Is Reconciling the Impassibility Impasse between the Young Turks & Old Sophiologists Simply Impossible or Simplicity, itself?
spoiler alert: I don't know
There’s a cadre of didactically generous & personally affable academic theologians – the Young Turks of the Boston College School (DBH’s nomenclature). Hart calls them Neo-Neochalcedonians, when, in fact, due to various mystical eternal – temporal simultaneities, they are, rather, proto-Neochalcedonians (or, maybe, being the exemplary patristic scholars they are, they just faithfully resourced the ressourcement).
I believe that many systems, ostensibly incompatible even, can be reconciled. I discovered that in my struggle to learn the languages of various systematic theologies so as to translate my panSEMIOentheism using the idiom of choice of any interlocutors du jour.
The absence of a natural theogonic dynamic ad intra, as affected by participatory dynamics ad extra, needn’t preclude a personal Christogonic dynamic as realized via a perichoretic eternal ἐπέκτασις.
The latter would operate theophanically per a divine person’s self-determined secondary nature, so purely acting via illuminative means. That’s to say that, since His indwelling being is to the intellect as form to matter, He’d thereby effect unitive perichoretic ends. So, Christogonically, we’re not talking about one unitary being, simply speaking, but about a unitive Oneness as regarding acts of understanding & love, both monergic & synergic, now & forever. As Bracken says vis a vis any Hegelian construction, as “ever on the move.”
Bracken's Spirit & Society appropriates Hegel in a way that could be used to vindicate an Hegelian Christogony & neoChalcedonian syntheses from charges of theogony. Perichoretically, per the corporate Oneness that theophanically manifests unitive acts of understanding & love, the Christogonic Totus Christus would refer to the One concrete social Absolute in terms of a dynamical & epectatic interpersonal unitive doing.
So, I don’t interpret the Young Turks of the Boston College School (DBH’s nomenclature) as naturally theogonic, but appropriate their NeoChalcedonian synthesis, as well as Jensen’s, as the perichoretic Christogony of the concrete social Absolute to whom we refer as Totus Christus.
I can’t say whether my account above squares w/how DBH or JDW do nature – grace. All reject the artificial extrinsicism of a duplex ordo – natura pura. I see persons as divinely othered & ever-indwelled, 1st by universal & 2nd by particular Px Presences.
See: https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2022/08/24/david-bentley-hart-responds-to-the-neo-neo-chalcedonians/
See also Ty Monroe’s discussion w/DBH.
Since I incline sophianic in my panSEMIOentheism, I feel like I’m aligned w/Hart via a Brackenized Bulgakov. There’s a Brackenized Hegel, too, which inclines me to the Young Turks, also
My Categorical Rubrics
In order to overcome any residual dualism w/its problematic causal disjunctions, persons & societies must be conceived as equiprimordial.
Exploratory heuristics for such mutually constituted wholes require mereological & emergentist phenomenological categories.
Philosophical theology has no suitable root metaphor to provision any robustly explanatory metaphysic. For example, combining conceptions of emergence & supervenience, then further specifying them as variously weak or strong, gives us notions that are, at best, trivial, or worse, question begging.
This critique similarly applies to our explorations of the origins of the quantum, cosmos, life, consciousness & symbolic language (free will). The best of those emergentist explorations can only provide our systematic theologies with the provisional metaphors of our different idioms, which we’ll deploy to convey our faith in ways that will unavoidably vary in communicative felicity from one audience to another. Following Nazianzen, we aspire to communicate in the least inadequate way available.
So, while I offer a pneumatological emergentism as the most felicitous exploratory heuristic for my mereological panSEMIOentheism, for example, it’s not with the pretense that it could resolve the De Auxiliis controversy. I only modestly ambition a bookmarking of reality’s manifold, multiform & ineluctable aporia to help make our theological, metaphysical & scientific heuristics more robustly exploratory. And they are of one fabric, epistemically, whichever side one takes in the Copleston–Russell debate.
Insofar as creatio ex nihilo & ex Deo are apophatic & kataphatic expressions of one reality, our mereological ontology must also be multiplicative.
And our categories must reflect various mutual conditionings, even though variously bilateral & a/symmetric.
Our relating of freedom & grace must address un/created realities as variously nondeterminate, self-determinate, determinate & indeterminate, as well as providing for both extrinsic & intrinsic relations as well as monergic & synergic operations.
Our phenomenological categories must also refer modally, both to identities & ontologies, while ambitioning successful references even when definitions, in principle, elude us. They’ll thus refer to – not only possibilities, actualities & necessities vis a vis reality’s undeniable regularities, but – also probabilities, variously epistemic or ontic (often unable to specify which).
So, it seems to me, that as created co-creators, grace can flow through reality’s emergentist hierarchy and mediated both mereologically & top-down as well as entitatively & bottom-up and both Absolutely & relatively as well as universally & particularly.
None of these criteria seem a priori or on the surface inconsistent with Bracken, Milbank, Hart, Jenson or Jordan Daniel Woods’ approaches as I’ve variously mis/appropriated them, whether neoClassical, sophianic or neoChalcedonian. But some of them may have made bolder claims & more refined specifications than I’ve picked up on. I’m thinking of im/passibility, for example, which I resolve in terms of Clarke’s version of the naturale - intentionale distinction & Boyd’s aesthetic intensity - scope distinction, more perichoretically & theophanically than participatorily & essentially. The Damascene distinctions between the operative, operating, operator & operated are helpful here, also, and I map them to essences, energeia, entities (social) & effects.