The document is a request for the completion of 11 discussion board assignments by February 25th for a religious studies course. Each discussion board should be 2-2.5 paragraphs and the client is willing to pay $5 per paragraph, totaling $90-110 for all assignments. The assignments cover topics related to Christianity including the Trinity, monotheism, early church developments, and thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas. The client provides the topic and questions for each discussion board assignment.
Hello,I have a total of 11 Discussion Boards I need completed by T.docx
1. Hello,
I have a total of 11 Discussion Boards I need completed by
Thursday, February 25 (48 hours). Each Discussion Board
should be between 2 or 2.5 paragraphs! I'm willing to pay up to
$5 USD per paragraph for a total of $90- $110 total for all
Discussion Boards! The assignments are really opinionated
versus that of a research paper.
Here are the assignments:
Discussion Board #1:
Topic: Introduction, the Trinity, One God and Divine
Revelation, World Religions
What is the Holy Trinity? Christian churchgoers hear the words
of Christ proclaimed: "Go therefore and make disciples of all
nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the son
and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them all that I have commanded
you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age."
(Matthew 28:29-20) Scripture refers regularly to God as Father
(Mt. 5:58)., as Son (Heb. 1:1-3), and Spirit (Rom. 5:50). Yet
Scripture also tells us that God is One: (Deut. 6:4). In these
passages, God is telling us about Who He is. We will learn over
the semester what Catholic tradition, and other Christians, have
believed about the mystery of the Trinity--and its implications
for our life of faith and life in society.
One thing that tells us about the difference of the Christian
God, is that He upholds a world that has a history. Time moves
forward in a line, headed for a final consummation where He
comes again, raises the dead, and ushers in an eternal kingdom.
We'll look into key Christian themes such as original sin and
our redemption in Christ, and the Biblical evidence for the
Trinity, over the next few weeks. Here, I want to distinguish the
2. Christian One God clearly from other religious portraits. This
will help us in studying what it means for One God to also be
Three.
Assignment:
What particularly interested you, or maybe seems in need of
further explanation or clarification, in this week's material?
Discussion Board #2:
Topic: Monotheism; the Jewish Bible; Divine Fatherhood,
Word, Wisdom, and Spirit
What strikes me most about Judaism is that it claims to be God
acting in history. This religion is specifically not local, and it is
very particular. The Lord God chooses a man, to leave his home
and beget a nation, which will be the witness of the Lord's ways
to the rest of humanity. The Lord God reveals Himself to
humanity, and calls out a chosen people as His bride and
witness. The idea is that all of humanity can know who He is.
He is His Word that He reveals to Moses on Mount Sinai. This
is a religion of Divine self-disclosure.
Also, the Scriptures show that the One God acts and is manifest
in ways that seem like distinct persons. God watches Israel like
a Father and is husband to Israel as a bride (but He does NOT
have a 'consort goddess,' He is the One God). He makes Israel a
family through a series of covenants by which the two bind
themselves to each other irrevocably. In the words of my
colleague Scott Hahn, the Lord gives Israel kinship by
covenant. The Book of Hosea indicates that the Lord loves his
bride Israel with surpassing intimacy.
God is also Wisdom, an understanding more profound than we
can fully grasp, yet we are invited to dine at her table (Proverbs
3. 9). Wisdom is a gift, something we receive, something that
brings life and happiness. God's Wisdom is herself the food that
sustains. God is also a Spirit, a creative, sustaining, and
redemptive power. Wisdom is a gift to which all of humanity is
invited; His special work with the Jews is an invitation to all
(Sir. 24). All of these realities point to God's intimate closeness
to Israel, and His desire for all of humanity to know His ways.
Assignment:
What stands out to you about the Jews' ideas of God's oneness,
and their ideas of God's personified Word, Wisdom, and Spirit?
Discussion Board #3
Topic: New Testament, Early Church, First Councils
This week's lecture covers a wide range of material. We
introduced Christianity, in the coming of Jesus Christ and the
beginning of the Church. Then we looked at how early
Christians grappled a mystery that the Jewish Messiah and
revealed to them: God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One God,
the I AM of Moses, but yet three clearly distinct realities at the
same time. Several things stand out to me.
First, Jesus Christ reveals not only who God is, but a radically
changed way of looking at life in this world. God is now
Immanuel, God with us in an intimate new way. Because the
Divine Christ atones for our sins in His priestly self-sacrifice on
the Cross, we are forgiven our sins and made righteous. We can
be dwelling places of God. And our life together in this world is
transformed. We are to love our neighbor as ourselves, as the
Jews had taught. But now God is with us in an intimate new way
to make that possible. The Church is His Body, His Bride, and
Christians are member of this living Body.
4. Second, Jesus Christ opens up hope of eternal Heaven. The Jews
had taught of a Resurrection of the Dead at the end of history,
and some sort of glorious new life. Now, Jesus Christ's
Resurrection from the dead in glory, having atoned for our sins,
is the sign of our own Resurrection at the end of time. We will
be resurrected in glory and dwell in eternal union with God and
each other in the eternal Wedding Feast (Rev. 21). Christ's
Resurrection is the shape of things to come for us.
Third, as we have seen, Christ reveals that God is also Three
while He is One. What our lecture today shows is the difficulty
early Christians had to achieving some understanding of this
mystery. They confessed faith in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in
worship (liturgy), and proclaimed Him such in Scripture. But
they had to work through a number of problems in coming to
some understanding of what they believed. Early thought drew
from analogies from nature--source and river, root and branch.
But these analogies suggested 'subordination'--that Son and
Spirit might be less than the Father in some way.
Others looked at how Father, Son and Spirit act in God's work
of creation--"economic" Trinitarianism. Some emphasized the
"monarchy" of the Father, to make sure they didn't lose God's
oneness. But this suggested 'subordination,' too. In time, as
Christians thought longer, some lost sight of the intimately near
God in their pursuit of understanding. Arians suggested that
Christ was the first creation, a lesser God-like being. Some
suggested that 'monarchy' meant that Father, Son and Spirit
were just 'modes' of One God. Others thought that Threeness
meant that there were really three Gods.
But other Christians responded by turning to philosophy to help
tell some truth about what exceeded their understanding. The
Son and the Spirit are One in being, of the same nature as the
Father. But they are also like to the Father, really distinct. They
are three hypostases--modes of being that subsist distinctly, as
5. persons. So Scripture's teaching that there is really one God,
and there are really Three in the one God, could be preserved.
The First Council of Constantinople in 381 issues this teaching,
and the "Trinitarian Controversy" was ended. And the stage was
set for further developments.
Assignment:
What interests you, or is tough to understand, or what questions
do you have about the New Testament portrait, or early Church
developments regarding the Trinity?
Discussion Board #4
Topic: Saint Augustine: The Trinitarian Image of God in the
Human Mind
Saint Augustine marks a turning point in Christian reflection on
the Triune God. Augustine is the first major Christian thinker to
sit down with the Scriptures, and ponder in a very systematic
way through the central mystery of the Faith. Augustine was a
diocesan bishop. Sure, he would have had scribes to help him
write his books. But he also had the responsibilities that come
with being a shepherd of souls. Augustine wasn't a university
professor. He didn't have a chair at a think tank. He pondered
the mystery of the Trinity right in the middle of a very full life
of pastoral ministry.
I didn't assign you to read On The Trinity because it's way too
long for our course. But the book reads something like a journal
or diary. Augustine is a pilgrim, pursuing the Divine Beloved.
His work is full of the Christian sense that God is present, even
though He's transcendent. As a priest, Augustine celebrated
Mass. He regularly consecrated the Eucharist. One section that
stands out a lot to me is his discussion of happiness in Book
XIII. All human beings want to be happy. We can only be happy
6. if we are alive. Christian faith, Augustine says, promises us the
hope in faith that we can live forever. That's the only way we
can be truly happy. We must be alive, and have the hope of
living forever. God revealed to us in love that He created us,
that He redeems us in Christ, and promises us an eternal share
in His Triune Life.
And, in a happy and fateful decision, Augustine says that God
painted portraits of His Triune Being in the world around us.
Most prominently, in our minds. The human being's highest
quality, says Augustine, is our reason. By it we love and will,
and we have relationships. Our minds are, in his view, most
fully what reflects the Image of God in us. And the fact that we
can know, remember, and will--while our mind remains the one
same substance it is--gives us an analogy to help us understand
something of the Triune God revealed in Scripture.
The Father is God as unbegotten. Our mind remembering is at
rest on what it knows. God as Son is God as begotten, God as
Wisdom and Word. When we understand, we exercise wisdom,
and have a word formed in our mind. God as willing His
existence, and as gift, is God as Holy Spirit. When we will, we
act, as God eternally is willing His existence and is the gift of
Father and Son.
Western Christianity would pursue the path of analogy, and
even more carefully systematic reflection upon the mysteries of
the Trinity. The Eastern part of Christianity--that centered on
Byzantium and the eastern half of the Roman Empire that would
become the Byzantine Empire--had a different temperament.
They, too, would reflect on Scriptures. But they were less
confident than the West, that the created order could tell us
much about the Divine Mysteries. We'll see in an upcoming
period how this difference would help lead to the first major
split in Christendom.
7. Assignment:
What makes sense, or stands out to you, about Augustine's
approach?
Discussion Board #5
Topic: The Early Middle Ages: St. Anselm and Richard of St.
Victor
This week we start considering thought in Christianity's second
Millennium. Between 1000-1200 AD, Christianity had been the
official religion of Western Europe for centuries. First of the
later Roman Empire, then after Rome's fall in 476 AD, the
looser Holy Roman Empire that arose over the next several
centuries in its place. The Church was what offered a great deal
of social stability, especially in the first few centuries after
Rome's fall. Great monasteries such as Canterbury arose, and
great monastery-cities like Cluny had not only monks but large
lay populations working the land around the monastery.
At this time, Christian thinkers began to ponder the mysteries of
their Triune God in an even more systematic way. This new way
of thinking was called scholasticism. They carefully applied the
rules of logic, the same rules you all learned in MID 100 Logic
and Critical Thinking. They reasoned through Biblical text,
consulted the tradition, and prayed earnestly. They reasoned
their way through the mysteries, as spouses contemplating their
beloved, as friends considering a friend, as children considering
their Divine parent.
Saint Anselm of Canterbury and Richard of Saint Victor are two
such thinkers. Saint Anselm ponders the Trinity as it arises from
considering the Father and the Son. There's lots of material, but
as you read through it, you'll see that it is simply many small
steps that produce a reasoned portrait. Saint Anselm saw
theology as faith seeking understanding. How can one God exist
8. as three Persons? Doesn't that cause plurality of being? Like
Augustine, Anselm uses analogies from the created order. But
you'll notice that he brings in the idea of relation. Maybe the
fact that their names signify relations might be helpful.
Richard of St. Victor produced one of the most influential
portraits of Western History. The notion of Person, a Scriptural
idea given that word by Church Councils, suggests that oneness
would not be enough for a God who has revealed to us that He
is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The love of persons is fruitful
in new life. The love of Divine Persons is a Person, and two is
not enough. Richard argues that perfection of personal love in
Divinity requires three Persons in the one Being.
Assignment:
What makes sense or doesn't make sense, in their discussions?
What stands out to you?
Discussion Board #6
Topic: The Filioque Controversy and the Early Middle Ages
The Filioque controversy--whether we can know the Spirit
proceeds from the Father and the Son--can seem abstract and
irrelevant to us today. What difference does it make? Yet this
controversy was at a major cause of the split of Christendom
into two halves. I think the sensibilities of East and West have a
big role. The result of this difference is seen in part, in how
each proceeded in history.
If something about the Holy Spirit's procession has to do with
the Father-Son relation, that suggests something like what we
would call generativity or procreation in the natural order. If we
can learn something about God's revealed inner life by
observing different kinds of fruitfulness in the created order--
our thought being expressed in memory, understanding, and
9. willing, or lover, beloved, and love, that suggests that *our*
thinking and making participates in something about God. It
also tells us that we can develop deeper doctrinal understanding
from Scripture. And the idea that the Pope can add new
language, and say that we simply unpacked something that was
implicitly there, suggests the head of the Church is more than
honorary. He has a real power to teach that is universal, by the
authority of Christ.
But if we can only know that the Father's monarchy is the
source of the Spirit's existence, there isn't the idea of what I
would call 'shared productivity.' There isn't the idea that the
generation or making in the natural order can tell us something
about God's inner life. We also shouldn't expect to get too many
clues from Scripture beyond what it explicitly says. There is a
greater sense that we should be content with mystery, perhaps
less of a sensibility that we are to pursue a strong unity in the
Church and go out and build in this world. Remember that the
Eastern Platonic worldview sees the physical order as literally
less real than the world of forms--and therefore, too much
pursuit of clarity and understanding could perhaps be pride.
Regarding the early Middle Ages, thinkers at that time in the
West are beginning to apply logic more rigorously to Scripture.
This makes it difficult for some of them to preserve God's
genuine threeness along with His oneness. We will see next
week how St. Thomas Aquinas reconciles and shows the
harmony of God's oneness and threeness.
Assignment:
What makes sense to your, or doesn't, in this week's lecture?
What stands out?
Discussion Board #7
Topic: Thomas Aquinas: Procession, Relations, and
10. Characteristics in God
What stands out to me about this week's letter is how Thomas
Aquinas shows that God is one and Three in a way that
genuinely accounts for both. God is one. God is three. And
there is no conflict. In addition, Aquinas shows how we could
not know that God is a Trinity without Divine revelation. There
are not "necessary reasons" for the Trinity. We would not know
that God is both one and three unless He had revealed Himself
to us.
Greek philosophy could tell us that God is an eternal Logos, an
eternal word of reason. But it could not tell us that God
eternally begets a Word that is a Person. Philosophy could also
tell us that God acts in the world--Aristotle speaks of God as
Umoved Mover. Others talked of a Demiurge, a God-made
lesser power that acted to cause. But Christianity tells us that
God's Spirit, His active, creating and renewing power, is a
Person as well.
Taking the revealed truth that God is Father, Son, and Spirit,
Aquinas tells us that there are two processions in God--
generation, the coming-forth of the Divine Word. Love is the
coming-forth of love. There are four real relations we can
determine from Scripture: Fatherhood, the source of the Word's
generation; Sonship, the relation of that which is eternally
generated or begotten; Spiration, the relation of being the
source of proceeding of Love; and Procession, the relation of
what proceeds, Love.
From these four relations, we can see that there are three
Persons--Father, Son, and Spirit. Thomas kind of derives their
reality and their Personhood by contrast. They are very much
real as Three persons, yet they are utterly one in Being. There
are not Three Gods. There is one God, one in being, in Three
Persons.
11. And like Augustine before him, Aquinas offers some insight
into God's processions and why the Spirit proceeds from both
the Father and the Son, while utterly preserving the eternal
monarchy of the Father (without monarchianism in the ancient
sense). Aquinas's thought suggests that part of our being
children of God, is to achieve some little understanding of His
inner life, and our world, by contemplation of God's Word and
the creation in light of God's Word.
Assignment:
What about Aquinas's thought makes sense, or does not, to you?
What stands out to you?
Discussion Board #8
Topic: Bonaventure: Divine Fecundity and Emanation
For the Week 11 Lecture, we consider the final great thinker of
the Middle Ages: St. Thomas Aquinas'ss Franciscan
contemporary St. Bonaventure. A first thing that's important to
note about this week's reading is that Bonaventure, like
Aquinas, has read the Scriptures and the tradition extensively.
Although I did not include lots of Scriptural citations,
Bonaventure has in mind the texts we considered in the first few
weeks of the course. What he is doing is reasoning carefully
through the texts of Scripture, and considering the arguments of
other Christians, as well as drawing from philosophy.
Bonaventure takes a different approach from Aquinas. Aquinas
was very concerned not to consider God's Fatherhood in
"positive" terms, because he was afraid that approach would
involve a weaker view of Divine unity. Aquinas framed the
existence and mystery of the Trinity in strictly relational terms.
By doing so, Aquinas preserves a strong view of God's unity as
12. well as Trinity. God's Fatherhood is simply God as unbegotten.
But Bonaventure saw God's Fatherhood as fecund or fertile, by
analogy from human fertility.
Bonaventure also is bringing a different general view of the
world beyond the physical, of metaphysics. For Bonaventure, all
things in the world emanate from God, and return to him. This
view is derived, as I explain in the lecture introduction, from
the early-AD era Greek philosopher Plotinus and his successor
Dionysius (Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite). Aquinas, too
drew upon emanation to help talk about God. But Bonaventure
does in a much stronger way that represents a different
sensibility. For Bonaventure, a strong view of emanation and
return does not mean that God doesn't create freely. It simply
says that God's goodness is so great, that not only is he
necessarily eternally fecund in the generation of the Word and
the spiration of the Spirit, that nothing else would happen. He
sees this view as perfectly in keeping with God's freedom.
Aquinas, who also discusses the creation as something that
emanates from God and returns to Him, only uses that notion in
a limited way. Aquinas worried that describing God's
Fatherhood in terms of fertility, and such a strong idea of his
overflowing goodness in creation, would compromise God's
freedom and unity. By describing God's Fatherhood only
relationally, Aquinas believes that he preserves the Bible and
tradition's strong view of God's Oneness better. Bonaventure
sees God's fertility as a kind of 'necessary reason' that God is
Triune, whereas Aquinas would say that this view might suggest
that the Trinity is not something we know only by revelation.
These distinctions may seem abstract to us. But for these great
Christians, holy people who loved God and lived a life of love
and community in God's service, how we understand God's
revelation affects how we look at the world. Aquinas's view
leads to a stronger view of human freedom, and of the dignity of
13. the natural order as informed by the Logos, than does
Bonaventure. Bonaventure's view seems to suggest that things
happen more necessarily or not freely, and suggests that human
freedom is more compromised by original sin, and that the line
between revelation and reason is less distinct than it is for
Aquinas.
Finally, the last part of the lecture looks ahead to the following
centuries. Not a lot happens in the theology of the Trinity for
many centuries, because the Trinity is not an object of
controversy during the Reformation. We'll discuss the transition
to modernity and postmodernity, and look at its effects on the
theology of the Trinity, in the subsequent lecture.
Assignment:
What interests you, or makes sense or doesn't make sense, in
this week's lecture?
Discussion Board #9
Topic: Reformation, Theology of Salvation, and the Trinity
This week's lecture discusses a period when the theology of the
Trinity was largely not controversial, and did not undergo major
developments. Most of the West accepted the Augustinian
tradition as it had been developed by Anselm and Richard of St.
Vicgtor, and then either Aquinas or Bonaventure. Western,
Northern, and Central Europe--Catholic Christianity--had
pondered the mystery, and had Biblical-theological syntheses
from varying approaches. Each saw itself, and was largely
accepted by the others, as developments from Scripture and
Tradition,
So when Europe lost confidence in the cosmological vision of
14. the world in the late Middle Ages, and the Church-state
relationship became closer and more corrupt, other parts of the
Christian faith would bear the immediate brunt of the loss of
confidence. King Henry VIII in 1530's England, Martin Luther
in 1520's Germany, and John Calvin in 1530's in the Low
Countries, all had other issues in mind when they led splits
from the Catholic Church. The relationship of the Bible to the
Church; the role of Sacraments in our redemption, deification,
and salvation; the relationship of the Church to the state, and
very importantly, how Jesus Christ's merits are applied to the
sinner, were the main theological issues.
The very important issue of corruption and apparent misuse of
sacraments (sale of indulgences) also helped reduce the
confidence of many Europeans in the Catholic vision that dated
to Christ's time and had been profoundly deepened and
developed in understanding since then. But none of these
questions are actually about the Trinity. So why are we
discussing them?
I would submit that Protestant theology has an important and
very unintended implication for theology of the Trinity. Simply
put, Protestant thinkers say that our salvation consists not of
being renewed in our being ("infused righteousness") but rather
God looking at us differently because of Christ's sacrifice on
the Cross ("imputed righteousness). Man is, as Martin Luther
said, simultaneously just and sinner. Man is what Lutheran
thought called a snow-covered dung heap--still "totally
depraved" in sin, but redeemed because God looks at us
differently.
If God looks at us differently, by implication that mean that
God changes. Catholicism (and Eastern Orthodoxy) say that
Baptism into Christ, and faith, change us in our being. The
change is in us, not in God. The idea that God looks at us
differently seems to violate a Biblical truth taught by Abraham
15. and Moses: God is one and thus immutable (does not change). If
God changes, does that not suggest that he remains the One God
while being Three? How can we say that God's one eternal ousia
is in three unchanging, eternal persons, when God actually
changes?
The tension this view introduces will play out later. In week 13,
we'll look at some subsequent developments in the 18th to 20th
Centuries with further implications for Christian theology of the
One God and the Trinity.
Assignment
:
What in this week's lecture interests you, or does or does not
make sense?
Discussion Board #10
Topic: Reformation and Enlightenment
This week covers a period of history that saw lots of change at
all levels of society. Europe was changing from a largely
agrarian and craft society to a mercantile and trade society that
still had lots of agriculture. Unfortunately, as parts of Europe
split off, there were terrible wars that in part had to do with
different views of what Christianity is. By the late 1600's, both
elites and the ordinary people of Europe wanted religious
tolerance and an end to conflict.
The developments of the period after the Reformation, called
the Enlightenment, helped make the Trinity seem more abstract.
European elites began to decide that Divine revelation was
something private, that people's claims that God revealed
Himself were subjective. Religion thus becomes seen as a
private matter. Most people still think that religion is vital for
16. one's personal life, and for a healthy society. Specifically, elites
began to believe that while reason could know objective truth
about things in this world, it could not arrive at objective truth
about God. If reason couldn't arrive at truth about God, how
could we believe that God's revelation is objective? How could
we believe that we really were fallen in sin, and really needed
redemption? How do we talk about the Trinity in this new
historical context?
After the Enlightenment, Europe began transitioning from the
rule of monarchies and nobilities to democracy, and in some
cases violent socialist / communist revolutions. After the
Enlightenment ended, the elites doubted whether God existed,
and whether there could be knowable doctrine. Maybe "Divine
revelation" was our vague sense of needing God and being
dependent upon him. Maybe God developed and grew through
our history and actions. Or worse, maybe God is a fiction made
up by the wealthy to convince the middle class and working
poor to accept their conditions--an "opiate of the people."
In the 20th Century, World War I helped destroy people's sense
that reason could know all things. So Some conservative
Protestants said, we just believe God's Word because He said it.
Or, worse, God's Word is simply his instructions on how to live,
and any supernatural elements had been made up by the
apostles, and had to be "demythologized."
Fortunately, God was still at work in the new, increasingly
subjectivistic world. He would call thinkers and churches, to
combine new and old. Maybe we could still look at the world as
a cosmos, where God the Logos disclosed Himself. But the
hunger for personal self-transcendence, the need for God, was
still there in a new age of science and technology. Maybe we
could bring these strands of thought together to talk about Jesus
Christ and the Holy Trinity.
17. Assignment:
What stood out to you in this week's lecture? What did or did
not make sense?
Discussion Board #11
Topic: Ressourcement Human Self-Transcendence, and the
Trinity in the Postmodern World
This week's lecture brings us through the last 60 years or so, to
the end of our course. Here we see some ways that early
postmodern theology--from the 1940's on--articulated the
mystery of the Trinity for the new postmodern world. God
seemed distant after the carnage of World War II and the
Holocaust. New hopes were dawning worldwide as nations that
had been colonies asserted their desire to govern themselves,
and the European colonial powers let them go.
Hans Urs von Balthasar and Karl Rahner raised some questions
about how to believe in the Trinity in a world that was
beginning to believe that not only faith was subjective, but
reason as well. By the mid-twentieth century, the suspicion of
truth as a tool of the powerful, first spoken by Marx and Engels
in Communism in the 19th Century, had joined with the new
existentialist belief that there was no God, the world was
meaningless, and our passions and are pain, and hopefully some
sort of human connection, are all we have.
The Second Vatican Council brought together the new and old.
In the Constitutions Dei Verbum and Gaudium et spes, the
Council agreed that human beings hunger for self-
transcendence, and for communion with other human beings.
These subjective wants are good. We are right to hunger for
justice in the world, and thirst for friendship with God. The
Council tells us that God is still with us to fill our "God-shaped
hole." He has reached out to us in the Incarnation of Jesus
18. Christ. Jesus Christ gives us access to the Father by the Holy
Spirit. By His Cross, death, and resurrection, He redeems us
from original and personal sin, and makes us partakers of the
Divine Nature (2 Peter 1:4). That is, He gives us the Divine
indwelling, and communion in God's Triune perichoretic life.
God is communion in His Triune Being. To be made in God's
image, and to be redeemed, is to be in communion with God, in
His Church. We are made too, for Triune-informed communion
with other human beings.
Pope Benedict XVI makes a profound application of of this
Trinitarian theology of communion. Christians are supposed to
live in society with the idea that communion with others,
including how we treat them in our moral life in our dealings in
society, is God's good will for humanity. So we are to put others
and their needs above ourselves, both in our personal lives, and
in how we structure our economy. Benedict says that societies
should aim for what he calls an "economy of communion." What
form that will take will differ from place to place. He is not
endorsing any particular economic system. He is offering a
principle, reflective of the inner Trinitarian life of God, that is
to inform our life here on earth--and offer a sign of our hope of
Heaven.
Assignment:
What stands out in this week's lecture? What does or does not
make sense to you?