Articles
In the image of the Holy Trinity
The Triune God
We believe in the Triune God: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
“God is love;
and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him”
(1 John 4:16).
The divine life—the love of the Triune God—is most aptly expressed by Archpriest Sergius Bulgakov:
God is love, and the Holy Trinity is the tri-hypostatic act of love as a single life.
This single life—nature, essence—is actualized in a triune hypostatic act.
Loving one another mutually, the Three Hypostases accomplish one act of love, in which they reveal their own essence.
The Most Holy Trinity must be understood as a triune act of reciprocity, in which, by the power of hypostatic love, the one life is revealed—not as … a single relation constituted by mutually self-revealing hypostatic love.
…
the life of the trihypostatic Godhead, as Love, as pre-eternal mutuality and self-revelation, is absolutely self-sufficient and complete,
it needs no one and nothing and cannot have any supplementing.
The trihypostatic God lives in Himself, i.e., in the Holy Trinity, and this Life is a pre-eternally realizing Fullness.
… By trihypostaseity
the solitude
of the Absolute subject, his aloneness, is overcome, …. The Trihypostatic God is one in His triunity, but not alone….
We are created in the image of the Triune God
“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”
(Gen 1:26).
“So God created man in his
own image, in the image of God created he him”
(Gen 1:27).
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And God said,
Let us make man in our image, after our likeness:
and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
Gen 5:1.
Wsd 2:23.
Srh 17:3.
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So
God created man in his
own
image, in the image of God created he him;
male and female created he them.
Gen 5:1-2.
Matt 19:4.
Mark 10:6.
1 Cor 11:7.
Col 3:10.
God designed humanity to love one another—so that people might live in love with one another and cease even
to learn how to wage war
(Isa 2:4).
Christ gives us a new commandment: that
we love one another
(John 13:34).
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A new commandment I give unto you,
That ye love one another;
as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.
John 15:12.
1 John 3:11.
1 Thess 4:9.
The human heart wants to love, to become love according to the image of the Holy Trihypostatic and Consubstantial Undivided Trinity.
God-Love created human beings for love.
The human heart wants to love and thirsts to be loved. It suffers when it does not love and when it is deprived of love. It wants to expand, to make room in itself, in its own life, for other lives, for many lives, for all lives;
…
to live in love, to become love according to the image of the Holy Trihypostatic and Consubstantial Undivided Trinity
— such is the frontier for human nature. … The one who loves is rich, for one becomes rich in God-Love. … It only
begins
the first lessons of love;
before it lies the life of the future age, all of eternity, which can be filled only by love, for there is no life and there is no eternity in non-love.
“They all may be one;
as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee”
After Adam sinned—fell away from God—the Lord cast him out of the Garden of Eden.
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Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
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So he drove out the man;
and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.
But from that time began
Adam’s return to God: “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall
all
be made alive”
(1 Cor 15:22).
Already in the Old Testament, we are called “sons of the Most High.”
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I have said, Ye
are
gods;
and all of you
are
children of the most High.
“Say unto them,
As
I live, saith the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked;
but that the wicked turn from his way and live”
(Eze 33:11).
The New Testament begins with another milestone on the path of
Adam’s return to God: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel”
(Mark 1:15).
In the New Testament, Christ says: “By this shall all
men
know that ye are my disciples, if ye have
love one to another”
(John 13:35).
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And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that
they may be one, as we
are.
John 10:30.
Eph 4:3.
…
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That they all may be one;
as thou, Father,
art
in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us:
that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.
John 17:11.
In his first sermon, the Apostle Peter calls upon us to
repent and and be converted, so that the next milestone in
Adam’s return to God
may arrive—the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord
(Acts 3:19-20).
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Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when
the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord;
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And he shall send Jesus Christ, which before was preached unto you:
Isa 49:10.
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Whom the heaven must receive
until the times of restitution of all things
( ἀποκαταστάσεως πάντων), which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began.
Hos 2:23.
Hos 3:5.
John 10:16.
“God may be all in all”
(1 Cor 15:28).
But God will be all in all
(1 Cor 15:28)
in the time of restitution (ἀποκαταστάσεως)
(Acts 3:21);
not in the sense that the Father alone will Be;
and the Son be wholly resolved into Him, …
but
the entire Godhead when we shall be no longer divided (as we now are by movements and passions), and containing nothing at all of God, or very little, but shall be entirely like.
How will He raise us from hell
But what about hell—what about the eternal Gehenna of fire?
The sole criterion by which the righteous will be separated from sinners will be
acts of mercy toward one's neighbor
(Matt 25:31-46):
“he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.” “For the time
is come
that judgment must begin at the house of God: and if
it
first
begin
at us, what shall the end
be
of them that obey not the gospel of God?”
(1 Peter 4:17).
Gentiles, however, will be judged according to the law of conscience
inscribed in their hearts
(Rom 2:15).
“But he shall say, … depart from me, all
ye
workers of iniquity”
(Luke 13:27).
“Be not afraid of them that kill the body, …
Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell”
(Luke 12:4-5).
St. Isaac the Syrian once expressed the thought that
the burning in hell is the torment of love:
extinguishing love in themselves, beings created by love, in love, and for love do not stop being tormented precisely by what constitutes the inner law of their being.
“Those who are punished in Gehenna
are scourged by the scourge of love.”
I also maintain that
those who are punished in Gehenna are scourged by the scourge of love.
For what is so bitter and vehement as the punishment of love?
I mean that those who have become conscious that they have sinned against love suffer greater torment from this than from any fear of punishment. For the sorrow caused in the heart by sin against love is sharper than any torment that can be. It would be improper for a man to think that sinners in Gehenna are deprived of the love of God. … Thus I say that
this is the torment of Gehenna: bitter regret.
“The Kingdom and Gehenna are matters belonging to mercy, which were conceived of in their essence by God as a result of His eternal goodness.”
If
the Kingdom and Gehenna
had not been foreseen in the purpose of our good God as a result of the coming into being of good and evil actions, then God’s thoughts concerning these would not be eternal;
but righteousness and sin were known by Him before they revealed themselves. Accordingly
the Kingdom and Gehenna are matters belonging to mercy, which were conceived of in their essence by God as a result of His eternal goodness.
It was not a matter of requiting, even though He gave them the name of requital.
That we should further say or think that the matter
is not full of love and mingled with compassion would be an opinion full of blasphemy and insult
to our Lord God.
Since the span of our life is finite, we can commit only a finite number of sins.
Upon entering the prison
(Matt 5:25),
we begin to repent of the sins we have committed;
we begin to pay our debts, and someday we will pay
the uttermost farthing
(Matt 5:26).
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Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him;
lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison.
Luke 12:58.
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Verily I say unto thee,
Thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.
Moreover, it must be noted that people will be bound for the fiery Gehenna strictly
on an individual basis.
Depending on the presence in a person's heart of hypocrisy, envy, or hatred toward another…. That is, of everything that constitutes “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life”
(1 John 2:16).
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I tell you, in that night there shall be two
men
in one bed;
the one shall be taken, and the other shall be left.
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Two
women
shall be grinding together;
the one shall be taken, and the other left.
Matt 24:41.
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Two
men
shall be in the field;
the one shall be taken, and the other left.
Thus—albeit through hell—the “workers of iniquity” will indeed come to God, become human beings in the image of God, and come to love one another: “and sinners shall be converted unto thee”
(Psa 51:13).
Where is Gehenna, that can afflict us?
Where is Gehenna, that can afflict us?
Where is the torment that terrifies us in many ways and quenches the joy of His love?
And what is Gehenna as compared with the grace of His resurrection,
when He will raise us from Sheol
and cause our corruptible nature to be clad in incorruption
(1 Cor 15:54),
and raise up in glory what has fallen into Sheol?
“For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ
shall all be made alive.
…
that God may be all in all”
(1 Cor 15:22,28).
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For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ
shall all be made alive.
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But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits;
afterward they that are Christ's at his coming.
1 Thess 4:15-16.
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Then
cometh
the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father;
when
he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power.
Dan 7:14.
Matt 28:18.
1 Tim 6:15.
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For he must reign, till
he hath put all enemies under his feet.
Psa 110:1.
Acts 2:34.
Heb 1:13.
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The last enemy
that
shall be destroyed
is
death.
Rev 20:14.
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For
he hath put all things under his feet.
But when he saith all things are put under
him, it is
manifest that he is excepted, which did put all things under him.
Psa 8:6.
Heb 2:8.
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And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him,
that God may be all in all.
1 Cor 11:3.
Published:
April 8, 2026
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