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You didn't pick the topic -- but you did choose to engage it, and in a particular way. And I believe there is no such thing as "just a philosophy discussion" when we're speaking of God. Every word we say about him either reveals or conceals his love. "Whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light."
You say that you're just "picking a fight over a specific word" -- but I think that word actually matters. I do affirm God's omnibenevolence. Not because I misunderstand divine simplicity or want to anthropomorphize God, but because the Christian tradition at its best has always taught that God is not just good by analogy, but that his very being is love -- and that love is revealed to us in the person of Jesus Christ. God anthropomorphized himself, "in a plan of sheer goodness," out of love.
The god of the philosophers cannot be the Triune God, precisely because of the apophaticism that you're defending! The God who is unknowable, ineffable, utterly perfect, cannot be grasped in his essence by philosophical categories. And pure reason would never imagine a God who is communion, who is Father, Son, and Spirit in an eternal relation of love. The Trinity is not the culmination of metaphysical logic. It is a revealed mystery that overturns what unaided reason would expect from the Absolute.
When someone comes asking whether the God of Christianity is morally trustworthy, the absolute wrong response is to retreat into terms like "God wills the good according to nature," as if that settles it. That may be defensible in scholastic language, but it's interpersonally and evangelically devastating, and empties the Christian message of the relational content that is its essence.
I think the fundamental problem with your position is you've emptied the concept of "goodness" of its volitional, transcendent, and glorious attributes, as though "well-behaved" exhausts what it means to describe someone as "good." You're affirming the universal love of God and yet denying the fundamental omnibenevolence of God -- as though "benevolent" is not a wonderful and precise way to describe willing the good for all things according to their nature!
Look at how Merriam-Webster discusses the history of the term 'benevolent':
In other words, to be "omnibenevolent" is "to voluntarily will the good for all things"... which is exactly what you just said about God!
If God is love, then we should be able to say he is good -- recognizably good. Good in a way that people can see, and praise for his goodness. Not just metaphysically perfect. Not just consistent with his own essence. But gracious, merciful, near to the brokenhearted, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. That's not a mistake of sentiment. That's the Psalms. That's the saints. That's the Cross.
So I don't think this was just a fight about a word. I think it was a moment when someone asked whether Christians actually believe God is good, and critiqued a motte and bailey in which God's goodness is affirmed in analogical terms -- but then, more deeply, denied as something humans can actually recognize or trust. You affirmed his view, by saying that Catholic Answers is an apologetics outreach and not a theological article, and thus that its answers are misleading or incomplete! You've been distracted by the term 'omnibenevolent' to the extent that you've affirmed exactly what he was arguing in a way that makes Christians appear untrustworthy and dissembling.
If we answer questions about God's goodness with hedging, precision, or tone-deaf abstractions, we've not preserved orthodoxy -- we've made it unbelievable. That's what I'm indicating here: that your vision of God's goodness is thoroughly orthodox, impeccably scholastic, and philosophically integrated... and yet utterly uncompelling, even horrifying. No one who was not raised in the Church would look at the vision of God you've outlined and say, "wow, sounds like someone I should worship." They would walk away thinking: "These people are clever. But their God? He sounds like a narcissist."
You can try to protect God from accusations of malevolence by retreating to apophaticism, but that is not the mind of God on the matter. God's answer to those who would accuse him of evil was to enter into evil, to experience suffering, to face death. God's answer to Job was not "my goodness is unfathomable to you," it was "my omnipotence is unfathomable to you." But his goodness and his love he demonstrated in his body on the Cross.
God is not just good by analogy, but what humans like you and I can understand about His goodness is only by analogy. He is not good the same way you are (presumably) good. When we see a saint, we see God's goodness there. A saint is good in the way God is, but God is so far beyond human behavior that we can't work the other way back to him. It's directionally confused.
Yes, we learned something additional to God's nature through revelation, that doesn't discount the things we can reason about His nature and is revealed in Scripture as well.
No, explicitly God is good but not in the sense we mean when we say a human is good. When we say a human is good, we colloquially mean something along the lines of a human behaves well. That is not what we mean when we describe God as good, that is entirely the point I am trying to make!
Omnibenevolence is a recent term and I object strongly to people outside the religious tradition inventing it and then using their own invention as an attack against the logical consistency of God. I have no objection to calling God benevolent. He is. I object to Omnibenevolent, because it can be defined any which way. It's the "omni" part that I object to.
Goodness, must I sing God's praises with every Motte Post!
God is great, He created us for such good things. He is an ocean of love. He holds nothing back, He takes pity on my who is weak and has entered into the depth of God-forsakennesss for our sake. God went out from God to the furthest reaches of not-God, to the furthest reaches of degradation, torture, despair, guilt, shame, DEATH! So that no matter how far we run away from him, He will always be there first. So we can always find our way back to Him. Forever His praise shall be on my heart!
If I start every theological discussion like that will it make people listen better?
Why would you call God "good" if it's explicitly not the same thing as human good, and you explicitly cannot understand what God's version of it is? When a blind man hugs an elephant's leg, is he right to conclude that an elephant is like a cylinder, except perhaps not the same kind of cylinder that we know?
It is a lot like the blind-men-elephant analogy. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing though. We can see how that goodness interacts with us. Our own human goodness has its source in His goodness as well. Since our goodness has its source in His goodness, we can say that it really is something like a goodness we recognize. It's not some kind of alien shrimp colors. But it is vastly beyond our morality as well, encompassing it and exceeding it.
The average normie Christian hugs the elephant's leg and thinks it's just like us. Look, it has a torso to hug! And that's wrong, but not necessarily dangerous. The average normie 8th grader thinks that the Earth goes around the sun in a circle and that's wrong but not necessarily dangerous or impactful to how they go about their daily life.
But those who have reasoned more about it or have further experience with the Goodness of God start to see other parts of the elephant. The goodness of God inspires such sentiments as:
or
Or the desire many Catholics have to suffer, their only desired relief being the presence of mind to offer that suffering to God as a sacrifice for the salvation of souls.
The goodness of God starts to look kind of distorted and weird the deeper a soul dwells in it. A human can reach beyond just a leg and we start to see something immense, kinda scary, but still recognizable and connected to the leg. We have every reason to believe it goes on further and further, beyond our comprehension but still Goodness because it's all part of the same animal, connected together.
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