YOUCAT Question n. 36 - Can we deduce logically that God is triune?
(Youcat answer) No. The fact that there are three persons
(Trinity) in one God is a mystery. We know only through Jesus Christ that God
is Trinitarian.
A deepening through
CCC
(CCC 237) The Trinity is a mystery of faith in the strict
sense, one of the "mysteries that are hidden in God, which can never be
known unless they are revealed by God" (Dei Filius 4: DS 3015). To be sure, God has left traces of his
Trinitarian being in his work of creation and in his Revelation throughout the
Old Testament. But his inmost Being as Holy Trinity is a mystery that is
inaccessible to reason alone or even to Israel's faith before the Incarnation
of God's Son and the sending of the Holy Spirit.
Reflecting and
meditating
(Youcat comment) Men cannot
deduce the fact that God is a Trinity by means of their own reason. They
acknowledge, however, that this mystery is reasonable when they accept God’s
Revelation in Jesus Christ. If God were alone and solitary, he could not love
from all eternity. In the light of Jesus we find already in the Old Testament
(for example, Gen 1:2; 18:2; 2 Sam 23:2), indeed, even in all of creation,
traces of God’s Trinitarian Being.
(CCC Comment)
(CCC 261) The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the
central mystery of the Christian faith and of Christian life. God alone can
make it known to us by revealing himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. (CCC 50)
By natural reason man can know God with certainty, on the basis of his works.
But there is another order of knowledge, which man cannot possibly arrive at by
his own powers: the order of divine Revelation (Cf. Dei Filius DS 3015). Through an utterly free decision, God has
revealed himself and given himself to man. This he does by revealing the
mystery, his plan of loving goodness, formed from all eternity in Christ, for
the benefit of all men. God has fully revealed this plan by sending us his
beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. (CCC 36) "Our
holy mother, the Church, holds and teaches that God, the first principle and
last end of all things, can be known with certainty from the created world by
the natural light of human reason" (Vatican Council I, Dei Filius 2: DS 3004 cf. 3026; Vatican
Council II, Dei Verbum 6). Without
this capacity, man would not be able to welcome God's revelation. Man has this
capacity because he is created "in the image of God" (Cf. Gen 1:27).
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