I recall one Indian sage talked about how it is sometimes better to taste chocolate than to be chocolate. Again, here is someone that was acknowledging that duality (or the Trinity) sometimes has its place over non-duality. We are meant to be here to be in relationship, and if things were truly non-dual in every aspect, then it would be impossible to have any relationship. We'd all be spiritual incels!
Perhaps there is more to God than the neo-Advaita orientated people realize, as the experience of not-two can be realized in an imminent frame but within the limits where God is just giving you a taste of His Nature without ever allowing you to be His Nature. We can't be God and we can't fully know Him, and yet as such we are invited to be in relationship with Him.
The author organizes the book around Balthasar's analogy of the musical symphony, dividing ontological distinctions into four "movements." Each movement corresponds to a specific type of theological distance:
Distance between God and Creation: The fundamental distinction between the Creator and the finite world.
Distance in Redemption: How God reaches across the "gap" caused by sin to reconcile humanity through Christ.
Distance within the Trinity: The interpersonal distinctions between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Eschatological Distance: The final union and distinction of the soul with God in the afterlife.
Some of the major highlights for me include the following:
“Love itself demands, not only possession and unveiling, but just as forcefully reverence and, therefore, veiling. If God unveils God’s self as veiled and if love is to endure to the very end, then unveiling must not be ultimate, but only penultimate.”“Distance is therefore the structure of the analogy between God’s withdrawal in the act of creation and our response in desire for God as our goal. This distance from God is what conditions the possibility for theosis, the divinization of the created person who seeks God out of love. That which distinguishes us from God becomes the means by which we become like God.”“The Johannine Jesus speaks here about withdrawing so that the disciples can hear the Spirit, not necessarily see God. But he has already told them that they have seen the Father because they see him (Jn 14: 7– 11); it is just that they have not yet seen completely, and so do not yet know completely. God withdraws in order to draw the human spirit into the trinitarian process of knowing God.”“In other words, hierarchy is a sacred arrangement of things that allows for the Christian and the church to grow into communion with God.”“For the Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart, “Beauty is the true form of distance” and “gives distance,” imbuing creation with the form of interpersonal space that pleases both God and creation itself, allowing for praise and worship. By “giving distance,” God in God’s beauty allows for the eternal significance of creaturely becoming to be made manifest to the eyes of faith.”“As the divine persons eternally approach and withdraw from each other in perichoresis, distance gives the space for beauty to radiate as the persons open to each other in kenosis and reach out to each other in epéktasis (straining toward in one's spiritual growth).”“A likeness is not able to be noted between Creator and creature unless a greater unlikeness is to be noted between them.”