In recent years Western theology has seen a dramatic renewal of trinitarian theology.⁴ This rich mix of retrieval and reflection provides crucial resources for our project. I would like to draw on one contribution that is particularly relevant to our topics, the work of John Zizioulas.⁵ An Eastern Orthodox theologian, Zizioulas presents a view of the Trinity that emphasizes elements typically thought to reflect that tradition. s divergence from common Western treatment of the doctrine. Some current scholarship suggests that this divergence is more presumed than real.⁶ In any event, so-called "Eastern" motifs are in fact widely reclaimed in much of the current rethinking of the Trinity in Western theology.⁷ Though I focus on Zizioulas, the primary features in our discussion are not peculiar to him or even to the Orthodox tradition but are common aspects of trinitarian theology, despite variations in terminology.⁸

Early Christian theologians were not primarily concerned with philosophy. But Zizioulas maintains that the doctrine of the Trinity introduced an extraordinary philosophical transformation. He makes two striking claims. The first is that the very vision of the human person we take for granted is bound up with the development of trinitarian doctrine. "The person both as concept and as a living reality is purely the product of patristic thought. Without this, the deepest meaning of personhood can neither be grasped nor justified."⁹ The second claim is that the Trinity introduces a genuinely new option in the severely limited list of possible ontologies or accounts of reality.

Those who study the history of the doctrine of the Trinity are familiar with a warning that appears regularly in the literature. They are cautioned that "person" (or the Greek word hypostasis), which early Christian writers chose to apply to the three divisions in the Trinity did not at that time carry with it all the meaning we would now associate with it. Perhaps few stop to consider the significance of a related fact: there was then no notion of "person," as applied to a human being, which carried our common associations either. The important distinction is that while we think of a person by definition as a unique individual, constituted by difference, pre-trinitarian usage took hypostasis (as applied to humans) to refer precisely to what is common in human nature, the substantial underlying reality. To say I am a person is to say that I belong to a class of beings with the same qualities. The word does not imply (as later notions of "person" do) a unique, separate personality. What is particular about an individual is accidental to that identity-by-sameness. The differences between individuals amount to fringe variations like hair color (essentially irrelevant) or to defects, a failure to match the single normative mold (as with a speech impediment or a missing limb). The type of variation that seemed most meaningful to classical thinkers was a variation in kinds or ranks of persons, rather than between individuals. In short, what we now think of as intrinsic to personhood---personality and individuality---was in some ways the opposite of the meaning that hypostasis suggested.¹⁰

The Latin term persona expressed something more like concrete individuality, though this had to do primarily with social or legal roles that someone assumes.¹¹ It is similar to what we mean by individuality in the external sense. It refers to features that characterize one (or a few) people in distinction from others. These distinctive features are manifest in outward relations with others, added on like a mask over pre-existing human nature. Persona has to do with individual differences, but entirely with those that are social in nature. In Roman law, a slave did not have "personhood." This did not imply slaves were excluded from the category "human," but that they could not contract social relationships. They could not function as agents in the public sphere. They lacked a civil persona, though through emancipation they might acquire such personhood. If one wished to refer to a universal or essential humanity shared by the slave and others, it is not the language of personhood that would be used but the language of a fixed nature. What is real about someone, in the sense of the most quintessentially human, is not "personal."¹²

To say that God is three hypostases sounded like saying God is three different substances or realities (a possibility early Christians consistently rejected). Or it sounded like saying that God is three instances of the same thing (three people would be three "human natures," three examples of one substance). On the other hand, to say that God is three persons sounded like saying God plays three different external, relational roles (such as cook, governor and teacher).¹³ According to Zizioulas, the unusual accomplishment of the theologians (especially the Cappadocian theologians) who refined trinitarian thought was to slowly bend this language to another meaning. The key step was the identification of hypostasis with "person," a blending of the different meanings of hypostasis and persona and the addition of new elements. It would take centuries to consummate this development. But trinitarian confession eventually made clear that the three divine persons were each constituted in their personhood by their distinctively different relations with each other. The variation of one from the other was not a superficial "add on" placed over a pre-existing, self-sufficient nature. Their differences constituted their personhood and their personhood was their nature.

At the point of departure, there is language that designates many features of what we would call an individual, but few in the hellenistic world would suppose that such "personal" descriptions had anything to do with the true being or essence of humanity. By contrast, hypostasis was a name for the true substance or essence of human nature, but it would not be associated with anything that was accidental or merely individual. In crossing the two, trinitarian thought in fact developed a new meaning of "person," pushing the sense of human "substance" in a more social direction and deepening exterior social roles with a dimension of inner life. The result is that a person's true being or nature is more deeply identified with free, distinctive, unrepeatable individuality.¹⁴ According to Zizioulas, there is an irony in the way we read the early trinitarian controversies. We remind ourselves that participants in those controversies who used the word "person" did not (yet) have the connotations we give it. But it is what they were doing with the term in those controversies that eventually gave it much of the meaning we now assume and readily project retrospectively.

God's substance does not precede the three divine persons, as if they are made up of the divine essence or are divisions of it. Being is not prior to personhood in God. To put it another way, personality is not a quality added to being. The qualities of a "person," as they were then understood would have been considered a failing in true divinity. Aristotle's God or Plotinus' God is not a person, almost by definition. The triune God is not just such a generic divinity with personhood added on, meaning by personhood those external relations and interactions that classical philosophers found so problematic for God. Instead, in the Christian understanding person becomes the most basic category of the triune God, whose divinity is constituted by the relation of the persons.

Zizioulas says the significance of this breakthrough can hardly be overestimated. In the Trinity, person becomes the primary ontological category: "God exists on account of a person, not a substance."¹⁵ This vision eventually transforms both the understanding of God and our notion of "person" in other connections. God is not one, on the basis of some pre-existing divine substance, and then only later becomes persons. Instead, the principle of God's existence is found in the persons themselves. "Person" is the most basic category of divinity, and not one person or three in isolation, but person as constituted by relation with others. The nature of God's being is the communion of persons. God's nature is to be a person constituted by the communion of persons. This is a "social" view of the Trinity, which does not so much stress threeness as it does the one communion among the three. It highlights three mutually implied dimensions in the divine life: person as premise of communion, communion between persons, communion as constituting persons.¹⁶

There is no more basic source of the divine being than person and communion. On such a view, the unity of the Trinity is not to be understood in terms of the persons all being composed of the same "stuff." It became common in the West to locate the principle of unity in a single divine substance or essence. But in Eastern Christianity the principle of unity was associated with the first person, the Father. This is the reason that the Eastern church has insisted that the order of the Trinity must proceed from the first person, from the Father: the original ontological principle lies in a person. And it is the same reason the Eastern church critiques treatments of the Trinity in Western Christianity which deal first with the divine essence as basic, and then with the three persons. This is reflected in Western theological texts which tend to talk first of the one God, and then of Trinity as a quality or characterization of the one God, while Eastern theological texts tend to take Trinity as the departure point in naming or discussing God.¹⁷

Purged of all temporal priority or domination of power, the Father is the principle of unity as the arche, or point of reference of the whole. The first person is the "origin," a word like "father" which in this context is wrenched from its ordinary temporal associations. In Zizioulas' view, personal communion can only be derived from personhood, and the person of the Father is this designated formal starting point for the co-equal, co-eternal persons.¹⁸ This explains the intense resistance of the Eastern church to the Western church' s teaching that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Word together, rather than from the Father alone.¹⁹ But we can see that even in this often bitter argument, the two sides each saw their approach as the better way to defend the same conviction Zizioulas describes: God's nature as person-in-communion. The East saw this best preserved through emphasis on the first person as the unique personal source. The West saw it preserved best through the vision of the Holy Spirit proceeding from the communion of the first two persons, and even as being the bond of love between the Father and the Son. That is, communion or relation itself has the power to "generate" person. The Western preference can lead us astray by seeming to make that communion the special work or feature of one person among the three, rather than constitutive of each and of God. The Eastern preference, stressing the first person as the principle of origin and unity, has its own dangers. It suggests in images a hierarchy that it denies in fact.

The idea of personhood as the very foundation of human reality is quite entrenched in our culture now. But this belief, let alone the conviction that distinctive individuality and relation lies at the basis of all being, appears to be one that requires a "thought experiment" like trinitarian doctrine. It hardly seems to be an inductive hypothesis. It is rather difficult to formulate such an idea logically if we confine ourselves strictly to human references.²⁰ Empirically, human nature always precedes person.²¹ A whole species stretches behind us, including the two parents from which our humanity is immediately derived. No one person or few persons can be said to bear in themselves the sum total of human nature, making the nature and that set of persons coextensive. The situation with the triune God is quite different. There the three persons do not share or derive from a pre-existing nature. The "nature" is the coincidence of the persons. The multiplicity of the three persons does not imply a division of the divine nature, as the multiplicity of humans implies a division of human nature, because the three divine persons coinhere. The entirety of divine nature is in them.

A traditional trinitarian paradox asserts that the sum of divinity is in each person as well as in all: there is no "more" of God in the Father and the Son together than in one of them alone. One can say that two infinities are not larger than one, but this paradox makes more concrete sense if we understand the divine nature as communion. Thus it is true that all of the persons are present in each one, by communion, but the whole of divinity is present in a distinctively different pattern in each case.²² It is the same wholeness, taken three different times, through three different persons. This somewhat esoteric discussion indicates the counterintuitive flavor of the idea that person is an ontologically basic category.

The most important point for our discussion lies in the next phase of Zizioulas' argument. If "person" is basic in the way just suggested, then the notion of a more fundamental substance or a prior being must give way to some other understanding. What is the divine nature, the "same substance" by virtue of which the three persons are one God? That nature is communion. The communion of the three is something distinct from each of them, something shared fully by all, something "made up" of nothing but the persons and their relations. Nor are the divine persons prior to their communion with each other, for their character as persons not only includes the capacity for relation but this capacity has always been realized. To be and to be in relation are the same thing for the divine life. As the title of Zizioulas' book indicates, God's being is communion. Therefore if Trinity is our guide, the most fundamental definition of being we can give is person-in-communion.

This has far-reaching implications. An old conundrum in Western thought (and in philosophy generally) has to do with otherness, or the one and the many. Philosophy seeks for some foundational explanation of reality, of being itself. But to the extent that such an account can be provided, it seems to leave no categories for ontological difference except those of defect and loss. If, for instance, the one true kind of being or substance is found in God, then whatever is different from God is defective insofar as it is not the same being. This line of thought was well represented in the Greek philosophical tradition. Since it understood true being to be eternal and unchanging, it understood both the divine and the world (insofar as it was truly real) as eternal. All that did not have this quality of being was deficient: difference equals defect. As applied to humanity, this meant that the true being of humanity must be some common and unchanging nature. Personal variations and relations (which Greeks plainly recognized as actual) were external, accidental, ultimately less real.

In articulating Trinity as the character of ultimate being, Christians affirmed an ontology in which the differences of the persons are basic and integral. There is no being without both difference and communion. In God the two are coincident. The being of the one divine nature is the communion of the irreducibly different persons; the being of the individual persons is constituted by their relations with each other. Consistent with their embryonic trinitarianism, and unlike Greek-minded contemporaries, Christians denied that either the world or humanity itself were eternal (they affirmed creation and did not believe that humans had intrinsically immortal souls). From the Greek perspective, this could only look like a disparagement of the world and humanity, attributing defects to them. On the other hand, Christians affirmed the goodness of the most contingent, changeable and "personal" dimensions of both creation and human beings, affirming their capacity to participate even in the divine life itself. From the Greek perspective, this could only look like an irrational exaltation of the manifestly imperfect and earthly. This situation was reflected in the church's conflict both with those who held the world was eternal (and thus divine) and with gnostics who denied that the world was eternal (and therefore concluded it was bad). Christians affirmed that the world was different from God, had a separate kind of existence, and yet the world was good. It was good because its very distinctive individuality fit it to participate in the divine life by communion. This is the trinitarian dynamic. The mode by which creatures can participate most fully in the divine life, communion, is consistent with the very nature of God, which is itself communion.

The differences among the divine persons imply no inequality between them. But Christians perceived the relation between God and creation as intrinsically unequal, relating two different "levels of being." Christians did not transpose the equality-in-difference of the divine communion to every sphere where differences exist among human beings, for instance. Though insisting that personhood implied an ultimate equality of human beings before God, the church did not apply this universally to human social relations. Nevertheless, the shift in the way the question was posed was crucial. The difference in "level" between God and creatures has to do with God. s character as the source of communion and as the deepest embodiment of it. This is an understanding of God. s nature that is not a zero sum game. In sharing such a nature with creatures, God does not have less of it. On the social front, the church generally accepted "spiritual equality" between persons as compatible with socially hierarchical relations.²³ But the expectation was planted that as persons are drawn into the life of the Trinity their relations with each other should increasingly approximate the triune ones, where asymmetry coexists with equality.

After all, the precipitating occasion of the whole trinitarian development was the overcoming of the most extreme inequality of all, that between God and humanity. Christ's incarnation might be unique but it was the case that proved the rule. Despite the obvious hierarchical character of the disparity between God and humans, even this radical asymmetry could be assimilated or transposed to the key of trinitarian communion. The fact that the fundamental nature of both is being-in-communion (and more specifically, being as communion of the distinctly different) means that they can have true communion with each other while remaining distinct. Christians can thus understand salvation as theosis, divinization, or sharing in the divine nature. By this they did not mean that humans acquire all the specific properties of God (like omnipotence). The trinitarian discussion we have just reviewed shows that to share in the divine nature (in quite literal terms) is to share in the triune communion. The participation is not the same as that of the triune persons themselves (that would be to be one of them), but it is a communion appropriate to our personhood.

Trinitarian doctrine was even more explicit about this. In the relations between the three divine persons there are incommunicable properties. To say the persons share everything with each other is to say they share all that can be shared while still remaining uniquely themselves. The identity of the first person is incommunicable to the others, and so on for each person. So when, in the relation between God and humanity, it is said that humans may become by grace what God is by nature, a similar reservation applies. There are human properties that are not communicable to God as there are divine properties not communicable to humans. This does not compromise the oneness of God and humanity (in Christ) any more than it compromises the oneness of God (in the Trinity). To suppose that the existence of any difference at all between Jesus and God rules out the true unity of Jesus with God simply ignores this trinitarian grammar. If a human and God are to be truly one--and the most profound standard for this would be the way that God is one---then difference is not only possible, it is necessary.

In the Eastern Orthodox tradition the "energies" of God were distinguished as communicable aspects of God's nature. This recalls those portions of scripture that treat God's holiness and glory as somewhat "impersonal" qualities. The divine energies are certainly personal in that their communication to humans enhances and deepens human personhood, relation with God and others. Perhaps they might be called "interpersonal." They can be communicated from one to another. The divinity of the Word, who is already God, is incommunicable, but the energies are transferable. They flow out to humans and in no way diminish the source from which they come. God is no less God for sharing the divine energies. The primary image the tradition uses to describe these energies is light, the light which illumines Christ and Moses and Elijah on the Mount of Transfiguration, for instance. This light of glory or divine energy is thoroughly personal in the sense that it is intrinsically associated with the triune persons. When received, it becomes part of the person, a visible expression of communion with the divine. Abstracted or isolated, it is impersonal. It is the glory of persons, but by itself it is not a person. Taken by itself, it leads only in an apophatic direction.²⁴

Humans can receive the communicable life of God, what the Eastern church called the uncreated energies of God. But humans cannot in any sense possess or incorporate the incommunicable properties (which are both the distinctive identities of the persons and also certain qualities like omnipotence) in the same way. These are realities creatures can only commune with while they remain the unique properties of the divine persons. If it is objected that the human communion with God is not really complete, because some aspects of the divine life are not transferred to humans, the answer is that such "reservations" exist in the communion of the divine life itself. In communion some things may be transmitted from one to another, but there are always aspects that remain the unique property of one and cannot be given away. In that case communion is not a bridge over which gifts are passed, but an intimate relation that gives you the benefit of and access to qualities that remain an integral part of the person with whom you are in communion.

Therefore the divine life which humans participate in by grace has exactly the formal characteristics of the divine life which is God's "by nature." Because God's being is communion in difference, humans truly and partially participate in that divine nature through a communion with God that is also a communion in difference, even though the differences in the two cases are different! God's nature is intrinsically open to relation. Therefore the debate about whether relationship to others is necessarily a defect in the divine (as it would be for Plotinus' neo-platonic God or the gnostic God) is quite moot. Humans, though finite and mortal and radically other than God, are persons whose nature is also communion-in-difference. Therefore they have a point of contact with God. They are in the pattern or image of the divine being. And their very difference from God is part of that image that they share with God.

Christians understand salvation as communion or koinonia. Traditionally Christians have seen three dimensions of saving relation in this communion: relation of the person with God (faith), relation with others (love) and relation with creation (hope). The first dimension of salvation is often called justification, the second sanctification, and the third eternal life. Salvation is one reality, a personal communion in which these three dimensions (the existential, the moral and the eschatological) are all present. Participation in the divine life is manifest as communion, in a kind of commutative law. It is a recursive process which sees the same pattern of mutual participation repeated and extended. We become members of each other by being in Christ; and through that koinonia we become partakers of the triune life of God.

God is a mystery that we cannot break down into smaller ontological units. Though often regarded as obscure, the doctrine of the Trinity gives two quite clear directions. First, the right ontological category for God is person-in-communion. Second, other kinds of being must be understood in relation to this, rather than the reverse. Trinity is not ambiguous about the nature of the religious ultimate. It specifies a particular coordination of personal and impersonal elements. An essentially impersonal absolute has no personal side. Any personal descriptions could only be projections cast upon the absolute in ignorance or a mistaken perception appropriate to a lower stage of insight. Such description is a mask that may be useful for certain purposes but it must finally be dispelled.

By contrast, a personal absolute can have a real impersonal dimension that is not at all extrinsic in that way. We need not leave behind the notion that persons have bodies that follow physical laws, for instance, in order to believe persons are not only physiological. If one person falls from a balcony to land on another person, we can understand this event in a completely "impersonal" way, described strictly in terms of mass and acceleration. This in no way rules out personhood in either party, nor a further personal explanation of how the fall came to happen. If the religious ultimate and the human religious end are themselves both impersonal, then the personal is excluded in a definitive way.²⁵ A trinitarian view of God does not require such rigid exclusion. The impersonal dimension of God is real. It is not dispelled by insight and it need not be exiled from God's nature. It is always an aspect of the divine persons and their communion.

We have pressed this exploration of trinitarian thought, and particularly of the meaning of "person," for a specific purpose. The complex nature of God holds out the possibility of a variety of distinct relations with God. That variety is the basis for truly different religious ends. Alternative religious ends represent an intensified realization of one dimension of God's offered relation with us. This intensification comes through limitation, in that a dimension (or some subset of dimensions) is taken to be God's sole true relation with us. The distinctive Christian claim is that salvation is participation in divine life that encompasses many dimensions on a level of equality and mutuality, a sharing in the "inner life" of God that only makes sense if God is triune, i.e. that there is meaning to "inner life." Because that life is a communion of persons in relation, salvation is also such a communion. This does not mean that Christians claim to understand the inner life of God. The fact of this trinitarian life is more, not less mysterious than a "simple" deity, as witnessed by the fact that it obliges Christians to encompass other religious ends in their affirmation of relation with God.

God is related to us in complex and distinct ways. The channels between God and humanity are open on several frequencies. Salvation consists in a particular enrichment, intensification, and harmonization of all of these, in interrelations that allow each its own scope. There is a hierarchy between full communion with the triune God and lesser, restricted participations. But all the types of relation with God are grounded in God, in the coexisting relations in God's own nature. In the strict sense there can be no question of a real relation to the triune God, no matter how penultimate or incomplete, being simply replaced by another. It can only be a matter of expansion or deeper communion. The key characteristic of the interrelation of these dimensions is the fact that none need be relegated to the status of a mere imperfect form of another.²⁶ Therefore the difference between some real relation and full communion is not a matter merely of linear increments: different types of relation and different dimensions of communion have quantum effects.

Traditionally Christian theology stressed that the external acts of the Trinity were indivisible. In relation to creation, it is the Trinity-in-unity that acts. Creatures can never rightly say that they are in contact or relation with one person to the exclusion of the others: where one is, the others are by virtue of their unity. But this always raises the question of what purpose the trinitarian distinctions serve. The primary purpose of trinitarian theology is not to identify God's action in the world with one divine person or another, though that theology has served as a vehicle for expressing the divine economy. A schema of the trinitarian "missions" of the three persons narrates the various ways God acts in the world, and the various ways we experience God's presence. Trinitarian theology does not primarily aim to provide a detailed, objective description of God when God is "home alone."

The primary spiritual and theological point of the doctrine is focused precisely between these two poles of pure economy and pure ontology. It affirms that the one God we encounter in any one way at a particular moment is---at that same moment and always---richer and more various in certain specific ways than that single encounter would indicate. This "richness" is both phenomenal and objective. It includes both other ways God can seem and other dimensions of what (and who) God is. Trinity affirms that any conception of God in se or "alone" which leaves aside the dimensions of communion is inadequate. The doctrine's primary benefit for us is to sensitize us to the communion-nature of God, and hence to the various dimensions or frequencies through which God can simultaneously connect with us. Trinity draws us steadily out of isolation in limited (though real) relations with God that can be absolutized as screens that block richer communion.

The Christian theological tradition suggests that mistakes about the Trinity affect Christian life. God's own nature does not change according to our ideas of it. But without a living sense of the Trinity, we contract the range in which God can share that nature with us, and the scope of our relation to God diminishes. This is so in connection to our prayer life, for instance, which is partial if limited to the approach to a generic "God" or to Jesus alone. If the trinitarian confession is sound, prayer is actually entry into the ongoing "conversation" of the triune life, as well as the communion of the saints. The doctrine of the Trinity is about knowing God, participating in the divine life by communion. This knowing is critical: it leads to steady transformation of our ideas about God. But it is also pervasively constructive for life and practice. "Knowing" God as Trinity is a way of life, a nurturing and growth into closer communion with God across a range of relations that fully encompasses our lives.²⁷ There is a trinitarian praxis without which it is hard to make sense of trinitarian doctrine. But without at least an implicit trinitarian confession, that complex of practices, especially in its communal character, is often truncated.

We can now see the connection between the Trinity and varied religious aims. The actual ends that various religious traditions offer as alternative human fulfillments diverge because they realize different relations with God. It is God's reality as Trinity that generates the multiplicity of dimensions that allow for that variety of relations. With all its complexity, Trinity does say what it appears to say at first glance: the Christian idea of God is somewhere between our idea of a person and our idea of a community. To picture God as a "simple" person makes the three too much like organs or faculties within a human being, makes them too sub-personal. To picture God as a community of individual persons makes the one too much like an abstraction or a contract, makes the godhead too impersonal or trans-personal. We have to cross our ideas of person and community as the early Christian theologians crossed their ideas of hypostasis and persona. If "person" is our model for God, then we have to transform it to the point that each of the three "constituent parts" of the person seem analogous to the whole. If "community" is our model for God, then we have to transform it so that the whole seems truly analogous to each of the three that constitute it. Trinity is a pattern from which these two concrete realities we know best are derived and diverge. In salvation, without losing their distinct identity as creatures persons (and their communion) will converge more toward that pattern.

Humans can concentrate their response to the divine in a particular dimension of the divine life, and may realize a distinct religious end if this channel of relation is maintained in isolation from the others. A trinitarian perspective can affirm diverse religious ends as real, and the traditions that offer them as valid ways to relation with God. Any of these is preferable to no realized relation with God. At the same time, a trinitarian framework recognizes that these contacts with God are not identical in their meaning or result. A relation with God is not the same thing as salvation. Insofar as alternative religious ends lack or rule out real dimensions of communion with the triune God, they embody some measure of what the Christian tradition regards as loss or damnation.

This possibility of loss and the human freedom involved in it stem from God's "withdrawal" from us in creation to provide the space for our existence and self-determination.²⁸ This has particular relevance for the first dimension of the divine life that we discussed briefly above, the more "impersonal" dimension. Creation establishes a distance between God and creation for the sake of the freedom of creation. Calling the universe into being, God also provides space to "let it be." This is not only a veil from God's immediate presence and power, but a foundation of what we call natural law and order, a ground for human freedom and development. Though this is a creative act of God, the substance of the action involves a certain apparent absence of God.

The distance between God and creatures which allows them the freedom for relationship is also an occasion for sin and loss. This freedom, and the fact that God's economy of activity toward us involves self-limitation, opens up the possibility for a variety of relations with God. As a part of the "letting be" which is integral to God's creating, there is a withdrawal of God from univocal presence to human knowledge. Immediate, sensible presence of God would be incompatible with human self-determination. God puts humans in a situation from which there can be varied, defensible conclusions about God's existence, a situation therefore in which humans are free to choose to believe in God and love God or not. But this also means that who and what God is becomes uncertain and God's actions of revelation themselves take place within the frame of this epistemic distance.²⁹ The varied religions and their varied religious ends exist in this space, a space which is itself an intrinsic part of the good creation.

The Christian perspective on other religions thus deploys a rather complex map within which to locate and recognize a variety of distinctive paths and ends. One of the most notable aspects of this map is that it leaves areas to be further specified by the details of other religious traditions. Take, for instance, the extraordinarily complicated and nuanced analyses of consciousness and mental events that are found in Buddhist tradition. This insight to the very roots of emptiness fills out the apophatic side of the Trinity's impersonal dimension, reflected in our created nature. It does so in a way Christianity alone never has or could. This specification greatly enriches the trinitarian map, though on that map there are other, co-equal domains as well.

There are different ways the complexity of the Trinity and its relations with the world may "break down," to varying religious effects. One way of fragmenting the Trinity would be to effectively take only one of the three persons as real, and treat the others as purely "economic" or secondary representations of that reality. So, for instance, one might hold to some kind of first mover, a transcendent agency of some sort, but deny any incarnational dimension or any personal immanence. This would correspond to certain kinds of deism, for instance. One might instead deny both a creator and particular incarnation but affirm an immanent pantheistic "Spirit." Or one might affirm an historical logos or pattern for human life, without either creation or immanence. This broad "map" is helpful in some ways, with its tendency to classify religions according their focus on creative transcendence, historical incarnation or spiritual immanence.

But as we have stressed, the Trinity suggests another complexity that is of even greater relevance for the religions. In truth, the world religions are beyond any simple treatment as "unitarianisms" of one divine person (religions of the Father or the Word or the Spirit). In their sophistication and wisdom, the traditions integrate a wide variety of religious phenomena. They generally show a keen appreciation of at least the economic elements of trinitarian expression.³⁰ Rather than focusing on unitarianisms of various sorts, it is more helpful to inquire about the principle or principles by which that integration takes place in particular traditions. This often involves concentration and refinement of a particular dimension of the shared life of the Trinity to the exclusion or limitation of one or more of the others. This is not the isolation of the Father or the Word or the Spirit per se, but rather the elevation of a single dimension of the relations among them and a single dimension of their complex relations with the world. For instance, one perspective might orient itself to the impersonal, infinite life shared among the three persons. Another might focus on the common "I" of the three persons, the indivisible acts of the one God in relation to the world.

In the last section we described some of the ways the development of trinitarian theology employed and stretched existing notions about human nature, and in turn helped to reshape our notion of the human person. We can develop our discussion further by considering certain kinds of human interaction as analogies for encounter with God. One human person can connect with another in at least three dimensions. It is important to remember that we are not analogizing this relation between two people with the relation of one human or community to one of the triune persons. Instead, we are drawing an analogy between three avenues of human interpersonal relation and contact with three aspects of the shared triune life as a whole, three aspects that exist by virtue of the divine communion among the three.

First, two people can have an "impersonal" relation, a connection that does not require personhood. This is the case with a purely functional interaction that could just as well be achieved by a machine (one person stamps another's ticket). It is the case when we interact on a purely biological level (one person receives a blood transfusion from another). This last example is a particularly good one. We are literally in contact with the life processes within another, but the contact takes place (or may) entirely without the exchange or engagement of any "personal" qualities.

A second dimension of relationship between persons involves an encounter with the unitary agency of the other. We directly meet the distinctive "products" of personality: words, thoughts, intentions, aesthetic expressions, feelings. These are "sent" by one and received by another. This may be a face to face event, emphasizing bodily and vocal communication. But the outward personal expression can also precipitate in a medium (like writing or art) that opens this dimension of relation even between those who never physically meet. This dimension is personal in a profound way, raising the full range of moral and social questions that mark human culture. It covers a wide range of interactions of varying intensity, from asking a stranger for directions to working together as student and teacher in a math class to living as friendly neighbors for the better part of a lifetime, to studying the work of a poet from another century.

A third dimension of relation is that of communion. Here one not only encounters another as a person but in some measure shares in the life of the other person. Empathy and familiarity with the way that the other's emotions and responses are formed eventually give us the vicarious capacity to experience the same responses in some measure. These arise in us not instead of our own reactions, but alongside them, though in some cases this line too may blur. Two people who simultaneously share the experience of listening to a great musical performance exemplify this. The effect of this sharing might range from the simple awareness that another's responses are virtually identical to your own (a knowledge which has its own distinctive impact on the nature of your experience) to a rather complex phenomenon in which you appreciate someone else's appreciation for elements that do not speak to you in the same way.³¹

Intimate contact with someone's life consciously and unconsciously shapes our own, and this process is steadily nurtured by exchange and open communication. Relationships of deep love, close family connection, intimate friendship, are examples of this. In such relations we certainly contact the unitary outward expression of the person's will and thought. But in addition we have some participation in the constitutive process that is behind such expression. We are in contact with the non-unitary features of their personality, with the tensions or unique separate dynamics that are at play in their experience and life.

My contention is that the life of the Trinity manifests three dimensions analogous to the three I have described, and that relation with God can be tuned or concentrated in one of these channels, with distinctive religious results. Let us consider the three in much greater detail.³²

Consider the first, more impersonal dimension. In their discussion of the Trinity, Ninian Smart and Steven Konstantine speak about the "infinity of the divine life," referring to the process of exchange among the triune persons, the life processes of their shared unity.³³ This is the radical immanence and the radical emptiness by which the divine persons indwell each other and make way for the others to indwell them. The question of self-consciousness in the divine persons is a complicated one, but we can simply note that there is a difference between personal activities that proceed with awareness, though with no deliberation or self-interrogation, and those that are self-conscious in a deliberative sense. Persons who are very close may maintain a steady flow of "unconscious" or unpremeditated exchange, where each registers what is happening to the other. This takes place at a level that is almost physiological as much as psychological. Smart and Konstantine are pointing to a dimension like this in the divine life.

In the biblical tradition, we find clear indications of relation with God tuned to this wavelength. There is a very real note in Scripture that highlights an impersonal side of the divine. In the Old Testament the holiness of God and the direct presence of God frequently have this character, like a fire in the presence of which everything mortal is consumed. Theophanies, or even the continuing presence of God that rests in the ark of the tabernacle as it travels with the people of Israel, have this quality. Humans exposed to this presence are in great danger, in a purely "chemical" and impersonal sense, quite apart from any specific intention on God's part. It is as if a creature stepped into a circuit where unimaginable current was being exchanged. The raw divine life is a "consuming fire," and accounts of those who encounter it (Moses or Job, for instance) trade strongly on the language of impersonal forces like fire and wind. This divine power or force might be viewed as something like an electrical charge or field, generated by the constant interchange of the three divine persons with each other. Just as living organisms have a variation in electrical potential in the body, a living exchange, so does the divine life have its own generative process.

We made the point in our discussion of Trinity that there is no uniform divine substance or essence. What there is one of in God is not a "stuff" but a communion. This means that in relating with God we are encountering dimensions of shared life. One such dimension is precisely this infinite exchange among them. In a rigidly empirical way, if we look beyond the three divine persons toward some substance or essence of the divine, what we encounter is the flux of relation among the persons. It is as if we searched within a human body for its life, trying to find in what specific place or function it resided. Or it is as if we tried to isolate the "life of a community" in one individual or event. In either case, the living fullness of the whole would escape us. We could come up with process, or structure, a set of dynamics that underlie the life we are trying to explain. What we find would be quite real and we would be right, at least in certain senses, to believe that this flux lies "underneath" the larger scale phenomena of a human body, a community or God. We might even jump to the conclusion that this "life" is nothing but the processes we isolate in our investigation.

God is not static, nor simple, and the divine life underlies every aspect of the created order. One dimension of the presence of God in the world is precisely the manifestation of this aspect of the triune life, its presence "in, with and under" all creatures. Whether by science or meditation, a profound empirical effort to distinguish what is at the bottom of natural world processes, or of our own mind, can attain an awareness of this sustaining or creative interaction. But that awareness will be limited to the phenomenal character of that process. Just as our personhood is not discernible at the level of the molecular interactions that take place in our bodies, so God is "impersonal" when encountered in this dimension of the divine immanence.

This divine impersonality can be perceived in two different ways, with their own integrity. The first apprehends the exchange among the divine persons, the flux itself as most basic. The nature of all is changing and impermanent: all is arising. And behind the arising there is nothing more substantial than that process itself. The only thing that could be more fundamental would be the cessation of such arising: something like what Buddhism calls nirvana. Contact with the impersonality of the "divine" can suggest the unreality of the self or the individual as we normally understand it.

If creation is examined rigorously in this dimension, it can rightly be found to have "emptiness" at its base. A striking contemporary analogy for this fact comes out in physics. Quantum mechanics provides a consistent and highly effective account of the most basic constituents of our physical world, an account in which matter itself seems to dissolve into something else: energy, or fields of mathematical probability. The "occurrences" that make up the regularities of our world, from subatomic particles on up, take place according to quite concrete mathematical schemes. But why (and how) these equations are taking the trouble to actualize themselves, if I may put it that way, is as unclear to physicists as to the uninitiated. If the quantum world represents an "edge" of reality, as the cosmological origin in time of the universe is another such edge, then it appears so far to be neatly turned back upon itself, leaving us quite self-enclosed. What's "there" is no fixed thing but rather a flux which, when smoothed out at higher levels, has a quite hard and regular tangibility. If looking into the constituent make up of matter in fact is a glimpse toward the heart of reality, then reality manifests an "emptiness," in the sense of the lack of substance or the dissolving of entities with enduring distinct identities.

It appears to me that this insight is far more developed and its particular implications more intensely understood in Buddhism than in any facet of Christian tradition. It is rather common for Christians to concede that Buddhist teachings are an impressive analysis of a godless world. This obviously implies that they are an accurate analysis of a world that does not exist, since God does. I am suggesting instead that this Buddhist vision of emptiness is an accurate picture of an aspect of the real world and an accurate, if limited, description of God's relation with the world.

The "emptiness" described is one of God's relations to creation, a fundamental dimension of distance given in the creative act itself. Nor is emptiness an entirely economic feature of God, one that God has only by virtue of creation and in relation to creation. As a "making space for the other," we can say such emptiness is a feature of the inner-trinitarian relations of the divine persons. Raimundo Panikkar talks of it as the kenosis in which the Father makes way for the Son.³⁴ Therefore the discussions between Buddhists and Christians which consider whether emptiness is a name for God (and vice versa) have a point.³⁵ It is interesting that Buddhism typically regards Trinity, incarnation and virtually all positive Christian representations of God as passing, instrumental representations, suitable to the spiritually undeveloped, while regarding "emptiness" as belonging to a different, and more ultimate plane of reality. For them emptiness is not merely an economic representation of the ultimate and it cannot be made co-equal with other characterizations of the ultimate. Christians on the other hand are obliged to coordinate the dimension of emptiness with others in the trinitarian view of God.

Apophatic theology, that branch of Christian theology that has focused particularly on the emptiness of references to God and on the negative spiritual path toward God, reflects a particular texture in the emptiness it finds in the divine life. This texture is "personal emptiness." We can distinguish three sides to this negativity. The first side is contingency. God acts out of a divine and sovereign freedom and God's actions are not necessitated. They are "empty" in that there is no causal determinism, no prior set of circumstances that strictly requires them. They flow freely from God's character and will. The second side of the divine emptiness we can call reservation. God is truly revealed but never fully or exhaustively revealed. There is a depth of God that remains unknown to creatures. In our contact with the divine nature there are always parts of the map that remain blank. The character of personhood is such that it cannot be captured entirely and permanently by an external understanding. The third side is what we have already discussed as God's withdrawal, the self-contraction that allows creation its space and integrity. This is not the emptiness of the great "beyond" in God, which must always exceed our finite grasp. It is a purposeful absence or a divine secret, in which God shields us from the blinding divine presence that would overwhelm us with such totality and certainty as to leave us immobile. God actively transcends the range of our finite faculties.

All of these, and especially the third, give a point of purchase for the Buddhist insight regarding emptiness. However from a Christian perspective the category of "person" qualifies that of emptiness without displacing it. We can see how this works out in each of the three cases I have just described. In the first case the emptiness is the freedom, lack of prior constraint, in a contingent, personal act. In the second case it is the quality of unrevealed depth intrinsic to a person, the "more" present beyond the bounds of any particular encounter. In the third case it is a personal act of self-limitation to leave space for another. In all these instances, emptiness is not regarded as transitory or less than real. It is a permanent dimension of personal reality and relation. It is an interpersonal reality of the divine life as well as of human life. But it is not the sole ultimate. If this avenue of relation is regarded, and actualized, as the sole ultimate, the Buddhist religious end becomes a real option.

This is one mode of perceiving the impersonal dimension of the divine life. A second mode reads this impersonality as that of a self without relation, a "person" of radically different definition.³⁶ If there were but one absolute self, then the flux and impermanence humans perceive as a dimension of the divine presence could be taken as the natural inner reality of that self. This is analogous to the constant biological and chemical and physical flux characteristic of any individual's physiological or even psychic processes. From this perspective, it is a category mistake to take the emptiness of the flux as the real story. That illusion arises from fixation on one level, the impermanence of the constituent parts, that blinds you to the larger reality they compose. Once you realize the identity of all with this single self, this impermanent activity falls into place as ephemeral expressions playing across one deeper consciousness. That consciousness itself is perfectly complete, for there is no "other" to which it relates.

The act of creation involves the divine contraction we spoke of above. It is also true that at the same time God is present to creation at every moment, as the sustainer without whom it could not exist. There is a relation of utter dependence between creatures and God, for their very life processes depend on God. s life, are supported by God's presence. The connection of creator to creature cannot be effaced. The other side of the divine withdrawal from sensible, cognitive or spiritual dominance of creation is the anonymous immanence by which God upholds each creature. There is a sense in which God is in us "by nature." This is not a relation of identity. It is not that creation is God, or that God's sustaining immanence is the same as our life and self. But there is an unbreakable link between them.

As a result, we can look deeply into ourselves or nature and find not only an emptiness of substance (because of God's withdrawal) but also a positive matrix that sustains us. Quantum mechanics can be viewed from one perspective as the running out of matter into "no thing." From another it can be viewed as an indication that the material world is upheld by an active process, a highly ordered structure whose mathematical signature is one of startling elegance and compactness. Christians regard this as the immanent, sustaining activity of God. But taken alone it is liable to characterizations like "matrix" or "force." If the insight regarding emptiness can point toward a conclusion about the insubstantiability of all things, the view of a sustaining power at the base of all things can lead toward a more positive image of an underlying reality, present alike in all that is. Nowhere is this perception more powerfully manifest than in the Advaita Vedanta tradition of Hinduism. Brahman, the one unshakable reality, sustains all things by pervading all things, by identity with all things.

Either apprehension---insight into a basic emptiness or insight into a total immanence---can lead reasonably to the conclusion "I am that." The boundaries that mark off any persons or creatures from others are only apparent. All things are empty, or all things are instances of divine immanence. This applies to us as humans: my being also is an instance of emptiness or immanence. The conviction that samsara is nirvana, or that atman is Brahman are two distinctive religious conclusions born of such insight, and they point to two distinct religious ends. Relation to God derived from our meditation on or investigation into the ground of nature and our own being may very well take the two forms we have described. Insofar as we concentrate on this insight and on revelation restricted to this particular vein, those two religious ends are viable options.

Such ends are tuned to the dimension of the divine life we have been discussing, with its two faces: the "distance" established by God's withdrawal and the simple divine immanence which upholds our existence. We can reasonably take the first face as emptiness, since all that is left behind in this withdrawal of God (what Panikkar calls the silence of the Father) is the flux of the divine life and its connection with us. All is impermanence, arising and passing. This can be taken as the lack of enduring substance or self. But, as the second face, it can also reasonably be taken as the eternal, ongoing life of a single subject. In that case, the fact that we find it at the base of all being does not lead to a conclusion that being as such is empty. Instead it leads to the conclusion that there is one reality alone whose life is immanent in all being and identical with it. In either of these perceptions, a real encounter with the impersonal dimension of the divine is honored. No-self and self-without-another are both construals of that encounter that provide true witness about the nature of this relation. Within these terms, Trinity itself is viewed as a misleading confusion, because of its attachment to the notion of person or its attachment to relationship between persons or both.

Although both of these convictions are represented within great religious traditions, the first in major strands of Buddhism and the second in the Advaita Vedanta strand of Hinduism, they also appear in less traditionally religious forms. For instance, there are a number of works that rightly draw extensive comparisons between modern science and certain strands of Buddhist and Hindu thought.³⁷ The most common contemporary forms of spiritualized science reflect the same two options. There is a spiritualized form of reductionistic science. It concludes that on the cosmological and quantum mechanical fronts the more we understand the way the world works, the less sense it makes, in terms of having any transcendent or substantial meaning. At the root of the universe we find intellectual and even causal emptiness. The human task is to grasp this emptiness with an existential authenticity. On the other hand, there is a spiritualized form of what we might call "ecological" science. It concludes from essentially the same data that the flux of one continuous world process is itself divine. We, and all other beings, are simply parts or moments in this unity and meaning comes in recognizing this identity. Our world ("Gaia") or perhaps our whole universe is a divine being, and we are one with it. From a trinitarian point of view, these two options veer either toward understanding the divine as pure relations, pure process, or toward understanding the divine as an absolute with no need of relations (since it is already in perfect identity with all that is). In either case the impersonal dimension of the divine life is isolated as an absolute and cut off from its integral place in the relation of the divine persons.

In encountering the emptiness of the world or the sustaining activity that upholds the world, we are meeting God in a particular phase of God's relation to us as creator. This is a real and valid relation, but it is isolated from other features of the triune communion. Each of the divine persons "makes space" for the others (as God makes space for creation). But each person also lives by coinherence with the others. From the Christian point of view, any impersonality in their shared life is always the product of the creative withdrawal (kenosis) of a person and the mutual immanence (communion) of persons.

To encounter God as an impersonal reality touches in depth a dimension of the divine life, the ceaseless exchange among the persons. There is an interesting corollary with this dimension in the history of Christian theology. Awareness of the dimension has been nourished in Eastern Christianity, where apophatic theology has remained a living tradition, in conjunction with a trinitarian theology. In Western Christianity the same strand is present in a minor key through some mystical and devotional traditions. But Western theology has shown a great interest in a divine substance or essence as the principle of unity in God. Particularly after the enlightenment, attempts to think about or relate with this divine essence (the "ground" of the Trinity) in a direct and pure way show a tendency to move toward the same insights into an impersonal dimension of the divine life that we have been discussing.³⁸ In fact, at least some varieties of modern atheism, as well as the "death of God" movement, can be seen as a certain reassertion of this dimension, a return of the theologically repressed.³⁹

But against the background we have sketched, and under its conditions, God also relates in a direct way with the world. In addition to the dimension of God's self-limitation or withdrawal in all creation and the dimension of God's universal immanence (two relations of God with creation which can be viewed in impersonal terms), there are ways that God relates as a character or agent. In fact, it is the first kind of relation, providing the freedom and separate sphere of creation itself, which makes this second one possible. It is God's "absence" and background immanence which allow for a free and historical encounter of humans with God as a single "Thou" on the stage of creation. If the first type of relation is one that can often be equated to insight or realization (of emptiness or of oneness with a single impersonal ultimate) then this second type is one that has clear interactive and interpersonal marks.

This dimension has the quality of an encounter between persons, a relation of active agents. The communion of the Trinity and the indivisibility of the Trinity's external acts mean that God is truly one. God encounters us as a free and consistent individual. God's activity, God's character as a personal agent is the predominant theme of Scripture. God acts, covenants, commands, punishes, loves and redeems. Humans seek God's presence, hear God's word, see God's acts, obey or disobey God's commandments, and offer praise or petition. This is an encounter with the ego or the common "I" of the Trinity. When we use "God" to refer to a simple personal deity, we are reflecting this relation.

The focus of this encounter is the outward communication of the will, purpose, thoughts and feelings of one to the other, on the analogy of external interpersonal relations. Obviously, this is a vision Christianity shares with most other theisms, certainly with Judaism and Islam.⁴⁰ This relationship exists between God and humanity. It is characterized by events and by mediating forms, like Scripture itself. From this perspective, it is possible to treat Trinity as a name for successive kinds of possible personal encounter in this mode. We may engage God the Father as creator, Christ the Word as redeemer or the Holy Spirit as sanctifier.

Panikkar offers an important insight when he chooses to characterize this class of relations with the divine by using the word "iconolatry."⁴¹ Iconolatry is a representation of the divine under some particular form, mental or material.⁴² This form could be that of a personal deity, "God." But it need not be. It could be a law, a teaching, or a narrative. Any definite image that represents the ultimate, and resists reduction to merely one limited expression among others serves as an icon. An icon marks the divine and relationship with it off from other possibilities. The first type of relation we discussed above involved insight into conditions that are always and everywhere the case. The realization of these conditions is marked with the motto "thou art that." Iconolatry by contrast demarcates some specific kind of relation that must be realized from among options.

We may most readily think of this as a connection between God and humans as individuals. This is an external, social encounter. It focuses on interactions like gratitude, obligation, and worship, relations that expect persons on either end. God appears as one with whom persons can have personal encounter. This is the God of the biblical and Qur'anic traditions. This relationship with the divine is marked not by the silence characteristic of the emptiness or immanence we just treated, but by acts and speech. God is an agent, who speaks and acts with humanity. Humanity speaks and acts in return. Insight and knowledge are less to the fore than attentiveness, obedience and faith.

But (and this is Panikkar's point) although we may commonly think of icons as the medium for a personal divinity, this need not be the case. Under the influence of the biblical tradition, we tend to think of icons as outward expressions of God. s personal nature. Through an icon, like the law given at Sinai, we encounter an external crystallization of the will or purpose of a personal deity. But it is possible to have a specific transcendent order or "law" without any personal will of which it is the expression. The "Tao" of Taoism or the logos in Stoicism, or the Kantian moral law would be examples. The Buddhist dharma might be another, depending upon whether it is taken as an eternal structure or order, or is itself simply the most important tool or skillful means used on the way to enlightenment. Even in the latter case, it comes close to iconic status. Thus at one end of the range of this iconic dimension there is some transcendent, impersonal structure or rule (like the Tao) which has iconic representations and at the other end there is the personal God of monotheism whose expressions of will and purpose take iconic form.

The key point that distinguishes this dimension as a whole from the impersonal one we discussed first, is not personality in the divine, although that becomes a crucial feature of much "iconolatry." The key point is that an iconic view of the divine allows for contrast and tension. The icon points to the fact that the divine is not empty nor is all being already in perfect identity with it. There is a distance between us and the divine, between us and our religious end, which must be traveled. Iconolatry typically manifests an ethical or moral emphasis, a drive toward transformation. Icons lie between us and the transcendent, pointing the way for change. It is not an existing condition that must be recognized (though that step is a valuable one), but a new condition or transformation that must be attained. It is not being, or the emptiness of being, that must be known. It is a change that must happen. The motto of iconolatry is not "thou art that" but "become what you are called/structured to be."

Islam is an excellent illustration. Here there is complete clarity about God as a free, transcendent and personal creator over against whom humans stand as responsible individuals and communities. The great icon of this relationship is the Qur'an, for here the nature of that relation and the plan for it are clearly, divinely set forth. God and humanity do not meet as equals, but they do meet as free individuals. The important categories of relation reflect this. Commandment, covenant, obedience, sin, faithfulness, trust, mercy, repentance, guilt, love, anger: all these come into play. We relate to God as to a unitary center of consciousness, a person who manifests will, purpose, decision, emotion. God communicates with us. God commands us to live in certain ways. God responds to our response. God loves righteousness, cares for the poor, condemns injustice, shows mercy to the repentant. This is a narrative and historical interaction.

Relation with God is limited if it remains entirely in the impersonal end of the iconic range. When it encompasses personal encounter as a mode for relation with God, it can stumble by treating God (on strict analogy to human relations) as simply one agent or character among others. This is an error against which Islamic tradition is particularly vigilant. Personal encounter can also go astray by taking the analogy of God as a single "I" too far, and so obscuring the complexity of the divine life. This can lead to exclusion of that first dimension we discussed (emptiness and immanence), and of others as well. But these iconic relations, as elaborated in different ways in traditions like Taoism or Islam, are very real relations with God. Maintained with devotion they can achieve distinctive religious ends, constituted by our human conformity to and enjoyment of the divine order that is offered to us.

A trinitarian perspective suggests that what is apprehended in these cases is the external unity of the Trinity, its cooperative unity in willing the good for creation. Human "reception" may focus specially on the content of what is willed by the Trinity (and this is consistent with impersonal icons of the divine) or may on the other hand closely connect what is called for with the personal character of the one who calls. In relating to God as personal in this way, as a single "I," Christians are on common ground with other monotheists. Christianity characteristically qualifies this common faith in two ways. The first is the conviction that the icon for this personal God is believed also to be a living person: Jesus Christ. The second, as we have described at some length, is the understanding of God as Trinity, which finds this single divine "I" grounded in a communion of persons.

We have just referred to encounter with God as a distinct personal being or through a particular icon. This can be a largely external encounter. It is a different matter when some further complexity is presumed in the divine itself. This complexity can be thought of minimally as a necessary need for a variety of specific icons (in contrast to just one). Or it can be seen as rooted in greater intrinsic personal "depth" and complexity (as is the case in the Trinity). This suggests participation in a third dimension of the triune life, that of personal communion.

The third dimension of relation with God is personal not only in the sense of interaction between persons, but in the sense of communion among them. To encounter each other as persons is not the same thing as to have personal communion with each other. In Scripture there is a longing for the external relation to become also internal, with a law "written on our hearts." The New Testament puts special stress on this, both in the case of Jesus' unique relation with God and in terms of the relation with God possible for believers through their communion in Christ and the Holy Spirit. This koinonia or participation has to do with a sharing of inner personal lives, with human sharing in the divine life.

Personal encounter is a relation that focuses on the responsiveness of one to another. Communion is a mutual indwelling, in which the distinct persons are not confused or identified but are enriched by their participation in each other's inner life. If the first dimension of relation we discussed tends toward identity of humans and the ultimate in impersonal terms, and the second type tends toward encounter in difference, this third dimension emphasizes communion of persons in their distinctive personhood. This is the participation in the divine life that is spoken of by Jesus in the Gospel of John and by Paul in his letters. By being in Christ we are able in some measure to be "in God." When Paul says "not I, but Christ in me" he does not mean "not me, but instead Christ who has now replaced me." Nor is he talking of a sudden insight that my self and Christ's self have always been the same, identical self.

He means a communion so close and full that not only external acts and effects are exchanged between persons, but also features of their inner lives. It is a communion so real that a person can rightly say of certain aspects of her own willing, longing or loving that they seem to arise more from the indwelling of the other person than from any purely isolated individuality of her own. It is a telling part of the description of this communion that its most characteristic manifestation is in relation to yet a third person. Communion between two who love each other can often lead to the metaphorical situation of not knowing where one stops and the other begins. This can also be confused with a loss of person or a fusion. The ecstatic forgetfulness of sexual union, for instance, can be taken as an image of undifferentiated oneness. The more typical feature of communion as I mean it is the discovery in ourselves of an openness or response to a third person which we can hardly credit as coming from us, except by virtue of the indwelling of a second in us. No one can love God and hate their neighbor. It is not an accident, of course, that this reflects the classic trinitarian formula that sees in the communion of any two of the triune persons the implied communion of each with the third. It is the same pattern that marks God's action in the world, the "economy" of redemption, as moving from the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit. The motto of this dimension is "transformation through communion."

The image of salvation is not complete identification with God (oneness), nor perfect agreement of wills (obedience, faith) between a human and God as a pair in external relation, but the personal communion of self and God which flows into communion with other creatures. Salvation is participation in the divine life precisely in this sense of communion. If the divine life were not triune, did not embody in itself just this communion of two that requires communion with a third, then salvation would be a more extrinsic relation with God than Christianity assumes, and hopes, it is.

We have outlined a variety of relations touching aspects of three particular dimensions of the triune life of God. It might appear at first that these stand in a roughly linear order, moving from the impersonal (emptiness and immanence) to the iconic (whether a transcendent order or a transcendent person) to personal communion. But they might better be pictured in a triangular or circular order, making impersonal relation and personal communion border each other instead of standing as polar opposites. This is so because there is a tendency for personal communion to be interpreted by some at the extreme as the same as pure union. If followed out fully, this can lead back to an impersonal identification, not unlike that characteristic of the first type of relation. For instance, it is not surprising that the most hopeful reports of the essential convergence of Buddhism and Christianity come from those who correlate the insight into the essential emptiness of things on the Buddhist side with a strand of Christian mysticism which takes achieved communion with God closest to a union in which relation itself is erased. The most personal thus becomes the impersonal, or the impersonal becomes the suprapersonal.

If God is Trinity, these dimensions of the divine life are a seamless unity in the communion of the three persons. The various relations with God we have outlined are themselves irreducible. If God is Trinity, then no one of these need be or can be eliminated in favor of the others. And any one who clings to the truth of one of the relations can never be forced from it by pure negation, but only possibly by enhancement. All three dimensions of relation connect with the Trinity's own reality, though not to the same cumulative extent. The three triune persons share an interpersonal communion, they relate to each other with the freedom and asymmetry of agents, and they participate in a common, infinite divine life of exchange and process. All three are a feature of the triune God's integral reality. No one is a lower expression of the others, for all are integral to what "person" means. The three kinds of relation we have outlined deal with aspects of this shared life. Christians hold that the richest human end is a communion with God that encompasses all these dimensions.

The validity of human responses to each of these dimensions of the complex divine life provides the power of religious pluralism, grounds the worthy claims of alternative traditions. This poses another question. If at least several religious ends are not simply illusions or errors, the problem appears even more vexing as to how they might be maintained together. The fact that validity and truth are distributed across a number of relations reveals to us the need for some grounding that unites them. Trinity provides that grounding.

Christians can understand the distinctive religious truth of other religions as rooted in the triune God. s real, specific relations with people in those traditions. On the one hand this provides a rationale for the Christian inclusive hope that such truths might lead people toward salvation, since the ends sought through such relations have an intrinsic ground in the triune God. But on the other hand, this perspective also provides the basis to affirm the separate reality of those religious ends in their own terms. In particular veins of relation, the distinctive religious paths and truths of other traditions exhibit greater purity and power than are usually manifest in Christianity. Limit can lead to such intensification.

This does not mean that the differences among the religious ends simply have to do with degree of intensity of the same thing. We have sketched several dimensions of relation with the divine life. An intensification of one such dimension, when coupled with exclusion of others or their relegation to an instrumental, secondary status, in fact can lead to a distinct religious end. For instance, the end sought (and I believe achieved) in Theravada Buddhism is based on a human relation with God "tuned" entirely to the frequency of God. s emptiness or withdrawal to leave creatures to their contingent freedom. Human relation with God is intensified and purified to fit completely within this one channel of God's relation with us. An analysis of the self carried out in this dimension will find selves themselves empty. Since a crucial element that gives selves their "substance" is their relations with others, the attempt to find a "remnant self" after subtracting all relation will lead only to emptiness. The person has no intrinsic ground for self-sufficient being. I am convinced that the Theravadan end is in fact, as that tradition claims, a cessation of suffering. In that concrete respect, it is similar to salvation. But the realization of this end relinquishes (as unreal) a whole range of possible relations with God and others whose presence is essential to the end Christians seek. In that respect it is much more similar ultimately to what Christians mean by loss.

It is important to make the point that relations with God in all three dimensions we have described are real relations with God. They are not relations with something else (idols) or with false gods. What humans find in such relations is truly there. These are all relations with the God who is triune, though some may refine and restrict their relationship with the triunity of God. They are not relations to only one divine person rather than to others, since given God' s nature and the communion of the persons that is not possible. An isolated relation with one person of the Trinity is something that exists only in abstraction. In each case it is God in God's triune nature we meet

By virtue of the constraints that we as humans put on our approach and relation to God, various aspects of the shared divine life are received in these relations. Human relations with God lead to alternative religious ends for two reasons. The first is that human conditions are in a measure constituted by the images and understandings persons bring to them. The second reason, closely connected, is that the relations between God and humans largely follow the logic of personal relations: mutual openness is required for persons to have true contact with certain actual features of the other. Unless we establish the channels to apprehend and connect with certain aspects of another person, those will remain a closed book to us and our shared life will lack that dimension. Religious ends differ in some measure because our own "conditioning" shapes our experience, but also because objective dimensions of relation with God are realized (or not) depending on whether we respond to the particular channels God has opened for that relation. For this reason, the fact that it may be "the same ultimate reality" which is behind distinct religious experiences and traditions does not by any means require that they result in the same religious end.

A famous verse of the Bhagavad-gita is often quoted on the presumption that it indicates the identical goal of all religions: "In whatsoever way men approach me, in that same way I receive them."⁴³ But Krishna. s declaration in the voice of supreme Brahman appears an equally good charter for a diversity of religious ends, affirming that people will realize the different receptions corresponding to their different approaches to ultimate reality. If human beings form their ultimate desires freely from among many options, and then through devotion and practice are able to see those desires actually realized, there is no reason to complain about the process but ample room to differ over which end we should seek. There is good cause to give profound attention to the concrete variety of religious traditions, to give the most serious consideration to their particularistic witness, and to expect that nothing will shape our destiny more distinctly than our religious commitment.

Our discussion to this point throws some light on Christology proper. One of the most common criticisms of the Christian view of Christ is that it involves contradictory statements about Christ's status. Jesus can't at the same time be externally related to God and also share the divine nature. The objection presumes a view of incarnation where being is a stuff of a certain sort or a homogenous status. As our review of Trinity has made clear, if we understand being as communion the situation is quite different. To say Jesus is divine by virtue of communion may sound like a "low" Christology, calling up pictures of Jesus as a human being who was specially sensitive to God, pursuing the same purpose, and so on. Some may reject this as not real divinity, real oneness with God. So long as we operate with the substance categories, this might be true. But if we take seriously the notion that God's "substance" is the communion of the triune persons, then to say that Jesus is divine by virtue of participation in that communion is to speak of the most profound unity and identity possible. It is God. s free choice to extend the inner communion of the triune life to a human being through the Word (the unique divine act) and Jesus. free participation in that communion that makes Christ divine.

Christ as a human has an "external" relation of communion with the Trinity as well as an "internal" relation of communion through the Word who is one of the divine persons.⁴⁴ It is the nature of both relations as communion that makes them compatible. There is an external distinction among the divine persons in respect to each other which is a condition of their communion with each other in the godhead. As the uniqueness of that communion within God is yet open to the possibility of the further communion realized in the incarnation, so the uniqueness of Christ's relation with God is open to participation by other people in that communion.

This is the premise of the extraordinary Christian claim that other humans can participate in the inner divine communion in a proportionate way. The human Jesus does not become the second person of the Trinity, but becomes one with that person, a communion as perfect as is possible without confusion, without the dissolution of the two "natures," human and divine. God became what we are in order that we might become as God is. We become by grace what God is by nature. We have communion with God by having communion with Christ, for the "inner" divine life is otherwise inaccessible to us. Christ participates in the triune life by nature and by grace---by the nature of the divine Word and the grace of the incarnation---and opens the path for others to join in that communion. This is only to say, in different terms, what can be said in more familiar trinitarian language. God meets us in three characteristic dimensions, dimensions that have to do not only with the way we perceive God but with God's own character. God is the creator who is above and under us, the personal source who transcends us. God is the Word and redeemer who is with us to overcome the sin that breaks our relationship with God, to make right our relationships with each other and to deliver us from death. God is the Spirit in us and among us, who transforms our inner life and maintains our communion with others.

Early Christian writers often depicted the Christian journey as a recapitulation, a return. This was not a literal return to the garden of Eden, nor the literal gnostic view in which actual particles of the divine nature migrated out of the material world to reunite with their source. Instead, this "return" was a growing up into the image in which we are made, a realization of the divine pattern. The idea that humans could become by grace what God is by "nature" says a great deal about how early Christians thought of God's nature. If that nature was preeminently omnipotence, or aseity, or infinity, then the idea of humans taking it on was patently incoherent. If that nature was a literal substance, then the only way in which it makes sense for humans to share it would be the gnostic idea that some humans have a small, separate piece of this substance hidden in them.

But if that nature is understood crucially as a certain life-in-relation, then the possibility of taking it on is already present in humans because they are created in the image of that divine nature. Humans are that image, for their being also is constituted by relation. Humans are able to realize this nature only by grace.⁴⁵ We are so constituted that we can realize our nature only through relation with God and others. But those concrete relations themselves are not ours. They are not given to us as part of our autonomous "nature," but depend on the free choice of others. They must come as the gift and grace of others relating with us or not come at all. Being created as human is a gift, the gift of God's relation with us which is unshakable and establishes us as persons. But fulfillment of our humanity, growing up into the image we bear, is also a gift. The second is given as a possibility in the first but cannot follow automatically from it.

Of course God and humans are different, and different in some constant ways. The "difference," the non-identity of God and creation precludes absorption of one into the other. But even this difference is not simply a generic one, in which it is only the same general distinction of creator/creature that marks every specific relation of communion with God. There is in addition an individual difference, where the nature of one person's communion with God has its own unique texture, distinguishing it not just from monism or separation generally but from any other person's communion with God. The salvation Christians anticipate is a personal communion of distinct creatures with God their maker.

The crucial precedent for this in the trinitarian life of God is not the equality, co-eternality, "same substance" of the persons but precisely the asymmetrical character of these relations of love and equality. The divine persons are fully one, fully mutual, even though they are not and will not become identical, even though what each one does out of a unique personhood is irreplaceably something the others do not do. In this specific sense there is a model in the trinity for full communion between those who are not the same. The communion of creatures with creator is such a communion, though it involves kinds of difference that are not in question within the trinitarian life.

We can pause here for a moment to consider the somewhat complicated topics we have been discussing from another perspective. The Christian view is in many ways a metaphysically pedestrian one. Christianity resolutely affirms and accepts attachment to "middle" realities of ordinary life: persons, relations, community, communion. Our human instantiation of these things may be frail and distorted but, as our consideration of Trinity has indicated, this kind of thing partakes of the deepest level of reality. These features carry over into salvation and are fundamental constituents of it. Persons, relations, communion: Christians desire for these to be transformed or renewed. They do not hope to get over them.

For this reason Christianity is frequently viewed as somewhat naïve. Many religious and secular world views purport to see through these middle level realities, to understand them as transitory epiphenomena of something more basic. For these world views it follows that the prominence given persons and relations in our everyday experience of life results from a distorted perception in some way. Truth and liberation would stem from insight that reveals these things as secondary, insubstantial, passing. Christianity's peculiar middleness places it between the appeal of esoteric analyses that tell us the ultimate, the true religious end, is nothing like what things appear to be and the opposite insistence that there is "nothing but" our historical human experience, without deeper transcendent grounding.

The Christian vision of salvation looks toward a condition in which relation with God is realized (in all three of the dimensions we have discussed) and in which one shares that realization with others. Salvation is a complex state, for in it a person is open to each of the dimensions of the divine life that we have described. It is also crucially dependent on intersecting communions. There is no uniform plan for every person. s relation with God in each of the dimensions we have outlined. Each instance will have its own unique features. No individual realizes the complete fullness of possible relation with God in any of these dimensions in a self-contained way. But she or he does approach that fullness through communion with other persons and creatures each of whom, in their relations with God and with others, fill out aspects that would be lacking for any one individual. Salvation is actually much more than the sum of any individual perfection.

The way that we can most deeply participate in a divine fullness, which literally overflows our finite capacities, is through mutual indwelling with other persons. This is rather like a set of parallel computers or processors that together can solve a problem that is beyond any one alone, or that can together produce a graphic image of depth and resolution impossible otherwise. To take another analogy, the body of Christ is like the array of multiple sensors in sophisticated radio telescopes or sonar systems.⁴⁶ Humans' communion with each other is also an instrument of the fuller communion with God. Our finite receptions of the triune self-giving multiply each other, in a kind of spiritual calculus that deepens each one's participation in the communion of the triune life itself. The key is openness for communion through the whole range of the divine dimensions, and openness to communion with other persons and with their unique relations with God. Such a vision embodies a profound imperative for justice, since every wound in the social fabric of human relation is likewise a rupture in the raw material of salvation. Broken bonds of human solidarity violate God's commands, but they are also close the very circuits of communion which are the nervous system of the redeemed life. A number of recent writers on the Trinity, notably Jurgen Moltmann and Leonardo Boff, have lifted up this perspective and drawn out its implications.

We talked particularly of three kinds of relation: humans with God, humans with each other, and humans with creation. I hope it has become increasingly clear that a serious consideration of alternative religious ends has the benefit of raising our appreciation for the specific character of salvation, the religious end Christians seek. All that we have been discussing, about tuning ourselves to the diverse "frequencies" or dimensions of the divine life, might be seen as an attempt to specify the first, the relation of humans with God. But we can now see clearly how the other two elements are necessarily included. Sin, evil and death can be effectively described as the empirical dilemmas of human life. But from the trinitarian perspective we have outlined, we can also see why estrangement from God would take these specific forms. The doctrine of the Trinity understands God as intrinsically relational. Since salvation is constituted by a communion that encompasses our relations with God, relations with other persons and with the rest of creation, it follows that disruption in our capacity for communion with others (God, persons or nature) blocks realization of salvation. All of these are enduring and crucial components of the religious end.

These dimensions retain their own distinctness and authenticity. The reality of one is not compromised by its inclusion with others. This is not only true for the broad dimensions of relation I have described. It applies as well to the specific way they are realized in individual cases. Every person who enters into communion with God in Christ does not have an identically formulated inner and outer life, in which some identical proportion or intensity of the different dimensions of relation we described is maintained at all times. According to Christian Scripture and tradition, such a thing is not desirable, even were it possible. There is an extraordinary range in the relative power with which these dimensions may show up. Paul's discussion in his First Letter to the Corinthians (Chapter 12) about the varied gifts among the saints makes this clear. In any event, an individual person can only realize a very tiny portion of the possibilities in any of these dimensions, isolated or not. This is why communion is the fundamental shape of salvation. Participation to the fullest in all these dimensions of relation with God is dependent also upon communion with others, so that both variety and depth can be enhanced and expanded.

"Saints," from this perspective, are as much those who have learned to participate by communion in others' communion with God as they are those who have developed to perfection their individual faculties for private unity with God. This is precisely what the "communion of the saints" is about.⁴⁸ Mutual participation, communion-in-difference, is integral to salvation, as it is to the triune life itself.⁴⁹ This is also why in Christian tradition community, the actual concrete body of the church, has been regarded as fundamental to the Christian life, even to salvation itself. Fuller communion with God and fuller communion with other persons go together. One is impossible without the other, for one person's total communion with God can plumb only a portion of the possibilities that the triune God offers. We have tended to stress the full array of human communion as a constituent element of the fullness of salvation. But there is another side to the picture that is also important. The multiple connections are crucial, but entry into this communion at the extreme only requires one point. A person can be drawn into this extraordinary, cosmic communion through initial attachment of the most humble and basic sort to one other person. In Dante's Divine Comedy this is exemplified in Dante's relation with Virgil and, above all, with Beatrice. Loving attachment even to one person, if that love has the character not of closed possession but of further openness through that person, can finally draw us to the very heart of the celestial rose.

Finally, a brief word about the eschatological implications of this vision. By now it should be clear that this theological perspective offers good reason to credit each religious tradition's "one and only" claims& .not least of all, Christianity's. But I would like to call attention to one point, and that is the way that this vision deals with the longstanding question of God's mercy and God's wrath. Short of predestinarian decrees, the problem is that at least toward some people God's character or purpose must change at some point, from a saving will to a condemning one. The view we have sketched, while emphatically not a universalism of salvation, is different.

It says that every human response to the manifestation and revelation of God meets from God only affirmation, only God. s "yes" of grace, of election of humanity in Christ for relation with God. Every response to the divine initiative has its reward. Every quest for relation with God that proceeds on the basis of some dimension of God. s self-giving to us meets the fulfillment for which it aims and hopes, even if it cannot be persuaded to hope further. Insofar as realization of relation with God in one of the dimensions we have discussed resists or refuses communion with God through other dimensions, it leads to its own distinctive end. And, of course, from the view of other religions, so long as Christians insist on clinging to distinct identities, relations and/or communion, they are barred from realizing the religious ends of those traditions.

Christians can hope for all to be saved. But if in their freedom and their choice of gifts, all are not saved, the consummation of creation will still be a wonder that testifies to the glory of God. The loss and judgement here are very real, but they flow only from the limits that humans impose on God's goodness. They too bear the marks of grace and truth. If God had offered creation only one, or only all of these other religious ends, God would have done well. And, to sound Pauline, we would have nothing to complain of. The Christian gospel is not about a God who stints on goodness. It is like that first of Jesus' miracles, when the guests look up in surprise: "you have kept good wine till last."