http://mliccione.blogspot.com/search?q=essence%2Fenergies

...if we take the term 'divine essence' to mean God as he necessarily is apart from what he does, if follows that the divine essence is incommunicable; for communication would be a complex of "energies," i.e. divine actions, and nothing can communicate that which it is regardless of communication. It also follows that there is a real distinction between the divine essence and the divine "energies," which are God as what he eternally does. (I say "eternally" not "necessarily" in this case because some of God's actions are atemporal and unalterable yet free and thus not necessitated by his essence or nature). But suppose we take the 'divine essence' as Aquinas ordinarily does, to mean God as what he eternally is. Given further Aquinas' doctrine that God is actus purus, and thus has no unrealized potentialities, it follows that there is no "real" distinction between the divine essence and the divine actions or "energies." And that is also a corollary of his doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS). So the question whether the essence/energies distinction is compatible with DDS depends on what one takes the term 'divine essence' to signify.

Jeff: My difference with Tom is that I can't see how conscious apprehension can occur in zero time duration.

Tom: No difference between us there Bro. I agree. Nothing “happens” without taking time to happen (if that’s what you’re getting at). I just place the whole context in time. In other words, my point long ago is just that it doesn’t take time for God to “catch up” with reality and apprehend it (just as it doesn’t take time for us apprehend our own self-conscious state). But since that which is apprehended is temporal, apprehension is a continuous, ever-changing, infallible sentient account of reality.

This is the whole issue really (with consciousness, relationality, and Process). We freeze these events and relations in zero-time slices only for the sake of speaking and conceptualizing them in logical terms. But I don’t think there are any zero-time ‘actualities’. All is in process. That’s where I think process is right on. My beef with process is their abandonment of the Trinity and hence their requiring a necessary God-world relationship that’s in process.

Corey: Nope. Zeno's pardox does NOT apply here. I know that's the "numbers game" Tom has in mind, but it doesn't work because we're not dividing a finite interval into infinitessimal sub intervals (a POSSIBLE infinite); we're dealing with a infinite series of discrete events, an ACTUAL infinite.

Tom: I’m not convinced Zeno doesn’t apply. When you traverse the distance between you and the wall, you traverse all the halves that compose the distance. You have to walk through them. To dismiss this because we can’t actually count them doesn’t really alleviate anything for me. The “halves” are there. To say they're just potential seems to beg the question.

BUT...Corey’s right; my main beef is with the personal/relational fallout. I could be wrong about Zeno. I’ve never put too much stock in the mathematics.

Corey: I'm guessing the fundamental rub here for Tom is with us envisioning what the experience of uneventful (timeless) loving relationality could possibly be like. In a word, it sounds profoundly BORING!

Tom: Not so much boredom. Boredom is a meaningful notion and it describes (I guess) an impotent relationality. That's a meaningful category. Atemporal personal relationality isn't boring to my mind, it's relationally vacuous.

Corey: But honestly, as far as the boredom thing goes, from my limited perspect it seems the same can be said for an infinite past. Nothing new ever happens.

Tom: I bought my second daughter Jessica a wonderful kaleidoscope two years ago. The light enters through a glass compartment that’s filled with colored stones afloat in a clear oil. When you look through the prism you never see the same pattern twice because the stones never repeat their position. The design is such that equal intensity of beauty and color rules out repetition. It’s an unending movement of equally intense and brilliant colors. It's just a picture, but it captures my idea of the intensity of personal divine relationality, love, and beauty which doesn’t change (on the one hand) while God is in constant process (an unending and creative exchange of love and affirmation) on the other. The process IS part of what constitutes the beauty of divine creativity. To my mind, (the exercise of) divine creativity does not come into the picture with creation. But this is what Corey HAS to believe. Since God is atemporal sans creation, for Corey God's choice to create is the first creative thing God ever does. In my view, divine creativity is constitutive of necessary divine relationality. So instead of an infinite past of “nothing new ever happens” (which totally misses my concern) I suggest something more like an unending celebration of “Look at that! Yes! Oh, cooool! Wow! Ahhhhh!” as God enjoys his own infinite creative self in an endless display of reposturing.

I remember reading Craig's God and Time where he defends the possibility of atemporal personhood and thinking it was the worst part of an otherwise excellent book.

BUT...this is all academic, right? Now that a temporal world is here, God's temporal. End of story.

Tom

Post Edited (MANY) : 5/31/2007 6:22:59 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (Starkman) : 5/30/2007 3:53:13 PM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (MANY) : 6/1/2007 1:07:43 PM (GMT-5)

And B., if I'm way off, so be it. I still have to conceive of God as some kind of person that can communicate with me. That's all I'm doing. I'm thinking of the act of communication in the only way I know how and, then, taking those ideas to their logical conclusion. It may be that God can know and communicate without doing so the way we do. I'm not worried about that. I'm game for God being abundantly more than I can think. It's about what can we conceptually know about God's capacities (which may be a very small subset of the whole). Mystery is not conceptual knowledge that we can say.

But note, I say "may be a very small subset of the whole." For you to say that God consciously knows all points discretely at the same time is just as much an assumption as saying He can't. I'm trying to take human apprehension as far as it can go and then ALLOW for mystery beyond that. I don't REQUIRE mystery just for the sake of requiring it. There needs to be a reason to require it. And you never give me one.

Post Edited (jefscott) : 6/1/2007 8:10:43 PM (GMT-5)

Corey: We use the symbol Pi to represent the relation between the circumference of a circle to it's diameter. We use 3.1415926535... to numerically represent Pi. But the thing behind Pi is just a circle, which can be immediately apprehended. God has no need for all the digits of Pi; that's OUR little language game we made up.

Tom: Right. That's what I was trying to say. You got right to it!

HOPKO  http://www.oca.org/OCchapter.asp?SID=2&ID=29

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is not merely an "article of faith" which men are called to "believe." It is not simply a dogma which the Church requires its good members to "accept on faith." Neither is the doctrine of the Holy Trinity the invention of scholars and academicians, the result of intellectual speculation and philosophical thinking.

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity arises from man's deepest experiences with God. It comes from the genuine living knowledge of those who have come to know God in faith.

The paragraphs which follow are intended to show something of what God has revealed of Himself to the saints of the Church. To grasp the words and concepts of the doctrine of the Trinity is one thing; to know the Living Reality of God behind these words and concepts is something else. We must work and pray so that we might pass beyond every word and concept about God and to come to know Him for ourselves in our own living union with Him: "The Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit" (Eph 2: 18-22).