I think the difference is approaching it from a philosophical angle or even like a logical puzzle. I think if I go back to the Orthodox perspective here it will help clarify how life, order, flourishing, etc connect to God's goodness without an appeal to an external standard. I don't think you're overthinking it necessarily, I just think you're asking for a question that doesn't actually have a useful answer.
In a sense you are correct that defining God as goodness makes it impossible to ask whether or not God is good. In our theology there isn't a separate standard of goodness that we can measure God against. You can't say whether or not God is good based on some scorecard, which is Euthyphro's first horn. We reject that because it puts something above God and contradicts His absolute freedom. And we also don't say good is whatever God is, because that second horn also makes "God is good" meaningless. Instead it is that His goodness is known through His eternal actions, and they're not good because they match a definition of good, they're good because they're God at work, and we experience them as good because they bring life, etc.
So then you ask well how do we know they are good without that criterion? Isn't that just defining God as good? And the answer is actually no, because what we're not doing is measuring against a philosophical yardstick of goodness. What we're doing is
encountering them. When we say that His energies promote life, order, justice, we're not making a definition statement, we're describing an experienced reality of what happens when
humans participate in His activities or energies. When you do something kind for someone, you are not following a rule that describes what you're doing as good, you are participating in the eternal love of God, and when you do that, you participate in and experience that love, and it is good for you and that other person, and you flourish. You become more alive, you become more human. It's an experiential reality, not a logical solution.
When Christ says "I come so that you may have life, and have it abundantly" it isn't a kind of sales pitch, it is what He does, and we know that's what happens because we've experienced it. When you experience it - say, by loving someone who hates you -
you are freed,
you flourish. It isn't defining God as goodness, it is describing God as He reveals Himself, and we call that good because that is what we experience when we encounter Him. There is no external standard to verify this against, because there's nothing above God to measure with, you don't need an external standard to know anything more than you need a chemical composition to know that food tastes good, or a special thermometer to know if fire is hot.
If you say well then that makes questions about "is God good" or "how do we know He is good" nonsensical, and in a way it does, but that's because the premise of those questions requires goodness outside of God to measure God against, which is a category error. Just like it doesn't make sense to say "is fire hot" or "how do we know fire is hot" - you actually run into those same kind of definitional problems (what is temperature? what is energy? I mean,
really?)
In the end it isn't that we're saying that life etc are good because that's who we believe God is - it's close - but instead that is the way God has revealed Himself to be in the scriptures, in human encounters, in Jesus Christ, and in our ongoing experience of His activities. Us saying those are good is not imposing a definition but recognizing something.
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is it valuable for humans to consider our own intuitions and empathies? If any moral intuition we possess is outside of God, then it cannot be good.
From an outside perspective, if feels like Christianity tells us that we are all unique and special and individual. . . but every spec of uniqueness and specialness and individuality that is not exactly God, is not good. We are meant to emulate our values and actions to that of God. And so what is left of us beyond that which we must match up toward God? Do we get to pick our own favorite color and favorite foods still?
Yeah I think this misses the mark a lot. Rather than what you put forward here, I would say that humanity itself is good, and was created in the image of God. To the degree that it embraces what it truly is and is meant to be, it is good. To the extent that it rejects that, it is bad. You individuality is not part of your human nature. You need to make a distinction between you as person and you as human. You can be a unique person and an excellent human and be distinct from another unique person who is also an excellent human. Your individuality and unique qualities were created
so that you may be an excellent human. So to the extent that you participate in God's energies and become good, you will actually become
more human, and actually
more uniquely yourself. The you that you were created to be. Rather than homogenizing, the anthropology of Orthodoxy creates a radically diverse cosmos filled with unique people, and each one is teleologically destined to be a unique god by grace, perfect and special in their person, truly good in their human nature - bound to God's divine nature through their shared human nature with Jesus.
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Do I get a say in my purpose? Are the parameters of a 'good, abundant, and flourishing life' absolute and set in stone? In this life, I am permitted to determine what flourishing means to me? Even if I'm "wrong" by the standard that is God. What about after this life? After this life am I permitted to continue to determine my own purpose?
No. You cannot change your purpose as a human, which is to become like God, perfect and unique and truly human. To do that would make you not a human, which is the image of madness and insanity we get in hell in the gnashing of teeth.
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In this way, some form of separation from God in the afterlife does not feel confrontational. And it doesn't feel hostile. God is still the Superior and God is still the Creator. A relationship where one party demands absolute conformity from another party is simply authoritarianism.
You're thinking about this like some arbitrary set of rules, you want to move you queen like a knight on the board and there's like some neutrality and its unfair if you can't. I'm sorry but this is a really shallow level to think about. What I'm saying is quite a bit deeper. You either participate in goodness - which is life, order, flourishing, justice, peace, etc - or you will become dissolute and dead and chaos.
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Is there not humility in 'being yourself' rather than fashioning ourselves in false mimicry of a divine perfection?
As above you're creating a false dichotomy. The choice isn't between being you vs losing yourself in the divine, it is between being you
through union with God and
not being you any more, having a complete loss of identity and humanity.
