By Schubert Ogden
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It's of the greatest importance to keep in mind that, when Maurice talks about "the name of the Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost," he understands it to be, "as the fathers and schoolmen said continually, the name of the Infinite Charity, the perfect Love, the full vision of which is that beatific vision for which saints and angels long even while they dwell in it. To lose this, to be separated from this, to be cut off from the Name in which we live and move and have our being, is everlasting death. There is no other account to be given of that state into which we fall when we are divided from Him who is the Life, the etemal life of His creatures" (Life, 2: 413; cf. 504: "I, ofcourse, believe – all Christendom professes to believe – that faith in the Trinity is faith in the comprehensive all-embracing name of God, the infinite charity – that it is the faith of which all narrower faiths were the anticipation and prophecy. ").
24 September 2007
Another important passage, for me, for understanding what Maurice means, and does not mean, by his characteristic talk of "the Name," "of being baptized in the Name," etc., is quoted by Vidler: 67 from _67 from Lincoln's Inn Sermons_, 1: 249. Significantly, Maurice distinguishes there between "the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost" and "aIl which that Name expresses," by which I take him to mean, "the Infinite Charity, the perfect Love," of which he speaks elsewhere (_Life_, 2: 413; cf. 504). At any rate, he appeals to the Fourth Gospel, where "it is written" that "\[t\]he Father loves the world, the Son dies for the world, the Holy Ghost convinces the world," and so on, in order to argue, by implication, that the church of which this name is the foundation, and which is sealed with this Name, exists not "as a rival competitor to the world, to plot against the world, to undermine the world," but precisely in order "to love the world, ... to save the world, ... to convince the world."
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14 October 2007