I don't know that Hart has or can close the interval or describe the threshold. There seems to be a disconnect between the Hart of The Experience 2014 and the Hart of dissenting admiration for Jenson of 2007, though whether that's a development or deterioration in Hart's faith or whether the disconnect has always been there or whether Hart bridges the gap somewhere else, I don't know. As I was suggesting above, he seems to be comfortable celebrating the inexplicable as such, but for the skeptic it's an unanswered contradiction, or an insistent refusal to think further, a blue pill, as a substitute for persuasion in relation to a graspable truth.

Maybe Lee M - I mean this comment also as a further reply to his comment above - can point to parallels in Christian theology, and also in respect to "divine free will." At this point the problem for uniting the Principle-God and the Principal-God is that the latter always seems to violate the perfections or infinitudes that align with the former's pure abstraction. That God "redescribe[d]... in more historical, dynamic, and relational terms" seems always necessarily to result in imperfect and less then all-encompassing gods, or a pluriform mono-deity that verges on or simply is polytheism under a different name, or an imperfect because contradictory deity in an imperfect or incomprehensible universe.

The rationalist will find little difficulty and rarely show much restraint seizing upon whatever paralogic or paraconsistency and driving the whole atheist convoy right through the gap between logic and paralogic. According to the further indictments by Jewish, Islamic, and other monists, the Trinitarian divine economy and all of that ratiocination about the Father and the Son in love and their human companions suggests a rather desperate effort to pretend "this isn't what it looks like!" Vastly learned, capable, and clever individuals like Jenson, Hart, and their esteemed predecessors can develop wondrous ways of diverting our attention from the simple logical and moral quandaries that necessarily follow from wanting to have your classical theist absolute baker producing new contingent cakes in history... and this also demonstrates how theological discussion takes on the shape of other philosophical discussion, since the problem of the perfect but also imperfect God is a way of re-framing the problem of the free will and determinism antinomy for moral judgment.

Best I can do here today is offer a summary of the Rosenzweig alternative as I understand it. Though it's written explicitly contra Hegel, I think it re-unites with Hegel, but we can set that aside, since we don't really care whether at the end Hegel looks better or worse, we're just trying to understand.

In the first two chapters of The Star of Redemption, for me the two most difficult chapters of the book, Rosenzweig offers a conceptual structure that is probably easier to follow in Hermann Cohen (his mentor) or maybe Buber, Levinas or even Derrida (R's "neo-Judaic" successors). Over the course of the book and especially at the end R develops as clearly as anyone I know of, especially regarding the crossing of the threshold, a philosophical justification of the positive faith of the believer, and of multiple positive faiths, even or especially in their primitive (or primal or primordial) anthropomorphisms and mutual exclusivity.

The former especially suggests a departure both from Cohen and from Judaic philosophy, as well as from classical theism. Whether R's departure is an unacceptable departure may depend in part on whether and to the extent you accept his preparatory work on the notion of "form" itself: what it could possibly mean for God and man to exist as likenesses of each other. Addressing Hegel and by implication the entire Western philosophical tradition (in theory completed in Hegel and also typified in Spinoza), Rosenzweig sets himself against monisms that lead to and depend on identity of reason and being or of the divine and nature (with God as principle or truth principle), and that point to highest conceptual abstractions that need to be rendered as fable to be understood by the multitude or to be useful in governing it, and are simultaneously hostile to or dangerous for philosophy.

Instead, R describes each of his three main figures - god, man, world - as possessing its own essence within itself: Each is differently: Each has its own mode of being. The "is" takes on the properties of an active verb (as we've discussed before at this blog, "to be" and its cognates eventually have to be understood as transitive in relation to the divine: https://ckmacleod.com/2013/12/02/amended-comment-at-thinking_reeds-blog-on-theistic-personalism-v-classical-theism/comment-page-1/#comment-78058 and following, under a post regarding a previous Lee M-inspired discussion). So, whatever or however God is, in order to be God, God cannot be thought simply or statically All or simply or statically UGOB, etc. Rosenzweig then proceeds with an "origin of the divine" philosophical narrative, a phenomenological re-statement of Genesis or a proto-Genesis. His approach is somewhat similar to that of his mentor Cohen. Since it rejects the identity of reason and being or of any type of "existence" with "Being," his God cannot be the God of the philosophers or principle or synonym for All, but that doesn't make Him a being like other beings either. He retains an infinite and unique creative relation to the All entirely within Himself: That's what it means or must mean to be as God is or Is, for Rosenzweig.

As per my earlier comment, it may be necessary to understand this God first as god concept within a theological system, in other words as definitional and provisional, not or not yet subject to a simple declaration of true or false or accurate or inaccurate.

This God that/who is certainly not simply synonymous with a principle or the All operates according to a type of freedom specific to His nature (or essence). He can affirm, say "Yes," as well as say "No," and each is essential to "divine freedom." We can suppose that such a God might be capable of filling the role assigned to Him in Jenson's account - in the sense that the notion of his unmet desires or needs, or his own apparent thrownness or temporality, doesn't present the same kind of contradictions. He both would be more and, only in a certain sense (a false sense), would be less than the God of Hart's Spinozist account or than the Spirit of an Hegelian idealization (seen one-sidedely or statically). This God might be in theory, but only in theory, capable also of filling the role sometimes assigned to him in Martin Luther's account or in the nominalist account that is said to have terrified Luther: Utterly beyond human beings, and therefore completely unknowable and unpredictable, as though at any moment, being all-powerful, he could erase all existent beings, or reverse any other divine ordnance, and ordain that annihilation good. Some Islamic theologies also move in this direction, of a truly all-powerful God with "creates rock he can't pick up" problems that cannot be taken by a true believer to be problems: This God can fully determine and re-determine his own nature and all nature, but that view takes us immediately into contradiction, including over the question of contradiction: Is God subject to logical necessity or law of non-contradiction or not?

I'm going to resist the temptation here to rehearse the paradoxes here, even though they're some of my favorite things. In sum, Rosenzweig's answer is somewhat Kierkegaardian: If God could be absurd, then all would be absurd, so therefore God is not absurd, and the Christian as well as authentically Jewish, but for R not Islamic and not Hindu or Confucian or Buddhist or pagan or atheist, insistence on a consistent, non-contradictory, and positive one God will be true for us always: In the Irenaian formula, it provides for a god to become. It doesn't suit contemporary multi-cultural and pluralist presumptions to compare religions this way, but it may be more honest to admit that the comparisons are always implicitly being made unless the choice of one confession over another is a trivial choice or not authentically a choice at all.

This has been a long answer to a simple request for a next step in discussion. It's purpose has been to suggest that any move however seemingly small can pre-determine and distort the entire discussion if it puts in place, however subtly, an ontology or concept of ontology that we may not need or want.

Lee M.: This is still very much a live issue in contemporary Christian theology; if anything, classical theism of the Hartian variety seems to be, as far as I can judge, somewhat on the defensive these days.

Another element of that debate would be as to how long we should say that the debate has been ongoing: The Hegelian idealization you reference is an argument that Christianity or the essence of Christianity, Christ on the cross and resurrected, is that selfsame coming into history of a "dynamic and relational" divinity, next to the idea that it takes 2,000 years to reach fruition as the modern philosophical and political idea ("thought and the universal"): the same framework as in Lessing's "Education of the Human Race," a becoming-exoteric and "second nature" of the formerly esoteric. Jesus Christ is in this sense the first "modern individual" and even the type of the "None": The Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

Hart seems to embrace the same notion or structure of belief in history/structure of history in belief in the Jenson article (which, not sure when, I'm planning to address below in a reply to both you and bob). Hart refers to the "great formula of St. Irenaeus (and others)": “God became man that man might become god.” He later returns to it and calls it "certainly true." For him, in ways that remain obscure to me, acceptance of this certainly true great formula leads to his apparently trifurcated faith expression: a highly specific positive tradition or confession on the one side (that as ever proposes implicitly exclusive truths and claims distinguishing it from other faiths); a classical theism on the other that is so generalized it unites all religions and, under a transposition of terms, even irreligion openly, honestly, self-consistently (religiously) pursued; and a mystery in the middle that somehow joins the two by some means that, we are implicitly assured, would not appear completely arbitrary if we somehow understood it or if understanding it was possible for us.

The indispensable mystery appears homologous with the principle-principal threshold and also with the interval (or "flaming walls of the world" in Epicurean atheism) between the Heavenly and the Earthly. As mystery, it seems to erase the "interval" and replace it with a nebulous void. For Hegel, Spinoza, philosophy, sociology, "thought and the universal," that incomprehensibility or willingness to leave uncomprehended is unacceptable, and Hart's insistence on its celebration suggests an act of psychological repression and reaction formation, pointing perhaps invariably to tools of social and political repression. The atheist possibly brought into sympathy with the creative principle sees a Sunday School teacher saying "shut up stop being such a smart aleck" - but also an Inquisitor, an Ayatollah, a con man, a snake oil salesman.

Why would man becoming god according to the great formula be barred from grasping the necessity of the connection or explaining the actual crossing of the threshold/interval/void, if there is a necessary connection? Doesn't the acknowledgment of this void effectively define man becoming god as grasping it as something other than a void, as susceptible to philosophy, however provisionally or gradually or unevenly? It did for Hegel, though it also seems to frame countless frauds and pathologies.

(Am struggling to compose a reply to you, bob, and also to Lee M, possibly a combined response, that moves the conversation forward. Seems it would take time and focused energy, of types in somewhat short supply for me right now, to say what I would like to say in a way that might be both understandable and yet also worth saying - another interval that sometimes difficult to close - possibly even the same or at least a connected or overlapping interval...)

To take the second question first, a concept of necessity would be necessary for any answer to the question to be regarded as a true answer, or as a conclusion necessarily following from whatever premise, meaning that the question itself, as a question, already presumes logical necessity. In other words, without logical necessity there are neither answers nor questions.

Without getting diverted by a discussion of different notions of necessity, we can, if we choose, rest on logical necessity if we are satisfied with an answer to the first question that does not require "God" to stand for more than a principle: God is necessary for necessity because necessity is necessary for necessity, and the word "God" functions here as just another name for the principle of necessity or the possibility of necessity. We may not need to use the word "God," but we do need a word for necessity in order to discuss necessity in words.

The same transposition will occur for each of the parallel notions regarding ultimate ground of being, being itself, the eternal, the infinite, and so on. We define "God" as ultimate, being itself, being of being, eternal, infinite, and then see where that gets us within the ontological system we wish to explore. On this level to ask whether God is the ultimate ground of being or is infinite or is necessary, etc., would be an absurd question or a refusal to have the discussion at all: A refusal to play the game, whether or not accompanied by an insistence that refusing to play the game is really playing the game - that sitting at your computer writing about God is the same as playing basketball if that's what playing basketball means to you. Or: It's like asking whether the ultimate ground of being is really the ultimate ground of being: The meaningful question in relation to the system as system is how does the u.g.o.b. function within it and is there any reason for anyone to care. Whether "u.g.o.b." is a better expression than "g.o.d." would be a question belonging to some other inquiry - probably a political one.

Now, you could mean or mean to mean something else, in which case I think your question needs to be more specific, or specific to that something else, more in the form of "Why is the being described as possessing x, y, and z qualities necessary for necessity?" or "Why is God the Heavenly Father of Jesus Christ necessary for necessity?" or "Why is God who sent his angel to Mohammed necessary for necessity?"

Also: Happy Easter!

Sorry?! Thanks much! Will want to wait to reply until I've read the linked piece, thought some more, and have taken care of some business.

The deity whom or deity concept that Hart stands by, or the way that Hart goes about trying to stand by it, doesn't seem very relevant to "society." One ends up, as Hart does, arguing oneself into disgust with one's fellows, with nothing to say to them except "I have nothing to say to you." Under the older dispensation, one could say, as Spinoza still says, that inspiring obedience and devotion on the part of the rude crude multitude is justification enough for religion. The modern sensibility, that Spinoza helped to shape, promotes a different approach, though whether it can ever actually embody such a truly different approach, or whether the demand for honesty and transparency can ever be honest and transparent about itself, remains questionable.

From another point of view, and an implication of the view of God in Its infinities, so also in the vicinity of Spinozism - since omnipotence and omnipresence dissolve any difference or distance between desire or will on the one side and actuality or actualization on the other, the only mind truly mind is mind of God or divine, or is all that ever is or is thought, so not hard to know, but all knowing.