all immanence, and therefore divine in contrast to everything human. ... But such beliefs are shown to be quite untenable, and corrupt and pagan, by the fact that God does in fact be and do this in Jesus Christ.... By doing this God .shows Himself to be more great and rich and sovereign than we had imagined. Te is absolute, infinite, exalted, active, impassible, transcendent, but. He is all this as the Lord, and in such a way that He embraces the opposites of these concepts even while He is superior to them. presence in the man Jesus... particular is itself the demonstration and exercise of His ... perfection.... His omnipotence is that of a divine plenitude of power in the fact that (as opposed to any abstract omnipotence) it can assume the form of weakness and impotence and do so as omnipotence, triumphing in this form. His The distinction between substance and hypostases in the Trinity helps make the same point. This distinction is a way of indicating that the hypostasis of the Word, who becomes incarnate, is not restricted by its own substance or nature "Without loss to itself, it may take on a created nature, a human one. This is possible for the hypostasis of the Word most fundamentally because, again, the divine substance is not defined, as finite substances are, by a nature exclusive of others. It is the very transcendence of God, then - a transcendence beyond simple contrasts - that enables intimate union with creatures like What makes God different from creatures is also what enables humans. God to be with what is not God rather than shut up in self-enclosed isolation. True for Thomas Aquinas, according to Henk Schoot, as it is for Barth: God is not transcendent in the sense that he needs a difference to be the unique one he is. God is not different within a certain genus, on the basis of a common similarity.... God is 'outside' of any genus, and thus God is not different from creatures the way in which creatures mutually differ. God differs differently... Such an account undermines the opposition between trans- cendence and immanence, because God is not transcendent in such a way that he is simply 'outside of' or 'above' the world, and thus not transcendent in such a way that it would exclude his 'descent' into the world. 18 Church Dogmatics IV/1, trans. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), 186-7. See also 129–30, 158–9, 179–80, and the explicit reference to Gregory Nyssa on 192. See also Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1, trans. G. W. Bromiley and T.F Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), 467 and 517. "See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, trans. Dominican Fathers (Westminster Maryland: Christian Classics, 1981), IIIa, Q. 3, A. 1, ad 2; and M.-V. Leroy, 'L'union selon P'hypostaste d'après S. Thomas,' Revue Thomiste 74, no. 2 (April-June 1974): 228, 235. Schoot, Christ the 'Name' of God, 144–5. 12 Because God differs differently, the characteristics that distinguish God from creatures need not be covered over or held in abeyance, God's characteristics need not be made more like those of our common life, for God to be brought near to us, indeed to become one with us. Immanence and transcendence, closeness and difference, are simply not at odds in God's relations with us. What makes God different from us enables closeness with us as I have just said. And closeness, from God's side, establishes difference. Rather than taking away our differ- ence from God, God's giving to us in relating to us is the very thing that brings about the difference between us; God's relating to us, God's coming near, is what gives us ourselves in our distinctiveness. This is true in God's creating of us God's decision not to be alone but to be with what is not God brings about the existence of the creature distinct from God - and it is true in every other case, inclusive of the incarnation. 21 * To put this point about closeness and difference in trinitarian terms, God is different from the world in virtue of the fullness of God's trinitarian life, but it is this very fullness that enables God to overflow in goodness to us. The Father already brings about what is different the Son and the Spirit - in complete unity with the Father. The triune God is therefore being nothing other than Godself in unity with a world different from God, as that unity and differentiation find their culmination in the human being, Jesus, who is God's very own. Primarily and originally it is not the cosmos or man which is the other, the counterpart of God . [but] God is all this in himself so that everything the creature . . . offers - its otherness, its being in antithesis to Himself -' is God's own 'superfluous overflow. [A]t the core of His being . . . God is the One who seeks and finds relationship. . . . He is Himself, and therefore to See the way Bonaventure exposits in a trinitarian fashion a Dionysian principle of divine self-diffusion in creation, according to Ewert Cousins, Bonaventure and the Coincidence of Orpentes (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1978), 105–7, 237, 254. "I use traditional trinitarian terms in this book for lack of a better non-sexist alternative that would enable me to make the same ultimately patristic theological moves. I believe there may be such functional alternatives but developing and defending one is a complex task that cannot be attempted in a book of such short compass. Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1, 201. 13