We should critically adapt our ontologies to doctrine & not vice versa
What I aspire to grasp are categories, grammars & logics of a vague modal phenomenology that can help me better understand Scriptural & liturgical references to persons, e.g. in terms of agent nouns & proper nouns or operators and their natures in terms of operative “what”nesses.
A grammar & logic of persons helps me better grasp the monarchy of the Father, Bonaventure’s positive innascibility and Bulgakov & Bracken’s creatio ex Deo. It also helps me better grasp the primacy of persons, the absolute primacy of Christ of Maximus & Scotus, Cyril’s hypostasis, Maximus’ dyothelitism, early Neo-Chalcedonism, Damascene’s “operat-” distinctions, Clarke’s naturale – intentionale distinction, Bracken & Jenson’s 3 domain model (infinite, eternal & transient) and how analogy & dialectics, grammatically & logically, unite, concretely & semiotically, in Trinitarian relations (R. Haecker).
These very general modal phenomenological grammars & logics gift us a heuristic to help us successfully refer to persons (naming them) even though we lack successful definitions of their natures (whatnesses, defining them). At this level of abstraction, a rather plain vanilla conception of the doctrine of divine simplicity [DDS] might still afford us a general consensus?
Theologians, in offering variously weak & strong conceptions of DDS, do reach impasses, which can present in terms of degrees of departure from our classical theistic framework, as variously conceived.
As they differentiate their stances, they’ll typically move beyond our phenomenological grammars & logics and general creedal heuristics to express them in various idioms with specific metaphysics (ontologies).
What’s most salient to me in evaluating competing DDS accounts is not which metaphysic one employs. I presuppose that many different idioms could all, albeit varying in felicity, express our basic creedal & doctrinal understandings in an internally coherent & logically consistent way. What’s pivotal is that we (“not uncritically”) adapt our ontologies to doctrine & not vice versa.
To wit, then, I’ve resonated w/the theological approaches of many different thinkers who’ve variously employed, for example, Christianised Neoplatonism (incl “revised”), various objective idealisms (esp German but also Peirce), neo-Whiteheadian & neo-classical process approaches, open theisms, neo-Thomisms (esp existential, transcendental & personalist), etc
I’ve not totally inhabited, b/c I’m not adequately equipped to thus inhabit, any of these different thinkers’ ontologies to see if they succeed or self-subvert or to discern how in/compatible they are w/my (our) phenomenological heuristic. But I don’t believe one has to be able to evaluate such accounts on their own terms, from inside & metaphysically, to meaningfully critique them, externally & theologically, where we’re all supposed to begin in the first place?
For example, my core theo-commitments come from – nothing metaphysical, but rather – my Charismatic sensibilities, which incline me to Catholic categories of grace, more robust accounts of prayer & providence and more fulsome accounts of divine sovereignty, even given my weaker conceptions of DDS. Those commitments, combined w/my inclinations toward a general primacy of persons & specific absolute primacy of Christ, might be better expressed by Clarke’s Thomist-inspired personalism or Gelpi’s social, relational metaphysics of dynamical
experience & expression than by Bracken’s neo-Whiteheadian process approach. Perhaps. That’s just best I can tell. I’m not really sure & am not especially interested in that type of project.
Other stances w/weaker notions of DDS and more nuanced conceptions of im/mutability & im/passibility make sense to me theologically, even if I’m not equipped to express or critique them metaphysically. At least, I suspect any impasses I have w/others are less often ontological & much more often theological (their prior core commitments) regarding kinds & degrees of DDS.