many people more confused than they would care to admit. According to the Nicene Creed, the Christian God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Father is God, the Son (Jesus) is God and the Holy Spirit is God. But they are not three Gods; all three are one God.
The Jesus problem emerged within decades after his death and resurrection. Early Christians found the idea of Jesus, simply as the human Messiah, the Anointed One of Jewish hope and expectation, inadequate. They felt he was more than human, and superior to the ancient mythic Roman deities who combined human and divine natures. The Council of Nicea’s final pronouncement was that Jesus was “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father; (and) through him all things were made.”
The essential concept of a communal God rather than a lonely monad fitted well the idea of God being loving. Love exists in community, not in isolation. But to say that God’s love referred simply to his relationship to a universe he had crafted was unsatisfactory. It had to be a reciprocal love like that of an offspring not a manufactured article. Also it implied that God needed the universe, that God had an unmet need, before the creation, in eternity. The idea of a needy God was unthinkable. God is creative, or rather procreative, but not in need of anything.
As I see it, a basic element of the God problem is dualism. Dualism is an innate feature of human thinking. It requires a mental effort to step round it. Most popular notions of God suppose there is God, and then there is something else that is not God. There are two realities, in other words: God and non-God. To my mind, if God is not everything, then God is not. I’m not interested in some distant monad out there, whether a person or a thing. For me the Trinity works – a tri-personal, communal, self-sufficient essence of love in whom “I live and move and have my being”, as Paul put it to the Roman crowd in the Aereopagus.
The Trinity works for me because the Second Person is God incarnate. In other words God has a physical self, embodying and materialising the ultimate spiritual reality. That is what incarnation means. When Christians talk of the incarnation they usually think only of Jesus. Saint Paul intuitively saw the fallacy here. If Christ is divine then, as he wrote to the Colossians, in and through Christ all things have their origin and their being. Christ embodies the whole universe, and any other universes that may or may not exist. Saint John said the same thing as Paul at the beginning of his Gospel.
So how many realities do you believe in? The Trinity formula offers a way to settle for one ultimate reality – God, the source, energy and materialisation of all being. Physical nature is not all of reality any more than Christ is all we mean by God. There is the Holy Spirit, the divine energy, everywhere and in everything that is the source of cosmic emergence and change (evolution) - the whole dynamic activity of nature. The Third Person is the radiant energy between the First Person, the Source of all Being and the incarnate Body of God.
And, finally, love is the motive of cosmic process. That takes some swallowing because much of what happens seems to us not to be the product of love. But I’m talking here of an intuition that goes deeper than our everyday perception of things. It represents a cosmic optimism that can be reasonably argued but not proved.