Thursday, October 28, 2021

What is Analogous to Analogy?

I suppose everything has its analogue in God, even analogy itself, being that the Son is -- so to speak-- analogous to the Father: 

exteriorization within God forms the ontological ground of possibility for the analogous exteriorization of a finite world, as well as for the exteriorization of God that we refer to as the Incarnation (emphasis mine).

Chapp adds that 

The concept of personhood, developed primarily to describe the relational hypostases within the Trinity and now applied analogously to describe spiritual creatures, allows us to overcome the autonomy/heteronomy impasse in our concept of freedom.

In other words, human persons (qua persons) are simultaneously free and subject to a higher authority. 

This is the ontological basis of our freedom to know truth and to choose the good. It is what gives a direction to both thought and action; it is why "progress" can even exist, and why "progressivism" is the denial of its real possibility (for in the horizontal flatland of the left, there can be no direction that isn't either arbitrary or rooted in the will to power).

Consider the many times Jesus makes reference to doing the will of the Father, and doing so freely: on the one hand, Not My will but Yours; on the other, No one takes its from Me, but I lay it down of My own accord.

This complementarity goes to the Ultimate Anthropology, the highest and deepest principle and context of human personhood. Thus, 

If human freedom is made in the image and likeness of this relational, Trinitarian God, then it can only come to itself by going out of itself and drawing close to the divine freedom in a dialogical relationship of love (Chapp).

A post or two ago we spoke of approaching God's "immutability" in an analogous manner, and the same can be said of his "timelessness." For in reality,

there exists within God something for which our creaturely experience of spatiality and duration are analogies. The exteriorization of the interiority of the Trinitarian hypostases demands that we posit the event-like quality of these relations... (ibid., emphasis mine).

That's exactly what I thought, but I never heard anyone but Petey express it this way. Hartshorne does, but in a manner that denies immutability and instead places process and becoming at the foundation of things. 

This is a metaphysical non-starter, because a cosmos of pure becoming equates to an eternal absence of identity. If this were true, then boys really could be girls, homosexuals really could marry, math really could be racist, and Biden's 2 trillion dollar giveaway to liberal parasites really could cost their host nothing.

This is not to deny or devalue becoming, merely to situate it in the proper context. In fact, 

the becoming of creatures in their relations with worldly others is an image and likeness of the event-like quality of the Trinitarian relations (ibid.).

Moreover, "We are able to call God 'other' precisely because of the distance and relationally within God himself" (ibid.). 

In short -- and this is important -- we now have a principle that explains how it is possible for anything other than God to actually exist. Put conversely, any conceptualization of God as a radical monad cannot explain -- and generally must deny -- human freedom as a limit on divine omnipotence. But this "limit" is -- analogously -- within the Godhead itself.

We're almost out of time, so we'll end with this:

The Father is, from all eternity, nothing more than the act of generating the Son in self-donation, while the Son is nothing more than the act of letting oneself be generated. Hence, the Son is the ground of possibility for all extra-divine "allowing oneself to be." The coming of the creaturely realm is therefore the finite analogue of the intra-trinitarian act of begetting the Son (ibid.).

Exactly. Abiding in God may look passive, but it's actually quite time-consuming. It takes all day to get nothing done.

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