Mascall on the "Three Heavenly Unities"

From E.L. Mascall’s Christ, the Christian, and the Church: A Study of the Incarnation and Its Consequences (pp. 92-93)

1. First, we must recognize the essential union of the Person of God the Father with the Person of God the Son within the life of the triune Godhead, a union through which the Son, who is eternally begotten of the Father, eternally renders to the Father a perfect offering of adoring filial love, a union which is perfected in the procession of the Spirit and in which the three Persons share the fulness of one another’s life by their common possession of the totality of Godhead.

2. Then there is the hypostatic union of human nature with the Person of the eternal Son in the Incarnation, a union in which the human nature, because it has no human hypostasis but is enhypostatized in its union with the Son, is raised to the level of Godhead and on that level is caught up into the eternal filial offering of the Son.

3. Lastly, there is the adoptive union of human beings by incorporation into the manhood of Christ, whereby, though their union with him, they too, without any destruction of their own personal individuality, are caught up into his filial offering.

The first of these is a union of Persons in one substance, the second is a union of natures in one Person, the third is a union of personal beings through union of their natures.

In the first case the terms that are united are both divine. In the second case one is divine and the other is created. In the third case both are created, for while, considered in its union with the Word, the human nature of Christ is divinized, considered in itself it is a creature.

In one sense, the first union is the closest of the three, for the divine Persons entirely possess one another in their complete mutual interpenetration (perichoresis, circumincessio). In another sense, the second is the closest, for the two natures, the divine and the human, concur in the concrete existence of one personal being.

The three unions are thus altogether different in their characters; if we forget this we shall fall into the most grotesque heresies. And each of them is enshrouded in mystery. In the first case we are unable to understand how, without being confused with one another, three Persons can each of them possess the same concrete essence in its totality. In the second case the problem is how one Person can be at the same time the subject of two natures, and moreover of two natures which are completely distinct, since one is divine and the other human. In the third case the problem is how, without losing our personal individualities, we can be incorporated into the concrete human nature of another man, namely Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, taken together, the three unities bridge the gulf between the Father and us: essential union of the Person of the Father with the Person of the Son; hypostatic union of the Person of the Son with the human nature of Christ; adoptive union of our human nature into his.