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.
I would submit that the whole piece is built somewhat narrowly... And it deals with 'fallen man' as a problem internal to man alone. The resulting curse from the original sin is not on man alone, but on the whole of creation - While there are no doubt 'things internal', a broader scope would need to be applied.
How does one define 'natural man', if the entirety of what we perceive to be 'natural' is not in it's original state?
And could it be that no 'graces' have been lost at all, but that the alterations in the natural environment and in physical man have left him in a condition wherein the comfortable choice... feeding his belly, as it were... is a powerful distraction which leads man inevitably to depravity, even as it leads him inevitably to plow the ground?
This seems a more reasoned (or at least as reasoned) approach, and is not so unnecessarily convoluted - And it also explains why the sins of Adam are conveyed upon his progeny throughout time - Something which would otherwise seem to be an unjust result.
Shhhhhh! Don't say that too loudly!
They even let me teach some times!
And one of the things I teach (I admit it, I'm a clown) is... well I like to teach sitting down and I'm talking about the Fall and suddenly I bend over, look at the floor, and point as if looking down from heaven and say, "Wait! What? Hey Gabe! Mike! Get over here! You see that? I can't buhLEEVE they're DOING that!" Then I turn to the class and say,"It's not like that."
We think God is outside of time and sees the whole thing at once. He doesn't "FORE-see" anymore than he changes his mind. Yet first it's REALLY hard to talk or too think that way, and second we have language all over the Torah the presents God as "repenting of the evil" after he sees some change in behavior or hears Moses or something.
But we don't think that God kind of looked around and said, "Oh boy, what're we gonna do now?"
But then, I often offer as a proof of the Christian religion that it spread for centuries before the discovery of coffee.
I mean, just think: All these people standing around after Mass with donuts in their hands and thinking,"I don't know, but I just feel I should be holding something warm."