Believing Three Ways in One God: A Reading of the Apostles' Creed.

A Reading of the Apostles' Creed 

Nicholas Lash

University of Notre Dame Press, $2 1.95, 136 pp.

In illo tempore, when public reading during silent meals was the norm at monasteries and retreat houses, Nicholas Lash's new book would have been the perfect accompaniment to a supper of brown bread and barley soup. For the book is frightfully nourishing, if more than slightly austere. Moreover, it too demands to be chewed in small morsels. Indeed, this slim volume will provide ample theological fare for a month of meals (Sundays restively excluded).

Only a first-rate thinker and stylist could achieve such a union of substance and brevity. And Lash, the first Roman Catholic since the Reformation to hold a chair in divinity at Cambridge, is outstanding in both the depth of his thought and the clarity of his writing. The present book is addressed to nonspecialists in theology who pray the Creed and would like to ponder its meaning and implications more fully and to do so in a meditative and, ideally, communal manner. Such lectio will, no doubt, be demanding; but I am confident that its outcome will be to realize Lash's hope of bringing his readers "to a fresh sense of the way all things hang together in relation to the mystery that we confess as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit."

To use a venerable word recently restored to Catholic theology and pastoral practice, Lash's intent is "mystagogic": to lead contemplatively and conceptually to a deeper appreciation of the Mystery of the Triune God, in whom we live and move and have our being. The Creed itself is trinitarian in structure, confessing the triune character of God and the threefold pattern of God's activity of creating, redeeming, and transforming the world. And this trinitarian identity of God and God's work calls forth and sustains the trinitarian shape of Christian existence. The Creed articulates our commitment to at-one-ment with God, among humans, and with the created universe, thus effecting humanity's harmony with the very rhythms of God's trinitarian life.

Indeed, Lash insists, the Creed, rather than a catalogue of diverse items, is the faith-filled recital of a single story, a drama, which did not occur once upon a time, but is actual and ongoing. Today God is creating, redeeming, and transfiguring the world and humankind. And in this same today of faith we are called to covenant, to assent, whereby revelation is actualized in us through Christ and in the Holy Spirit.

The book's structure resembles the intricate pattern of a symphony, with each successive movement taking up, refining, and complementing themes previously sounded. Thus each of the three articles of the Creed must be read and reread in the light of the others; even as the three divine "persons" indwell one another mutually .and inseparably. This "co-inherence" of the Three in God and its reflection in the interrelatedness of all things which come forth from God (bearing in their very being the imprint of their trinitarian origin and destiny) makes the realization of communion the very matter of both contemplation and of action, inspiring a "contemplative praxis." There can be no purely private contemplation of the Triune God; and no human action that does not affect the common good.

However, unlike others who invoke words like "mutuality" and "relationship," Lash's austerity derives in large measure from the absence of either sentimentality or nostalgia in his vision. For him darkness is all too real and all too threatening, both in the heart of matter and in the hearts of humans. Faith's confession is that the Light shines and that darkness does not ultimately prevail. But there is no hint of "cheap grace" here. For the cost to God is not less than everything: the crucifixion of the dearly Beloved. Yet, even in the face of Love's total gift, our "strenuous resistance to reality" perdures and requires redemption. Thus Lash shows rare appreciation of the Christian way as essentially paideia, formation, education: the time-consuming and time-redeeming training in Christianity, in its language and practices.

In a short, striking final chapter, Lash recapitulates his reflections by retelling the Creed's narrative as the story of the "three gardens." God plants a garden in Eden, in the direction of the rising sun, and God will bring it to fulfillment in that garden city (promised in the Book of Revelation), where the tree of life bears fruit all year long. But, in-between, Gethsemane's garden of struggle and surrender recalls and sacramentalizes "the way in which the wilderness is made to be what it both should and will be: paradise, God's garden." It is the way of the Crucified: the peace achieved through the blood of the cross.

Lash's rich consideration of the Creed also prompts, as it should, further reflection. Let me raise up one theme: the language we employ in speaking of the Trinity.

Lash rightly insists upon God's incomprehensible nature and advocates a welcome modesty of speech in face of the mystery of God. Indeed, theologically and, perhaps, temperamentally he inclines toward the tradition of "apophatic" or "negative" theology; stressing, as it does, the ineffability of God's mystery which, to us, appears more darkness than light. Thus he counsels an "austere nescience" as the least inappropriate theological stance.

In this vein he favors dropping the language of "person" when referring to the three in God and replacing it, at least in technical discourse, with the language of "mode" or"manner" of being. The book's very title bespeaks this preference. In making this proposal, Lash stands in the splendid ecumenical company of Karl Barth and Karl Rahner--a formidable array, to say the least.

The objection to "person" language is well rehearsed. In the modern context speaking of three "persons" inevitably suggests three individual agents, hence three gods or "tritheism"; whereas originally it merely served to designate with a common word the threefold distinction Christians learn to recognize in the one God. A further danger we risk in too facilely transferring to God a word that has, over the centuries, acquired such a freight of experiential connotations is that we may thereby imagine we have achieved a purchase upon God's mystery, thus compromising "the absolute difference between God and the world."

Despite the soundness of Lash's cautions and the impressive witnesses he marshals to support them, I find his proposal unrealistic and liable to misunderstanding. He insists that his replacement terms--mode, manner, way--do not constitute "modalism": the ancient heresy that God is one without distinction, who only appears in threefold guise in the course of the successive episodes of salvation history. But the refrain he sounds on this theme still strikes me as not sufficiently differentiated, especially to ears sensitized by the tradition of the Eastern church, which so underscores what distinguishes the three in God. In this regard, though Lash speaks movingly and insightfully of the "Spirit," the newness of the Spirit's mission does not always stand out clearly; nor how the "Spirit" differs from the "Word" in God's trinitarian life.

With the German theologian Walter Kasper, then, I think it pastorally and theologically preferable to retain the venerable language of "person"in God: correcting and refining our understanding by delineating carefully the context of its usage. Our understanding and appreciation of that context has most certainly been deepened by Lash's lovely text.