"We must know God in order to know God more deeply. As Karl Barth insists, it will not do to begin by positing a generic divine being in order to work our way up to the true God. Christian theology seeks to know, praise, and proclaim the one living God, the Father who begets the eternal Son by his eternal Spirit, the God who is a communion of three equal divine persons. Any theology that seeks to know God while prescinding from incarnation and Pentecost is founded on idolatry, no matter that the living triune God is clumsily squeezed into the idolatrous frame. To put it provocatively, much Christian theology has unwittingly posited a nonexistent idol and attributed creation to that idol, rather than to the living God who is Father, Word, and Spirit."
Apophatic statements (knowing through negation by delineating what a thing is not) are only useful if they lead to cataphatic (positive) statements.
There is a popular notion that when we speak about creation, we can use language to describe things as they really are, but when we speak about God (a being so totally other), we are reduced to babbling.
"But the world itself is full of mystery, for in its depth creation is nothing but the created effulgence of the glory of the Creator. Our capacity to name and shape the world through words at all is a continuous miracle, a daily aftershock of the Creator's first magical fiat lux ("Let there be light"). Mystery does not suddenly confront us when we begin to speak about God. Mystery confronts us at every turn, in every encounter with anything at all, because every encounter is an encounter with the Creator in his creation. God is not a creature, yet if we must "babble" about God, then all speech is reduced to babbling. But then if babbling is all we do, perhaps we should conclude that, for creatures, babbling simply is the form that rational speech takes. We babble, but compared to what?"
"Where do the standards of "appropriate" talk about God come from? Thomas's grammar of Godhead assumes a divine metaphysics; where does he find it? Not in Scripture, it seems. which is full of ordinary "composite" statements about God that cannot, in any obvious way, be reduced to "to be God is to be": To be God is to be God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; to be God is to be God of Exodus; to be God is to be Creator of heaven and earth; to be God is to be the Father who raised Jesus from the dead in the power of the Spirit. To put it starkly: If Thomas's strictures on theological language put most of the Bible under erasure, something has gone wrong."
"The question is whether Thomas's initial account of simplicity is compatible with the modifications he later makes under pressure of the Christian creed. Does he build trinitarian modifications into his understanding of simplicity, or does he initially assume a non- (or anti-) trinitarian account of simplicity? I will argue the latter and will further argue that this leaves Thomas's theology with a degree of incoherence that becomes evident in his and later treatments of God as Creator."
"Thomas mounts the argument later in the Summa Contra Gentiles, in the midst of a discussion of the identity of essence and existence in God (1.22). If they are distinct, one must be cause of the other: Existence must be dependent on essence or essence on existence or perhaps both dependent on something else. None of these can be true of God, since necessary existence is by definition independent existence: "if it depends on something else, it no longer exists necessarily" (si ab alio dependet, iam non est necesse esse).
But this is Arian metaphysics. Eunomius, not Athanasius or the Cappadocians, equated derived esse with secondary esse. As Thomas knows, the Son is "from another" (ab alio), and therefore his necessary existence as eternal Son is derived from and dependent on the Father's act of begetting. We speak rightly of the Son only with passive locutions: He is begotten of the Father; as Word, he is spoken. "Patiency" is a feature of triune being and existence. Thomas knows there is derivation within the Trinity but in his opening arguments does not acknowledge that reality, No doubt he would evade the objection by objecting to my terminology. What happens between the Son and the Father is not "dependence" or "passivity," though we must call it that, due to the limitations of human language. Grant the point for the sake of argument, yet my criticism stands: There is that in God (esse acceptum ab alio) of which created dependence and passivity are resemblances. This is just what Thomas denies when elaborating the argument from motion."
"A trinitarian argument from motion might go like this: All is in motion, and that points to a first mover. But this first mover is not only the source of motion but the model and pattern of motion, for in him the Father begets and the Son is begotten and the Spirit proceeds from both. The argument from motion points to a first mover, but a first mover eternally, infinitely in "motion," moved with inconceivable motion that infinitely exceeds the movements of creation, yet moved and moving. That is to say, we might conclude the demonstration from motion not with "this is what everybody understands by God" but with "this is what we Christians understand by God." It would provide a via leading us not to deity but to the destination we long and need to go toward, toward Trinity."
Apophatic statements (knowing through negation by delineating what a thing is not) are only useful if they lead to cataphatic (positive) statements.
There is a popular notion that when we speak about creation, we can use language to describe things as they really are, but when we speak about God (a being so totally other), we are reduced to babbling.
"But the world itself is full of mystery, for in its depth creation is nothing but the created effulgence of the glory of the Creator. Our capacity to name and shape the world through words at all is a continuous miracle, a daily aftershock of the Creator's first magical fiat lux ("Let there be light"). Mystery does not suddenly confront us when we begin to speak about God. Mystery confronts us at every turn, in every encounter with anything at all, because every encounter is an encounter with the Creator in his creation. God is not a creature, yet if we must "babble" about God, then all speech is reduced to babbling. But then if babbling is all we do, perhaps we should conclude that, for creatures, babbling simply is the form that rational speech takes. We babble, but compared to what?"
"Where do the standards of "appropriate" talk about God come from? Thomas's grammar of Godhead assumes a divine metaphysics; where does he find it? Not in Scripture, it seems. which is full of ordinary "composite" statements about God that cannot, in any obvious way, be reduced to "to be God is to be": To be God is to be God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; to be God is to be God of Exodus; to be God is to be Creator of heaven and earth; to be God is to be the Father who raised Jesus from the dead in the power of the Spirit. To put it starkly: If Thomas's strictures on theological language put most of the Bible under erasure, something has gone wrong."
"The question is whether Thomas's initial account of simplicity is compatible with the modifications he later makes under pressure of the Christian creed. Does he build trinitarian modifications into his understanding of simplicity, or does he initially assume a non- (or anti-) trinitarian account of simplicity? I will argue the latter and will further argue that this leaves Thomas's theology with a degree of incoherence that becomes evident in his and later treatments of God as Creator."
"Thomas mounts the argument later in the Summa Contra Gentiles, in the midst of a discussion of the identity of essence and existence in God (1.22). If they are distinct, one must be cause of the other: Existence must be dependent on essence or essence on existence or perhaps both dependent on something else. None of these can be true of God, since necessary existence is by definition independent existence: "if it depends on something else, it no longer exists necessarily" (si ab alio dependet, iam non est necesse esse).
But this is Arian metaphysics. Eunomius, not Athanasius or the Cappadocians, equated derived esse with secondary esse. As Thomas knows, the Son is "from another" (ab alio), and therefore his necessary existence as eternal Son is derived from and dependent on the Father's act of begetting. We speak rightly of the Son only with passive locutions: He is begotten of the Father; as Word, he is spoken. "Patiency" is a feature of triune being and existence. Thomas knows there is derivation within the Trinity but in his opening arguments does not acknowledge that reality, No doubt he would evade the objection by objecting to my terminology. What happens between the Son and the Father is not "dependence" or "passivity," though we must call it that, due to the limitations of human language. Grant the point for the sake of argument, yet my criticism stands: There is that in God (esse acceptum ab alio) of which created dependence and passivity are resemblances. This is just what Thomas denies when elaborating the argument from motion."
"A trinitarian argument from motion might go like this: All is in motion, and that points to a first mover. But this first mover is not only the source of motion but the model and pattern of motion, for in him the Father begets and the Son is begotten and the Spirit proceeds from both. The argument from motion points to a first mover, but a first mover eternally, infinitely in "motion," moved with inconceivable motion that infinitely exceeds the movements of creation, yet moved and moving. That is to say, we might conclude the demonstration from motion not with "this is what everybody understands by God" but with "this is what we Christians understand by God." It would provide a via leading us not to deity but to the destination we long and need to go toward, toward Trinity."