Trinity: Ineffable Mystery

First, the systematic theology way.

Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity, on the Trinity on this, the feast of the Holy Trinity:

The First Person knows Himself; His act of knowing Himself produces an Idea, a Word; and this Idea, this Word, the perfect Image of Himself, is the Second Person.

The First Person and the Second combine in an act of love and ... produce a state of Lovingness within the Divine nature. Into this Lovingness, Father and Son pour all that they have and all that they are, with no diminution, nothing held back.

Thus their Lovingness too is Infinite, Eternal, Living, Someone, A Person, God.

Thus the Son is generated by way of knowledge and the Spirit is breathed, or spirated, by way of Love.

Now the Theology of the Body way:

Can you see now how the very image of the Godhead is imprinted on human nature? A man and a woman when they have intimate knowledge of each other, when they give themselves to each other completely with nothing held back, then a third person, a child, comes into being by way of Love.

[This ineffable mystery can barely be comprehended by our poor finite brains.]

Why Christ Had To Die

Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity, on why Jesus had to die.

[B]ecause He was a man with a true human nature, he could offer a true human act in expiation of human sin, an act of total love to balance humanity's self-love; and because He was God, the human act He offered was of infinite value and so could satisfy and more than satisfy for the sins of men.

But all things are in the power of God. Why, we may ask in all reverence, did the divine plan include the death of the Redeemer?

The two answers that instantly spring to mind are that nothing could show the love of God so overpoweringly as His willingness to die for us, and nothing could show the horror of sin so clearly as that it needed His death to expiate it.

There must certainly have been something in what Our Lord had to do which made His dying the best way to do it.

Although he was Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered; and being made perfect he became the source of salvation to all who obey him. Heb 5:8-9

Thinking And Maturity

Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity, on the relationship between thinking and maturity.

[M]ental maturity is worth having: what more suitable companion could there be for that commoner phenomenon, bodily maturity? Thinking is very hard and imagining is very easy, and we are very lazy.

What Your Imagination Shouldn't Do

Another nugget from the master of street corner theology. These little digestible chunks will help us on our way to sanity.

Thus the first test of any statement concerning spiritual reality is not can imagination form a mental picture of it, but does it stand up to the examination of the intellect, do the terms of it contradict each other, is it conceivable or inconceivable?

Imagination can say nothing about it either way. It cannot reject it. It cannot accept it either. It must leave it alone, and that is precisely one of the things that imagination hates to do. -- Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity