Thomas White;13484130:
No. I have provided CCC 251, and you must admit what it says to have a real discussion.
The CCC teaches that some aspects of Christian faith go beyond the levels our understanding is capable of. A Math teacher may communicate to her Geometry students that Calculus exists. That doesn’t invalidate the dogmas of Geometry which they have already learned. It would be foolish to say that because we can never learn all about the atom, or Trinity, therefore our incomplete learning is just speculation.
Yes, I agree.
A man may not be able to communicate the experienced full glory of his marriage in words. But his words about his experience are useful, as far as they go. Writing about a topic based on one’s experiences does not prevent one from intelligent discussion based on revealed dogmas of the Church.
Yes, but this is not at all equivalent. I would think the full glory of God is ineffable, infinitely beyond our ability to express it.
Our knowledge of Theology (and other subjects) is always partial. That does not mean it must not contain absolute truths, based on what we do know. A fundamentalist is not one who claims to know some absolute truths. A fundamentalist is one who acts like he is superior to one who does not believe them.
I cannot quite comprehend what a partial absolute truth might be. But since you mentioned calculus, I will try an example. Think of the ‘limit’ in calculus and imagine a person one-hundred feet from a line. The person advances halfway to the line, or fifty yards. He then advances half of the remaining distance, which is twenty-five yards. And he does this again and again, always advancing halfway to the goal. In fact, if he is persistent in his attempts to reach his goal, he will do this an infinite number of times, in ever smaller increments, but he will never reach the line.
That isn’t meant as a full explanation, but it is something of the way I look at Absolute Truth. I do not believe, for example, that God can be either known or experienced by the human intellect alone. The question here, however, is whether the word “person” expresses the nature of the Trinity. CCC 251 teaches that the word ‘person’ “signifies an ineffable mystery, infinitely beyond all that we can humanly understand”. I don’t really understand why this seems to be questioned.
The teaching is that this is
infinitely beyond our understanding, and this means we cannot possibly
understand it. But what would ‘understand’ mean? It has been noted on the thread that late in life Aquinas had an experience of the full glory of God. I don’t doubt this, but he was said to be unhappy that in all his work he had been unable to reveal this understanding, as it were, in his writings. I see the type of experience Aquinas had as possible but if so that it would be a spiritual or mystical experience. It is not that this is not possible, but only that it is not an
intellectual experience. And it is in this way that the Trinity cannot be humanly “understood”. In a sense, church teaching lets us know something about the Trinity that we can understand, but these words cannot reveal to us what that something truly is.
