This old interview with Armstrong at U.S. Catholic sums up most of the things I dislike about her:
USC: How do people understand God in Western culture today?
Armstrong: The idea of God is treated as fact today. A lot of people see God as a discrete personality; God is a creator in the same way as you or I create something. In the 17th century in the West and during the Enlightenment, scientists and philosophers such as Isaac Newton and René Descartes believed that they could prove God's existence scientifically. They said science was the best path to all truth. The other ways of coming to truth, such as art or mysticism or ritual, were downplayed. God became a fact, pure and simple.
USC: What's wrong with seeing God as fact?
Armstrong: Theologians like St. Thomas Aquinas have said that God doesn't exist like you or me or this chair. They said you couldn't say God exists because exist is too limited a word...
USC: Are there other doctrines that could help us recover the sense of religion as practice?
Armstrong: We never really got Trinity in the West, but it was also a spiritual practice. In the early Greek church, the Trinity would be imparted not just as a jingle--"Three in one and one in three, oh, the noble Trinity"--but as a meditation after the transformative initiation of Baptism.
You swing your mind back from the three manifestations of God that we can sense, to the ousia of God, the one that we can never know, backward and forward. The doctrine is simply the end of the meditation. You have to go through the meditation and keep doing it all your life to understand Trinity. It's described very much as a transcendent experience. Ancient theologians were trying to remind Christians that it was impossible to think about God as a simple personality.
http://www.uscatholic.org/node/5076
"The idea of God is treated as a fact today?" Except for a few million or more atheists, agnostics and other doubters.
"...you couldn't say God exists because exist is too limited a word." Meaning Armstrong & Co. just make up any old crap they like to define God. I see that every day in Certain DU Groups. That's why we can never get a straight answer on what they believe. Or don't.
The "ousia" of God that we can never know? We have to "go through the meditation" ALL OUR LIVES to understand Trinity? This is just bafflegab and double-talk. Armstrong and her buddies in the Sophisticated Theology racket are past masters of that.
I can explain the Trinity without a lifetime of meditation - it was an attempt by the early Xian Church to explain some unexplainable doctrines the Church itself had created. The Church failed utterly to rationalize a basically irrational idea, and declared the whole thing a Great Mystery.
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