That difference between light and incarnation of the light was something you brought up a few times. Sorry I missed some of the key aspects of it. This is of course important in John with his notion of the logos as Christ. It’s always been interesting to me how the JST changes John 1 and those key parts on the Word to Gospel. I always took that to be an interesting mixing of Mal 3:1 “messenger of the covenant” which pops up in D&C 45:9 and other places. The light of John is the covenant.

My ontological criticism was that if light is the ground of being then it also has to ground time ontologically. But if light is tied to the endless regress that doesn’t quite work. But maybe that’s me still confusing the incarnation of the light with the light. i.e. the regress is the incarnation

To the point about secular grace, this seems a constant problem in a lot of process styles of philosophy. I think it’s a problem in Whitehead too. Effectively this all goes back to the first modern process thinker Leibniz. There Leibniz has monads which are bundles of becoming. However the monads are infamously windowless which means he needs the pre-established harmony to make them change. This thus requires God. With Whitehead he appropriates Leibniz but makes his equivalent of monads windowed. However while relations become more important in Whitehead he still has God making all this possible in certain ways. (I’ll confess it’s here that my relative forgetfulness of the nuances of Whitehead limits me)

The way to turn this around is that if secular grace is what connects these different objects (with objects in some sense viewed dynamically rather than statically) then it actually fulfills the role of time, causation and relation. When you raise light or true light I’m thus not sure you’re making quite the break with Adam that I think you do. Effectively you’re just calling it something else. i.e. light is Adam’s secular grace.

I’ll have to think about this. I confess my neoplatonism knowledge has become quite a bit fuzzier than it once was. It’s honestly been years since I last studied it closely – especially the Jewish forms in late antiquity and the medieval era. Your point about incarnation is actually similar to how certain strains of Jewish mysticism tied the En-Sof to the whole Adam Kadamon set of emanations. People have for years noted that as a possible parallel to Joseph Smith (although typically done via weak parallels – such as that initial period in the early 90’s). The sefirot thus might be again to Joseph’s temporal regress of gods – although there are obvious differences. The sefirot is not temporal but is a more abstract neoplatonic set of clearings and emanations. Joseph’s regress of gods has a potentially odd connection to time but fundamentally is historical not ontological. (Which was why I raised that question – this distinction between a ontological/logical regress versus an historic one)

I should add that I think atheists end up with something akin to the ousia of theists. It’s just the theist part they reject, as you note. (Or they’re just ignorant they’re doing this) It’s the weird mix of God as ground with God as interventionist ‘person’ that is the problem for Trinitarians IMO. This is why the line between atheists, deists, and theists who only care about the ‘ousia’ part is pretty blurry. They end up believing similar things and just call them different names. With Mormons I think you simply have a total break between God as ground or transcendence and God the interventionist person. Thus effectively we’re atheists with the Father as demiurge from a Trinitarian point of view.

Regarding whether this all is a flaw in OOO. It definitely is an aspect of OOO I don’t care for. I think it ends up being akin to a Newtonian composition of mechanics in terms of causes/relations and a Hamiltonian form which is just the evolution of the wave function or system. Adam’s form is more the Hamiltonian way of thinking whereas thinking in terms of causes or relations is the Newtonian form. But both are mathematically identical even if there is a big ontological difference between the two conceptions.

I think that secular grace is an inadvertent side-stepping of a flaw in the network theology/OOO stuff. Without some sense for what the interconnections are/represent/facilitate/constrain, it’s logically and scientifically vacuous, I believe, to say that new objects/meanings emerge on the objects. One would have a very different world if humans could only interact via gravity and electromagnetism vs. hydrostatic forces vs. encounters of consciousness, and these variations, which are fundamental to any account of meaning, are elided in what I read of network theology. I’m arguing that per JSJ the True Light of Christ’s adoption is the relevant mode of relation that allows network theology to do its work. But then what we’re calling emergent meaning is actually the work of the True Light. (There’s the parallel question of judgment/evaluation, and there the True Light also allows you to say what is actually or not actually meaningful; I believe you lose any non-trivial judgment with the move to pure flatness/self-grounding. And with no non-trivial judgment we really are utterly at sea and imminently drowning, I think.

But i gladly and freely confess that this project may not work and clearly needs substantial more thought to make it work. Glad to be schooled on many topics and sorry that this work has to get squeezed into the interstices of my work days.

All best, Sam