The pope just asked everyone to catch up to Unity...
Yep, about time. The lead/leave debate is of course a matter of vernacular English. The theological debate is, as the article says, a lot more nuanced. The French were there way before us all.
Interesting in light of discussions elsewhere about predestination if God knows what we will do ...
Interesting too, as I looked up '
father' in the 'Metaphysical Bible Dictionary' and there's a paragraph that says:
"There is also another sense in which we think of God as Father. Jesus would not have chosen the word father to describe God had He wished simply to describe a cause or principle... There is a relationship with God into which we can enter where He seems "closer . . . than breathing... " As I thought your expression of God not as Person but as Principle was a Unity doctrine. (God as both Person and Principle is, of course, an ancient tradition, God the Father being
Arche Anarchos — 'the Principle without principle'.)
This immanence Augustine spoke of as
interior intimo meo et superior summo meo – 'more inward than my innermost self and higher than my highest" (
Confessions 3.6.11).
Theologian Denys Turner's exegesis: "God is not to be sought outside the self, for God is already there 'within', eternally more intimate to me than I am to myself. It is I who am 'outside' myself and it is the God within who initiates, motivates and guides the seeking whereby and in which God is to be found. Not only is God within my interiority; it is from the God within that the power comes which draws me back into myself, and so to God.' (
The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism, p59). The seat of that interiority is the heart in ancient tradition. All this, of course, preserves the 'otherness' of God an avoids the pitfalls on pantheism/panentheism.
