If certain Thomists & David Bentley Hart are Right (and they are), then …
For a great conversation, visit Eclectic Orthodoxy, where Phillip Cary‘s _Inner Grace: Augustine in the Traditions of Plato and Paul_ is under consideration.
Especially see Fr Kimel’s comment with which I resonate.
The points of agreement between DBH & those Thomists who, like Hart, reject the free will defense of hell might be instructive?
Their shared “freedom for excellence” conception is consistent with a philosophically coherent double-agency?
It’s a type of compatibilism that would see grace as non-necessitating even when it’s shattering our vicious natures?
So, efficacious graces would only ever establish & enhance – not annihilate or hinder – our freedom.
One might ask, though, why the protological epistemic distancing & peccability? What greater good might they be ordered toward?
In any given infusion of efficacious grace, if our essential & sufficient free will is not at risk, just what is it, then, that we’re imagining as possibly being sacrificed (seemingly coerced)?
Wahlberg’s Thomistic Autonomy Defense introduced an autonomy ordered toward intimacy as an enriched notion of freedom. That tracks in the right direction.
I don’t view Wahlberg’s notion as changing anyone’s degree or depth of freedom, however. Rather, I interpret that in terms of one’s range or scope of freedom.
That’s to say that it has been eternally determined that we will freely manifest Christ as imagoes Dei, predestined as we are.
Ordinarily, what we autonomously co-self-determine is not whether but how we’ll freely manifest Christ as we grow in likeness. The ranges of how we will manifest Christ, however, can be variously expanded or narrowed, synergistically. They can be sacrificially self-surrendered during ordinary self-determined soul-crafting operations.
Extraordinarily, through predestination, election & all manners & degrees of efficacious gracing, we can respond extra-kenotically to invites that, in some ways & to various extents, will limit the scope of our theophanic expression, e.g. whether as priest or prophet or king or as Theotokos, Moses or Paul, always for the sake of others.
Total Aside:
No, Wahlberg’s Thomistic Autonomy Defense of Hell doesn’t work. Rather, it proves that God has no greater good to lose in terms of human free will. A restoration of all to their original beatitude & the eternal preservation of everyone’s capacity for the beatific vision would not risk — but would, indeed, enhance – their freedom for excellence.
Only extraordinarily would God infallibly determine that any given person will sacrifice their autonomous self-determination in this or that manner & to this or that extent. There is a sacrifice which can get mislabeled a coercion. Why and when He does is always ordered to maximizing the overall balance of human co-creative autonomy toward ends like the greater good of optimal divine intimacy & greatest expansion of theophanic breadth.
That’s why my approach insists on:
1) a universal restoration of our original beatitude,
2) a universal preservation (not necessarily realization) of our original teloi &
3) universal post-mortem impeccability.