Read the comments to this too
and here at comment 113 here http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2012/11/do-you-want-to-go-to-heaven/#comment-47512
First, if God could not create free-willed beings, then there would be only one will acting in the universe, which you are precariously close to saying in the suggestion that the divine will acts “through us.” If that is the case, then the fact that sin exists would mean that God was sinning, thereby contradicting His own nature, which is absurd. Consequently, it cannot be denied that God is capable of creating free-willed beings with whom the divine will concurs without acting through them as instruments without impugning His sovereignty. Nor can it be the case that God is responsible for His failure to force someone to comply, as you suggest to be the case if Christ to some extent left you in the hands of your own will...........
Instead, you need to accept that God can work through concurrence with free wills without harming His sovereignty. Now, if free wills could disrupt God’s will without His consent, that would definitely be a problem, and that is the sort of concern that the passages cited above are intended to alleviate: creaturely monergism. But divine monergism, which these passages do not specifically address, is equally problematic. Based on the Scriptural witness and essential metaphysical considerations, it is necessary to affirm synergism, not to suggest that the divine will needs creaturely agency to operate but that God can choose to do so.
and from comment 131:
The fact that God would ever need to “trump” our free will is ridiculous; it puts human will on the same plane as God. To put it another way, even given 2000 years of Western philosophical background, you’ve still managed to anthropomorphize God. Without God’s concurrence, free wills wouldn’t even exist, so there’s no reason to assume that acting *through* free wills means He has to destroy them in the process. Moreover, you’re suggesting God allows free will to exist to sin, but then trumps (i.e.,destroys) that same will in order to save people. There’s simply no reason to believe any of this; it certainly doesn’t come from the Bible.
Romans 9 simply explains that there is no injustice for God granting salvation to particular Gentiles and refusing it to particular Jews, just as there is no injustice in God granting or denying certain blessings after He has given others. Like Romans 4 and 11, Romans 9 gives examples of people with one type of blessing who are then denied another. Thus, Abraham received God’s blessing apart from the Law, so likewise, it does not deprive Jews of anything to give it to Gentiles. Esau was blessed by being the elder, but God nonetheless gave Esau’s blessing to the younger. Pharaoh was made a great ruler, but God did not save him from destruction; on the contrary, he allowed Pharaoh’s downfall. None of these have anything to do with God “trumping” free will or using people as instruments. They simply say that people who have received some kind of blessing are not thereby entitled to demand from God other blessings out of God’s grace. Again, you’re talking about something that the passage does not address, simply because of reading your philosophical beliefs into the Bible.
from 54 http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/12/signs-of-predestination-a-catholic-discusses-election/
Why can’t I just turn this around and say something like, “It cannot be said truly in the Catholic doctrine that God works all things out according to the counsel of his own will, or that he has his way among those in heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth, and none can say his hand or ask him, ‘What doest thou?’”? In the same way that our view seems to you to destroy God’s desire to save all men, it seems to us that yours destroys God’s ability to accomplish his will, both of which are equally Scriptural ideas. So unless your position can account for both, it does no good highlighting our problem texts as if that proves anything.
God does work all things out according to the counsel of His will, and He has His way among those in heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth, and no one can stay His hand or call Him to account. But, God’s will is not that no other being exercise its will, or that He decide for each free creature what it will choose, and then let it live out this pre-determined program as if that creature had free choice. He is so much more generous. He has willed that there be real creatures truly endowed with free will, and that these free creatures truly and freely exercise their free will. This is precisely why there is a difference between God’s antecedent will and God’s consequent will, not because God is of two minds, but because His consequent will takes into consideration the free choices of His creatures. We know, for example, that God’s antecedent will is that all men always keep the Ten Commandments. But obviously, not all men keep the Ten Commandments. That does not “destroy God’s ability to accomplish His will.” He Himself has generously willed that we be given the power to freely choose contrary to His antecedent will. And yet even when we will what is contrary to God’s antecedent will, God is able to bring about through our choices the end He has willed, an end which takes into consideration our free choices.
The Calvinist position makes God either likewise impotent (since He can’t seem to prevent people from going against His will specified in the Ten Commandments), or insincere in implying that it is His will that we obey the Ten Commandments, if whatever is His will He necessarily accomplishes. Instead of attributing schizophrenia, impotence or insincerity to God, we explain the distinction between His antecedent will and consequent will as a distinction based on His generosity in giving to rational creatures genuine free choice, even the power to choose contrary to His antecedent will, as Lucifer did, and Adam and Eve as well. If you say that they sinned because God willed them to sin, you make God the author of evil. But if you say that they sinned because God willed them to have free will, and because they freely willed to sin, then you do not make God the author of evil, nor do you make Him weak. Rather, you affirm the generosity of His gift of rationality to creatures, and locate the blame for man’s sin on man himself.
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