Why the Permissions of Sin & Damnation Can’t Be Conflated
1) Fr JDR writes: “What we need are principled ways for universalists to distinguish God’s permission of sin from the permission of damnation.”
2) Is this not related to “Why doesn’t God deify everybody immediately?”
3) Or pretty much the same as asking: “Why bother with epistemic distancing and the light of faith, if all will be permitted to enjoy the light of glory, anyway?
re #1, Fr JDR’S query: The permission of sin involves possible rejections of God via acts that are relatively knowledgeable & sufficiently culpable. The permission of damnation involves rejections of God via acts that are fully knowledgeable & absolutely culpable, acts that remain impossible for finite, fallible rational creatures?
re #2, deify everybody, already!
https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2021/01/20/if-god-is-going-to-deify-everyone-anyway-why-not-deify-everyone-immediately/
re #3, why not the light of glory from the get-go?
For starters, there’s one permission of sin and it extends forever such that rational creatures remain essentially peccable. Our eventual impeccability is a practical state, variously intrinsically self-determined (e.g. character development, soul-crafting, virtuous habits, etc) & extrinsically conditioned (e.g. formative influences, accidents of birth & contingencies of life, providential interventions, infallible efficacious gracings).
In my take, perhaps idiosyncratic, not all practical impeccabilities or stabilities in the good are the same. Each person’s stability in the good for any particular mode of union has been attained by a unique blend of intrinsic & extrinsic factors.
Generally, the more one’s impeccability has been attained pursuant to intrinsic factors, the greater will be one’s degree of virtue & capacity for beatitude, hence intimacy.
Our original epistemic distancing, which requires the light of faith and a life of trust, presumably provides each the most optimal extrinsic environment to grow in virtue per one’s intrinsic self-determinations. The more people — who will come to the various modes of divine union via graced intrinsic self-determinations — the better, for their own sakes. The greater, too, will be the People of God’s overall degrees of virtue & capacities for beatitude, ad majorem Dei gloriam.
To the extent, then, that there would be ongoing post-mortem second chances, it would seem to me that one’s extrinsic environment would necessarily play a much larger role in one’s attainment of their practical impeccability. This would seem to prima facie decrease the number of opportunities one might have to intrinsically self-determine one’s character, ergo lessening those degrees of virtue & capacities for beatitude which would be attainable post-mortem.
God’s permission of sin, therefore, is ordered to the optimal attainment of both personal & ecclesial virtue, beatitude & unitive intimacy.
No so-called permission of damnation is necessary for either the optimal ante-mortem attainments of sanctity, which are maximally intrinsic, or for the suboptimal post-mortem attainments, which tend to be more extrinsic. Of course, the maximally intrinsic corresponds with the deepest realizations of intimacy.