First Comes Love: Finding Your Family in the Church and the Trinity

This slender book conveys a monumental message. Using simple stories to illustrate complex theological concepts, Dr. Hahn (Professor of Scripture and Theology, Franciscan Univ. of Steubenville), compares the human family to the Divine, namely, the Trinity. Employing examples from Scripture, the Church fathers, and Magisterial teachings of the Catholic Church, he shows similarities between human and divine expressions of love. Family-specific terminology like brother, sister, mother, and father used in ordinary conversation mirrors the inner life of the Trinity. Essential Catholic teachings and practices find clear expression in the daily experiences of Christian men and women. The 12 short chapters invite the reader to both personal reflection and active imitation. Additionally, the nearly 40 pages of critical documentation add academic credibility to this accessible text. Highly recommended, especially for Catholic readers.

This is arguably Scott Hahn's best and most important work in print to date. In previous books, the popular speaker and theologian has traced the theme and reality of covenant in Scripture ("A Father Who Keeps His Promises") and examined the covenantal nature of the Church's liturgical worship ("The Lamb's Supper") and Mary's spiritual motherhood ("Hail, Holy Queen"). Now, in "First Comes Love," Hahn plunges even more deeply into the supernatural foundation of the New Covenant -- the Trinity -- and shows how the Triune God is the source and sustainer of both human families and the Church, the family of God. Hahn shows how the Trinity, which the Catechism of the Catholic Church" describes as "the central mystery of Christian faith and life," is inexahustible but not unknowable. Beginning with courtship and marriage, and building on the theme of family and love, Hahn moves on to the Incarnation and then ascends to an extended consideration of the God Who is family, covenant, and love. Covenant -- the complete gift of self to another -- is illuminated by the light of the Trinity, in which the three divine Persons eternally give themselves to one another in total love: "Covenant is what God does, because covenant is Who God is." Hahn then masterfully shows how the Incarnation, the Church, and the family logically flow from the reality of the Triune life of self-gift and life-giving love.Written in a popular and personal style, the book clearly communicates the brilliant, but often dense, writings of Pope John Paul II pertaining to family, love and sexuality. This is particularly evident in Hahn's depiction of the Fall, when Adam and Eve refused to sacrifice their natural desires for the greater, supernatural good. Sacrifice is the way to God; it "is the only way that humans can imitate the interior life of the Trinity. For God is love, and the essence of love is life-giving. Sacrifice, then, became the essential mark of all subsequent covenants between God and humankind."Insightful, engaging and spiritually challenging, "First Comes Love" demonstrates that Hahn has few equals when it comes to explaining the complex riches of the Catholic Faith -- without watering them down or dulling their power and potency. There is no greater vocation than to be a true child of God, and "First Comes Love" is a fine articulation and explanation of that precious truth.

Drawing deeply from the wellsprings of the Bible, the wisdom of the Church, and his own experience, Scott Hahn reflects simply yet profoundly on the nitty-gritty of life, love, relationships, marriage and family, all in the context of the bedrock doctrines of the Christian faith. His retelling of the story of our salvation in Jesus Christ opens us to the truth of our origin and destiny in the one God, a Trinity of divine Persons who abide in a communion of love -- a love stronger than sin and death. This book is full of good news and solid answers to life's toughest questions.

Our civilization is in crisis largely because its most fundamental building block, the family, is in crisis. Therefore, Divine Providence has raised up two great theologians of the family today (the deeper the crisis, the profounder God's response): Pope John Paul II and Scott Hahn. "First Comes Love" is John Paul's Biblical theology of the family in layman's language. Deceptively simple, this book is both radically orthodox and profoundly revolutionary.

Scott Hahn is always a surprise. You pick up the book thinking that, after a glitzy autobiographical opening (in the American fashion), this will be a re-play of an old record. But then, as you read on, the absolute freshness of the thinking rises up and hits you between the eyes. Now he has done it for family, Trinity, Church. If you think the beginning is schmalzy, read on. For Hahn, romance and children break down egoism, but even when our nuclear families are not spoiled by dysfunction, neither romance nor children is good enough. Our longing for love, family, home, can only be fulfilled in the DIVINE family plan -- which is where Israel and Christ, Trinity and Church come in.He starts from Israel. The twelve tribes, Hahn argues, were "trustee-families," with "covenant" the legal, ritual way to accept new members. But that -- the Israelite experience -- was only a beginning. The Saviour spoke a family language of a new kind, a language of a Father's children, and a God who is (as we would come to say, in shorthand) "Trinity". His aim was to draw people away from even the primal families of the old Israel into a new supernatural family that would be "as big as God".Just why such re-making was necessary, and why -- in the last analysis -- it took the Incarnation and the Atonement to make it stick, it is the job of the narrative of the Fall in the book of Genesis to explain. Here Hahn's account takes on the tension of a detective story. I will not spoil the reader's enjoyment, but limit myself to saying: Hahn's theology of the Fall is wholly original and wholly orthodox, two qualities that, in such wide-ranging biblical interpretation, are rarely combined.The message of Jesus life and death is clear: only a blameless life given to another, for another -- given sacrificially, then -- could reverse the Fall and reveal the Trinity. The Trinity is the only family bond that can last for ever, and the proof of its reality is Eucharistic communion in the Real Presence. And so finally to the Church. The great trustee family of ancient Israel moves to the margins but Jesus's disciples are not left orphans. In the Church, Christ has a bride that is also his body -- not as strange as it sounds, for a woman was so to cleave to her husband as to become one flesh. And this bride is, through our baptism, our Mother. Or rather, it is because the Holy Spirit's mothering of believers happens through Mother Church that she -- the Church -- can regenerate in baptism. As the communion of saints, human sin notwithstanding, this is a family that is always functional. And in its context, all those domestic realities from which Hahn started -- the married couple, children, sexuality, and indeed single people, whether consecrated celibates or not -- can find their home at the sacred hearth of God.The delicacy with which Scott Hahn reaches out in his conclusion to those who have suffered in the family circle, or suffered from having no family circle to