Predestination

I have been busy reading for this, but I have yet to finish all I need. I have a book by Reginald Garrigou-lagrange on predestination. I have a book on Aquinas and his ideas of aesthetics. I just got a book on the ideas of Freedom and Grace as understood by Augustine. The more I read the more I can see that predestination is based on a few ideas. The first of these is the power of the creator not being "all powerful". The second being the idea of "original sin" and its effects on the human condition. And thirdly, the one I see as most important, is that the whole teaching of Predestination is a negative teaching. All of it is based on refuting a particular heresy at different times in history. There is no positive teaching, separate from rebuttal teaching. This leads me to a very nebulous idea, that maybe what has been taught is not as sound as it could be. A person in an argument, especially in a religious dispute, will tend to pull ideas and proofs to fit their argument. It is also known that heretical teachings in the early years of Christianity were destroyed so it becomes more difficult to understand the other side of the story. What we know, of a lot of the heresies, are found in the rebuttals where they are quoted or in what the reformed are asked to proclaim. You can discern what the ideas they, the heretics, proclaimed, by what they were ask to profess (usually the opposite of what they were teaching).

So, where to now? I need to find Origin's ideas on predestination and then the Pelagian Heresy. They seemed to have hit on an idea that was quite along the ideas of the Eastern Fathers, and that Augustine ( a Western Father) laid a major fight on them and refused to accept their profession of faith on separate grounds from their reformed teaching on predestination. Seems like he was really taking a lot of the argument "personal" and not as a disagreement. Also Augustine threw in the idea of infant baptism, which added an even more diverse twist to predestination that has haunted the "loving God" image since.

Just an update of where I am, and that I have not forgotten the topic of the year. I know it is the center of conversation at every meal, every coffee house, donut shop and taco stand in the whole world. Okay, so I am alone in this conversation!