This is certainly our point of contrast, then; because I cannot logically regard God’s active self-existence to necessarily involve God’s creation of not-God entities in order to continue self-existing. Not-God reality is not God, and does not actively self-exist; there is no and cannot be ontological parity between God and not-God. (Call that shallow if you insist. I call it logical.)
Nor do I regard God in His infinite self-existence to have changed to be no longer the perfect pure self-generation of God. That God must act differently from the action of self-existence, however, must be true for not-God entities to exist; but that does not and cannot involve God self-begetting and God self-begotten (and God self-giving) ceasing instead to act in self-existence.
I do grant the most intimate possible points of connection between the self-sacrificing action of God and (not-God) Nature as an ongoing result of that self-sacrificial action – but the real distinction of a creation (by the Lamb slain at and as the foundation of the world, so to speak) means any not-God Nature (however many such systems of created existence exist) is not itself ontologically on parity with God. Similarly, an ever-increasing number of such systems can always be increasing in number, perhaps even at infinite speed, without that number ever ‘adding up to’ the infinity from which those numbers come.
What I do insist on, in regard to God’s continuing ontological self-existence, is that God shall not treat rational creatures in those Natures in any way which would run in contravention to the fulfillment of fair-togetherness between persons. (I don’t mean that I’m ordering God to do that, of course; only that I cannot accept an idea about God to be true that involves this, without denying orthodox trinitarian theism.) But even this does not require God to be creating not-God entities in order for God to self-exist.
I don’t think free agency at all denies, but rather affirms, at least a limited ability to choose in a way that is not determined by all incoming environmental effects. But we probably have very different ideas of what free agency per se involves, and so are inadvertently talking at cross purposes here using similar terminology. “The bottom line is that Free Agency maintains that, however difficult it is to predict or define, our decisions are entirely based upon elements of our soul and perception and context, which are all under God’s deterministic control or intimate foreknowledge, making our choices entirely malleable in a deterministic way,” doesn’t sound at all like “free agency” to me even in a limited way. “Free” “agency” == “our choices” are “entirely malleable” by, “entirely based upon”, “deterministic” influences?? That sounds like the total opposite of any even slightly real free agency.
My problem is when you elide that over into the circumstances of “the best perceived option” creating the (apparent) choice of (actual) behavior. Being forced by circumstances to quit doing something that I willingly intend I would continue if I could, highlights the distinction of events involved. The core intention, even if clouded by perception, is what a person is personally responsible for, and what the person is actively choosing.
I would say instead the free will per se is the only way in which a person is actually a person and not an illusion of a person; and this active agency can only come from God (the Father of spirits). God, I agree, authoritatively chooses to let our free will exist in subjection, currently, to many non-rational and non-moral stimuli, affected by causes; but this cannot be the end or the beginning of our will. In one sense I can agree that God therefore does not choose to protect our free will in various ways (imposed death being the most obvious example); but in the only ways that can possibly have meaning, our free will is the only created thing about us which God ultimately protects, our existence as free wills being why God voluntarily self-sacrifices to create not-God reality at all.
A not-God natural system teeming with any number of impersonal not-God entities, is after all only a work of art at best. Derivatively created spirits are children, not puppets (even if we and/or our ancestors have currently tied us up in bundles of knotted strings woven from the threads of Nature, her maternal dress becoming our shroud until the time of childbirth has been entirely fulfilled.)