My two cents on your post:
>>>” I believe the terms eternal and begotten are mutually exclusive. “
Eternal in this theological sense means outside time, time does not apply. So neither does ‘before’ or ‘after’ .
>>>”I personally find these statements illogical.”
Transcendent God means God transcends physical senses and reason/logic. There is a difference between transcending logic and contradicting logic. If we take ‘eternal’ as defined above, then logic is not violated - even if we cannot use logic to fully comprehend it.
God must transcend logic or else (He) is not God; we would have a philosophy not a religion.
The Most Holy Trinity is eternal; however, God chose to become incarnate, in time. These are not mutually exclusive. Nor or they illogical. As a weak analogy of outside time and incarnate: the laws of physics exist without any matter to ‘incarnate’ in; when matter exists, the laws ‘incarnate’ in them.
Thanks for your post.
Yes, thank you! After all, belief in logic as “truth” can be considered heresy in itself. That is rationalism, not Christianity. ‘Cogito ergo sum’ is not the motto of a Christian! Nor is Jeffersonian democracy a principle of the Faith.
The Kindergarten Katholicism of Msgr Pope (and scores of blog and konference priests like him) dumbs down the faith when it erroneously asserts the “equality” of the Trinity in a misleading effort to simplify; does revelation fit into a catchy 2000-word blog post that resembles paint-by-numbers more than theology? Or is that degradation justified for the sake of a palatable pastoral lollipop to people who cannot hope to understand Aquinas, Kierkegaard or von Balthasar?