Contra Fundamentalistic Knee-Jerks – there aren’t heretical pantheists behind every monistic tree

My Neo-Chalcedonian Christology isn’t over against Chalcedonian answers to questions about natures. It just changes the subject to seek answers to questions about Christ as a person.

My starting point hasn’t been metaphysics. Rather, my questions first arose in the contexts of a synoptic narrative Christology and my personal experiences in rituals, devotions & practices.

Regarding the Gospel narratives, I engaged those through the work of Don Gelpi, who interpreted the Christology of Maximus the Confessor believing that Maximus’s doctrine held the key to explaining the hypostatic union doctrinally.

As for my personal encounters with Christ in both rituals, devotions & practices as well as my quotidian experiences of other persons & of nature, I processed those working with Amos Yong, who shared my pentecostal outlook.

I further deepened my self-understanding by engaging various “religious others” as a foil, both through immersion in the writings of Thomas Merton and my friendship with an Aurobindo disciple, which led me to the work of Frank Clooney, especially regarding Vedanta. Clooney’s engagement of Purva Mimamsa, the epistemological framework for comprehending Vedanta, actually deepened my interest in & commitment to Lonergan’s anthropology because of the numerous homologies it invoked & evoked.

My Neo-Chalcedonian Christology has engaged all of these Christ-encounters seeking an answer to the question: What does it mean for humanity & the cosmos, even, that God became one of us?

In addition to the analogical grammar of each person’s logos of being, what type of logic might best foster our understanding of the logos of hypostasis?

This is to ask, beyond our grammars for natural participation & logos of being, formally speaking, where Christ’s infinite & finite acts refer to qualitatively different, incommensurable activities, regarding the logos of hypostasis, nonformally:

How do Christ’s otherwise incommensurable activities interpenetrate to thereby cause manifold & multiform effects (whether protological, historical or eschatological) in such an obviously harmonious & synergistic way?

Nonformally, it does appear that, per a personal (Christological) perichoresis & logos of hypostasis, because these activities ensue
from an identical power, they can interpenetrate – not only bilaterally, but – symmetrically.

Now, if Aquinas is correct in that the Divine essence will be to the intellect as form to
matter, and Cho is correct that our “primordial desire to know, which is present in all humanity, is the first gift of God’s love, the Holy Spirit,” then our graced, synergistic, theotic activities, otherwise incommensurate with our human finitude, because they ensue in part from an identical power, can interpenetrate – not only bilaterally, but – symmetrically.

This would all be to recognize that, for example, per Aquinas, “in the beatific vision a person’s intellect and God become, not one thing simply–speaking, but one as regards the act of understanding,” which is to say, operatively, in acts of love, which can, even in heaven, still otherwise vary in degrees of glory, beatitude & intimacy and grow in certain ways via eternal epectasy.

Now, it is my – not uncontroversial – belief that, while the Holy Spirit universally presences the entire cosmos, for rational creatures this, definitionally, takes the form of a mutual indwelling, which is not contingent per se but only in terms of advancing degrees of intimacy, which is to say, in growth from image to likeness, friend to lover, eros to agape (think of Bernardian love).

Such a mutuality & synergism, definitionally, implicate an indispensable freedom. Not only David Bentley Hart, but even the more astute Thomists, realize the intrinsic rationality of an authentic freedom. Without belaboring the logic, no one can rationally, freely, definitively & finally reject God.

That one can not, by definition, rationally, freely, definitively & finally reject God, therefore, forecloses on such a decision ever being characterized as a free-choice counterfactual because, more fundamentally, it is not even a possible world counterfactual.

With the above non-negotiable (for me) qualifications, the gratuity of grace, the classical Catholic taxonomy of graces, certain theodicies & defenses, the reality of sins both venial & grave, the need for post- & or even ante-mortem purgation, and all other aspects of theological anthropology, formative spirituality, ascetical & mystical theology, soteriology, sacramentology, ecclesiology, eschatology, Christology, Trinitology, pneumatology, Mariology & sophiology, even divine predilections & predestinations to higher degrees of holiness & beatitude, still very much hold in their logics, ways, means & ends.

All theoanthropological architectonics & God-world relationships will not rise & fall based on the denial that any given soul could possibly remain, interminably, in a purgative state. Neither will they collapse if we insist that an authentically free will is a fully rational will and that persons grow in an authenticity & freedom that will finally determine – not whether they go to hell, but – how they will experience & illuminate heaven, e.g. as a votive candle or blazing helios.

Nowhere in this consideration has any particular metaphysical idiom been implicated, although certain metaphysical implications are necessarily presupposed.

There are some who all too cursorily engage such as DBH’s definition of freedom and make a silly & facile charge of pantheism, as if that definition implicates a thoroughgoing divine determination of a free-choice counterfactual. Fie on that incoherence!

There are some who see the word “monism” and recoil, reflexively charging pantheism. While all pantheisms are monistic, not all monisms are pantheistic.

Truth be known, I know of no extant taxonomy of God-world relationships that’s adequate to the task of disambiguating all of the competing ontologies, different types of monism & dualisms, different pantheisms, different panentheisms, even different classical theisms. It’s best to let authors self-describe & to depthfully engage their works (not tweets) before daring to dispossess them of their self-labeling & reassigning them to a taxonomy that means very little.

People can certainly share dogmatic creedal commitments while otherwise differing regarding which metaphysical idiom best communicates same.

Following the order of Lonergan’s functional specialties, one reasons from one’s theology & preferred theologoumena as a prerequisite to fashioning one’s metaphysical system and not vice versa.

And I’ve said all this to suggest that I can read all of the fundamentalists’ designated villains du jour (Jordan Daniel Wood & his merry band of Boston College Neo-Chalcedonians, David Bentley Hart, John Milbank) and examine their creedal & theologoumenal commitments and wholeheartedly resonate with same and, with no inordinate ontological contortions & convoluted logics, rearticulate (translate) their insights into all sorts of idioms that aren’t repugnant to classical Christianity.

That’s not to say, for example, that I don’t want to search for the most felicitous way of expressing those insights (which is a social, relational, dynamical metaphysic of experience & expression), it’s just to acknowledge that – if all root metaphors eventually collapse, even in philosophies of mind, origins of life or of sentience or of symbolic language or of quantum-gravity – so much more so, then, will they inexorably fold in our fallible modeling of the God-world relationship or of the human soul.

The a la carte metaphysical menu certainly couldn’t include a materialist monism or pantheism contra an analogia entis-based logic of being, but as regards our logics of hypostases & persons, there’s nothing inherently theo-repugnant in Vedanta, Neoplatonism, emergent monism, dipolar monism, pneumatic hylomorphism, emergent dualism, etc One will notice that these selections include substance & process thought, classical theism & panentheism.

Not to be coy, my approach is largely married to the thoughts of Don Gelpi, Joe Bracken, Bernard Lonergan, Frank Clooney & Amos Yong. And I often very liberally borrow the phraseology of Jordan Daniel Wood without citation or attribution so as not to taint him with my misappropriations or facile interpretations.