The distinction between “internal to God’s eternal intention” and “not constitutive of God’s eternal identity” is elegant, but I think it ultimately depends on a metaphysical assumption that deserves further scrutiny.
If creation is truly internal and eternal (i.e., if it is not an afterthought, not extrinsic, and not secondary), then it becomes difficult to see in what sense it could fail to be constitutive without reintroducing, at least formally, a non-relational remainder in God. A relation that is real, eternal, and internal, but not constitutive, risks collapsing back into a refined version of externality.
This is where I think something deeper is at stake and where the relative absence of the Holy Spirit in these discussions is telling.
Much of the debate is framed in terms of “God” and “Christ,” identity and revelation, eternity and history. But without the Spirit, the ontology of presence and participation remains underdeveloped. The Spirit is not simply the application of a prior divine intention; the Spirit is the living actuality of divine presence—the one in whom God is not only revealed to creation but present as participatory communion.
If that is the case, then the question is not whether the world is constitutive of God as an external object—it clearly is not—but whether divine identity is intelligible apart from the eternal relational act in which God gives himself, expresses himself, and is present. Once presence (pneumatology) is taken seriously at the ontological level, the gap between “internal” and “constitutive” becomes much harder to sustain.
Put differently: if relation is not merely economic or revelatory but ontologically primitive, then identity is not something that stands behind relational expression. It is precisely what is actualized in it.
This does not entail that God “needs” the world in any deficient or developmental sense. But it may mean that divine identity cannot be meaningfully described apart from the eternal, living act of self-giving that is revealed in Christ and present in the Spirit.
Yes I think Aaron, this is exactly the right push-back to apply, especially the pneumatological point. The Spirit should prevent us from imagining the economy as a merely external revelation of a God otherwise sealed off from creation; in the Spirit, divine life is genuinely present as participatory communion. However, I’m not convinced that this collapses the distinction between “internal to God’s eternal intention” and “constitutive of God’s eternal identity.” The distinction only fails if “internal” means “constitutive in the same sense as the eternal relations of Father, Son, and Spirit.” But that is precisely what I want to deny. The Father’s begetting of the Son and the Spirit’s eternal procession are constitutive of divine identity; God’s free communication of that life to creatures is not. Creatures are constituted by relation to God; God is not constituted by relation to creatures. The Spirit makes divine life really present and participable, but the Spirit’s mission into creation does not make creation part of what makes God triune. So yes, I agree, pneumatology deepens the account of participation, but it does not remove the need for asymmetry. Otherwise the world becomes, however subtly, a condition for God’s being God.
I think this clarifies the real point of disagreement very well, and I agree that the Spirit must prevent us from imagining the economy as merely external. But I would suggest that the asymmetry you want to preserve depends on a further assumption that may need to be examined.
You write that the distinction only fails if “internal” means “constitutive in the same sense as the eternal relations of Father, Son, and Spirit.” But that already presupposes that there are two fundamentally different kinds of relation: those that are constitutive of divine identity (the trinitarian relations) and those that are not (God’s relation to creation).
The question is whether that division can actually be sustained once relation is taken to be ontologically primary.
If relation is truly intrinsic, eternal, and internal to God’s act of self-giving (and not merely a contingent addition), then it is not clear what it would mean for it to be non-constitutive in principle. A relation that is real, internal, and eternal, but not constitutive, seems to reintroduce (however carefully) a layer of identity that is not itself relationally actualized.
That, I think, is the deeper issue. The asymmetry you’re preserving appears to rely on the idea that God’s identity is fully constituted by the relations of Father, Son, and Spirit apart from God’s act of self-communication. But if the Spirit is not merely the terminus of intra-trinitarian procession but the living actuality of divine presence and participation, then the line between “immanent” and “economic” relation becomes much harder to draw in a strictly non-constitutive way.
To put it differently: I don’t think the alternative is that the world becomes a condition for God’s being God in the sense of supplying something God lacks. That would indeed be a mistake. But there may be another option that avoids both that conclusion and the asymmetry you want to preserve.
Namely, that what we call “God’s identity” is not something complete apart from relational actuality, but is precisely the eternal act of self-giving in which God expresses and is present. As such, the issue is not whether God is constituted by “relation to creatures” as external objects, but whether identity itself is anything other than relationally actualized.
The concern about making the world a “condition” for God’s being God seems to assume that any constitutive relation must be externally grounding or ontologically prior in a competitive sense. But if relation is intrinsic rather than external (i.e., if it is the very mode of divine actuality rather than an added dependency), then constitutivity need not imply contingency, lack, or completion through the world.
So the question may not be whether we must preserve asymmetry to avoid divine dependence, but whether “dependence” is being understood in a way that already presupposes the very ontology in question.
To be clear my claim is not that divine identity is non-relational apart from the economy; the claim is that divine identity is constituted by the eternal relations of Father, Son, and Spirit, not by the world’s participation in those relations. The Spirit makes participation real, but real participation does not mean reciprocal constitution. The creature is truly constituted by communion with God; God is not constituted by communion with the creature. I love Hart’s line that “we are modes; God is not.” That’s a non-negotiable asymmetry
I think the deepest point of tension for me concerns the Spirit specifically.
You distinguish between the constitutive intra-trinitarian relations and creation’s non-constitutive participation in those relations. But I don’t see how the Spirit’s eternal identity as communion, presence, participation, indwelling, and self-giving can remain fully intelligible apart from actual participatory presence beyond a closed divine interior.
In other words: what is “procession” if not ecstatic presence and communion? And if the Spirit is eternally the actuality of divine presence, can that actuality be meaningfully conceived in complete abstraction from manifestation and participation without reducing “Spirit” to a purely intra-divine structural relation?
Similarly with the Logos: “Word,” “Image,” and “Expression” seem already to imply manifestation and intelligibility. But the question becomes even sharper with the Spirit because the Spirit is not merely expression but presence itself.
Do you think there could truly have been “no world” in a way that leaves Logos and Spirit fully intelligible as Logos and Spirit? Or does the very intelligibility of divine triunity already imply that divine life is not a closed interior subsequently opened outward, but eternally self-expressive and participatory in principle?
I’m not suggesting the world “completes” God or supplies something lacking. I’m asking whether the asymmetry you want to preserve may still rely on conceiving divine identity as fully constituted prior to relational actuality beyond the immanent Trinity itself.
We are circling the same point now. I agree that God is not a non-relational monad, and I agree that the Spirit prevents us from imagining the economy as a merely external display. God is eternally relational, eternally self-giving, eternally communion.
But that still does not answer the decisive question: is the world constitutive of God’s being God, or not?
If yes, then God is not fully God without the world. Calling that relation “noncompetitive” or “intrinsic” does not remove the difficulty; it only redescribes it. If no, then the asymmetry I am defending stands: the economy truly reveals and communicates God, but does not constitute God.
So I would put it simply: God is not complete apart from relation, but God is complete apart from creation. The Spirit does not become Spirit by indwelling creatures; creatures become participants in divine life by receiving the Spirit. The Logos does not become Word by creating; creation manifests the Logos because the Son is eternally the Father’s Word.
That is the line I am trying to preserve. Real participation, yes. Reciprocal constitution, no.
I think the issue I’m pressing may be slightly different from the dilemma as you’re framing it.
I’m not arguing that God “needs” the world in order to become complete or fully God. I’m questioning whether Logos and Spirit are intelligible as wholly self-contained realities apart from manifestation, presence, communion, and participatory actuality altogether.
You say the Logos does not become Word by creating — agreed. But what is “Word” apart from expression and manifestation altogether? Likewise, the Spirit does not become Spirit by indwelling creatures — agreed. But what is “Spirit” apart from presence, communion, and participatory actuality altogether?
My concern is that we may still be imagining the Trinity as a fully self-contained intra-divine relationality that could remain entirely “within itself” even if no world had ever existed. But if Logos and Spirit are inherently ecstatic realities (i.e., expression and presence as such), then I’m not sure a wholly closed divine interior is ultimately intelligible in the first place. Not because creation “completes” God, but because divine actuality may be intrinsically self-expressive and participatory rather than self-contained first and communicative second.
I've followed the conversation with Aaron with interest. I'm rethreading at the top for those who read in the app.
"God could have not created" is unintelligible because that is a category error for an Actus Purus for Whom creation cannot be described in terms of a counterfactual gratuity. The free intention of the giver, alone — is both necessary and sufficient to account for creation.
This same dynamic plays out in the fact that the gratuity of creation derives not from divine counterfactual deliberation but creation's radical dependence on God as - not just the apophatically registered ex nihilo conceived as a singular event, but - the kataphatically registered ex Deo conceived as participation (creatio continua). This dynamic similarly forecloses natura pura.
The ad intra Trinity's relations, alone, are sufficient to account for an essential kenosis or Balthasar's ur-kenosis. Similarly, they sufficiently account for what we could call an ur-theophany or intrinsic self-manifestation inasmuch as the Son is the perfect self-expression (Verbum) of the Father and the Spirit is the subsisting love/unity that manifests this mutual self-gift.
We mustn't ignore, however the asymmetry between those infinite processions and the temporal missions. The fact of our finite participatory reception does not collapse the distinction between “internal to God’s eternal intention” and “constitutive of God’s eternal identity.” For one thing, that would entail a facile conflation of the concrete expressibilities of archetypal logoi and the concrete expressions of all creaturely participations - not necessarily at the expense of creaturely freedom per se, but - seriously impoverishing our common sense experiences of creaturely autonomy, which are richly textured in their manifold & multiform modes, degrees & forms.
For another, more saliently, classical theism precisely presupposes "two fundamentally different kinds of relation" vis a vis God's constitutive identity and our asymmetric participatory receptions of divine presence/presents. This is not to deny the divine - human noetic identity, only to insist that it observes the analogical interval.
The reason that we can meaningfully refer to ad intra relations is because there are semantic & structural - not ontological - univocities disclosed by the reality of participation with, as Robert so well puts it, no quarantine per a real essence - energeia distinction and its economic corollary - no natura pura, either.
Those two fundamentally different kinds of relation are precisely why St Basil forbade arithmetic or counting of divine persons:
This is a recapitulation of the same disagreement and impasse that Aaron & I located before. And he was a great & congenial conversation partner whose views I found eminently helpful as a foil. In that discussion, I described participation, itself, as the primitive; the identity‑registers were its differentiated expressions. That’s why I keep describing participation as a freely intended theophany rather than an essentialist theogony.
Even granting the immunized version of Aaron's objection — where the constitutive relation is said to be non-contingent and intrinsic, not a matter of God needing anything the world supplies — the problem hasn't actually been dissolved, only repackaged. The real issue is not whether God is completed by the world. It's whether divine self-identity is now internally structured so as to include an external term within its own identity-conditions. That's a different and subtler move than dependency, but it's still a reconfiguration — bidirectional identity-indexing, if you will — and classical theism can't absorb it without ceasing to be itself.
This is precisely where the logos/tropos distinction does its work: the archetypal logoi of all creaturely realities are eternally in the Logos as intelligibilities — Aaron can have that — but their tropic actualizations are not re-importable into divine identity without collapsing the difference between eternal form and finite instantiation. That collapse, viewed from the divine side, is the same error that appears from the creaturely side as the facile conflation of concrete expressibilities and concrete expressions — the same coin, differently faced.
Similarly, when we call the Spirit "gift," "communion," "presence" — these name a donum subsistens, a subsistent intra-divine reality, not an actuality that requires exteriorized reception to be what it is. To infer from "presence" that there must be someone outside God receiving it in order for the Spirit's actuality to be real is to confuse immanent Thirdness (pardon my Peirce) with the finite mode of its participatory reception — which is precisely the epectasis/inexhaustibility conflation I keep flagging: we do not participate in divine epectasis; we participate in divine inexhaustibility epectatically.
The DBH/JDW conversation as inflected by the communicatio idiomatum makes the point vivid: predicate logic can allow diachronic modal identities to migrate theophanically to the Son per His enhypostatic humanity without that subverting His infinite synchronic identity theogonically — push past that constraint and you haven't achieved a more relational classical theism, you've arrived at Absolute Idealism, the Full Monty Hegel. It's not that such a move cannot be sustained intelligently and coherently — it's that sustaining it coherently requires abandoning classical theism for a different metaphysical order altogether, which is the most precise way I know to name our impasse.
So the asymmetry isn't a bald presupposition Aaron can simply interrogate. It's a consequence: divine simplicity cannot coherently include extrinsic variability within its identity-conditions and remain simplicity. The moment it does, you don't have a more relational God — you have a different kind of being altogether, which is not the One we worship.
Yes indeed - on our classical theist account there’s no question that it is incoherent to consider creation to be constitutive of God as God is a se. No longer can one speak of the “I AM” - God who is simple, actus purus, in whom there is no imperfection, no unrealized potential awaiting actualization.
I think this reveals the precise point where my ontology parts company with the classical framework.
You continue interpreting intrinsic manifestation through the lens of unrealized potential, supplementation, or incompletion, as though if divine actuality necessarily manifests, then God must somehow require creation in order to become fully actual.
But that is not my claim.
I am not proposing movement from non-manifestation to manifestation as fulfillment of a lack. I am proposing that actuality itself is intrinsically self-manifestive. The issue is not unrealized potency awaiting completion, but whether wholly self-contained actuality is finally intelligible at all.
A saint necessarily loving All does not imply deficiency or unrealized potential. It implies actuality faithful to nature. Likewise, my claim is that divine actuality necessarily manifests not because God lacks something, but because manifestation belongs intrinsically to what divine actuality is.
So the disagreement now seems even deeper to me: classical theism fundamentally identifies perfection with self-contained completeness, whereas I increasingly suspect perfection may instead be intrinsically expressive plenitude.
John, this is an extraordinarily thoughtful articulation of the classical position, and I genuinely appreciate both the precision and the charitable clarity with which you’ve framed the disagreement. I also think you are correct that what is ultimately at stake here is not a minor adjustment within classical theism, but a divergence at the level of metaphysical first principles.
What I increasingly find myself unable to affirm is precisely the intelligibility of wholly self-contained actuality, even in refined trinitarian form. That is the deepest point of tension for me.
So while I fully affirm the eternal processions, the asymmetry between Creator and creature, the non-identity of finite manifestations with divine essence, and the inexhaustibility of divine life, I continue to struggle with the idea that manifestation, expression, presence, communion, and kenosis can remain wholly fulfilled ad intra without contingent manifestation belonging intrinsically to actuality itself.
This is why I now increasingly formulate the issue as follows: actuality intrinsically manifests contingently. Not because finite creatures are necessary beings in themselves, nor because God depends upon an external ontological counterpart, but because I no longer think actuality and manifestation are finally separable realities.
So when I interrogate asymmetry or classical simplicity, I am not merely rejecting inherited axioms arbitrarily. I am questioning whether wholly self-contained actuality is actually intelligible once personhood, manifestation, energies, participation, and kenosis are all taken with full seriousness. At that point, contingent manifestation no longer appears to me as “extrinsic variability” added onto divine identity, but as intrinsic contingent expression of divine actuality itself.
You are absolutely right that classical theism cannot absorb that move without becoming something else. I agree. But I increasingly suspect that this is because classical theism still preserves (however refined) the intelligibility of actuality fully complete “within itself,” whereas I no longer think actuality and manifestation are finally separable realities at all.
So I think you are right to identify this as a genuine metaphysical divergence rather than a merely verbal dispute. And I deeply appreciate the clarity with which you’ve helped expose exactly where that divergence lies.
Aaron, I think the real divergence is now fully on the table. I think I might be able to honor your intuition — that manifestation is intrinsic to actuality — even while pressing on what I think could be a tension internal to your own formulation.
I will deploy my own cosmotheandrism as a resource in exactly the same way that I have appropriated Jordan Daniel Wood's "Creation as Incarnation." It makes my own account neo-Hegelian with an Objective (not Absolute) Idealism. I didn't manufacture this whole cloth & idiosyncratically but out of Fr Bracken's Divine Matrix. Here are some contemporaries whom I considered allied, architectonically:
You want to affirm two things simultaneously: that contingent creatures are not necessary beings, and that actuality and manifestation are not finally separable. But those two commitments are pulling against each other, and I don't think the seam holds.
Here is why. If I say "fire intrinsically produces heat," I mean heat is not accidental to fire — it belongs to what fire is. A fire that produces no heat is, by that definition, not fully fire. Now you are saying something parallel: manifestation intrinsically belongs to actuality. Fine so far. But then you add: and the manifestation is contingent — meaning it may or may not occur, and which specific manifestations occur is not fixed in advance.
The problem is that if manifestation belongs intrinsically to what actuality is, then an actuality that is not manifesting is — on your own terms — not fully actual. The absence of manifestation would represent something unrealized in actuality itself. But that is precisely what potency means: a real orientation toward something not yet actualized, without which the being in question is incomplete. You have, in effect, reintroduced something functioning like potency into the divine actuality you are trying to refine. The word "intrinsic" has already made the commitment, and "contingent" cannot undo it. The escape hatch doesn't work: you cannot borrow the ontological weight of "intrinsic" and then disclaim the consequences by calling the result "contingent." The "intrinsic" is doing the theogonic work even when "contingent" is sincerely meant to block it.
My own resolution considers creation as eternal and eternity as created — which sounds paradoxical but is a precise architectural claim. Most of this debate has been conducted as if there are only two registers: God on one side, the temporal world on the other. On that binary, your move is understandable: if the logoi are genuinely in the Logos, and the temporal world is just those logoi instantiated, then the temporal world seems to belong intrinsically to what God is. But that binary is precisely what my framework refuses.
There are three registers, not two. The first is the infinite and timeless ad intra processions — Father, Son, Spirit — pure actuality, no before or after, no potency, no creaturely character whatsoever. The third is the historical and temporal domain we all inhabit — circumscriptive, embodied, contingent creaturely existence unfolding in time. But between them sits a second register: the eternal and everlasting domain where the archetypal logoi of all creaturely realities live in the Logos. This domain is genuinely eternal — it has no temporal beginning or end in the way our history does.
But — and this is the crucial move — it is already creaturely. It is not a piece of divine identity. It is the most primordial, most eternal layer of creation, but it is creation nonetheless. Think of Hawking's no-boundary universe or the background-independent spacetime of loop quantum gravity: no edge, no moment of beginning, finite yet unbounded — and still not infinite in the divine sense. The eternal-everlasting domain is something like that: boundless from within, but not God.
Now the inference you need becomes visible as a jump over a missing step. You want to move from "logoi are genuinely in the Logos" — which I grant fully — all the way to "therefore their temporal instantiations are constitutive of divine identity." But there is a more precise address for what you are rightly tracking: their temporal instantiations are constitutive of Christ's enhypostatic humanity, semantically and structurally univocal to His own diachronic modal and relational identities. The communicatio idiomatum handles exactly this — temporal, modal, and relational predicates migrate theophanically to the Son per His enhypostatic humanity, which is precisely where they belong and precisely as far as they can coherently go. Theophany, not theogony. The eternal-everlasting domain is not God completing Himself through creation. It is creation at its most eternal depth, participating in God. Those are not the same thing, and collapsing them is precisely the move that turns theophany into theogony.
This means manifestation IS intrinsic to actuality — but the intrinsic manifestation is the ur-theophany of the immanent Trinity, fully actual and inexhaustibly complete, not requiring the circumscriptive-temporal register to be what it is. The economic missions are real participations in that ur-theophanic actuality, not its conditions.
The deeper issue is intelligibility itself. Your position defines intelligibility in a totalizing direction: actuality becomes fully intelligible when its manifestations are included within its identity-conditions, potencies progressively reduced to act, the system approaching a terminus of finite consistency and completeness. But that is precisely what makes the Absolute Idealist's God too small — Gödel-like rubrics dissolve because the system is in principle completable.
The God of classical theism is wholly incomprehensible not because He falls short of intelligibility but because He is supremely and infinitely intelligible — inexhaustible in a way no totalizing system can contain. His actuality is not rest at the end of motion but rest as infinite motion, where the concept of unfulfilled potency simply fails to refer.
On my account, our heavenly mansions are Hilbert Hotels — infinite rooms, infinite guests, always room for more. On the Absolute Idealist account, the Hilbert Hotel becomes a motel where the lights have been left on but a no vacancy sign hung — there was no room at Bethlehem, and even if we grant Jesus the metaphorical room that framework needs Him to occupy, the Father and Spirit are still turned away at the door, because they aren't persons, just moments.
¹ Even the eternal-everlasting domain's infinity is not divine infinity by another name. A Hilbert Hotel is infinite — it has no last room — but it remains a countable, structural infinity, the kind Cantor designated ℵ₀. Divine inexhaustibility is not a larger cardinal; it is a qualitatively different order of reality altogether, one for which the entire apparatus of transfinite arithmetic remains, as Aquinas would say, in the genus of creatures. The eternal-everlasting domain may be unbounded from within, but it is bounded by what it is not — namely, God. Divine infinity has no such exterior.
John, this is extremely helpful, and I think your three-register account clarifies the strongest possible alternative to what I’m proposing.
I agree that theophany must not collapse into theogony, and I am not trying to make God become God through temporal history or finite creaturely actualization. But I think the pressure point remains: if the eternal-everlasting domain is already creaturely, then you too have denied “God without creation” in the simple classical sense. The remaining question is whether this eternal creaturely register is merely theophanic participation, or whether its very necessity already shows that contingent manifestation belongs intrinsically to divine actuality.
I also do not think “intrinsic contingent manifestation” reintroduces potency into God unless contingency is defined as unrealized possibility awaiting completion. That is precisely the definition I am rejecting. I mean contingency as finite, dependent, non-exhaustive expression. On that account, manifestation can belong intrinsically to actuality without any manifestation exhausting or completing actuality.
So I do not see my view as totalizing divine intelligibility. Quite the opposite: no manifestation, no world, no history, and no system exhausts Source. My claim is not that creation completes God, but that actuality is not intelligible as wholly self-contained apart from manifestation.
Where I think we still differ is that your account grants an eternal creaturely domain but then protects divine identity by treating it as participation without constitutive force. I understand the move, but I am still asking whether that distinction is explanatory or simply the point at which classical asymmetry is reasserted.
In her 2012 thesis, The Theological Significance of Chance: Temporal Divine Action Discerned through Probability and Complexity Theory, at St Mark's National Theological Centre, School of Theology, Charles Sturt University, Alice Murray argued that Jenson’s and Bracken’s acknowledgements of the possibility of a tri-polar presence of God have resonance with a three domain model of reality.
She distinguished three domains of reality by their relation to our concept of time:
1. God’s infinite, timeless domain of embracing love from which creation and hence
time itself was enacted,
2. The eternal, everlasting, spiritual domain which is the all-embracing dimension of
creation, and
3. The material, transient domain in which the temporal process of the universe is played out.
I had previously appropriated Joe Bracken's Divine Matrix through the lenses of Bonaventure & Peirce. Murray's framing furnished even more coherence.
When I'd first read JDW's Whole Mystery manuscript, I responded to him that it read to me as being fully consonant with my understandings of both Fr Gelpi's Maximian Narrative Christology & Fr Bracken's Divine Matrix.
It is with Gelpi & Bracken (Murray's) that I've (constructively?) appropriated JDW ever since. When I first encountered DBH's body of work, I engaged it as being fully consonant with my understandings of Fr Lonergan's works.
While I receive DBH's Christomorphic vision as theo- bedrock as in conversation with my above-mentioned Jesuit co-religionists, as I mentioned to Fr Al a few days ago: While JDW goes beyond DBH and sharpens the old Christ-specification pencil further, on my reading, Jordan has not broken the point.
If one approriate's JDW through Bracken (Murray's), where does that leave the argument?
DBH gets the veto: The infinite & timeless God is not made God by the world. God is not completed by creation, history, evil, or even by the Incarnation. This is the domain of nondeterminate being without modality & of divine archetypal intentions.
JDW gets his finite eternal & everlasting creation & Incarnation as historically & temporally manifest in Bethlehem. These are the finite created domains of determinate being & modality, wherein the Son became & eternally becomes God. That's another story. The greatest one ever told.
There is one concern with Wood’s premise however. Tom Belt pointed this out. The issue is not simply whether creation belongs to God’s eternal purpose, but how that purpose relates to the Father’s eternal begetting of the Son. As I see it, yes the world is eternally intended through the Son, but it is not what makes the Son Son. That is to say that the Son’s sonship has its meaning in the Father’s eternal begetting, not in the world’s coming to be.
But Tom's concern should dissolve once Wood is read through Bracken-Murray's three-domain map — infinite/timeless, eternal/everlasting, temporal — where eternity itself is a created predicate belonging to domain 2, not domain 1.
The Son's diachronic identities — modal and relative — generated through his operation of his eternal and historical enhypostatic humanity do migrate to his person via the communicatio idiomatum. That traffic is real. But it runs to the person, not back into the infinite synchronic identity of Sonship in domain 1. The hypostasis receives; domain 1 remains nondeterminate. DBH's veto stands, and Wood gets exactly what he needs — just with a more precise address.
That's why I so often resort to "my (constructive?) appropriation."
To be clear, while I insist on a Hartian participatory bedrock, I otherwise consider my Bracken-inflected Woodsian Maximian interpretation & Christo-grammar as a defensible theologoumenon, i.e. not the only coherent approach.
I think we have to be careful about which lens of Hegel one appropriates when it comes to JDW. I know he reads Hegel through a very particular hermeneutic that involves the “fragments of love,” which I’m sure he’s mentioned openly before and has to me in questions I’ve had with some of this directed towards him.
I’m often baffled by the accounts of non-knowing that occurs within the divine life, even in relationality. I sometimes wonder if that “hiddenness” within the divine life is where we find the answers to the question of need/want/must when it comes to creation. For example, when Christ says that even the Son does not know when all things will end, only the Father, or when Scripture says that the Spirit searches the depths of God, aren’t we left with this moment of “why” that is left there hanging in the breeze.
We can center all of these discussions on love/logic that is made manifest, etc. but fundamentally there is something operating that, and most would hate this in the simplicity camp, needs to/wants to/must move and does. So in effect, the “all things” that are in Christ, and by virtue of that the Father must also be things that have to have a connective strain of necessary purpose but what that rational is lies inside the depths of something we may never fully understand on this side of the Aeon. I like “understand” here more than know. (I always lean towards Schelling more than Hegel. After all, to know something, one must truly understand it and be able explain it, or else it has no content to the person or identity. It’s mere fact or speculation.) The why of all this may be the unanswerable, not so much the who or how.
The logos brings about the will of the Father, and yet, that will transcends even its own knowledge in some capacity. (Unless Jesus was just playing coy with the Disciples…although He repeats it in Acts to, so I assume He really doesn’t know the answer to that profoundly interesting point.)
This may also seem somewhat mytho-poetic in scope, but I think it’s the only way to put an analogy to the point.
I scratched my head to recall certain things JDW had said about Bulgakov in the past. Those lead me to believe that JDW could well be structurally open to making that Bracken-inflected move.
The distinction between “internal to God’s eternal intention” and “not constitutive of God’s eternal identity” is elegant, but I think it ultimately depends on a metaphysical assumption that deserves further scrutiny.
If creation is truly internal and eternal (i.e., if it is not an afterthought, not extrinsic, and not secondary), then it becomes difficult to see in what sense it could fail to be constitutive without reintroducing, at least formally, a non-relational remainder in God. A relation that is real, eternal, and internal, but not constitutive, risks collapsing back into a refined version of externality.
This is where I think something deeper is at stake and where the relative absence of the Holy Spirit in these discussions is telling.
Much of the debate is framed in terms of “God” and “Christ,” identity and revelation, eternity and history. But without the Spirit, the ontology of presence and participation remains underdeveloped. The Spirit is not simply the application of a prior divine intention; the Spirit is the living actuality of divine presence—the one in whom God is not only revealed to creation but present as participatory communion.
If that is the case, then the question is not whether the world is constitutive of God as an external object—it clearly is not—but whether divine identity is intelligible apart from the eternal relational act in which God gives himself, expresses himself, and is present. Once presence (pneumatology) is taken seriously at the ontological level, the gap between “internal” and “constitutive” becomes much harder to sustain.
Put differently: if relation is not merely economic or revelatory but ontologically primitive, then identity is not something that stands behind relational expression. It is precisely what is actualized in it.
This does not entail that God “needs” the world in any deficient or developmental sense. But it may mean that divine identity cannot be meaningfully described apart from the eternal, living act of self-giving that is revealed in Christ and present in the Spirit.
Yes I think Aaron, this is exactly the right push-back to apply, especially the pneumatological point. The Spirit should prevent us from imagining the economy as a merely external revelation of a God otherwise sealed off from creation; in the Spirit, divine life is genuinely present as participatory communion. However, I’m not convinced that this collapses the distinction between “internal to God’s eternal intention” and “constitutive of God’s eternal identity.” The distinction only fails if “internal” means “constitutive in the same sense as the eternal relations of Father, Son, and Spirit.” But that is precisely what I want to deny. The Father’s begetting of the Son and the Spirit’s eternal procession are constitutive of divine identity; God’s free communication of that life to creatures is not. Creatures are constituted by relation to God; God is not constituted by relation to creatures. The Spirit makes divine life really present and participable, but the Spirit’s mission into creation does not make creation part of what makes God triune. So yes, I agree, pneumatology deepens the account of participation, but it does not remove the need for asymmetry. Otherwise the world becomes, however subtly, a condition for God’s being God.
I think this clarifies the real point of disagreement very well, and I agree that the Spirit must prevent us from imagining the economy as merely external. But I would suggest that the asymmetry you want to preserve depends on a further assumption that may need to be examined.
You write that the distinction only fails if “internal” means “constitutive in the same sense as the eternal relations of Father, Son, and Spirit.” But that already presupposes that there are two fundamentally different kinds of relation: those that are constitutive of divine identity (the trinitarian relations) and those that are not (God’s relation to creation).
The question is whether that division can actually be sustained once relation is taken to be ontologically primary.
If relation is truly intrinsic, eternal, and internal to God’s act of self-giving (and not merely a contingent addition), then it is not clear what it would mean for it to be non-constitutive in principle. A relation that is real, internal, and eternal, but not constitutive, seems to reintroduce (however carefully) a layer of identity that is not itself relationally actualized.
That, I think, is the deeper issue. The asymmetry you’re preserving appears to rely on the idea that God’s identity is fully constituted by the relations of Father, Son, and Spirit apart from God’s act of self-communication. But if the Spirit is not merely the terminus of intra-trinitarian procession but the living actuality of divine presence and participation, then the line between “immanent” and “economic” relation becomes much harder to draw in a strictly non-constitutive way.
To put it differently: I don’t think the alternative is that the world becomes a condition for God’s being God in the sense of supplying something God lacks. That would indeed be a mistake. But there may be another option that avoids both that conclusion and the asymmetry you want to preserve.
Namely, that what we call “God’s identity” is not something complete apart from relational actuality, but is precisely the eternal act of self-giving in which God expresses and is present. As such, the issue is not whether God is constituted by “relation to creatures” as external objects, but whether identity itself is anything other than relationally actualized.
The concern about making the world a “condition” for God’s being God seems to assume that any constitutive relation must be externally grounding or ontologically prior in a competitive sense. But if relation is intrinsic rather than external (i.e., if it is the very mode of divine actuality rather than an added dependency), then constitutivity need not imply contingency, lack, or completion through the world.
So the question may not be whether we must preserve asymmetry to avoid divine dependence, but whether “dependence” is being understood in a way that already presupposes the very ontology in question.
To be clear my claim is not that divine identity is non-relational apart from the economy; the claim is that divine identity is constituted by the eternal relations of Father, Son, and Spirit, not by the world’s participation in those relations. The Spirit makes participation real, but real participation does not mean reciprocal constitution. The creature is truly constituted by communion with God; God is not constituted by communion with the creature. I love Hart’s line that “we are modes; God is not.” That’s a non-negotiable asymmetry
I think the deepest point of tension for me concerns the Spirit specifically.
You distinguish between the constitutive intra-trinitarian relations and creation’s non-constitutive participation in those relations. But I don’t see how the Spirit’s eternal identity as communion, presence, participation, indwelling, and self-giving can remain fully intelligible apart from actual participatory presence beyond a closed divine interior.
In other words: what is “procession” if not ecstatic presence and communion? And if the Spirit is eternally the actuality of divine presence, can that actuality be meaningfully conceived in complete abstraction from manifestation and participation without reducing “Spirit” to a purely intra-divine structural relation?
Similarly with the Logos: “Word,” “Image,” and “Expression” seem already to imply manifestation and intelligibility. But the question becomes even sharper with the Spirit because the Spirit is not merely expression but presence itself.
Do you think there could truly have been “no world” in a way that leaves Logos and Spirit fully intelligible as Logos and Spirit? Or does the very intelligibility of divine triunity already imply that divine life is not a closed interior subsequently opened outward, but eternally self-expressive and participatory in principle?
I’m not suggesting the world “completes” God or supplies something lacking. I’m asking whether the asymmetry you want to preserve may still rely on conceiving divine identity as fully constituted prior to relational actuality beyond the immanent Trinity itself.
We are circling the same point now. I agree that God is not a non-relational monad, and I agree that the Spirit prevents us from imagining the economy as a merely external display. God is eternally relational, eternally self-giving, eternally communion.
But that still does not answer the decisive question: is the world constitutive of God’s being God, or not?
If yes, then God is not fully God without the world. Calling that relation “noncompetitive” or “intrinsic” does not remove the difficulty; it only redescribes it. If no, then the asymmetry I am defending stands: the economy truly reveals and communicates God, but does not constitute God.
So I would put it simply: God is not complete apart from relation, but God is complete apart from creation. The Spirit does not become Spirit by indwelling creatures; creatures become participants in divine life by receiving the Spirit. The Logos does not become Word by creating; creation manifests the Logos because the Son is eternally the Father’s Word.
That is the line I am trying to preserve. Real participation, yes. Reciprocal constitution, no.
I think the issue I’m pressing may be slightly different from the dilemma as you’re framing it.
I’m not arguing that God “needs” the world in order to become complete or fully God. I’m questioning whether Logos and Spirit are intelligible as wholly self-contained realities apart from manifestation, presence, communion, and participatory actuality altogether.
You say the Logos does not become Word by creating — agreed. But what is “Word” apart from expression and manifestation altogether? Likewise, the Spirit does not become Spirit by indwelling creatures — agreed. But what is “Spirit” apart from presence, communion, and participatory actuality altogether?
My concern is that we may still be imagining the Trinity as a fully self-contained intra-divine relationality that could remain entirely “within itself” even if no world had ever existed. But if Logos and Spirit are inherently ecstatic realities (i.e., expression and presence as such), then I’m not sure a wholly closed divine interior is ultimately intelligible in the first place. Not because creation “completes” God, but because divine actuality may be intrinsically self-expressive and participatory rather than self-contained first and communicative second.
I've followed the conversation with Aaron with interest. I'm rethreading at the top for those who read in the app.
"God could have not created" is unintelligible because that is a category error for an Actus Purus for Whom creation cannot be described in terms of a counterfactual gratuity. The free intention of the giver, alone — is both necessary and sufficient to account for creation.
This same dynamic plays out in the fact that the gratuity of creation derives not from divine counterfactual deliberation but creation's radical dependence on God as - not just the apophatically registered ex nihilo conceived as a singular event, but - the kataphatically registered ex Deo conceived as participation (creatio continua). This dynamic similarly forecloses natura pura.
The ad intra Trinity's relations, alone, are sufficient to account for an essential kenosis or Balthasar's ur-kenosis. Similarly, they sufficiently account for what we could call an ur-theophany or intrinsic self-manifestation inasmuch as the Son is the perfect self-expression (Verbum) of the Father and the Spirit is the subsisting love/unity that manifests this mutual self-gift.
We mustn't ignore, however the asymmetry between those infinite processions and the temporal missions. The fact of our finite participatory reception does not collapse the distinction between “internal to God’s eternal intention” and “constitutive of God’s eternal identity.” For one thing, that would entail a facile conflation of the concrete expressibilities of archetypal logoi and the concrete expressions of all creaturely participations - not necessarily at the expense of creaturely freedom per se, but - seriously impoverishing our common sense experiences of creaturely autonomy, which are richly textured in their manifold & multiform modes, degrees & forms.
For another, more saliently, classical theism precisely presupposes "two fundamentally different kinds of relation" vis a vis God's constitutive identity and our asymmetric participatory receptions of divine presence/presents. This is not to deny the divine - human noetic identity, only to insist that it observes the analogical interval.
The reason that we can meaningfully refer to ad intra relations is because there are semantic & structural - not ontological - univocities disclosed by the reality of participation with, as Robert so well puts it, no quarantine per a real essence - energeia distinction and its economic corollary - no natura pura, either.
Those two fundamentally different kinds of relation are precisely why St Basil forbade arithmetic or counting of divine persons:
https://theologoumenon.substack.com/p/how-to-count-persons-divine-and-human
This is a recapitulation of the same disagreement and impasse that Aaron & I located before. And he was a great & congenial conversation partner whose views I found eminently helpful as a foil. In that discussion, I described participation, itself, as the primitive; the identity‑registers were its differentiated expressions. That’s why I keep describing participation as a freely intended theophany rather than an essentialist theogony.
https://theologoumenon.substack.com/p/what-grounds-identity-participation
Even granting the immunized version of Aaron's objection — where the constitutive relation is said to be non-contingent and intrinsic, not a matter of God needing anything the world supplies — the problem hasn't actually been dissolved, only repackaged. The real issue is not whether God is completed by the world. It's whether divine self-identity is now internally structured so as to include an external term within its own identity-conditions. That's a different and subtler move than dependency, but it's still a reconfiguration — bidirectional identity-indexing, if you will — and classical theism can't absorb it without ceasing to be itself.
This is precisely where the logos/tropos distinction does its work: the archetypal logoi of all creaturely realities are eternally in the Logos as intelligibilities — Aaron can have that — but their tropic actualizations are not re-importable into divine identity without collapsing the difference between eternal form and finite instantiation. That collapse, viewed from the divine side, is the same error that appears from the creaturely side as the facile conflation of concrete expressibilities and concrete expressions — the same coin, differently faced.
Similarly, when we call the Spirit "gift," "communion," "presence" — these name a donum subsistens, a subsistent intra-divine reality, not an actuality that requires exteriorized reception to be what it is. To infer from "presence" that there must be someone outside God receiving it in order for the Spirit's actuality to be real is to confuse immanent Thirdness (pardon my Peirce) with the finite mode of its participatory reception — which is precisely the epectasis/inexhaustibility conflation I keep flagging: we do not participate in divine epectasis; we participate in divine inexhaustibility epectatically.
The DBH/JDW conversation as inflected by the communicatio idiomatum makes the point vivid: predicate logic can allow diachronic modal identities to migrate theophanically to the Son per His enhypostatic humanity without that subverting His infinite synchronic identity theogonically — push past that constraint and you haven't achieved a more relational classical theism, you've arrived at Absolute Idealism, the Full Monty Hegel. It's not that such a move cannot be sustained intelligently and coherently — it's that sustaining it coherently requires abandoning classical theism for a different metaphysical order altogether, which is the most precise way I know to name our impasse.
So the asymmetry isn't a bald presupposition Aaron can simply interrogate. It's a consequence: divine simplicity cannot coherently include extrinsic variability within its identity-conditions and remain simplicity. The moment it does, you don't have a more relational God — you have a different kind of being altogether, which is not the One we worship.
Yes indeed - on our classical theist account there’s no question that it is incoherent to consider creation to be constitutive of God as God is a se. No longer can one speak of the “I AM” - God who is simple, actus purus, in whom there is no imperfection, no unrealized potential awaiting actualization.
I think this reveals the precise point where my ontology parts company with the classical framework.
You continue interpreting intrinsic manifestation through the lens of unrealized potential, supplementation, or incompletion, as though if divine actuality necessarily manifests, then God must somehow require creation in order to become fully actual.
But that is not my claim.
I am not proposing movement from non-manifestation to manifestation as fulfillment of a lack. I am proposing that actuality itself is intrinsically self-manifestive. The issue is not unrealized potency awaiting completion, but whether wholly self-contained actuality is finally intelligible at all.
A saint necessarily loving All does not imply deficiency or unrealized potential. It implies actuality faithful to nature. Likewise, my claim is that divine actuality necessarily manifests not because God lacks something, but because manifestation belongs intrinsically to what divine actuality is.
So the disagreement now seems even deeper to me: classical theism fundamentally identifies perfection with self-contained completeness, whereas I increasingly suspect perfection may instead be intrinsically expressive plenitude.
John, this is an extraordinarily thoughtful articulation of the classical position, and I genuinely appreciate both the precision and the charitable clarity with which you’ve framed the disagreement. I also think you are correct that what is ultimately at stake here is not a minor adjustment within classical theism, but a divergence at the level of metaphysical first principles.
What I increasingly find myself unable to affirm is precisely the intelligibility of wholly self-contained actuality, even in refined trinitarian form. That is the deepest point of tension for me.
So while I fully affirm the eternal processions, the asymmetry between Creator and creature, the non-identity of finite manifestations with divine essence, and the inexhaustibility of divine life, I continue to struggle with the idea that manifestation, expression, presence, communion, and kenosis can remain wholly fulfilled ad intra without contingent manifestation belonging intrinsically to actuality itself.
This is why I now increasingly formulate the issue as follows: actuality intrinsically manifests contingently. Not because finite creatures are necessary beings in themselves, nor because God depends upon an external ontological counterpart, but because I no longer think actuality and manifestation are finally separable realities.
So when I interrogate asymmetry or classical simplicity, I am not merely rejecting inherited axioms arbitrarily. I am questioning whether wholly self-contained actuality is actually intelligible once personhood, manifestation, energies, participation, and kenosis are all taken with full seriousness. At that point, contingent manifestation no longer appears to me as “extrinsic variability” added onto divine identity, but as intrinsic contingent expression of divine actuality itself.
You are absolutely right that classical theism cannot absorb that move without becoming something else. I agree. But I increasingly suspect that this is because classical theism still preserves (however refined) the intelligibility of actuality fully complete “within itself,” whereas I no longer think actuality and manifestation are finally separable realities at all.
So I think you are right to identify this as a genuine metaphysical divergence rather than a merely verbal dispute. And I deeply appreciate the clarity with which you’ve helped expose exactly where that divergence lies.
Aaron, I think the real divergence is now fully on the table. I think I might be able to honor your intuition — that manifestation is intrinsic to actuality — even while pressing on what I think could be a tension internal to your own formulation.
I will deploy my own cosmotheandrism as a resource in exactly the same way that I have appropriated Jordan Daniel Wood's "Creation as Incarnation." It makes my own account neo-Hegelian with an Objective (not Absolute) Idealism. I didn't manufacture this whole cloth & idiosyncratically but out of Fr Bracken's Divine Matrix. Here are some contemporaries whom I considered allied, architectonically:
https://theologoumenon.substack.com/p/why-a-properly-triadic-participatory
You want to affirm two things simultaneously: that contingent creatures are not necessary beings, and that actuality and manifestation are not finally separable. But those two commitments are pulling against each other, and I don't think the seam holds.
Here is why. If I say "fire intrinsically produces heat," I mean heat is not accidental to fire — it belongs to what fire is. A fire that produces no heat is, by that definition, not fully fire. Now you are saying something parallel: manifestation intrinsically belongs to actuality. Fine so far. But then you add: and the manifestation is contingent — meaning it may or may not occur, and which specific manifestations occur is not fixed in advance.
The problem is that if manifestation belongs intrinsically to what actuality is, then an actuality that is not manifesting is — on your own terms — not fully actual. The absence of manifestation would represent something unrealized in actuality itself. But that is precisely what potency means: a real orientation toward something not yet actualized, without which the being in question is incomplete. You have, in effect, reintroduced something functioning like potency into the divine actuality you are trying to refine. The word "intrinsic" has already made the commitment, and "contingent" cannot undo it. The escape hatch doesn't work: you cannot borrow the ontological weight of "intrinsic" and then disclaim the consequences by calling the result "contingent." The "intrinsic" is doing the theogonic work even when "contingent" is sincerely meant to block it.
My own resolution considers creation as eternal and eternity as created — which sounds paradoxical but is a precise architectural claim. Most of this debate has been conducted as if there are only two registers: God on one side, the temporal world on the other. On that binary, your move is understandable: if the logoi are genuinely in the Logos, and the temporal world is just those logoi instantiated, then the temporal world seems to belong intrinsically to what God is. But that binary is precisely what my framework refuses.
There are three registers, not two. The first is the infinite and timeless ad intra processions — Father, Son, Spirit — pure actuality, no before or after, no potency, no creaturely character whatsoever. The third is the historical and temporal domain we all inhabit — circumscriptive, embodied, contingent creaturely existence unfolding in time. But between them sits a second register: the eternal and everlasting domain where the archetypal logoi of all creaturely realities live in the Logos. This domain is genuinely eternal — it has no temporal beginning or end in the way our history does.
But — and this is the crucial move — it is already creaturely. It is not a piece of divine identity. It is the most primordial, most eternal layer of creation, but it is creation nonetheless. Think of Hawking's no-boundary universe or the background-independent spacetime of loop quantum gravity: no edge, no moment of beginning, finite yet unbounded — and still not infinite in the divine sense. The eternal-everlasting domain is something like that: boundless from within, but not God.
Now the inference you need becomes visible as a jump over a missing step. You want to move from "logoi are genuinely in the Logos" — which I grant fully — all the way to "therefore their temporal instantiations are constitutive of divine identity." But there is a more precise address for what you are rightly tracking: their temporal instantiations are constitutive of Christ's enhypostatic humanity, semantically and structurally univocal to His own diachronic modal and relational identities. The communicatio idiomatum handles exactly this — temporal, modal, and relational predicates migrate theophanically to the Son per His enhypostatic humanity, which is precisely where they belong and precisely as far as they can coherently go. Theophany, not theogony. The eternal-everlasting domain is not God completing Himself through creation. It is creation at its most eternal depth, participating in God. Those are not the same thing, and collapsing them is precisely the move that turns theophany into theogony.
This means manifestation IS intrinsic to actuality — but the intrinsic manifestation is the ur-theophany of the immanent Trinity, fully actual and inexhaustibly complete, not requiring the circumscriptive-temporal register to be what it is. The economic missions are real participations in that ur-theophanic actuality, not its conditions.
The deeper issue is intelligibility itself. Your position defines intelligibility in a totalizing direction: actuality becomes fully intelligible when its manifestations are included within its identity-conditions, potencies progressively reduced to act, the system approaching a terminus of finite consistency and completeness. But that is precisely what makes the Absolute Idealist's God too small — Gödel-like rubrics dissolve because the system is in principle completable.
The God of classical theism is wholly incomprehensible not because He falls short of intelligibility but because He is supremely and infinitely intelligible — inexhaustible in a way no totalizing system can contain. His actuality is not rest at the end of motion but rest as infinite motion, where the concept of unfulfilled potency simply fails to refer.
On my account, our heavenly mansions are Hilbert Hotels — infinite rooms, infinite guests, always room for more. On the Absolute Idealist account, the Hilbert Hotel becomes a motel where the lights have been left on but a no vacancy sign hung — there was no room at Bethlehem, and even if we grant Jesus the metaphorical room that framework needs Him to occupy, the Father and Spirit are still turned away at the door, because they aren't persons, just moments.
¹ Even the eternal-everlasting domain's infinity is not divine infinity by another name. A Hilbert Hotel is infinite — it has no last room — but it remains a countable, structural infinity, the kind Cantor designated ℵ₀. Divine inexhaustibility is not a larger cardinal; it is a qualitatively different order of reality altogether, one for which the entire apparatus of transfinite arithmetic remains, as Aquinas would say, in the genus of creatures. The eternal-everlasting domain may be unbounded from within, but it is bounded by what it is not — namely, God. Divine infinity has no such exterior.
John, this is extremely helpful, and I think your three-register account clarifies the strongest possible alternative to what I’m proposing.
I agree that theophany must not collapse into theogony, and I am not trying to make God become God through temporal history or finite creaturely actualization. But I think the pressure point remains: if the eternal-everlasting domain is already creaturely, then you too have denied “God without creation” in the simple classical sense. The remaining question is whether this eternal creaturely register is merely theophanic participation, or whether its very necessity already shows that contingent manifestation belongs intrinsically to divine actuality.
I also do not think “intrinsic contingent manifestation” reintroduces potency into God unless contingency is defined as unrealized possibility awaiting completion. That is precisely the definition I am rejecting. I mean contingency as finite, dependent, non-exhaustive expression. On that account, manifestation can belong intrinsically to actuality without any manifestation exhausting or completing actuality.
So I do not see my view as totalizing divine intelligibility. Quite the opposite: no manifestation, no world, no history, and no system exhausts Source. My claim is not that creation completes God, but that actuality is not intelligible as wholly self-contained apart from manifestation.
Where I think we still differ is that your account grants an eternal creaturely domain but then protects divine identity by treating it as participation without constitutive force. I understand the move, but I am still asking whether that distinction is explanatory or simply the point at which classical asymmetry is reasserted.
In her 2012 thesis, The Theological Significance of Chance: Temporal Divine Action Discerned through Probability and Complexity Theory, at St Mark's National Theological Centre, School of Theology, Charles Sturt University, Alice Murray argued that Jenson’s and Bracken’s acknowledgements of the possibility of a tri-polar presence of God have resonance with a three domain model of reality.
She distinguished three domains of reality by their relation to our concept of time:
1. God’s infinite, timeless domain of embracing love from which creation and hence
time itself was enacted,
2. The eternal, everlasting, spiritual domain which is the all-embracing dimension of
creation, and
3. The material, transient domain in which the temporal process of the universe is played out.
I had previously appropriated Joe Bracken's Divine Matrix through the lenses of Bonaventure & Peirce. Murray's framing furnished even more coherence.
When I'd first read JDW's Whole Mystery manuscript, I responded to him that it read to me as being fully consonant with my understandings of both Fr Gelpi's Maximian Narrative Christology & Fr Bracken's Divine Matrix.
It is with Gelpi & Bracken (Murray's) that I've (constructively?) appropriated JDW ever since. When I first encountered DBH's body of work, I engaged it as being fully consonant with my understandings of Fr Lonergan's works.
While I receive DBH's Christomorphic vision as theo- bedrock as in conversation with my above-mentioned Jesuit co-religionists, as I mentioned to Fr Al a few days ago: While JDW goes beyond DBH and sharpens the old Christ-specification pencil further, on my reading, Jordan has not broken the point.
If one approriate's JDW through Bracken (Murray's), where does that leave the argument?
DBH gets the veto: The infinite & timeless God is not made God by the world. God is not completed by creation, history, evil, or even by the Incarnation. This is the domain of nondeterminate being without modality & of divine archetypal intentions.
JDW gets his finite eternal & everlasting creation & Incarnation as historically & temporally manifest in Bethlehem. These are the finite created domains of determinate being & modality, wherein the Son became & eternally becomes God. That's another story. The greatest one ever told.
Yes agreed - however I am not sure that Jordan is making that move with DBH or not.
There is one concern with Wood’s premise however. Tom Belt pointed this out. The issue is not simply whether creation belongs to God’s eternal purpose, but how that purpose relates to the Father’s eternal begetting of the Son. As I see it, yes the world is eternally intended through the Son, but it is not what makes the Son Son. That is to say that the Son’s sonship has its meaning in the Father’s eternal begetting, not in the world’s coming to be.
But Tom's concern should dissolve once Wood is read through Bracken-Murray's three-domain map — infinite/timeless, eternal/everlasting, temporal — where eternity itself is a created predicate belonging to domain 2, not domain 1.
The Son's diachronic identities — modal and relative — generated through his operation of his eternal and historical enhypostatic humanity do migrate to his person via the communicatio idiomatum. That traffic is real. But it runs to the person, not back into the infinite synchronic identity of Sonship in domain 1. The hypostasis receives; domain 1 remains nondeterminate. DBH's veto stands, and Wood gets exactly what he needs — just with a more precise address.
Yes agreed, it would dissolve - however I am not sure that Jordan is making that move with DBH or not.
That's why I so often resort to "my (constructive?) appropriation."
To be clear, while I insist on a Hartian participatory bedrock, I otherwise consider my Bracken-inflected Woodsian Maximian interpretation & Christo-grammar as a defensible theologoumenon, i.e. not the only coherent approach.
I’m on board with Christo-logic, where it breaks down for me is when it takes a Hegelian turn.
I think we have to be careful about which lens of Hegel one appropriates when it comes to JDW. I know he reads Hegel through a very particular hermeneutic that involves the “fragments of love,” which I’m sure he’s mentioned openly before and has to me in questions I’ve had with some of this directed towards him.
I’m often baffled by the accounts of non-knowing that occurs within the divine life, even in relationality. I sometimes wonder if that “hiddenness” within the divine life is where we find the answers to the question of need/want/must when it comes to creation. For example, when Christ says that even the Son does not know when all things will end, only the Father, or when Scripture says that the Spirit searches the depths of God, aren’t we left with this moment of “why” that is left there hanging in the breeze.
We can center all of these discussions on love/logic that is made manifest, etc. but fundamentally there is something operating that, and most would hate this in the simplicity camp, needs to/wants to/must move and does. So in effect, the “all things” that are in Christ, and by virtue of that the Father must also be things that have to have a connective strain of necessary purpose but what that rational is lies inside the depths of something we may never fully understand on this side of the Aeon. I like “understand” here more than know. (I always lean towards Schelling more than Hegel. After all, to know something, one must truly understand it and be able explain it, or else it has no content to the person or identity. It’s mere fact or speculation.) The why of all this may be the unanswerable, not so much the who or how.
The logos brings about the will of the Father, and yet, that will transcends even its own knowledge in some capacity. (Unless Jesus was just playing coy with the Disciples…although He repeats it in Acts to, so I assume He really doesn’t know the answer to that profoundly interesting point.)
This may also seem somewhat mytho-poetic in scope, but I think it’s the only way to put an analogy to the point.
I'm ok with neo-Hegelian, which is how I've (mis?)appropriated JDW. https://theologoumenon.substack.com/p/the-synchronic-diachronic-complementarity
I scratched my head to recall certain things JDW had said about Bulgakov in the past. Those lead me to believe that JDW could well be structurally open to making that Bracken-inflected move.
https://theologoumenon.substack.com/p/interpreting-dbh-and-jdw-thru-bulgakov
A follow to the above. What I think JDW's primary focus has been (and not). https://theologoumenon.substack.com/p/how-jdws-monistic-christology-can