God of Order

Abstract

The doctrine of the beatifying vision of God may be derived not only from Sacred Scripture’s promise to the faithful that they shall ‘see God’ (Matt 5:8; 1 Cor 13:12; 1 John 3:2), but also (and perhaps more fundamentally) from Scripture’s testimony that God ‘is not the God of disorder but of peace’ (1 Cor 14:33). An analysis of the concepts of nature, on the part of humanity, and agency, on the part of divinity, within a broadly Aristotelian framework elucidates why early modern Reformed scholastics exposited the beatific vision as the ultimate end of humankind as a fitting implicate of the biblical testimony that God is a God of order.