“Christian faith occurs precisely where our own speaking and relating is overtaken by the divine dynamic of triadic speech. It thus entails two kinds of affirmation. The first is that we truly encounter God in Christ and–through the Spirit–hear in the Son the voice of the Father. The second affirmation is that this new kind of speech- relation can never become our own property but always remains gifted by divine disclosure. Our own new speaking, as an attitude of faith, is grounded in the relation into which we enter through listening to the voice of Christ, in scripture, liturgy and the body of those who celebrate his name. The speaking of the Petrine church as teaching and of the Marian church as intercession is neither ordinary speaking nor is it divine seeking but rather is a human speaking that has been overtaken by the trinitarian self-disclosure and has been conceived in the domain between the two which is marked by excess, risk and penitence. Christian truth too is of this kind, and is affirmed between a human reality and a disclosure of a divine reality which transcends any capacity we have to render an adequate account of it. Christian truth is therefore both a coming into possession and a form of dispossession. It fills us with a pervasive trust and knowing even as it robs us of the security of stable self-knowledge which dissolves into the dynamic of our own deepening relation with the divine being-in-relation, who is the trinitarian Word. The witness of Christian truth before the world is thus simultaneously the confession of our own individual and corporate inadequacy before the transcendent reality of the divine speaking that has come upon us. The affirmation of that truth and the penitence that we discover at the heart of our embrace of it necessarily belong to each other, and they find existential expression in the life of self-emptying risk for the sake of the other which is discipleship. It is the Christian form of life as compassionate self-exceeding before the other which is the true communication of Christian truth as the dispossessive, overflowing eruption of being and love from within the Godhead.”
A Theology of Compassion. Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2003. p. 284
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