I think that can be answered in different ways depending on the perspective. I would start with God and say that God sovereignly elects and chooses the yes/no of everyone's salvation. For the "No's" their understanding and/or belief about God, etc. is irrelevant. (Aren't I nice? :) For the "Yes's" God will provide sufficient and necessary understanding and belief about God to ensure salvation, the gift of true faith. This gift includes the requisite applications also, e.g., repentance, perseverance, etc. All of it comes from God.
(b)See (2a) above but with special reference to right understanding about the faith/works mess.
I think from God's perspective He provides all the faith and does all the works, so there is no mess. :) From man's perspective I still don't think there is a mess. True faith produces general good works every single time. Therefore, whether or not a person understands or agrees with that is irrelevant. (Of course to say that I must hold that it is impossible to have true faith and not do works.) In any event, I think there are zillions of people just like you and me, who have true faith, do good works, completely disagree on how faith and works relate to each other, and yet we are probably both fine.
Sometimes it's amazing and distressing to me that we have so much contention, because I guess that everyone of us in the history of his relationship with Jesus has experienced a moment in which he said, "Yes!" And of that moment, again I GUESS, the best description is, "I did it, yet God did it in me, both to will and to do."
Yes, I suppose I separate it by considering the two different perspectives of intellect and experience. Both are good and part of human nature.
(4)(As an attempt to illuminate a way to think about freedom) I asked someone a trick question the other day: Is God able to lie?
I would say "No", God is not able to lie because that would violate His unchanging nature (God is truth) as described in the Bible. If He lied He would cease to be God. Instead, He would be something else, not the God the Bible describes. The same would apply to God ceasing to exist or making a rock He couldn't lift. However, this in no way is a curtailing of God's freedom, which is absolute. When I think of freedom I think of freedom from "what". The only "what" for God would be His own nature, which is defining, so I don't think the issue of freedom would really apply to that.
The "trick" is that I'd suggest lying is not an "ability," but a defect or perversion of an ability. The proposed analysis is: The "end" or "object" of communication is to convey what I mean (and to mean the truth.)
I would say it depends on how "truth" is handled. For example, God asking Adam where he is. The appearance is that the truth is that God doesn't know where Adam is. However, we know the real truth is that He did know where Adam was and the purpose of His communication was to convey to Adam that He required Adam's presence. I would not call this a lie, and God successfully conveyed what He meant and it was the real truth, although it was not necessarily obvious.
Even to WANT to convey the truth is a freedom I do not perfectly manifest or experience, at least not often. And when I want to, I still mess up.
Yes, the remnant of sin is there and we occasionally do not convey the real truth.
So the POWER or ability of God is that He CAN tell the truth, and wants to. For Him to want to lie would be a loss of ability, and since He has neither parts nor passions but is utterly "simple" it would be a loss of "what it is HE is."
I'm not sure I'd put it in those terms, but I think we end in basically the same place. I suppose I wouldn't say that God CAN tell the truth and wants to, but rather that God DOES tell the truth because He IS truth. It is His nature so there is no issue of wanting. We don't think of wanting to breathe air, we just do it because our nature requires it. But as I think you say, if God lost what it is that He is, then He wouldn't be God any more.
To act like a corrupt fool MAY be something appropriate to politicians, wait, I mean, MAY sometimes LOOK like freedom (Have sex with, oh, the young Veronica Lake or re-read that tricky passage in Romans, what to do, what to do ...) But it's NOT freedom, it's weakness and failure.
Yes, and I would add total bondage to sin. Before I became a Christian I sure felt free as a bird in pulling all the crap I did, but little did I know how much in chains I really was. Praise God for rescuing the sorry likes of me. :)
Just to tie it up rhetorically, since God has "all the power that is" therefore we can see that the ability to lie is not, strictly speaking a "power."
To me, this has important, what, resonances with the whole question of free will and the rest.
As I've said before, SOMETIMES Calvinists and the "irresistible grace" crew appear to be denying freedom, but I'm not sure that's right. When God shows even the slightest hint of His love and glory, it is freedom to affirm, and slavery to reject. Whether and how one can "freely" chose slavery is another question. But similarly, when we feelthy papists insist on "free will" WE are the ones who appear to be put in the position of saying that it's an exercise of freedom to choose fornication over enjoying the Truth.
My latest infatuation is with a very nice but difficult book, very Catholic I have to say, which looks at this question in terms of Nominalism and "Scholastic Realism". The book is by Servais Pinckaers, O.P. (he's Belgian) and it's title is The Sources of Christian Ethics. It's a slog, but an interesting slog.
The relevance is that Pinckaers argues that the "Freedom from what?" idea of freedom comes from Nominalism, and that Nominalism is pretty much the focus of evil in the late medieval (intellectual) world.
He suggests, following Aquinas, that instead the will is directed to "the good" (which is more than moral good) and to be attracted to what is not good is a defect of the will, and therefore a compromise of freedom. Try this:
The ability of free will to choose between various things in conformity with the end ['end' as in 'that for the sake of which', man was created with the 'end' of the vision of God] shows the perfection of freedom; but to choose something not ordered to the end, that is, to sin, evinces a defect of freedom. Therefore the angels, who cannot sin, enjoy greater freedom of choice than do we, who can.But to make a LONG, LONG argument short, Pinckaers proposes (following Aquinas) that freedom is "Freedom FOR excellence" before it is freedom FROM anything. I would add that it is because we are sinners and everything we see is affected by that, it is quite understandable that our first thought of freedom would be "freedom from." But as we live, pray, think the Gospel, we see that freedom is really freedom TOWARD.Summa, First Part, question 62, article 8, reply to objection 3
FWIW.
Turning to other news: Go directly to your library and pick up Edward Feser's The Last Superstition for a rollicking good time refuting atheism. The guy is trained as a philosopher and writes like Ann Coulter. It is more fun than you can imagine.
Have a great day.