[[202102181416 David Bentley Hart on Theosis]] [[202111212143 DBH on theosis as the historical rationale for the trinity]] > Finite existence itself is always already nothing but the gracious effect of God calling creatures to himself out of nothingness. All those boring false dilemmas bedeviling Western theology since the Pelagian controversy—the causal priority we assign either to our own working out of salvation or to God working in us, either to God’s foreknowledge or to his sovereignty in election, either to the creature’s merit or to God’s, and so on—are simple category errors. Between the immanent and the transcendent, or the finite and the infinite, such rivalries of agency are not even cogently conceivable. - Hart, David Bentley. You Are Gods (p. 9). University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition. - https://www.facebook.com/groups/ChristianTranshumanistAssociation/posts/2119849228189325/ [[202209142052 Our Spirit is the Holy Spirit]] DBH says Paul makes this clear, by his ambiguity > "Bulgakov is surely right, and on the soundest scriptural ground, when he speaks of the human spirit as that which is uncreated in humanity, and that which proceeds from God as an outpouring from his essence; and Bulgakov is right also in saying that, in creation, God calls his own breath to hypostatic existence—calls his own Spirit to indwell his creatures as their spirits—and thereby gives hypostatic life to the rays of his own glory. > ...This is the ultimate reason that the first moment of the creature’s being is at once a vocation issued by God and yet also an act of free self-positing on the part of the creature. The Holy Spirit is the "embodied" affirmation of the Logos > Just as the Holy Spirit is not some limited psychological individual consciousness possessed of an isolated self, who is first himself and who then only latterly assents to the Father’s self-utterance in the Logos, but is instead hypostatic as God’s own eternal assent to and delight in his own essence as manifested in the Son; so also the spirit in us is nothing but a finite participation in that eternal and infinite act of divine affirmation and love. The spiritual creature exists as always, in its origin and its end, wholly surrendered to God. And the chiasmus of the Spirit in us, in our creation and deification, is always the Spirit rejoicing in the love of Father and Son. > The inmost reality of the spirit in each of us, that is, is nothing but that act of joyous accord with and ecstatic ascent into God. This is what Maximus identifies as our “natural will,” which is nothing but our absolute preoccupation with the supernatural end intrinsic to our very being, more primordial and more ultimate than the transient and finite preoccupations of the psychological ego. In the eternal act of creation, God’s will that the creature be is always already the will of the spirit within the creature to assent to that eternal vocation, because that assent exists within the divine Spirit’s eternal response to the Father; every creaturely spirit freely wills its own existence only as a created inflection of God’s eternal “I AM” in the mystery of the Trinity. > The creaturely spirit’s freedom is, in its essence, the freedom of the Holy Spirit within the divine life. The eternal Yes of God to the creature is always already the creature’s eternal Yes to its creator, for the latter exists only within the eternal Yes of the Father to his own image in the Son, in the delight of the Spirit; and this is the Son’s Yes to the will of the Father; and this is also the Spirit’s eternal Yes to the Father’s full expression in the Son; and, in the end, these are all one and the same Yes." > grace all the way down and nature all the way up > David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods (2022), p. 19.