Teaching on the beatific vision throughout the history of the church has hardly been uniform in all the details. There is disagreement from author to author, though on the main points we find substantial agreement. I, for one, am quite disappointed with most formulations. I do not feel that most have really made clear and dealt with the infinite Creator-creature distinction and many formulations seem to view Christ as a sort of divinized super-human instead of wrestling with the truth of Chalcedon that his human nature is exactly like ours. To cut through the many unclear and unfortunate formulations, I offer 5 qualifications of my own here:
Christ did not possess the beatific vision on earth (Turretin 13.13)
Christ does not "fully" or "completely" possess the beatific vision because God is infinite and thus we shall always be learning and seeing more and more about Him for all eternity.
All that God has planned may or may not be seen through the beatific vision because this is nowhere explicitly nor implicitly taught in Scripture and furthermore cannot be seen through the beatific vision because finite minds cannot comprehend the aeviternity of human history on into the endless glorified state, though a limited amount of future things may be seen according to the degree of our possession of the beatific vision (Aquinas 1.12.8, Turretin 11.7.14; though this point is mostly my own).
One can speak of Christ's possession of the beatific vision being the cause of our possession of it only in the same sense that Romans 4:25 grounds our resurrection (and thereby possession of the beatific vision) in Christ's resurrection being the legal and therefore causal/meritorious grounds of our resurrection.
Steven Duby's 6th chapter in "Jesus and the God of Classical Theism" is helpful here and reaches similar conclusions to mine, though I am stronger and more dogmatic in these assertions. It must be denied (in accord with Owen) that the union of the Word with Christ's human nature necessarily provided any blessings or gifts and graces upon the human nature of Christ as Scripture never explicitly or implicitly says this nor does reason demand it; rather, the Scriptures teach the Holy Spirit bestowed graces upon His human nature (except insofar as the hypostatic union itself is considered a grace). I would also add that I am drawn to the view of the Leiden Synopsis (agaisnt Turretin's leanings) that the BV is direct vision of God's essence rather than through created likeness.
