Inaugural Post
Hurray for blogs! Unfortunately its late, and I don't have anything particularly novel, relevant, or otherwise humorous to write on this, the inaugural post of a blog emerging late into an already saturated marketplace of free opinion. I might think of something better to write tomorrow or the next day.
Ok, well, thats not necessarily true (both the good idea part, and the part about not having anything to say). Though I'm certainly not going to attempt it right now, Halden has posted a "worst theological problem meme," regarding theologians near and dear to the heart of any particular blogger willing to respond. As such in the coming days I might attempt to cobble together a critique of Wolfhart Pannenberg, which will reflect a smaller version of mine already existing (and cluttering) Halden's blog.
Anyway, its been fun writing like I actually have readers, even if its been essentially two paragraphs of nothing. hopefully I will have more theologically relevant things to say in the future, so that this late night impulse to finally create a blog might not go to waste. And to not make this intital post totally otiose, I'll leave with a quote from the verbose rhetoric of Hart:
"For Christian thought...analogy is not a discourse that recovers a lost or obscured identity; it does not discover a likeness that has been made unlike through the defatigation, palliation, or enervation of emanation; nor does it restore or repristinate a likeness made corrupt by its decline into materiality; nor does it disclose the ground of a metaphysical homonymy between the transcendent and the immanent, a dialectical drama of negation and determination. Certainly the analogical never offers an epistemic grasp of the divine, such that God comes to occupy a more and more stable place in a taxonomy of concepts. Insofar as analogy describes the way in which creation manifests the God who gives being, difference is the first term of the likeness, and speaks of the trinitarian God who always has distance and difference. And so analogy widens in the interval of difference even as it closes it, asserts an ever greater dissimilitude embracing every similitude. Such is the nature of the ontological difference that analogy identifies: the god whose 'infinite form' comprises all distance is himself the distance, the interval, between God and creation. God's infinite otherness comprehends all creation's likenesses. Theological analogy, proceeding from an analogia entis, does not identify substances within a hierarchy of substance, but succeeds as analogy precisely in its rhetorical excessiveness: not simply its hyperbolic intimation of an unsayable otherness, but its power to eventuate in ever greater ranges of supplementation, ever more elaborate and intricate metaphorical inventions. Analogy -- as the dynamism by which language preserves and crosses the interval of the metaphoric and metonymic, the apophatic and cataphatic, the qualitative and quantitative infinite -- is that infinitely open rhetoric that is still always exceeded by, and is always reaching out toward, the plenitude of the truth into which the Holy Spirit leads, the divine utterance by which God is God."
David Bentley Hart. "The Beauty of The Infinite." pp.314-315
Ok, well, thats not necessarily true (both the good idea part, and the part about not having anything to say). Though I'm certainly not going to attempt it right now, Halden has posted a "worst theological problem meme," regarding theologians near and dear to the heart of any particular blogger willing to respond. As such in the coming days I might attempt to cobble together a critique of Wolfhart Pannenberg, which will reflect a smaller version of mine already existing (and cluttering) Halden's blog.
Anyway, its been fun writing like I actually have readers, even if its been essentially two paragraphs of nothing. hopefully I will have more theologically relevant things to say in the future, so that this late night impulse to finally create a blog might not go to waste. And to not make this intital post totally otiose, I'll leave with a quote from the verbose rhetoric of Hart:
"For Christian thought...analogy is not a discourse that recovers a lost or obscured identity; it does not discover a likeness that has been made unlike through the defatigation, palliation, or enervation of emanation; nor does it restore or repristinate a likeness made corrupt by its decline into materiality; nor does it disclose the ground of a metaphysical homonymy between the transcendent and the immanent, a dialectical drama of negation and determination. Certainly the analogical never offers an epistemic grasp of the divine, such that God comes to occupy a more and more stable place in a taxonomy of concepts. Insofar as analogy describes the way in which creation manifests the God who gives being, difference is the first term of the likeness, and speaks of the trinitarian God who always has distance and difference. And so analogy widens in the interval of difference even as it closes it, asserts an ever greater dissimilitude embracing every similitude. Such is the nature of the ontological difference that analogy identifies: the god whose 'infinite form' comprises all distance is himself the distance, the interval, between God and creation. God's infinite otherness comprehends all creation's likenesses. Theological analogy, proceeding from an analogia entis, does not identify substances within a hierarchy of substance, but succeeds as analogy precisely in its rhetorical excessiveness: not simply its hyperbolic intimation of an unsayable otherness, but its power to eventuate in ever greater ranges of supplementation, ever more elaborate and intricate metaphorical inventions. Analogy -- as the dynamism by which language preserves and crosses the interval of the metaphoric and metonymic, the apophatic and cataphatic, the qualitative and quantitative infinite -- is that infinitely open rhetoric that is still always exceeded by, and is always reaching out toward, the plenitude of the truth into which the Holy Spirit leads, the divine utterance by which God is God."
David Bentley Hart. "The Beauty of The Infinite." pp.314-315
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