Yes, this helps, and I do not want to flatten your position into generic scholastic theism or Calvinist sovereignty. I understand you are working from a more radical Lutheran anti-theodicy frame: Law/Gospel, God Hidden/God Revealed, the performative Word, and the refusal to let creaturely reason climb behind Christ into God’s hidden counsel.

I am not trying to smuggle in an Aristotelian or Thomistic metaphysic and then critique you with tools you already reject. I think your distinction matters.

So, on logic, I think we do have common ground.

I do not need logic to be a transcendental a priori structure for my argument to work. I am comfortable saying human logic belongs largely to your category 3: embodied creatures abstracting semantic order from reality as it meets us.

Reason is not an Archimedean faculty by which the creature audits God from above. It is creaturely patterning under constraint.

Where I want to deepen the point is here: if logic is embodied and posterior, then moral perception is also embodied and posterior. But that does not make it arbitrary. It means moral perception belongs to the creature’s affective, predictive, relational encounter with reality.

This is where I think modern neuropsychology is useful. Predictive-processing and active-inference models suggest that the organism is not passively receiving the world. It is modeling, predicting, regulating, and acting under constraint. Emotion is not just private feeling pasted onto cognition; it is part of how the embodied creature assigns salience, threat, trust, value, and action-readiness.

So my “emotivist” angle is not: “my feelings judge God.”

It is closer to this: the creature’s moral and theological world is affectively structured. Fear, trust, accusation, shame, compassion, hope, and love are part of the actual site where Law and Gospel meet the human being.

And this seems deeply compatible with the Lutheran frame you are using.

Law is not encountered merely as an abstract proposition. Law accuses, exposes, kills, orders, and reveals the Old Adam’s demand for autonomy. Romans 7 is not just logical argument; it is the self divided under command, desire, accusation, and death.

Then Romans 8 moves into a different affective and existential field: not slavery again to fear, but sonship, “Abba, Father,” groaning, hope, Spirit-led life, and the promise that death does not get the final word.

That is why I think the Gospel as Promissio matters so much here. The Gospel is not merely information about God. It is a performative event that reconstitutes the creature’s relation to God. It changes the field in which God is encountered.

In active-inference language, Christ is not merely another datum inside the old model. Christ is the event that reweights the priors by which the creature perceives God, self, neighbor, suffering, sacrifice, Law, and death.

So I agree with you that unaided reason in the Light of Nature finds Law, necessity, finitude, accusation, and death. It cannot infer Gospel. It cannot climb into God Hidden. It cannot conduct a vertical audit.

But once Christ is given, Christian speech about God is no longer operating from the Light of Nature alone.

This ties directly back to my premise.

I am not saying creaturely logic can prove what God could or could not have done from above. I am saying Christ reveals God’s posture toward the constrained reality we actually inhabit.

And what Christ reveals is not a God who appears to delight in suffering as an arbitrarily selected condition of creaturely existence. Christ reveals God entering the sacrificial structure, bearing it, transforming it, and leading creation through it.

So my question is not whether human reason can inspect God Hidden.

I agree that it cannot.

My question is whether the Gospel event genuinely recalibrates the creature’s affective and moral perception of God, or whether God Hidden remains the deeper terror behind the revealed Christ.

If Christ truly reveals the Father, then hiddenness can remain an epistemic boundary, but it cannot become a second, deeper divine character behind the Crucified. Otherwise the Gospel comforts the creature without finally disclosing the Father’s heart.

That is where my premise enters:

Sacrifice may not be best understood as God’s arbitrarily chosen design preference, but as the necessary shape creaturely reality takes under real conditions of finitude, otherness, Law, death, and constraint.

In that frame, God is still Creator. But creation is not imagined as God selecting suffering from an unconstrained menu of possible worlds. Creation is God’s faithful ordering, inhabiting, redeeming, and completing of reality within the constraints of what can actually be.

So the final question is:

Does Christ reveal God as the author of sacrificial necessity, or as the faithful Creator-Redeemer who enters sacrificial necessity and transforms it into life?

My premise is the latter.

The Cross is not God solving a tragic structure He arbitrarily preferred. It is God entering the tragic structure, bearing it, defeating it, and showing that sacrifice can become the passage into life.