Do you believe in heavenly freedom & impeccability?
how about predestination?
I was pleased when Pope Francis named Brother Simon Gaine, OP, a member of the International Theological Commission, especially because Gaine authored the book _Will There Be Free Will in Heaven? Freedom, Impeccability and Beatitude_ (2003), wherein he expounded on Servais Pinckaers’s “freedom for excellence.”
Gaines’s conception of freedom had prepared me to grasp & wholly embrace David Bentley Hart’s model.
Nowadays, it’s extremely hard to navigate competing models of grace & freedom.
In the same way that the distinctions between libertarian & compatibilist models don’t even ask all the relevant questions, the Molinist & Báñezian solutions don’t even address the concerns of today’s Neo-Báñezians.
I’ve given up trying to process these disputes. I can’t even figure out how to map their concepts.
I’m no longer interested in which “school” one belongs or how one self-describes. To cut to the chase, I just want to know:
Do you believe in heavenly freedom? impeccability? predestination?
In addition to the Pinckaers – Gaines – Hart model of freedom, I’m sympathetic to Mats Wahlberg’s Thomist “autonomy” account as ordered toward intimacy. For me, while it doesn’t block any inferences re universalism (it’s no coherent defense of hell), arguably, it might supplement other logical defenses to the problem of evil.
In the beatific vision, for me, our “freedom for excellence” would operate as ordered to our universally realized primary beatitude, while our “autonomy for intimacy” would be ordered toward our differentially realized secondary beatitudes.