From: "D. F. Siemens, Jr." <dfsiemensjr@juno.com>
Sorry, Howard, but your questions box God into human patterns. This is why
the older philosophers recognized that the only way to approach the deity is
through the via negativa. The Christian way, of course, is to see the Father
in the Son, the only way to truly know him.
Sorry, Dave, but the traditional answers -- which ascribe to God various
constructed/conjectured attributes as being "atemporal", "outside of time",
or "beyond time", or as "seeing all time at once," or as "knowing contingent
outcomes in advance without destroying their contingency" -- put us in a
position of reciting things that have no referent in our experience, only in
our imaginations. In that circumstance, I thing we may ask questions and
challenge familiar mantras. Theology must be an active workshop for people
living & experiencing today, not a museum for displaying only the work of
"older philosophers."
Howard Van Till
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