All knowers know God implicitly in all they know.” ~ Thomas Aquinas
One of the reasons I never completed my thesis was that I could not find an answer. Thesis writing is difficult because it assumes you can pose and then successfully answer a challenging theological question. While I stumbled upon an interesting question I could not find an answer, and this is why the question lingers. In dealing with the question of how the gospel is communicated beyond our narrative framework within the work of Stanley Hauerwas I began to see that this problem might be a “problem” specific to Protestant theology.
20th century Protestant theology can roughly be split along two lines: those who find a commonality within humanity as such and those who see a radical discontinuity between religious traditions. For the former liberal strand of Protestant theology, the gospel is something that can be translated or communicated directly to a non-Christian simply through our natural capacities. In other words, it does not take a work of supernatural grace to enable one to understand that message of the gospel. For the latter Barthian theologians, however, the message of the gospel runs so counter to our (fallen) natural state that there is no way for a non-Christian to understand the truth of the gospel without a work of supernatural grace.
The question from the previous post assumed as a launching point the latter of these two positions. The question as to whether or not we can speak across and work together with people outside of our narrative framework assumes that there is a natural discontinuity between the church and the world. This topic was recently taken up on Halden’s blog, wherein Halden drew the distinction, not between two forms of Protestant theology, but between a Barthian discontinuity and a de Lubacian (Catholic) continuity. I would contend, however, that Halden is not fairly reading Henri de Lubac. The position Halden attributes to de Lubac is actually more characteristic of Liberal (and Fundamentalist) Protestantism and its collapsing of grace into nature, or, rather, the liberal positing of a continuity between church and world that renders the church as a superfluous addition to the natural.
While it is true that de Lubac was reacting to a Neoscholaticism that closely resembled the Barthian separation of nature and supernatural grace, he did not go so far as to reduce the supernatural to a seamless perfection through a mere correction, supplementation, or alteration. While I find no problem attributing the superadditum position to Roman Catholicism, I do find it an unfair read of de Lubac. For de Lubac supernatural grace posits at once both a continuity and discontinuity with the reality of God. In as much as we are created by God we are created with a desire to see God. However, in as much as we are finite we cannot achieve this end without a second, sanctifying work of grace that propels us to a place that we cannot get to naturally on our own.
Between nature as it exists and the supernatural for which God destines it, the distance is as great, the difference as radical, as that between on-being and being: for to pass from one to the other is not merely to pass into “more being,” but to pass to a different type of being. It is a crossing, by grace of an impassable barrier. One does not merely need extra strength, such as an actual grace would give: one needs a new principle, that principle of divine life which we call “sanctifying grace.” (Mystery of the Supernatural, p. 83)
Thus, for de Lubac, the answer to Halden’s question — Grace as Interruption or Superadditum? — is both! Grace is a fulfillment of the deep longing placed in us by the Creator for the Creator, but it requires something beyond itself, something that is so foreign that it’s arriving is experienced as an interruption. Again, here is de Lubac:
In short, for Christians created nature is no kind of divine seed. The “depths” of the spiritual soul, that “mirror” where the image of God is reflected secretly, is indeed, a Tauler says, in the “birthplace” of our supernatural being: but it is not its seed or embryo. It is indeed our “capacity” for it – to take a word used by Origen, St. Bernard, St. Thomas, and many others – but that does not make it a participation in it, even initially or distantly, “which needs but to be developed and enriched.”… The longing that surges from this “depth” of the soul is a longing “born of a lack,” and not arising from “the beginning of possession.” (Mystery of the Supernatural, p. 84).
What de Lubac is pointing to, is I think, the same thing G. K. Chesterton described as the basis of romance. In Orthodoxy Chesterton noted that romance requires something to be both familiar and foreign at once. The experience of romance for another person requires that there be a point of contact, a source of something familiar, for us to identify with them. But at the same time there must be something foreign, something other, in order for us to not completely collapse the person into our own identity. And what is this a description of if not the Sublime, that which is both beautiful and terrible, that which both gives and takes life.
In all of this I found that there might be some answer my, rather Protestant, question. In fact, the recognition that my question springs from a Protestant problem is a movement toward an answer itself. Of course, Robb Beck has already pointed this out in his comment to my first installment of this post. But I have only begun to explore what de Lubac and others of the Nouvelle Théologie have to offer in answering this question.
