WLC: "You can't prove the negative"

[emjay]

So how do you apply this 'Negative Way' thinking to the God of the Bible? Ie it's one thing to think of God in this abstract 'God of the philosophers' type way... God is Good, God is Being etc... but how you get from that, or can discern that, from reading the Bible, especially the OT, has frankly always been a complete mystery to me. Ie how do you get from the dynamic and seemingly arbitrary, spiteful, jealous (as it is itself claimed to be in the Bible), insecure and indecisive god of the OT - one willing to repeatedly smite whole groups/populations for the sins of a few, just to make a point or advance a narrative - to this somewhat static-seeming abstract concept of a God of the Five Ways... God is capital G Good itself, God is capital B Being itself? Basically I'm asking, how does 'Negative Way' thinking apply in practical terms to reading the Bible?

Those are complex questions well beyond the scope of this thread. That said,  the path from Plotinus's One to the "I am" revelation to Moses is very short. Whereas it takes much contemplation to get to Christ cruxified.

What I will also say is that my personal approach to bible study is more esoteric and heavily influnced by Swedenborg.

I may be wrong, but from what I've gleaned from what you've said about this, both here and in the past (including what you've said in the past about treating the Bible as largely allegorical, far more that I ever did when I was a Christian)... it seems to me that you perhaps have a sort of 'fragmentary' approach to reading the Bible? Ie treating it more like a compendium of literature than a linear historical record... along with Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell (whatever exactly that is... I couldn't tell from a cursory read of the Swedenborg wiki, which looks very complicated, but guessing it's perhaps a work of literature like Dante's Divine Comedy?). I read Dante's Divine Comedy a long time ago and though I found it very interesting, provocative, and entralling, it was at the end of the day just very imaginative literature to me (I don't know if within Catholicism (which seems similar to your views, on account of Aquinas etc) it's meant to be taken as revelation, but it certainly wasn't within my Protestant upbringing). If that is your approach... ie more grounded in ideas and literature, than line by line analysis? Then I could at least understand where you're coming from a bit more, but at the same time could pretty much categorically say that that could never be me, and never was me when I was a Christian in the past (ie I grew up a literalist and a creationist), because, differences in beliefs aside, my mind just doesn't work like that; I am [over]analytical and reductionistic by nature, so I could never approach any of this based on vague ideas and impressions even if I wanted to.