There are a lot of great questions in your post but the approach of classical theists and theistic personalist are different to the point where one should lay down significant groundwork before discussing anything. So first off, agency is the ability to cause an effect. Classical theists agree God has agency in this sense. But classical theism simply denies that God has moral agency because it believes morality is objective and tied into the nature of things. So in order to really dial this in we would have to discuss morality and what makes it objective. How do we cross the is/ought divide and how do wedeal with Euthyphro’s dilemma? I have been recently laying all these things out step by step in this thread:
https://discourse.biologos.org/t/morality-and-subjectivity-objectivity/
Actions being right or wrong for a substance depend on the telos or ends given its nature. A pen that writes consistency is a good pen. A margarita made with fresh lime juice is a good margarita. A good margarita does not write well. That doesn’t make sense. These are artifacts with imposed meaning but natural substances have their goodness baked in. As I noted, a good heart is one that pumps blood efficiently, a good use of intellect is one that seeks truth. In the classical view teleology or final causality in an Aristotelian sense a part of the nature of things. I went through this more fully here:
Since good is defined as something that achieves its ends the term does not apply to God in that that sense. There is no external moral standard God must obey, God has no boss, no peers, no unfulfilled potentials, not ends to achieve. God is perfect.
My understanding of human agency is that we are supposed to be image bearers of divine agency and pursue choices that uphold love, goodness, peace, and justice.
Yes, we are supposed to choose actions that lead to our flourishing given our nature. We are supposed to choose good but God is goodness itself.
The point isn’t that we exist as goodness and love to reflect God’s essence, the point is that we use our agency to do good and loving actions. Many of which have moral components.
A good action for us is a moral action by definition in classical theism. We are not God. We can reflect his image but not in the same way as Jesus and there is an infinite gulf between man and God. A painting of a fire does not emit heat. For me, theistic personalism makes God too human.
So exempting God from moral agency is fundamentally unsatisfying to me and feels like semantic and category games to get an outcome instead of actually dealing with our observed reality.
We don’t exempt God. The definition of morality makes this a category mistake. At this moment you are using the word moral in an undefined sense from my perspective. I get your gist but without defining morality, dealing with is/ought, Euthyphro and objective/subjective, it’s kind of hard to have a discussion about it. The classical view of morality handles them with ease.
Athens vs Jerusalem. It’s a strong pushback but one that ultimately loses its force really quickly. When the Bible says “God remembered his covenant” do you think he really forgot? When he parades the animals in front of Adam to find a suitable mate do you not think he didn’t know none of them were going to be a fit beforehand? When it says God rested and was refreshed, do you really think God was tired? God doesn’t have a localized physical body, changing emotional states nor does he lose a wrestling match with a human being.
The Bible anthropomorphicizes God but it contradicts itself when you take all these descriptions literally. “God is not a human being, that he should lie, or a mortal, that he should change his mind” (Numbers 23:19), “I the Lord do not change” (Malachi 3:6). Yet we see God repenting several times. The question is what is an anthropomorphic description of God and what is not. This is not a matter merely imposing Greek constructs. I’m pretty sure you and everyone but the most conservative of interpreters think many statements about God in the Bible are absolutely non-literal.
Then there are mic drop statements where God lays truth on us such as. "I am that I am. Sounds a lot like essence = existence here. What the Greeks discovered (prime mover/uncaused cause), God revealed to Moses via a burning bush.
Using philosophical tools to illuminate Scripture is no more imposing Greek philosophy on the Bible than using facts of modern science to illuminate the Bible is imposing atheistic science on the Bible. This is a matter of the degree of which the Bible is accommodated. A lot of exegetes are comfortable with accommodation only applies to science but while the Bible is not a science textbook it is not a work of philosophy or history either. Nor is it a systematic theology or just a book of moral laws. Accommodation applies to all aspects of the Bible.
As for the covenant, classical theists think of that as condescension and gratuitous love, not a social contract. if I made a contract with you it would be morally wrong to break it as I am subject to a higher law (justice, fairness) given the nature of what is means to be human. God has no boss, peers or law higher than himself. Fairness is not some external moral absolute God must abide by. God is goodness itself. So when God enters into a covenant with us the classical theists would say he is not stepping into a pre-existing moral framework to become a “good covenant partner,” He is freely binding Himself out of pure grace.
The problem to me is one of viewing God as a Mesopotamian tribal-deity who made a deal with one group of humans as opposed to a maximal being who lacks potentiality, is pure act, is pure goodness, sustains existence ex nihilo every instant and so on.
“The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21).
Vinnie