First off, any appeal to "common sense" always gets my attention and leads me to question that thing which the writer says we all know.And, as we "eternalists" (Have I invented a new school?) say, God doesn't "FOREknow", he KNOWS, for all times are "now" to Him (we think.)
I would love your guy to read Whitehead (whom I deplore) because whitehead disagrees with me about eternity and disagrees with your guy that God knows what's going to happen next (though I think Whitehead would give Him the ability to make better guesses than the rest of us.)(Whitehead was WAY too hard for me, and the little I thought I understood, I didn't like.)
The Incarnation thing is about (1.a) what it was that became incarnate, and (1.b) from where, so to speak, he became incarnate, and about (2) how great was the self-emptying that Incarnation, AND (3) that the Incarnation -- the "work of Christ", His whole earthly life from conception to Ascension -- is, inter alia, revelatory. You wanna know Who God is? Look at IHS. You wanna know what omnipotence and bliss are? Look at an infant or a man being tortured to death. Like that.
SO I'm circling around the issue. And what I discern through the darkening vitreous humor of my aging eyes is that somehow in the Love which is the Trinity there is something which to the eyes of human minds looks like yielding. If it were not so, He would not have come among us as a baby and died among us as a victim, immobilized by nails, ropes, and cross.
That's my sketch. I may never be any more articulate about it than that, but that's where I'm trying to head, okay?
You did a marvelous job as far as my untrained eyes can see:
The Incarnation thing is about (1.a) what it was that became incarnate, and (1.b) from where, so to speak, he became incarnate, and about (2) how great was the self-emptying that Incarnation, AND (3) that the Incarnation -- the "work of Christ", His whole earthly life from conception to Ascension -- is, inter alia, revelatory. You wanna know Who God is? Look at IHS. You wanna know what omnipotence and bliss are? Look at an infant or a man being tortured to death. Like that.
+Athanasius: "For He was made man that we might be made God; and He manifested Himself by a body that we might receive the idea of the unseen Father; and He endured the insolence of men that we might inherit immortality. For while He Himself was in no way injured, being impossible and incorruptible and very Word and God, men who were suffering, and for whose sakes He endured all this, He maintained and preserved in His own impassibility."
I could agree with "looks like". I just can't take the next step. :) Without implying your position (I don't take your above as a commitment one way or the other), I think there is a real difference between God humbling Himself "TO" man and Him humbling Himself "in front of" man.
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