My Responses to DBH & other interlocutors re some of his recent Universalist Musings
Below are some of my responses to
Universalist Musings
The full interview
Response I (to DBH)
My own family, both primary & extended, way more than the average family, is filled with adoptees, whose enjoyment of our family life is beatifically identical. That's to observe that they realize the very same beatitude of our family's love, the very same enjoyment of & delight in our family as those of us who are otherwise related by nature.
So, that we're created rather than uncreated persons, who participate rather than impart & signify rather than exemplify the godhead and that some analogia certainly obtains, I've never meant to deny. I've only ever intended to vehemently trivialize same, for the Spirit of adoption enables ALL of us to cry out "Daddy!" Always has. Always will.
Response II (to another interlocutor)
re "Would that not resolve questions of logos asarkos v. logos incarnandus?"
It's precisely that Christological insight that I suspect analogically informed Bonaventure's emanationist account of the Trinity vis a vis a positive conception of the Father's innascibility.
It's precisely a type of eternal simultaneity (which Jordan Daniel Wood resolves in terms of vertical & horizontal causes) in play which would block any handwringing Thomist's inference to a putative "proto-Father" vis a vis divine persons.
Vis a vis the hypostatic union, an eternal-temporal simultaneity would block any logos asarkos inference.
Cosmotheandrically, it would block any natura pura inference.
It has seemed to me that, Thomism, properly considered with Neoplatonic logic, would not be over against or even inconsistent with this speculative grammar.
The whole two-tier controversy comes about from a grade school category error that fails to distinguish natural "whats" from modal "hows."
We must go beyond thinking in exclusively analogical & participatory concepts. What happens when we do is that the perichoretic insights bequeathed us by Cyril, Maximus, the Damascene et al fall by the wayside, leaving one with - not only a seriously impoverished, but - dangerously
dualistic approach to God's love. From an eternal perspective it devolves, functionally, into a practical Manicheanism.
Response III (to another interlocutor)
1) the so-called Fall doesn't refer to some ontological rupture located in the past but to a teleological striving oriented toward the future
2) creation = Incarnation in an eternal-temporal simultaneity
3) protology = eschatology
4) an implicit assent by creatures to the act of creation (although, I appeal to a divine omnipathy)
5) that all synergetic co-creative acts are eternalized, every trace of human goodness, every beginning of a smile, all wholesome trivialities! while all refusals to cooperate are ephemeralized via self-nihilation or purgation, etc; iow, our virtuous secondary natures perdure & vicious natures are purged.
However, I think we best desist from engaging in counterfactual analyses of nondeterminate beings.
And we best nuance that the epistemic distancing implicated in your account did in no way make sin necessary. It only made its possibility unavoidable.
I like your instincts re apokatastasis & theosis, that our human nature's eternally perfect, albeit relative vs Absolute, and that means that grace operates via our tropoi to help us freely choose, modally, HOW - not, naturally, WHETHER - we shall manifest Christ, eternally.
In modeling reality, I prefer to stay vague & semi-formal rather than specific & analytical, to avoid evidential theodicies, although I'm sympathetic to logical defense re evil.
In conceiving the beatific vision, dreaming of both primary & secondary beatitudes, while neither eye has seen nor ear heard nor the heart of woman conceived ... I don't think that we, as imagoes Dei, should get overly mysterian with our eschatological theological anthropologies. Specifically and especially regarding death, I feel we can & should trust our innate aesthetic sensibilities & moral intuitions. Any God-conceptions that depart from these, to me, are suspect. Death, then, remains an
abomination, albeit mitigated. Like eternal conscious torment, death remains aesthetically repugnant & morally unintelligible to me. The God revealed to me as Daddy has no need of either death or ECT.
Response IV (to another interlocutor)
As long as we don't reify nothingness. In my view, it's an abstraction that doesn't successfully refer.
In my view, there's neither tragedy in creation's essentially "not being God"
nor violence in our being substantially different persons & thus situated in mutual opposition to God & each other. That's because the whole of reality is harmoniously ordered to essentially participate in God's nature & each particular person in reality already substantially coinheres in God's
presence.
In taking Creation as Incarnation, mutually constituted opposites are generated in terms of beloved I - Thous, who relate as - not being to nonbeing, but - Universal to particular, Absolute to relative perfection.
Even the fullest expression of the most radical evil is merely a nihilating SUBcontrary. Any privation, then, is a mere parasitic existent, which shall vanish as a mere temporal ephemerality. Otherwise, the act of creation would devolve into a divinely willed Manichean dualism.
Others might better nuance "ex nihilo" but I tend to interpret it & "ex Deo" as if they're just complementary apophatic & kataphatic expressions.
Response V (to another interlocutor)
Becoming refers mostly to hownesses, much less to whatnesses, vis a vis theosis, grace, etc
I find the distinction between "constitutive" and "revelatory" acts helpful. And further bifurcate constitutive into the natural & participatory vs the modal & perichoretic.
I may overplay the following intuition but it works for me, at least, as a default stance, open to nuanced exceptions.
Constitutively, vis a vis the divine nature, there's absolutely no "becoming" going on as its the pure act of necessary being.
If we conceive the Logos-logoi eternally, too, it may well be that, vis a vis the essential forms of Christ's divinely willed determinate being, there's no becoming going on here either.
Where the action of the divine esse intentionale is taking place, constitutively, is in nothing to do with natures, neither re Christ's secondary nature nor re the Cosmotheandric logoi nor re any microcosmic logoi of particular persons. Rather it involves ongoing hypostatic multiplications via the generation of particular I - Thou opposites, whose identities are mutually constituted.
The above generative acts are, at the same time, revelatory. Perichoretically & modally, they pertain to tropic manifestations of eternal logoi.
So, any becoming perhaps refers to neither divine nor human natures, whether considered eternally or temporally. Instead, it refers modally to how each concrete particular, co-creatively & synergetically, freely (relatively so) self-determines to manifest Christ.
So, what all the groaning & birthing is all about is the becoming of a concrete social Absolute (Bracken), the Beloved Community (Royce), the Community of the Beautiful (Garcia-Rivera), etc
I'll finish with my formulation of Bracken, who's very close to Bulgakov (w/some idiomatic tweaking):
If there is a mereological whole exceeding the sum of its parts, it's - neither a supraindividual nor other substantial entity, but - an interpersonal reality, a concrete social Absolute, constituted by - not a static & divisible unitary being, but - a dynamical & multiplicative unitive process, where synergistic hownesses remain uncountable because "ever on the move." (eternal epectasis?)