Kevin has offered up some soteriological cogitations in reply to my last post. I will reply to his post from the soteriological standpoint we've been pursuing later this week, and if possible, combine with it my reply to any forthcoming posts by Darren. But in Kevin's reply he refers to my descriptions of God's person vis a vis his nature as an “assertion of an impossible 'superessential personhood.'” There's other talk of “avoiding rational antinomies by fleeing rationality altogether” and of seeking “to escape such logical contradictions by asserting even more of them” and so forth. Kevin's after all, is not merely a rational God, but a God who happily conforms and confines himself to logical categories.
One is very tempted to be a bit snarky here and say that the Church has never known such a God, but, alas, that would be saying too little and too much, an assertion Kevin will likely find incomprehensible. It is saying too much in that while God cannot be confined or conformed to logical categories, since God is far beyond human knowing, God is, after all, the font of all truth, and as such does not actually commit logical fallacies or contradictions, nor can such be truthfully predicated of him (as long as the “him” we're speaking of is the Personal Trinity, but more on that in a moment). But it is saying too little because, while it is true that God cannot be conformed or confined to mere logical categories, in point of fact, God is, in his essence and his Person ultimately incomprehensible. That is to say, what can be known of God not only does not begin to adequately treat of God, but even that which is truly known itself exceeds the human ability to comprehend.
But with those provisos, we do know God in ways that are true and real, although partial and never fully comprehended by us. And since my soteriological reflections depend in large part on the Personhood of God, and of the Second Person of the Trinity, I thought it important to execute a sidebar here to clarify my own contentions and dispel Kevin's mischaracterization of those contentions as irrational and illogical.
Part of the difficulty is that Kevin and I come from two different traditions. He has accepted the Augustinian tradition, handed down through the Reformed theology he has espoused, while I accept the tradition of the Cappadocians which has come down through what is somewhat mistakenly called the Eastern Church.
One of the seminal texts on the Trinity, for Christians East and West, is St. Gregory the Theologian's first theological oration on the Son (Oration XXIX, the third theological oration), especially chapters 2-3. Here St. Gregory articulates what is the standard Orthodox understanding of God: the monar