***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***Then:If this were the case then God could never had revealed himself. This has never been the position of the Church. God condescends to reveal himself mediated through the categories of the human mind and not that we can utterly know his essence but we certainly are capable of knowing of his nature otherwise we could say nothing about him.
***About freedom and God's control, and freedom as something which sort of goes through stages: I was once free to marry.
…
So somewhere in the middle of what you say I want to suggest that there might be a kind of freedom entrusted to us
…
***This the perfect example of what I spelled out in my post is the problem with the Romanist, et al, thinking and that is you start from experience and try to move to revelation instead of starting with revelation and interpret all facts through the prism of revelation.
On a micro level, I just don't think I did that. After the part you quoted about "one" I said:
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.In other words, I did NOT say it's impossible. I said we have to be careful.
And then I use, as our Lord does, an experience from life to make a comment about n aspect of the Spiritual life, and you SEEM to say (but I might have gotten this wrong) that I an trying to make sense of things
" based only on [my] own senses independent of God, …"
What I would say first is "ONLY?" What "only?"? What's "only" about what I'm doing? And that leads to my sense that this seems to demonstrate MY observation that the Reform weltanschaaung has trouble with both nuances and mystery, and a kind of aversion (whether right or wrong would be a matter for discussion) toward the concept of what might be called "process" (By which I do not mean anything to do with Whitehead.)
This last comment might bear some adumbration: We see human fathers. We see Ephesians 3:14-15. We pray to God and think about Him. Little by little we see that He is a REAL Father, and we guy-type parents are to him as Rams are to us, when it comes to Fatherhood. HE is the reality, WE are the "sorta-like".
I fear think the rest of your post may also have some hastily drawn conclusions based on falsely exhaustive alternatives.
Yes, the Eleatics and Parmenides and Plato and Plotinus and the rest ponder the one and the many. But I have still been called a polytheist by Muslims and Jews, and a few Protestants right here on FR seem almost ready to agree with them about us Catholics! So, yeah, I'll stick with "unexpected". Finally we have:
***so maybe omnipotence doesnÂ’t work out as we might think it does.***I hold that Scripture says that omnipotence is very like a baby who needs his diapers changed or a man hanging on a cross, or like someone who was "an hungered". And when it is so revealed, it is not much esteemed, and many, to this day, think it feckless and passively masochistic. (Or passive-aggressive: I once was shearing a small flock of sheep and their owner said she thought IHS came to earth and got Himself crucified to make us feel guilty!) A bruise reed He - Lord of Lords, Pantocrator - will not break.What does the revelation of God say?
Yeah I think omnipotence isn't what we thought it would be.
SO here's the REAL question: I say something, and you shake your head and say, Can't he see he's doing exactly what I said?
And I read your response and shake my head and say almost exactly the same thing!
To me this suggests that we are missing the true area of our differences. THAT, to me, is the interesting area of question. There is SO much misunderstanding. Some of it is willful; some is a kind of giving up - "I've had it, whatever I say they don't listen; they don't get it; they don't WANT to get it!"; and some of it is because maybe we've been looking in the wrong place.
Sure, some would rather win in Hell than lose in heaven. There's not much hope there. But some, I think would love at the very least to be able to delineate, clearly and in a manner with which both sides agreed, the matters of difference.
Of course, for some it's an article of religion that we are evil. That's gonna leave a mark.
***To me this [misunderstandings] suggests that we are missing the true area of our differences. THAT, to me, is the interesting area of question. There is SO much misunderstanding.***
I guess I don’t find that so unexpected. Different traditions use different terminology which leads to confusion. Writers don’t show their readers charity in their misunderstandings. Readers don’t show writers charity in their terminology. Writers don’t make an effort to use terminology that translates to a different tradition. Ground motives are left unsaid. Examples and idioms are used that are contextually situated. Concepts are left unpacked without examples. There are myriad variables that lead to misunderstanding. This has always happened. Personally I’m not so interested in these sociological and psychological variables but try to understand them as best i can.
That being said let me respond, in charity, to some of your statements.
As for the whipsaw effect with Transcendence and Immanence the point I’m trying to make is one of starting point. The initial point was that revelation is possible based upon Biblical anthropology. For those who hold to utter transcendence, say like the Greeks and Barth, the only way to know God is through experience. OTOH, someone like Aquinas will start with reason of sense expierence and try to rationalize transcendence. In the first case God is unknowable except by mystical experience and the second case God is knowable through reason based on sense expierence. Instead of starting within ourselves to know God we should always start with the transcendence that became immanent, Christ, through the prophets and apostles as recorded in scripture to filter all facts.
As for the rest of your post it seems your moving toward panentheism or as Barth described it, “God is being in becoming”.