The God of the Possible or WWJD

These are thoughts evoked by Tom Belt's recent article - The God of the Possible

Our moral intuitions & aesthetic sensibilities are not "mere" but are integrally intertwined with our discursive reasoning in every human value realization. To speak of an "axiological epistemology" is to utter a redundancy.

That's why Scotus' primacy of the will doesn't devolve into voluntarism or Peirce's aesthetic primacy --- hedonism.

That's why Merton said that, often, truth comes flying in on the wings of beauty & goodness.

That's why Lonergan issued the imperatives to be attentive, reasonable, intelligent, responsible & in love.

That's why so many, formatively, begin with right belonging (orthocommunally), which then gifts us right desiring (orthopathically), which then gifts us right behaving (orthopraxically), before finally awakening to a right believing (orthodoxically). Only when taken together will these imperatives lead us to our ever-increasing human authenticity or right becoming (orthotheotically).

Our faith journey involves knowledge that's propositional & gnoseological as well as a participatory & operative knowledge.

That's why Stump urges analytic theologians to engage logic & Franciscan knowledge in tandem.

That's why infernalists know that, beyond their arguments, they must indeed attend to our affective & evaluative dispositions.

That's why some do bother to engage us holistically, by using storytelling & concrete examples, to complement their formal arguments.

That's why they know, in both their heads & hearts, that restorative, remedial & retributive punishments must be proportional to be just and that, otherwise, a moral modal collapse will ensue, eschatologically.

That's why some will dismiss eternal conscious torment, while others will provide examples of how hell's just not nearly as bad as most have imagined. It's more like staying at a suburban Motel 6 while your kinfolk are in the downtown Mariott; so, eat, drink & be merry, for all may, can, will & shall be hell, ahem, well.

Those with eyes to see, though, know that allowing the possibility (running the risk) of unintended eternal evils (e.g. an everlasting peccability) as an unavoidable risk isn’t morally justifiable because the retributive (&/or restorative) weight of such an infinite perdition (e.g. eternal purgatorial fire) would be WAY disproportional, by definition, to any offense that could be committed by finite, fallible persons.

That scenario collapses, therefore, per double-effect & cooperation with evil type principles into ‘directly intending’ – not ‘merely permitting’ – an evil. And no, one can't coherently recruit Nyssen's eternal, ecstatic epectatic dynamic as aesthetically, morally or logically proportional to an everlasting purgative sequestration (of course, state of being, not place).

Given certain circumstances, then, permission can become tantamount to intention.

Given certain circumstances, evil as a parasitic existence can become, for all practical purposes, a substantial existent.

The whole time I was reading Tom's article and the responses, apposite & otherwise, I was thinking about my favorite General Audience of Benedict XVI

Lastly, Duns Scotus has developed a point to which modernity is very sensitive. It is the topic of freedom and its relationship with the will and with the intellect. Our author underlines freedom as a fundamental quality of the will, introducing an approach that lays greater emphasis on the will.

Unfortunately, in later authors, this line of thinking turned into a voluntarism, in contrast to the so-called "Augustinian and Thomist intellectualism". For St Thomas Aquinas, who follows St Augustine, freedom cannot be considered an innate quality of the will, but, the fruit of the collaboration of the will and the mind. Indeed, an idea of innate and absolute freedom - as it evolved, precisely, after Duns Scotus - placed in the will that precedes the intellect, both in God and in man, risks leading to the idea of a God who would not even be bound to truth and good. 

The wish to save God's absolute transcendence and diversity with such a radical and impenetrable accentuation of his will does not take into account that the God who revealed himself in Christ is the God "Logos", who acted and acts full of love for us. Of course, as Duns Scotus affirms, love transcends knowledge and is capable of perceiving ever better than thought, but it is always the love of the God who is "Logos" (cf. Benedict XVI, Address at the University of Regensburg, 12 September 2006). In the human being too, the idea of absolute freedom, placed in the will, forgetting the connection with the truth, does not know that freedom itself must be liberated from the limits imposed on it by sin. All the same, the Scotist vision does not fall into these extremes: for Duns Scotus a free act is the result of the concourse of intellect and will, and if he speaks of a “primacy” of the will, he argues this precisely because the will always follows the intellect.

Toward a More Coherent Theoanthropology

Rather than consider certain theo-anthropo stances over against, I’ve looked for aspects of truth, beauty & goodness in each to see if any apparent dichotomies might be dissolved.

Consider sufficient:efficacious; omnipresence:indwelling; synergism:monergism; im/peccability; in/ancaritability; ir/resistible; justifying:sanctifying; un/elect; intellect/will; formal/efficient; assent, refusal & quiescence (absence of refusal); in/compatibilism; natural:personal; necessary:fitting; determination:freedom; inter alia.

It’s a long (1500 pp) story, but oversimplifying it, I’ve found that if we allow many of the realities in certain competing theologoumena, specifying some as universal, others – particular and some as extra/ordinary, each can find a place in a coherent stance.

Certain dichotomies do have to be sacrificed if we want to salvage all of the above divine realities.

In order to coherently hold all of those above realities together, any artificial extrinsicism must be ditched re nature:grace. Transient purgation would stay, while eternal perdition would have to go.