Toward a more Eschatologically Enhanced Apokatastenai – new & improved: affectively sweetened & beatitudinally enriched
say goodbye to Limbo, try our new & improved apokatastenai
Fr Aidan Kimel’s Predestined to Glory: The Extravagant, Prodigal, and Omnipotent Love of God has fostered great discussions, especially involving certain libertarian inclinations of various co-religionists of mine. While my views don’t fit comfortably within a compatibilist – libertarian frame, I’m very sympathetic to certain dynamics as are on offer, especially by Fr Kimel, but also by perditionists like Stump, Noia, Wahlberg & Rooney as regarding the fittingness of various divine favorings.
I’ve aleady contributed my summary position comment at Eclectic Orthodoxy and have continued to follow it with an active interest. Below are thoughts I’ve compiled along the way and have tried to rearrange to better frame up my own stance. My stance, I suspect, is too idiosyncratic. To inject my approach into that ongoing conversation would obfuscate more than clarify what’s at stake. So, here I am, instead.
Very loosely, then, more so as a heuristic to foster more explorations than an argument to refute any particular take, please consider:
no to beatitudinal flatlands
God does unite with His creatures in many ways & to varying extents including omnipresences, indwelling, mediated & immediate.
yes to God’s love of what we are vs what we can become
God loves persons unrequitedly and achieves union in the eschaton to the degree they’re willing (not just able, e.g. no person’s vicious nature could ever be beyond purgative graces) to receive.
If God doesn’t will every good for everyone, that needn’t mean that His love must be considered conditional, restricted or limited.
yes to distinction between freedom and autonomy as ordered to intimacy
God could’ve set up a world where all equally attain some maximum degree of union, but He willed an even greater good, which is that all would be capable of – not just freely, but – autonomously self-determining their degree of divine intimacy.
yes to certain moral intuitions
Moral intuitions can be informed by eminently defensible weseeum (we see Abba’s character as revealed in Jesus) inferences as grounded in special revelation & speaking to what fittingly would be the case. So we reject caricatures that conflate what God would or wouldn’t fittingly do with what God could or couldn’t necessarily do. We distinguish any wouldn’ts of divine esse intentionale & will from any couldn’ts of divine esse naturale & necessity, i.e. what’s fittingly vs necessarily the case.
yes to justly withheld efficacious grace
All of the above could be true while still leaving open the question: in which putative scenarios would efficacious grace have been withheld fittingly & which – unjustly?
We might examine this question in terms of the 3 Maximian apokatastases: immortality, theotic realization & apokatastenai. We’ll come back to these Apokatastases to examine what’s behind the Maximian Doors 1, 2 & 3.
no to theological determinism
First, we should note that any thoroughgoing theological determinism (Calvinist) is a nonstarter for Báñezians, Molinists, Open Theists & their many neo- & quasi- formulations. Efficacious grace is non-neccesitating. Finite persons are adequately determined & sufficiently free.
no to the capacity to definitively reject God
Also, while maintaining that, while, of course, we can have sufficient knowledge of goodness & God to culpably sin and even gravely so, we simply don’t have sufficient knowledge of God to definitively reject Him or absolutely so. Rather, all persons would freely & infallibly follow their inclinations per the logoi of human nature, once given such a definitive operative knowledge of God. That knowledge could be infused by any number of ways & degrees of divine presencing known to God, alone, per each person’s dispositions.
no to telic foreclosures
Next, we must say no to disproportionate punishments, where divine permissions would become tantamount to divine intents.
In terms of the 3 Maximian apokatastases: immortality, theotic realization & apokatastenai.
contingent immortality?
No to annihilation as imagoes Dei are inviolably good. An indicative apokatastasis of immortality would be appropriate.
contingent theotic realization?
Eschatologically, God will continue to unite with His creatures in many ways & to varying extents. Unitively, in terms of intimacization, a subjunctive theotic apokatastasis would be appropriate. We needn’t all attain the same degree of glory. Ergo, yes to certain types of predestination, preterition, predilection, impeccability, inancaritability & all sorts of superabundant divine favorings, beyond an essential abundance.
contingent apokatastenai?
about an essential abundance
There are no essential beatitudinal contingencies. There are no moments, when rational creatures aren’t indwelled. Might we defensibly conceive apokatastenai as our purgative restoration via imperfect contrition to original beatitude, equivalent to, at least, an erotic love of God for sake of self? So, in a manner of speaking, our indicative apokatastenai would be one that’s eschatologically enhanced by our conceiving it in terms that are more affectively sweetened and beatitudinally enriched?
So, yes to those who imagine post-mortem accounts that suggest greatly mitigated degrees of suffering or more slight deprivations of goodness as contrasted with conventional ECT accounts. Do keep moving in our direction!
yes to Noia’s universalism problem but no to his indwelling-based beatific contingency
yes to Wahlberg’s autonomy defense
yes to Stump’s focus on divine intimacy as greater good
yes to all preservations of the gratuities of creation & grace
no need for dichotomy between hatred & nuptial bliss, only abundance & superabundance, i.e. AMDG, ad majorem Dei gloriam
Universalists must reject premises that employ terms defined in such a way as not to even successfully refer in one’s own system, or, at least make clear that we’re only stipulating to certain premises & definitions only for argument’s sake as we inhabit an alternate take only to demonstrate how it self-subverts, whether thru incompatibilities & incompossibilities or reductios ad absurdum, which can include violations of our most widely shared parental instincts, aesthetic sensibilities, moral intuitions & common sense interpretations of freedom & determination.