Rhemantic Modality and the Order Toward Union: A Metasemantic Account of Divine Communication

Classical theism affirms divine simplicity and immutability while Scripture speaks of God addressing, responding, and communicating. Contemporary analytic theology often treats these commitments as unstable together, oscillating between interactive models that introduce temporality or change in God and strictly classical models that render such language merely metaphorical. This paper argues that the dilemma arises from an illicit cross-respect inference: creaturely communicative structures are transferred into the non-productive intrinsic domain governed by classical constraints. Building on the author’s companion studies on ordered non-reversibility and rhemantic modality, the paper develops a metasemantic account in which divine communication consists in the creaturely reception of invariant divine reality under a communicative respect borne rhemantically as intrinsic orientation toward union. Scriptural language identifies this reality as encountered within creaturely conditions while systematically blocking inferences of composition, succession, passivity, or interaction in God. The result preserves the full meaningfulness of theological language without compromising classical commitments. Divine communication is neither temporal interaction nor attenuated metaphor, but the intrinsic reception of what is always the case under a rhemantically ordered communicative modality. Part of a series on rhemantic modality and classical Trinitarian ontology. Companion papers: • “Intrinsic Orientation and the Classification of Ordered Non-Reversibility” • “Intrinsic Orientation and the Necessity of Non-Reversible Order”