Can Being itself be the Christain God?

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Magritte wrote:
Joe, your God is not simply necessary being - your God is an amalgam of attributes and qualities, over and above necessary being.
For example, you insist that your God is, following Tillich, "not less than personal". But this quality of being not less than personal does not follow from just necessary being. There is nothing about necessary being that requires us to consider it as something more than completely impersonal. And the same follows for all the other attributes of God - that God is loving, and caring, and is capable of having a relationship with man - that God intercedes in history in various ways, that God is just and merciful and so on..

.Meta: you are confused about the implications of necessity. in the sense in whi9ch I use it it means not contingent, it is not a limit on the nature of God.

through his energies (E Orthodox concept) God is immaent and can do contingent things. for example, God did not have to create the world. sure the divine would have a consciousness but he can manifest i9t to us in such a way that we feel we are communicating, whereas if we saw Gods consciousness truly we would not have a clue about it.

there are thinkers and scientists such as Gaswamy who see the basis of reality as mind. there is a connection between love and being. Balthasar says love = being.

that's enough to establish any attribute I see in God



Magritte: Now you may of course say that necessary being is an essential property of God, and I'd agree, given my understanding of your conception of God. But while necessary being may be necessary to your conception of God, it is not sufficient to establish your God, unless you can specify how all the other myriad attributes, qualities and facets of your God follow from necessary being

Metacrock:
(1) certainly is. the TS argument and the modal are based upon the concept.

(2) that's a different matter it does not support your original thesis. you said my God is made up of contingencies, now this says can't prove God. two different ideas.

I've written more than enough on this blog to see the folly in this argument.


God as being itself part I



part II

Tillich has been so criticized as "liberal," and clearly he did not believe in theism. Yet there is a very conservative Catholic thinker, friend of JPII, who pushed the being itself i9dea and there is no way Von Balthasar can be said to be non-theist. read my article Hans Urs Von Balthasar and Being itselfly