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***Then say what’s negative in our theology?***

Sure, I’ll restate what I’ve said many times before.

The Christian doctrine of God is that he is infinite, eternal and unchangeable. That naturally begs the question how man could know anything of this God in our finite and contingent condition.

Orthodox Christianity has always taught that man has an actual constitutive knowledge of God by means of revelation. This revelation is available to man’s mind on the basis of his being a creature of the Creator and in the sense that he is created in the image of God man is revelational of God. Since Man is revelational of God his mind is made for the reception of revelation. In the Genesis narrative God walked and talked with Adam. The human reason therefore never functioned properly and could not function properly except in self-conscious relationship to this supernatural revelation. Every fact was what it was by virtue of the place that it would occupy in the plan of God for the whole course of history. The human mind was gifted with logic and that was supposed merely to order the facts of reality, both with respect to God and with respect to the created universe in self-conscious subordination to supernatural positive word-revelation.

Now here’s where it goes negative. Since the Fall man has tried to make sense of the world based only on his own senses independent of God and if any conception of God is allowed it is allowed only in the negative sense, that is, in what God is not and not any positive constitutive statements about God. Aristotle, for instance, allowed for the possibility of God but not a transcendent God that was able relate to the finite world. Thus, for Aristotle, nothing could be said about the nature of God since God is unable to reveal himself to man.

Whenever we see Christian dogma that acquieces to the atheistic/agnostic position that dogma is deformed in several aspects. Usually you’ll find this deformity in making man independent of God through freedom of the will. If man is independent of God then he is no longer relevatory of God. Also, if man is partly independent of God then God becomes dependent upon man or they become dependent upon each other and upon the universe. Since man is partly independent of God his ultimate reference point is no longer exclusively found in God.

Once man no longer becomes relevatory of God because of his independence he is locked into the universe of his senses (empiricism). Once man is locked into the universe of his senses he longer has any contact with the transcendent God.

Thus any professing Christian who takes the atheist/agnostic position is both an irrationalist in the sense that he believes he has no positive knowledge of the nature of God and at the same time a rationalist who believes he can reduce reality to a network of logical relations. In essence then the Universe or Reality becomes the ultimate reference point with God and Man merely actors within that Universe.

The only way out of the inconsistency of the atheist/agnostic position is to make God the ultimate reference point to which man is entirely dependent and the acceptance of Scripture as the infallible revelation of God is the only way for reason to escape irrationalism.

Thank you, t_c, for your statement. It's a very crisp articulation of a point of view.

Kosta, it would be a help if you could point out some particulars where your disagreement, so to speak, comes to a head.

A kind of canon for my theological method (cf Hamlet: If this be madness, yet there is method in it.) is this:

Dawg's First Caveat of Theology:
God is so very different from the 'categories' of the human mind that He isn't even 'one' the way we usually think of 'one'.

Consequently, at every step of the way, we have. so to speak, to look around, pat our pockets, gather our belongings, count our change, and make sure no little one has wandered off, and we have both our gloves.

You, t_c, say:

Since the Fall man has tried to make sense of the world based only on his own senses independent of God and if any conception of God is allowed it is allowed only in the negative sense, that is, in what God is not and not any positive constitutive statements about God.

Just for clarification:
"allowed" by whom, by a "thinker" or what?
I sort of agree. I think there is, as Augustine implied and many have said, "a God-shaped hole in our hearts," so that we, even the Gentiles, can learn much of God by examining, as it were, the edges of the soul's wounds. But our learning will be inadequate because the very faculty of reason is crippled - crippled, though, not paralyzed; less useful, not useless.

The rest of my differences would fall under the head of "falsely exhaustive alternatives". And here -- and I say this not at all as an "I'm right and you're wrong, nanny-nanny boo-boo," kind of thing -- I would say there are many similar problems. Often, from my POV, some Protestants seem to be saying, "It's either A or B," and I want to say, "Whoa, hold on, are those the only choices?"

About freedom and God's control, and freedom as something which sort of goes through stages:
I was once free to marry. I could choose to marry this person, or that person or no person at all. Or I could dither and never make up my mind. If I never chose, it would be like my freedom never matured, or was never used. If I chose wrongly, well, that would be a shame, possibly a disaster (though it seems that nothing is beyond God's redeeming reach). But if I chose rightly and stuck by the choice, then my freedom, which seems to have been lost or "used up" when I got married blossoms into parenthood (or not) and a life of working out what matrimony means.

So somewhere in the middle of what you say I want to suggest that there might be a kind of freedom entrusted to us which is only properly used if we immediately hand it back to God. (and we never do, because we're broken, etc.)

Gosh I hope there is something comprehensibly in that.

One more (alleged) thought:

Also, if man is partly independent of God then God becomes dependent upon man or they become dependent upon each other and upon the universe.

I'm probably misunderstanding you (there's a lot of that going around) but isn't the Incarnation an instance of God mysteriously becoming sort of kind of dependent on mankind and on His creation?

Just as God isn't "one" the way we expected, but includes within his simplicity a society of persons, so maybe omnipotence doesn't work out as we might think it does.

Just sayin' ....