I think the problem faced by anyone who draws or tries to draw conclusions from Scripture is doping out when the last tether was cut and the craft started drifting randomly -- if you take my meaning.
As I rushed through Fr. Hardon's stuff, when I see "deiform" I just think, okay, that's a Latinate way of referring to man's being made in the image and likeness (hereinafter "I+L"). So I don't have the sense of hitting a wall that you had (I'm guessing) when you ran across that word. So I have to go back and see what I missed.
I was struck with the, let's say,"enthusiasm" of the first part of Hardon's description. But I think he pulls it out of the fire when he says:
The body goes quickly to the things of sense; the mind goes more slowly to things of the spirit. Thus, there are roots of disorder in man’s very nature. St. Paul spoke so eloquently of this battle, this conflict in man (Rom. 7). In Adam, God did not remove the disorderly tendencies, but by the gift of integrity He put in him a principle of control.IF I understand him, he's saying that of unfallen man.
So, if that's right, to sum up the first part is to say that by the grace of his creation, by the grace of his "right relationship" (itself a gift) to God, Adam has many other graces which follow, like holiness. He also has graces that are (Hardon says) praeternatural, graces such that creatures (like angels) might be given.
(I hit a wall at impassibility. I don't see why unfallen man would not suffer, and I would want clarification here.)
So, two things: one is that a lot of this seems to be just drawing out what a man, an animal that can think and choose, is and what would be the case if such a creature had no history of sin. When Hardon writes of "a principle of control" that seems to answer to my experience. The "higher" thing for me is to watch my diet because it's good to take care of the body God gave me. Because of the Fall, my "principle of control" is out of whack. When I ride my bicycle where the aroma of hot oil from all the fast food places assaults my nose, I know how weak my principle of control is.
But I can imagine unfallen Adam saying,"Yeah, smells great. No thanks."
And deiformity seems to me to be not SO bad a term. "You are gods," quotes IHS. And John says, "We will be like him for we shall see him as he is." And remember, when we say "form" we don't mean shape, we mean something like principle. One might say the "Form" of a chair is "sit-on-ability." So man's deiformity would be something like thinking and choosing and loving spiritual things-ability. And it's approximate because we can't create stuff, including ideas (true ones,anyway), because it is in every respect derivative, while God's form is what he is, AND it is, "adjusted" to suit an animal who feeds and breeds.
So to me,the TERM "deiform" just is shorthand for I+L. And then all the stuff Hardon says about it is not found in scripture any more (or any less) than Euclid's proof of the Pythagorean Theorem is found in his definitions and axiomata.
I guess my hope is that if you hack your way through my verbiage, you can find the question or two that skewers the whole thing OR you can comment on the different turns I take in the road and say why you would have turned the other way.
Frankly, your light-handed (in the best sense of that term) treatment of this material leaves little to squabble over (some, but little). My original squawk was the enormously complex integrated circuitry drawn by Hardon (& Co.) wherein "grace" is mapped into packets of "power" Adam is either granted or denied (or eventually stripped of).
When Hardon denies that the Adamic story is the direct outcome of God's plan for human failure ("What intervened to disrupt God's plan?"), he makes God a surprised bystander (or a hand-wringing buffoon) who must scramble for a plan B. What about the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world? So, God didn't know what was going to happen? He really did not know where Adam was when He asked, "Adam, where are you?"? The whole Hardon trail points in the wrong direction right from the beginning.
Hardon hints of the "roots of disorder", but claims Adam has "...perfect order and control...". This is simply not the case. The character cannot withstand the very first enticement to rebellion by his wife. Control? Please. Further, Adam could not have possibly been as "god-like" as Hardon wishes him, since he did not originally possess even the capacity to recognize good and evil, an understanding acquired as his on-board lusts drove him to eat of the tree. Recall, this was no apple tree, but the tree of the "knowledge of good and evil". Once sampled, God said the man had to be removed as he now had become, "...like Us, knowing good and evil."
Evidently, Adam also lacked eternal life from the get go, seeing that God drove him from the garden before he could eat of the tree of life and live forever. The guy was really just everyman, doing what we do best...rebel. And, Paul makes this point in spades, "There is none righteous, not even one, there is none who understands, there is none who seeks for God..." Rom. 3:10ff. Hardon misses this by a country mile and, as you noted, mischaracterizes Luther & Calvin. I might disagree with much the two said, but that everything the unregenerate man thinks, does and believes is tainted with evil is spot on. Hardon loves man too much; total depravity is a reality.
As I said, the excessive focus on "grace" being treated like various power pills sprinkled over everything detracts from the grace to which Paul refers. When God invades a life, dead in its trespasses and sin, adopts the person while still at war with Him, breaks the heart over the rebellion, and rescues the man by forgiving him, then clothes the soul in the righteousness of His Son, we see what "grace" is. This is the only grace described by Paul. This is the course on grace Hardon should take.
I have grappled with you in the past, but I have always noticed you maintain a kind of peaceable reasonableness. And, while it is obvious that you have deep connections to the Organization (which I consider the errant perpetrator of an instituional and non-biblical theology), it seems you wander dangerously close to allowing the Book to tell the story and out where the Son of God, alone, is the Head of His body.