GENEROSITY
Notes on the Father
April 24, 2025

Identity is the willingness to suffer out of Love for the Other.

Identity IS Obedience.

Jesus is God as man because as man he trusted and obeyed God perfectly.

The unity of Jesus’s will and the Father’s: that is not a fusion of persons (not that kind of ‘identity’), but the sharing in one ousia. At the maximum level of abstraction, this means they “are” the “same” being—but this sameness is the sameness of being-love, of being-self-giving. It cannot “be” without an other to whom it gives itself and who in turn gives itself (back) in full.

We sinners are not (never) the same as God because our obedience is (woefully) imperfect. Theosis is a formation (or conform-ation) in Christ through the perfection of obedience, and so an increase in the degree of “partaking of the divine nature.”

The only way to be “perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect” is to believe and obey the Father like Jesus.

Even more, we believe in Christ because his belief should be our belief. He is the Way, the Truth, the Life—because these are only ever gifts from the Father. To realize them fully is to obey the Father as fully as Christ did—to share the faith of Jesus.

We do this through the Spirit, the Spirit that Christ sends, which is his spirit—it is the very spirit of his obedience, of the love he himself has only received.

Behind the Son and Spirit, backing them in all their operations, is the One Father, who gave us his Son (his example of faith is “faith incarnate”) that we might learn to believe and obey as we ought “through him.”

To learn this is for the Spirit of the Son to be “in” us, just as the Son is “in” the Father (Jn 14:20).

The Spirit of the Son’s love and obedience is thus also eternal. It is the same spirit of self-giving Love from the Father which the Son receives and reflects, reciprocates, and gives back. This rendering back to the Giver what was given is precisely—“obedience”(Jn 17:10).

The “generation” of the Son must be understood this way (not strictly on the model of human generation between fathers and sons).

The generation of the Son is this loving and obedient giving and receiving and giving-back of being (ousia). The Trinity is not some compact simple essence which then differentiates into three—unless we strenuously recall that this “simple essence” just is—self-giving Love.

Reception generates the recipient—and generates Him as self-giving Love which is itself outstretched in self-giving Love: both to its Giver and to Another—a giving of the Spirit of the gift.

The Son and the Spirit “have” this Love and “are” this Love—because the Father gave it to them. The Father gave it—gave them their being—because he is and his being is just that: self-giving Love.

That self-giving love cannot exist fully without the fullness of the Other’s reception. The only “necessity” in the Trinity is logical—that this giving and reception and giving back be total. Put on our terms, this is why God longs to be allowed to love us—why he abandons the flock for the lost sheep.

It is not that anything is lacking in God—for in the Son we see that the Father’s gift is received-returned eternally, and in Jesus we see that this gift can be received-returned on earth, in humanity, as man.

But the example of Jesus shows at every point the infinite amplification of this dynamic into our world—as the one sent by the Father to show the Father, he shows us that the Father wants the totality of humanity and the totality of humanity to receive fully that fullness of his love—and to return it to him.

A returning of Love to the Father which, once again, is identical with pouring that love out in the gift of self for another—love of God and love of neighbor—surrender.