Thomas, that bogeyman of open theists, he of the absolute, changeless, impassible, atemporal, impersonal deity – that Thomas says (a point picked up by Edwards) “it pertains to the idea of goodness to communicate itself to others.” Hence, if God is good He is necessarily self-giving; He is not the Chief but the Chief Servant. Being the greatest of the good, He is the servant of all – by definition.
On this assumption, the incarnation is no contradiction of God’s character, but its manifestation. If being good is being self-communicating, then the “highest good” is to communicate oneself “in the highest manner to the creature.” Barth has nothing on Thomas here: We know God’s glory in the face of Jesus.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
The Revival of Patristics
On May 25, 1990, the renowned patristics scholar Charles Kannengiesser, S.J., delivered a lecture at the annual…
The Enduring Legacy of the Spanish Mystics
Last autumn, I spent a few days at my family’s coastal country house in northwestern Spain. The…
The trouble with blogging …
The trouble with blogging, RJN, is narrative structure. Or maybe voice. Or maybe diction. Or maybe syntax.…
