So, what I’m looking for, or trying to propose is a definition of the infinite that is 1) concretely derived from Christology and Scripture, 2) not merely posited by negation, 3) gives due accord to the utter qualitative difference between God and creation, and 4) does not render this difference as a separation or incompatibility between that which is creaturely and that which is divine.

I want to be able to assert that infiniti capax finiti: the infinite is capable of the finite, and to my mind that includes the experiences of suffering and death that we witness Christ taking kenotically into himself in the incarnation. I think Balthasar is on the right track with this (and really only a hair’s breadth from Hart) in his discussions of the relationship between time an eternity. In these he claims that, in light of Christ, we must say that there is “something like time”, a sort of “super-time” that belongs properly to God’s life and within which created time is enfolded and given being. Thus, he even goes on to assert, in light of the death of Christ, that there must be some sort of “super-death” in God which grounds God’s ability to enter into the reality of death in Christ. Balthasar identifies this “supder-death”, rightly in my opintion, with the infinite self-giving of the Trinitarian persons to one another, the “primal kenosis.”

That may raise more questions, but I think that it is in answering such questions we get on the right track.

Second, the problem with Hart’s rejection of divine suffering isn’t that he misunderstands apatheia, which he defines perfectly, it is rather that he fails to allow this definition to fully inform his concept of divine infinity. In Hart’s work there is a constant oscillation between a positive definition of divine infinity: “the power to cross every boundary” and the love which “consumes every pathos in its ardor” and a negative definition thereof: “everlasting immunity to every limitation” or that which “cannot be interrupted”.

Hart is right in stating that “divine apatheia is the infinite interval of the going forth of the Son from the Father in the light of the Spirit” and that “every interval of estrangement we fabricate between ourselves and God –sin, ignorance, death itself– is always already exceeded in him”. However, this mode of divine exceeding does not imply that God does not or cannot experience the interval of the finite in God’s own being. Precisely because of the infinite dynamism of the divine infinity, there is no reason to assume that the finite intervals of sin and death cannot enter into the life of God. The finite poses no threat to the infinite but is taken into in the ardor of the Trinitarian love and only so is overcome, redeemed, and transfigured.

So Hart is right that God is not sundered by suffering, but he is wrong to say that this constitutes immunity thereto. God need not be immune to suffering because anything that suffering imposes on God’s being is taken seamlessly into the folds of God’s infinite love and overcome by it. But that overcoming is not a static “always already” it is a dynamic consumption and absorbtion that is a real experience in the life of God. Cross no less than resurrection are realities that enter into God’s life. But this is not “change” in God. Rather it is a current, or a ripple in the cascading tidal wave that is God’s eternal Triune love. But that makes God’s experience of it more real, not less. Divine pathos in Christ is the divine apatheia catching all creation up into the life of God.

I think Hart would agree with this, at least largely. But at points his negative infinity language threatens to mitigate his positive trinitarian language. Jenson however, I think is unambiguous on the point, though perhaps his language sometimes gives confusion impressions as well.

I’m curious about turning around the following line: “Thus, Hart avoids metaphysical abstraction by allowing the concreteness of God’s triune life to define the term. Mystery determines metaphysics.”

It would seem to me that, rather, we could say that “Metaphysics already contains mystery,” or that the abstract already contained the concrete. Or perhaps both directions simultaneously. What I would like to avoid is the idea that metaphysical abstraction is always arid; while Hart puts a different spin on things, I don’t see anything fundamentally different from what I read in Aquinas or Scotus even in the midst of their logically precise argumentation (I have actually had spiritual moments which have transformed my vision of the world in the midst of Scotus’ subtle nitpickings). Some medievals who wrote in multiple genres, such as Bonaventure, use the same language in its “abstract” form in philosophy, and turn around and use that precise same language in extolling the beauty of God and God’s mystery, suggesting that they did not seperate out the two. Metaphysics and devotion were inseperably linked, and may even be now in the middle of much-despised fields such as analytic philosophy, unbeknownst to the uninitiated. Hart is a translator of sorts, in this instance.

A similar situation might be mathematics: non-mathematicians complain about how dull and dry math is, but mathematicians don’t see it in this way at all. Ask any pure mathematician, and they will tell you that one of the main things which draws them is the beauty of math. It’s art for a different crowd.