That’s why I don’t expect, much less ask, anyone to accept a doctrine they haven’t seen the truth of yet. If I or anyone else haven’t communicated it clearly yet, it hasn’t been communicated yet, that’s all.
But I play fair another way, too: I do expect and even ask people to reject a doctrine they honestly think they’ve seen the falsity of, whether that’s universal salvation or trinitarian theism.
What you quoted Fr. Kimel on is pretty much the nadir of apophotic theology – or maybe not quite, because it still recognizes kataphatic content to negate. But you ought to be able to see the difference, yes?
I can’t in good conscience ask people to accept something that in principle cannot possibly make sense. It’s even a self-refuting position to try to take: someone understands a position well enough to see that it makes sense that it cannot possibly make sense?? And that’s why it should be believed?
Having personal faith in someone is different than that. We trust specialists, so far as we have reason (or desperation) to believe THEY KNOW and understand the truth of something even if we don’t, or under the circumstances can’t. But there has to be a point at which we can distinguish the con artist from the true specialist. And throwing up a cloud of unknowing isn’t that point. We’re called to reject falsehood and accept truth, and that means rejecting contradictions, unless and until we see they aren’t really contradictions. Training people to accept contradictions is how cults and false religions, and false philosophies, fool people.
I will also add that while I completely agree that someone should never pretend to have reasoned their way to understanding the Trinity (or pretend to have reasoned their way to understanding anything, unless they’re making a harmless joke); by their own admission, people who think the Trinity cannot even possibly make sense to anyone, are in no position to say that no one has ever done that: that’s either their own sheerly ungrounded assertion, or they somehow understood enough of the Trinity to say that it makes sense that the trinitarian doctrine cannot make sense, which is self-refuting nonsense. It would be better, and more consistent with positively valuing truth, for them to say that (as far as they can tell) the Trinity is a mistake and wrong – and that they understand (they think) where the errors are and so why it’s a mistake and wrong. The agnostic can have an honorable agnosticism, but nothing, so far as that goes, to say about whether the Trinity can be understood by a human reasoning.
Now, if Fr. Kimel only meant that no creature can fully understand the Trinity, I totally agree. No creature can, demonstrably or even in principle, fully understand the keyboard I’m typing on right now, myself included. But lots of creatures (myself included) can understand it well enough to distinguish it as a keyboard and not as the holy and ineffable three-personed Creator (for example), even though none of us can fully understand it except the holy and ineffable three-personed Creator – which is not a claim anyone could even possibly truthfully make without a holy and ineffable three-personed Creator making some kind of legitimate sense to them, not-incidentally! No more than someone could even possibly truthfully make a claim about a keyboard without it even possibly making some kind of legitimate sense to them. And a keyboard makes a lot more sense to a lot more people than me, even though none of them (except the Ground of All Existence) can understand it completely.
Is experiential experience of the Trinity (theosis as it’s called in the East; the Beatific Vision as it’s called in the West), better than mere logical understanding of the Trinity? Sure it is! – but no one could legitimately say that who doesn’t also have some legitimately logical understanding of the truth of the Trinity. Otherwise they’d only be making a mistake (even if the mistake happened to be accidentally true anyway, so to speak). My own mystical experiences don’t blot out or discount my logical understandings of the Trinity; often, even usually, they run concurrently – not always, I’m only a creature, but the not-always doesn’t mean the logical understanding is false, it’s just a failure of my attention. That’s a natural limitation, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Typically my meditations on the logical coherencies and implications of the Trinity lead to a mystical experience; other people get there somewhat different ways, and that’s fine – so long as distinct truth isn’t being thrown under the bus thereby. I’m glad Buddhists can have mystical experiences, too, but that doesn’t mean Buddhism (of whatever variety and varieties) is just as true as trinitarian Christian theism. They probably (definitely?) take apophatic theology to its limit, though.