Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/111

 In this whole history men have attained to the consciousness of a truth, and this is the truth which they have reached, namely, that the Idea of God has come to be a certainty for them, that the human is God as immediate and present, and this indeed means that we have in this history, as understood by Spirit, the actual representation of the process of what constitutes Man or Spirit. Man as potentially God and dead—that is the mediation whereby the human element is discarded; or, regarded from another point of view, what has potential or essential Being returns to itself and by this act first comes to be Spirit.

It is with the consciousness of the Spiritual Community, which thus makes the transition from man pure and simple to a God-man, and to a perception, a consciousness, a certainty of the unity and union of the Divine and human natures, that the Church or Spiritual Community begins, and it is this consciousness which constitutes the truth upon which the Spiritual Community is founded.

This then is the explication of the meaning of reconciliation, that God is reconciled with the world, or rather that God has shown Himself to be by His very nature reconciled with the world, that what is human is not something alien to His nature, but that this otherness, this self-differentiation, finitude, as it is sometimes expressed, is a moment in God Himself, though, to be sure, it is a vanishing moment; still He has in this moment revealed and shown Himself to the Church.

This is the form which the history of God’s manifestation takes for the Church; this history is a divine history whereby it reaches a consciousness of the truth. It is this which creates the consciousness, the knowledge, that God is a Trinity.

The reconciliation believed in as being in Christ has no meaning if God is not known as Trinity, if it is not recognised that He is but is at the same time the Other, the self-differentiating, the Other in the sense that this