TRIUNEVERSE

The answer to the question “Who is Jesus?” affects everything about our lives. This is the case because what Jesus’ followers through the centuries have claimed about him is that Jesus is God and man, that:

Jesus is the human locus of the divine, the human face of God

        the incarnation of the “Second Person” of the Tri-personal God

                the Eternal Word made flesh.

                        And BECAUSE Jesus is God and man,

                                   He is the Redeemer of the human race who negated a primordial curse

       the Savior who delivers us from our enslavement to evil and the danger of final damnation

               the transmitter of the very Life of God.

If Jesus is indeed whom he and his followers say he is, then he is nothing less than the fulcrum of human history and human destiny.

In this work we will try to show that Jesus is the Incarnation of Infinity. God and man and therefore our Savior.

We will do this in three phases: WHAT, WHO and WHY

In the first phase, the WHAT, we consider what is known, what is virtually indisputable, about Jesus. We review the top ten data-sets that point to Jesus’ identity.

In the second phase we move from the WHAT to the WHO. From what we know about Jesus, we turn to what is claimed about Jesus and why – and how we can make sense of it all.

In phase three, we turn to the WHY question. Why did Jesus come? If he is whom he and his followers claimed him to be, why is that relevant to us? And, if it is relevant, how do we apply this truth to our lives?

Ludwig Wittgenstein, the most influential philosopher of the last 100 years, speaking as a modern Jewish witness to the Resurrection, said, “What inclines even me to believe in Christ’s resurrection? … If he did not rise from the dead … We are in a sort of hell  … cut off from heaven. But if I am to be REALLY saved, –  what I need is CERTAINTY – not wisdom, dreams or speculations – and this certainty is faith. And faith is what is needed by my HEART, my SOUL, not my speculative intelligence.”

Likewise, Marshall McLuhan, the prophet of the Internet, said, “If I hadn’t believed it, I wouldn’t have seen it.”

The revelation that God is Trinity – Three Infinite Persons subsisting in the unity of One Infinite Mind and Will – is the great Theory of Everything that makes sense of everything in our experience of the world. In this book we will see how it is the Trinity that explains the undeniable but unfathomable facts of everyday life encountered by the human race:

• • • The phenomenon of knowing, our capacity for understanding
    • The power of willing, of choosing, loving and giving of ourselves
    • Our existence as selfs/persons that know, love and find fulfillment in relationship
    • The emergence of a new person, a new “I” from the loving union of two other “I”s
    • The creativity, rationality and energy that constitute the world
    • The belief of three “centers” within God found in the greatest pre-Christian religious traditions which represent the three main human approaches to God: cyclic-mystical (India); unity-in-multiplicity/harmony (China); historical-linear (Israel).
    • Jesus’ revelation of the Father, of his own Sonship and of the Spirit of the Father and the Son

We know because God is Knowing, we love because Loving is the Life of God, we are selfs/persons with minds and wills who commune and reproduce because the infinite Mind and Will is a communion of interacting Selfs/Persons.

The Trinity is the Big Picture that connects all the disjointed dots of our experience of the world and ourselves. At the center of being, we now know, there is meaning and communion, knowing and loving, agent-hood and activity. And the entire dynamic of the universe is driven by the endless creativity, rationality and energy of the Triune Life.

Since God is infinite love, there has to be love within God.  Since God is infinite, this loving, its object and its fruit must likewise be infinite: Three inseparable “centers” that ARE the One.  And in what would such love consist?  In a giving, receiving and sharing in full of the divine nature, of all that it means to be God.  A child receives its human nature with all its powers from its parents as a manifestation and fruit of their love.  Likewise, the love within God is a giving, receiving and sharing in full of the divine nature with all its infinite power and glory.

It is a love without beginning or end, a LOVE that IS. “Trinity“ is not God’s proper name. It is simply a way of saying that God is infinite love. To say that God is Trinity is simply to say that God is LOVE.

This is a book about the greatest love story ever told. It is a story that plays out in three places: in God, in human history and in our lives. And we explore each in turn.

God is Three Persons in infinite-eternal Love. For God is a beginningless, endless Act of Love of the Lover (the Father), the Beloved (the Son) and the Co-Beloved (the Spirit).  The Three are One Heart. For to be Heart is to give all of one’s being to the Other: to give totally, unconditionally, forever: to love. They are Three “centers” in a single Ultimate Reality of Love. One Heart. This is the first “level” of the Love Story.

The Father loved us into being through his Son and his Spirit. We were created so that we too might be drawn into the infinite-eternal Love of the Three Persons, our hearts embedded in the Heart of God.

But, as the hunter-gatherers and every ancient culture tells us, we chose not to respond in kind. Our hearts were hardened and we said No to the divine invitation of Love. The result was the ultimate heart attack of death and destruction. Nevertheless, our heart-broken Lover pursued us.

On the human side, the religions of Africa, Mesoamerica, India, China, Persia, Israel and the Mediterranean societies recognized their Creator and sought forgiveness through the universal practice of sacrifice. But all recognized the breach could not be healed without a perfect sacrifice made by the sinless One. This understanding of God, God 1.0, culminated in the revelation received by the people of Israel.

The next stage of the Love Story in human history was the incarnation of the Son in Jesus of Nazareth. It was Jesus who revealed God 2.0.

He proclaimed a revolution: “The hour is coming, and is now here, when true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and truth.”

The whole identity and mission of Jesus of Nazareth centered on the Father. Jesus addressed God only as Father. The Father revealed by Jesus was:

• • • prodigal in his limitless love, all Heart
    • more intimate than any earthly parent and therefore called Abba (the affectionate Aramaic expression for one’s own father) and, above all,
    • “our” Father meeting all our needs, all the time, and drawing us into GodSpace, the protection and provision of his Providence.

Henceforth, we cannot see God except as the infinitely, unconditionally loving Father who makes us his children through his Son and in his Holy Spirit. God 2.0. God as Heart.

By his death and resurrection, Jesus made the perfect sacrifice and removed the barrier to our union with God. Through the waters of baptism, we are invited to be re-invented as a new race: redeemed by the Son and filled with the Spirit and thereby children of the Father in the fullest sense who will live “happily ever after”.  This is level two of the Love Story.

The third and final level of the Love Story is our own life. We are each love letters written by the Father. If we accept his offer of eternal union, we become his Love Story.

Eternity’s time has come.

“When the time for Pentecost was fulfilled, they were all in one place together.  And suddenly there came from the sky a noise like a strong driving wind, and it filled the entire house in which they were.  Then there appeared to them tongues as of fire, which parted and came to rest on each one of them.  And they were all filled with the holy Spirit and begin to speak in different tongues, as the Spirit enabled them to proclaim. … Then Peter stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice, and proclaimed to them, … “This is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: ‘It will come to pass in the last days,’ God says, ‘that I will pour out a portion of my spirit upon all flesh.” (Acts 2:1,4, 14, 16-7)

It was the mysterium tremendum et fascinans – the Mystery tremendous and fascinating:

An explosion of endless energy.

 Signs and wonders.

Power and Glory.

 The birthing of the WAY that is TRUTH and LIFE.

 It was a never-ending Event:

The descent of a divine Force. A Personal Force. A Person present as a “force.”

The God-Force.

Those who were “touched” by the Force

spoke in “tongues,”

prophesied,

journeyed to distant lands and certain deaths,

proclaimed a New World born in our midst.

These carriers “downloaded” the Force across societies and geographies and centuries.

The Force assumed myriad forms and flowed through diverse channels.

The Force unified history with its own Livestream platform.

The Force was with God.

And the Force was God.

And the Force made its dwelling in humankind as the Holy Spirit.