The previous post in this series is here.
The key to this middle way, if it is truly a middle way between extremes, is divine self-limitation—the idea that the God of the Bible is vulnerable because he makes himself so out of love. p.139
… the personal God of the Bible is revealed there as the one “principle of all things,” “both cause and reason” for everything else’s existence. [Emil] Brunner also rightly emphasized that for the Christian this is no “theory of the world,” no rational, speculative hypothesis, but revealed truth of the “one word of God.” p.142
Whether or not one takes the Genesis narratives of creation literally, their theological meaning is obvious to anyone who approaches them without bias against personal theism: The whole world, the universe, everything outside of God, was created by God “in the beginning.” p.143
And, yes, God has mind, intelligence, thought, purpose, but his essence is not “Mind” (Nuos) as Greek philosophy conceived it. p. 145
According to the biblical narrative, then, there are two basic categories of reality—God’s, which is supernatural and personal (but not human), eternal, independent, self-sufficient; and the world’s, which is dependent but good, filled with purpose and value and governed as well as sustained by God. p.145
The distinct, singular personhood of God, the reality of God as a being among beings, not an all-inclusive, unconditioned, absolute Being Itself, is a hallmark of the biblical portrayal of God. p.147
By the free act of creation, by creating something outside of himself with limited autonomy, the God of the Bible has become a being beside other beings and limited by them in a limited way. p.149
… the difference between God and humans is character, not personhood. p.149
As philosopher Plantinga explained, the scientific search for truth assumes nature is not all there is. If nature is all there is, then truth itself is a chimera and our human faculties for discovering and knowing it are unreliable. p.151
As already explained, according to the biblical view of God and the world, the world has a relative autonomy over against God—by God’s own design. Yet neither nature nor history are independent processes operating entirely under their own laws and powers. p. 151
Modern Christian thinkers such as Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid (1710–96), Horace Bushnell (1802–76), and C. S. Lewis, among many others, went out of their way to explode the myth that a miracles must be a divine interruption of nature—as if, in order to act in special ways, God must “break into” a world that operates like a machine alongside of, over against, and independently of God’s immanent, continuing creative activity. The biblical-Christian view of nature and history is the both are in some sens always already the activity of God. That is not to say that everything that happens in them is the direct, antecedent will of God; it is only to say that, from a biblical and Christian perspective, the very laws of nature are, in some sense, simply regularities of God’s general providential activity. And history is always being guided, directed, and governed by God—even when God’s human creatures, endowed with free will, rebel and act against God’s perfect will. According to a biblical-Christian worldview, God’s agency is always the principle and power underlying everything. p.152
That means, then, that a miracle is never a “breaking” of nature’s laws, a “violation” of nature, or a “disruption” of history’s story as if nature and history were normally operating under their own power and overcome by God “from the outside.” That is the myth about the supernatural and miracles imposed by modern naturalism. p.152
Rather, from a biblical-Christian perspective, a miracle is simply an event in which God acts through nature in an unusual way. p.152-3
The ultimate reality of the biblical narrative, God, is self-sufficient but also vulnerable. He is not dependent on anything outside himself and yet, at the same time, opens himself to influence by his own creatures. … God’s self-sufficiency is his freedom; his vulnerability is the product of his love. p.154
According to [Thomas F. Torrance], the Genesis creation narrative itself implies God’s entrance into time. p.157
Catholic Tresmontant affirmed that the God of the Bible, unlike the ultimate reality of Greek philosophy, is not an unchanging sameness but ever active life and action. p.157
For Cherbonnier, God’s immutability is simply his faithfulness, not his static being-ness without becoming or eternity without temporality. p.158
That is, the biblical story consistently correlates virtue and knowledge but not in the Greek sense of “to know the good is to do the good.” Rather, for the Bible and Christian thought generally, “doing the good,” by God’s grace and with faith, produces knowledge of ultimate reality as the ultimate good. p.162
But also, Brunner argued, the whole idea of an objective moral law, “right” and “wrong,” depends on ultimate reality being a personal God. p.162
For biblical-Christian thought, then, metaphysics and ethics are inseparable. p.163