Ricky:

So there’s God

Who has concepts of us in His mind even before creation

And then there’s creation

Where those concepts are made manifest in flesh

Ig?

Nick:

For me, I take a more radical view on the topic. I think the concepts of creation that God has are part of his act of creation itself. “Free knowledge”

Ricky:

Interesting. I was thinking about that as well but wasn’t sure of which view I held.

That’s a good way to distinguish us from the Person of Jesus, for example.

Because altho He was conceived in flesh, His concept/Spirit always existed, whereas our concepts were created.

So do you take it the concepts existed prior to the physical act of creation then?

Yeah I reject the notion of the members of the trinity sitting around prior to creation planning what’s in creation. To me that planning comes with the creation itself.

All in one act.

Ricky:

Ok so our concepts existed once creation existed? And by creation, you mean the universe at large, correct?

Well the universe is one part of that. I take the universe to denote the entire spatiotemporal world. Where the actual world, to use modal terms would include all immaterial things.

At least some immaterial things that are created

Not sure I’d say angels are In creation obviously

Nor heaven. But it’s get murky ontological where we place such

Jimmy Stephens:

It’s influenced mainly by Frame’s triperspectivalism and Dooyeweerd’s aspectual narrativism.

From the Neo-Calvinists the great insight is that the existence of creation is not a substance, it is a meaning.

From Frame the great insight is that the economic Trinity undergirds and shapes the natures (read: meaning) of all things.

The problem with hylomorphism is largely that it borrows Greek categories that, insofar as they remain pagan, are significant but contradict tenets of Christianity, and insofar as they are rid of their pagan ultimacy, are vacuous. (edited)

Like, the act-potency distinction.

What is that?

Is that just a heuristic for classifying human experience? Cool, but then it’s not some ultimate category of existence.

Is it an ultiamte category of existence? Then it’s more fundamental than God, resides over Him, and He is made subject to it to be called “Pure Act.”

Take that example. God is Pure Act.

Do you mean just that there is nothing unrealized or merely potential in God? Cool, but that does not overlap with the meaning of “act” as used of creatures, and bars natural theology from projecting act-potency categories onto the Almighty altogther.

Do you mean what Thomists have tried to do in natural theology, that God is at the top of the act chain? Then God is subject to a spectrum located in a reality outside Himself that defines things as Act-Potency.

Thomists keep trying to have their cake and eat it too.

Ricky:

Yes the issue I was facing was having to try to explain the Creator-creature distinction while also having to use the Thomistic language to recognize commonalities. And I would rather not end up in some weird type of panentheism or something.

Jimmy Stephens:

Hylomorphism also just has terrible epistemological counterparts. Like, if the universal is immanent, and so that it is in the properties, say, of natural objects, then what is going on that gets the human mind to grasp that universal? Aristotle and Aquinas dither here. They appeal to “abstraction,” which no offense, is just a way of saying my brain casts a magic spell, and higitus figitus, alacazam, I now know the universal. Coolstory and all, but that’s just a gateway to subjectivism.

You know one object as instance “bah” and I know it as instance “blah” and who’s right?

Furthermore, when you abstract, that is, erase the particularity so that what is left behind is merely universal, how did you not erase the relation between the class in my mind and the particular instance that was supposed to occasion the abstraction?

Read:

http://files1.wts.edu/uploads/images/files/publications/Oliphint/Bavinck’s%20Realism%20WTJ.pdf