I am familiar with the idea that theology is God coming to an understanding of self. I found this ditty of German Idealism egregious when I was an under-graduate and I think it still carries that cachet. But I find it a bentrovato axiom of idealism on two counts.
First, it is not far removed from the insight expressed in that antique ditty: if cattle had gods, cattle-like they would be. We have here a new observation of, a new enunciation of, theological anthropomorphism, albeit, tempered by centuries of anfractuous thought and a goodly dose of German ablating to the rational core. But this parry is in error, and the second objection below will, I hope, reveal that.
Second, to say theology is god in the process of understanding self sounds brilliantly insightful. But I think any light here is catoptric. The insight would be better expressed as philosophy is Nature understanding itself.
If we claim that which is called god comprehends self in theology, we are in the present tense. We have placed the divine in a definitive time. Even if we expand those parameters to times past and times to come, even if we invest times past, present and future with a dynamic interrelatedness, we have still encompassed the divine within time; we have created a pantheistic position. Time is a unit of our self-comprehension, of our delimitation, of our extension. This is why theology has traditionally placed the divine in eternity, outside the time experience. But theology has also grappled with the paradox that the divine apposed outside of time is a pure transcendent, and pragmatically irrelevant, at least by definition, if not by disposition.
Nature can be delimited by time, but the divine, as long as it is not accepted as co-equal with Nature, cannot be. If the divine is that which is worthy that name, then it is the protasis (the pre-foundational) of Nature and the apo-catastasis (the post-climactic) of Nature. I have purposefully used the ancient theatrical terms protasis and apo-catastasis to avoid any sense of purposeful or intelligent design and teleological power. That is not to say I believe purposeful creation and end are errors, but they are ideas that presume something more than reason can provide, even if stretched to the heights of induction. The value of any such flights into the unknowable and inexpressible are better and most properly left to the poetry of spirituality and religion wherein they play a critical role in earlier stages of self formation and development: the comprehension of the self a gift, as given, as driven, as called.
The divine is not co-extensive with Nature. Nature flows from the divine. Nature is an expression of that sheer power of being, the ceaseless creativity. Nature, time, space, thought, all physical and meta-physical items we experience are the epiphenomena of that sheer unspeakable power. The divine is in that sense the sacred, the that which cannot be spoken (as is denoted by the word sacrilege), the that which cannot be entered into (as is denoted by the word adytum), that which the human cannot behold and live. To speak of the divine comprehending itself in any wise is at best a religious solecism. Theology is not god in search of self, it is man in search of god and simultaneously failing to realize god is indefinable in rational terms.
Reason, intellection, is not, I believe, the ultimate category for defining being or our experience of it. We cannot delimit the divine groundwork of being to rationality. I do believe we can celebrate its inexpressibility, its sheer, fearsome, pressing singularity, its insatiably multifarious outpouring. Religion rightly presents that as creativity and anthropomorphizes it into Creator God, but that religious act is simply and properly that, a religious act, a placing of a mask over the face of the “that which man cannot behold and live”, the sheer power of being. Theology can only point to the inexpressibility of the ultimate, denote the role of religion, and critique the logic of its prescriptives. This last, the critique of the logic of religious prescriptives, of masks and rituals, of religious imagery and liturgy, are muchly and sadly neglected by most. This gross neglect is the greatest failure of every civilization on the planet, for the masks presented and the acts before it observed are humanity’s ultimate hope expressed. Do we do right to confine God to an ethnos? Do we do justice in making the Divine a pure, uninvolved transcendent? Do we confound the Creator by making him into a fearsome judge? Yet, to one degree or another, every major religion on the face of the earth falls prey to one or more of these prodromata of myopia. So long as such diminutive images filter the purest light, so long as the Holy is so aloof as to not touch the hands of every man, so long shall God and goodness, kindness and compassion be only ideals and not the life and living of everyman every day. Religion, theology, metaphysics are all fundamentally about the inexpressible, but that does not mean they ought to be exempted from consistency and critique. Indeed, if spirituality (pan-psychic development) is held to be of any value, its intellectual and emotional integrity are mandatory. One cannot build a straight wall with crooked lumber.