A messy Irenaean world which leaves much to be desired and then grows in value due to our contribution has a great value.
A perfectionistic world where everyone is already perfectly virtuous and everything is good and we just maintain that level of good also has great value.
Quite plausibly the two worlds have incommensurable value.
God could just choose between these incommensurable values. But what God does is something else: he leaves it to the first humans to choose. This seems an especially great gift: we get to choose the basic shape of the value that our world takes.
We sin, and we get the Irenaean world.
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"O truly necessary sin of Adam,
destroyed completely by the Death of Christ!
O happy fault
that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!"
Self sacrifice, compassion, forgiveness and reconciliation, perseverance in the good in spite of hardships, etc., all the greatest acts of love, and looking at all of this from the imagined point of view of an eternity that is being spent with the possession of these authentically accomplished virtues and memories, all of which we can continously draw value from, like from an infinite well:
even if they are incommensurable, an Irenaean world certainly makes for a better story.
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