Freedom

in general psycho-experiential terms

• when freedom is present so is responsibility
• Freedom is conditioned by who and how the freedom is given to us
• jailer example: we are free within the limitations of our jail cells/responsibilities

• God enables us to function as ourselves and our freedom is limited by his virtue. As his virtues are endless, so is our freedom
• Our range of freedom does not exceed our finitude. He creates us as himself to love and be loved in return, so that we have the freedom to sin because of his love and the freedom that his being necessitates
• Sin
• Preferrential option to sin: Original Righteousness and Original Sin
• Love does not intervene with our freedom to sin, it is by his love that we have the freedom to choose something in violation to God. Person not robot
• Our freedom to be faithful is maximal in how we know how to define love. Love makes us to be loved in response. Gratuitous exchange on God's part
• Love & coercion are mutually exclusive
• The relationship of freedom and responsibility are conditioned on the grounds of the love of God which is void of coercion
• Human beings are responsible to love and we exercize our freedom to love or reject love on the grounds of love. we are essentially relational. 

• Communitarian
• church and religion are only individualistic because we are HB. However they are fundamentally relational because we are relational beings (Person)
• HB's are fundamentally relational: Great command to love God and to love others with heart, soul, mind, etc.
• Presupposes that you know how to love yourself. Self-love is a template for the love of others. 
• Our fundamental orientation is to be in a relationship with God which becomes the apex in which we relate to other people (we are God?)
• Christian Living is Always Ecclesial 
• this is how we exercize the commandment and love. personal because HBs are fundamentally relational beings. how can love exist with one person?
• Responsibility: always faithful to God and to the tradition. 

• HB's are God's self in history. HB ST is the historization of divine ST. HB's can't transcend without the ST of God's self within us. Whether we recognize the ST of the divine or not doesnt make it true. God allows us to accept/reject on the grounds of his love.
• when we reject the descriptions of ourselves, we reject the chracterization of God but not the character of God because we can't reject ourselves.
• Every experience of ST is a co-experience of God
• Salvation: experience of God that allows HB to ST past limitations in the divine and human realms. human and divine are different but they are in communication with each other because they are united in a realtionship. Not identical nor mutually exclusive.
• All HB implicitly and explicitly experience salvation through Christ. complementary to the divine. 
• Salvation of Christ is the salvation from our individualistic isolation. 

• All of human history is able to be characterized in which the people of the bible have experienced God.
• Notion of compatibility with the divine took a while to work out
• In scripture, we can find characterizations of having a healthy relationship with God.
• Scripture has the extremes of Yahweh: his desire to murder us and his love for us and everything in between

• when we read other scriptures, we have to ask where the notions of ST are. 
• all ST is an experience of God
• we are all moral beings that are all capable of OR & OS. all ontologically the same
• omnipotence is a contradiction to love in Rahnerian theology, but they are complementary
• All religions have elements of faith and faithfulness because all HB ST and have recognized God in some form or another

• Contract theology: Do good so that God will bless you. heaven & hell, karma, etc
• Covenant theology: God loves unconditionally. Love itself will never stop loving
• All of human life is communal and the church as a community of BS is a microcosm of it as well as other traditions. 
• Christianity is the most correct "C" or ST. all HB's ST because we are inadequate in our failure to not ST. we cannot help but transcend even if we mechanically ST away from God
• We are permanently adjacent to God because of his love for us and the degree of our commitment to God plays out in how we interact with other people, even those outside our faith traditions

• Presence and "personal" are interchangeable
• Presence is the organizing principal of being able to relate to matter. It is the presupposition of being able to relate to matter. We believe that we can talk to and be spoken to unlike when we encounter things without spirit.
• negative explanation: prerson is what resolves from our desire for our relational wholeness. we recognize the person we are communicating with is molecular. circular reasoning

• a sacrament works by virtue of the fact. the configurations of molecules is a sign. it's body is the sign 
• sign is something that points, an announcement.

• What the sign or molecular configuration points to
• Sign is impersonal, but the signified thing goes beyond the sign and actuates what the sign is pointing to
• Signified things is always ST actuated

• if something is happening to somebody else, we use the word "you"
• "You" is the marriage of sign and signified
• We are dealing with the person as a ST being in materially attached to the physicality of their molecular composition.
• We are talking to being who is there rather than about a being who isn't.
• You signifies our presence difference between "you" and "me". Two ST in a reciprocal relationship to each other

• sacrament is any configuration that conveys presence or exchanges and reciprocally changes things
• any matter or material that signals the presence of the personal, the uttering of "You"
• matter on a horizontal level, conveys the personal to us

• any matter that conveys God's presence or person to us. we denote by uppercasing the S in the sense of whose person is being conveyed and how
• we approach the matter in and through which we will encounter God. it is the anticipation of us wanting to experience the person that is the encounter of the matter
• Matter on a vertical level (Personal in terms of God)
• Matter is always susceptible to be defined in our relationship with God

• 7 Sacraments portray God most accurately. slices of reality designated by HB that consistently, persistently and transplacently convery God's presence to the world
• creation of the church
• does not mean that God does not reveal himself in other material things
• Priests: it is not who is delivering the message, but the message itself that brings comfort. not the sign but the signified, the eternal and divine You of God
• 7 sacraments encompass all of human life, it accounts for the totality of it in all the ways that we encounter God

• present tense participle and verb. Greek.
• verb whose activity is without end. the essence is continuing, it is not a noun, it is a verb. it is an ongoing being that will always continue being and never cease being. verb to be/to exist refers to that which was Jesus and the father have in common. we have the ousia of Jesus. Jesus is homousios with the father and one being.

• my individuation that distinguishes me from you. the existential differences 

• of the same being. ontologically identical

• substantia is a noun. it focuses on the molecular aspects of the word. 
• People believed that the person of Jesus was different from the person of God, but this is not true because they are of one ousia

• how we live our lives in relationship to others. 
• the most intense way that we can imagine expressing our lives and existence as HS
• Different content across culture/people
• how and not what. How we live when we are most ethical

• Marriage of two concepts and realities
• ex: the wiser we get, the closer we are to death (wisdom and death are the full experience of our finitude) degrees of tension within it
• Dialectical complents in Spirituality
• givenness of the past: past cannot be changed, we are expressions of past experiences
• relative openness of our future
• Past & Future are combined. Spirit is at our core, it is at work and ungovernable. We never know how we will be tomorrow, but we hope that we will ST properly and always choose C. 
• Tension of Past & Future determine present
• We are always an expression of the Past
• Nobody lives in the "now" everyone lives in time. we stand towards the future because we are responsible to change the future
• Spirituality is always expressed in the dialectical present. Present happens when we place the moral seriousness of life and commitments into practice
• We will always encounter the future in spirit and we experience the now of our existence as spiritual beings
• Our matter changes but the opportunity to ST in our spirits and our encounters with the Presence

• Observe creation from the Big Bang Theory. look at existence as an observer not as a creator
• see humanity as a subject in terms of evolution. the first major change of material reality is self-realization 
• Hetero-realization
• we discover that we are a subject. another person is a subject. then there is a relationship between the two subjects. 
• Observer sees these molecules that eventually become aware of the relationships
• Stand towards the world/reality or any configuration of molecules as if it too can become personal. It has the possibility of be-ing with whom I can be relational with or with whom I can develop a relation with  and in turn we both deepen an understanding of who we are- Love
• 
  We don't determine anything in advanced, we can only observe. 
• Person is spirit + matter, and we were created in order to love and to be loved in return, to relate

• Spirituality, materiality. Spirituality is the ability to maximize the relationality of two clumps of matter.
• "I am going to relate to you in a way that maximizes the gooderness of our self-transcendence and at the same time is open toyour so that I too have this reciprocal intenthion that we believe on the grand scale is what motivated God to create the universe in the first place"
• Materiality is the impersonal vehicle for irrationality. We cannot change the outset. 
• It is the Sacramental view of life. 
• Nobody is less able to do anything, all HBs are equally relatable, all human, all ontologically the same. vs. Cosmological: we can't decide what is and what isn't. 

• Not a resolution of conundrum
• Epistemologically, it is the specific storehouse from which the person gets their answers. The permanent adjacency of HB coming to "know" that draws from that which is not mine so that it becomes mine so that what I do not know becomes what I do know.
• White-board!!!
• We are permanently adjacent to the unknown.
• NOT A PUZZLE
• Mystery means that God is permanently adjacent to us as the possiblity of the resolution of our self-transcending intentions to know. 
• Before we asked a question, every possible answer is a part of God's mystery. When we solve "C" we solve the question, not the mystery of God. Even if we use the mystery of God against him and sin, we are still adjacent to him. We cannot exist or ST against him, so when we sin it is agregious to God because we are using the gift of God against him. 

• Values of Christianity:
•  micro: a person who is explicitly sinning who is drawing B from the divine storehouse is formally STing. However they draw from God for ulterior purposes, but still drawing from God
• The final analysis: Goodness will voluntary choose the best answer because it is the best way to be faithful to God
• We are all responsible for our actions, not satan. whoever he is?
• Our existence does not take away from the existence of God.
• God is "that than which nothing greater can be conceived" Ontological Argument of god. 
• By definiont, it is a mystery. God is a mystery because there is nothing greater that can be known

• God is that which solved the problems of the world and he was the one who accounts for the reasonableness that which science cannot
• It does not solve anything because every advance of science is a retreat on the part of God
• Closer science gets to filling up the mysteries of the universe, the smaller the need for God becomes

• ST is SNE (Supernatural Existential) because it is a gift of God. We are the other part of ST, we are the figures and the ground is God. We are the historical instantiations of God's ultimate self.
• We have materialty and it is the existential part that exists in history. Human capacity for ST is God who is not historical but God in history. 

• Thematic is what we know consciously, for it happened in history. this is our own transcendence. WHo and how God is who and how we are as historical instantiations of God's self in the world of materiality and the world of history

• Things that cannot be defined, the mystery of God, the ontoligical nature of God that is not historical. the spirit that has its own nature.
• Cosmic spirituality: we cannot determine what will become spirit or matter 

• According to Rahner, a person could explicitly deny Christianity, but in reality "existentially is committed to those values which for the Christian are concretized in God."
• A person who is living a life committed and faithful to God implicitly is an anonymous Christian becuase we are all Christians. Christ's salvation was for all, it is because of him that we are all able to be fully obedient to God. 
• Even though a person denies God/Christ, he can still ST towards God, therefore is truly living for God. 

• the utterly natural and utterly insolvable frustration that follows the realization that my finitude cannot itself be transcended
• HBs are finite. we can only experience what we experience, we are made aware of our finitude. this awareness is consupiscence.