“The man who is ready to prove that metaphysical knowledge is wholly impossible has no right here to any answer … since he himself has, perhaps unknowingly, entered the arena. He is a brother metaphysician with a rival theory of first principles.”

F. H. Bradley
Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay, 1893

Christians do well to remind ourselves from time to time that our God was the Jews’ before He was ours, and if we believe, as our philosophy teaches us to believe, that His perfection implies a nature that is eternally unchanging, then the Father to whom our humble and meek Jesus reconciles us is the God of the great flood, the God of the horrible plagues inflicted on the Egyptians—not only on Pharaoh and his captains but on the civilians, on the women and, most infamously, on the children—the God who rained fire on Sodom, who cruelly tested Abram, who commanded the genocide of the Canaanites, the God afflicted with that most tedious of human failings: the God who is, by His own account, jealous.