Time for a Change in God

To review: the philosophical ascent to God is (↗O), while God's descent to us is (O↘). But these two arrows -- of natural and revealed theology, respectively -- have a mutual influence, such that the whole durn cosmic mountain must look like (↗O↘), but with an (↔) of mutual influence at the bottom. Like one giant loop. 

Now, the last word in (↘) is obviously the Incarnation whereby God literally has skin in the game. However, there are many other hints short of this, for again, the Universe speaks, such that the existence of O is clearly seen by its effects, which include the total intelligibility of being. If there were no (↘) of any kind, we would be plunged into an unintelligible world of non-being.

Total chaos and formless darkness, much like that which the Spirit of God hovers over In the Beginning. That right there -- "Spirit of God" -- tells us that there is more to God than an absolute monistic oneness, much less the fact that there's a lot of speaking going on in Genesis 1, and speaking is always from and to. Later we are told that

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.... Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.

In short, the With goes all the way up and down: this is an irreducibly relational God. This being the case, we should find traces of relationality everywhere and in every thing, and this is indeed exactly what we do find. 

The revelation of relationality is an example of what I mean by the mutual influence of (↔). In this case, we have to rethink the (↗O) from our side via (←). What we call natural theology is now supplemented by what we have received from God, (↘).  

This is why a Christian natural theology is so different from the Greek or any other natural theology. 

Now, some might say that this is no longer natural theology at all, since it has become contaminated by the supernatural. To which we would reply that nature is already supernatural, unless you're just not paying attention: natural and supernatural always and everywhere constitute a benign complementarity, not a vicious dualism.

Again, hints are everywhere, and revelation provides the reason why the hints are here to begin with. Through purely natural theology (↗O) we are indeed able to reason our way up to the Absolute, but revelation, among other things, tells us why the ascent is even possible. 

As we discussed a few post ago, the purest form of (↗O) is described by Plotinus (or Buddha or Shankara in the East), who ascends to the point of total absorption into, and union with, the One:

Since we are multiple, composite beings, striving toward union with the One means undoing our specific forms of existence.... To save our life we must lose it (Leithart).

Plotinus can ascend to O, but in so doing must leave Plotinus behind and below:

To approach the origin, we must abandon discursive thought, which means that philosophy comes to an end just at the moment it attains its end (ibid.).

Just when it was getting interesting! Bestwecando? Yes, absent the (O↘) from Godside.

Skin in the game. As it so happens, Plotinus detested his own skin, and quite literally. His crony Porphyry said that he appeared "ashamed to have a body."  

So deeply rooted was this feeling that he could never be induced to tell of his ancestry, his parentage, or his birthplace.

He showed, too, an unconquerable reluctance to sit for a painter or a sculptor, and when Amelius persisted in urging him to allow of a portrait being made he asked him, "Is it not enough to carry about this image in which nature has enclosed us?"

Probably the most unlikely concept Plotinus could imagine would be the idea that God would willingly subject himself to one of these shameful meatbags.

Above we spoke of the contamination of pure metaphysics by Christianity, but what if, somewhere along the line, pure Christianity has been contaminated by the metaphysics of Greece? Again, that arrow at the bottom of O (↔) is a two-way street. 

Plotinus' One is radically simple, meaning it can have no parts or distinctions whatsoever: it is timeless, immutable, immobile, utterly self-sufficient, and certainly doesn't care about anything outside itself. But if this is the case, then how can this One

exist in three distinct persons? How can there be processions in God if "in God, nothing can be moved or be outside"[?] There is no place for processions in an immobile, simple God.

Here we have a problem of the excluded middle, for God cannot be both simple and three; nor do I believe we can just defer to "mystery" when our metaphysic becomes tricksy, because there can be no right to absurdity, much less for God. 

Cards on the table: of course God changes, except we have to stop thinking of change as a privation, rather, as an eminent perfection. For me this is the whole point of the revelation of Trinity, and once revealed to us, we must take it back to our metaphysic (←) and rethink the whole (↗O) from the goround up.

In the sidebar you will see a quote by Bishop Robert Barron:

No, the perfect, unchanging God of whom Thomas speaks must be a gyroscope of energy and activity and at the same time a stable rock.

Which comes close but may not be quite radical enough for what we are proposing. Leithart writes that

To say there are processions is to say that there is something analogous to "movement" within the Godhead, a "whither" and a "whence." 

And I say movement is movement, and cannot be reduced to simplicity. In short, you can maintain simplicity, but then you are no longer talking about the God revealed to us. Leithart is somewhat disorganized and repetitive, but the following passage will do: 

the Trinity is not a sheer mystery of revelation, but an eminent original of which created being is a resemblance.... 

The act of creation reveals the inner life of the Trinity; the generation of the Son is the eternal and necessary root of the Father's free act of creating, and the Son's reception of being is the uncreated model of the receptive existence of creatures.

This post is getting long, but I've said before that the principles of creation, change, movement, relation, life, love, beauty, and even time may be situated in this "difference," this "space" between Father and Son, but we'll flesh it out in the next post.