Monday, July 14, 2008

Sokolowski on the Christian distinction

"Unless the Christian sense of the divine is differentiated from anything and everything in the being of the world, unless the Christian God is differentiated from what philosophers have called the whole, all the Christian mysteries cease to be mysteries. Either they become impossibilities, or they become accommodated to natural necessities, or they are made to compete with what is natural and to obfuscate the way things have to be."

Robert Sokolowski, The God of faith and reason: foundations of Christian theology (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1995 [1982]), 38.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

how does this distinction account for the trinity where God, who is transcendent, becomes part of man in Christ and how God who is beyond time and space can be made incarnate??

Steve Perisho said...

It accounts for it precisely as it says it does. Which is to say that only if God is not a member of the universe are the Christian mysteries (is for example the Incarnation) possible.