Honestly, I think you’re better than these sorts of comments.

So, it’s perfectly appropriate to suggest another paradigm for another day with other emphases. Bauckham, in God Crucified, seems to be on the trajectory you’ve attempted to articulate here, Halden. To his mind, he sees the early Jewish (monotheistic) Christians asking: Who is Jesus? not What is Jesus?

You should read (I suppose you already have done?) his essay on a Reformed account of kenoticism in SJT. He lectured a series on this too which is being published soon.

I have a question, I’m not looking for a debate or anything; I just want to make sure I’m understanding you correctly.

You’re saying that there are basically “three wills” and one “one will” (like the “one and many” thinking)? The former correlating to the hypostasis, the latter to the ousia of God; and that these “wills” actually coinhere in the one will and purpose of God . . . which in fact then actually gives us a theology of perichoresis of the wills of God (which turns out to really be a one will of God). Am I tracking with you?

Perhaps I shouldn’t have got sidetracked (though I really am curious if you were serious about the flat-earth thing, or if the joke’s on me and I’m not getting it). Recall that at the beginning of our discussion you claimed that I was begging the question by presuming an substantialist ontology. It’s not unfair for me to defend myself from that charge, or — as I was mostly doing — trying to figure out what in the world I was being accused of.

My intentions were twofold: I was trying to figure out what exactly you meant by that a “substantialist ontology”, and whether it characterizes Nicene Christianity. The point of bringing up Aquinas (etc.) was simply to determine the breadth of your critique, not to get an in depth analysis of each thinker. I just wanted you to come right out and say whose thinking exactly suffers from the supposedly flawed ontology–again, not necessarily a list, but just the general picture. That seems to have offended you, as you waffled between limiting your critique to Augustinian “neo-platonism”, to “most of… Christian tradition” (!). If I haven’t been able to make substantive criticisms it’s because the target is changing so widely.

I do think the issue of ontology is interesting, so if you wish to engage about that, I might comment over at the post you directed me to (Jenson’s on the fast-track reading list, BTW), if you’re open to it. If not, I can rest here. For the purposes of this post, I’d just like to get a definite idea of generally how much Christian tradition falls under the ambit of a substantialist ontology and how much does not.

If you really want to actually explore these matters, I suggest you read Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology and see where that takes you. He certainly engages everyone you’ve brought up and formulates a doctrine of the Trinity that is quite amenable to what I’ve suggested in this post.

Honestly I’m tired of the little rhetorical games you’re playing. You don’t respond to the actual points I’m making, instead you just orbit out make these meta-comments about how if I don’t get down with whatever you are saying I’m clearly abandoning everything Christianity’s ever believed. And somehow I’m the one making gross generalizations? Please.

I’m very familiar with this strategy of doing nothing but dropping names and pretending at sophistication while just taking the same tired pot-shots over and over again. Do you really expect the comments on a blog thread to be able to expound, in detail the subtitles of every single theologian in the history of the church? You’re just blowing smoke because you don’t seem to like people questioning your pristine, unique snowflake of an ontology.

You haven’t made one material objection to anything, just gone in circles asserting that whatever you think about ontology is somehow the only thing that makes sense. Sorry, that’s not an argument.

And as long as we’re making meta-comments that don’t advance anything real, why don’t you just admit that you think certain philosphical constructs are the gospel itself? You clearly do.

I think our discussion has run its course at this point.

Um, what? Among the educated Christians, certainly among theologians, the earth was, as a rule, not only known to be round, but its circumference was known as well. I’m guessing this is a cunning bit of sarcasm.

Hart begins that passage by saying that, on the face of it St. Gregory’s thought is similar to Plotinus’, then he develops the movement of St. Gregory’s theology, then begins to use it to take up slamming Plotinus again (around page 207 and he continues his assault almost every time Neoplatonism comes up for pretty much for the rest of the book). It’s strange of you to suggest that Hart is a neoplatonist when he explicitly regards it as an important moment in the advent of Nihilism in the West.

I think we’ve got to the heart of your critique, though. You lump together the diverse Platonic and Aristotelian traditions together into one ontology in reckless disregard to any differences or subtleties which might be important to the issue so that you can disregard the traditions as a whole (much as my Christian grade-school teachers used to talk about the dangers of “post-modernism”), despite the fact that, broadly, the Greek language of essentialism was precisely what was at issue at the Councils of Nicea and Constantinople. Your critique of essentialism, as you’ve presented it here, is crude enough include (at least) all of the Patristic and most Medieval theologians within its ambit. Certainly the classical formulation of the Trinity is very suspect under such a view. Why not just own up to that? Why do we have to do this dance about how you object to Augustine’s tacit ontology, but not that of most other Fathers?

Where is your criticism of “essentialism”? Or even a cogent exposition of what that means? Is it on your blog, or are you relying on the work of another theologian or philosopher? Or is that just a catchall term for an incoherent conception of those dastardly Greeks?