Oecumenical Grace Series

Here's a wonderful series on Grace over at Fr Aidan's blog:

http://afkimel.wordpress.com/2014/06/10/grace-oecumenical/
http://afkimel.wordpress.com/2014/06/12/oecumenical-grace-eastern-orthodoxy-on-theosis/
http://afkimel.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/oecumenical-grace-roman-catholicism-and-created-grace/
http://afkimel.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/oecumenical-grace-catholicism-and-the-divine-life/
http://afkimel.wordpress.com/2014/06/19/oecumenical-grace-the-protestant-gospel/
http://afkimel.wordpress.com/2014/06/22/oecumenical-grace-comparisons/


Also reblogged in its entirety below:

Grace Oecumenical

http://afkimel.wordpress.com/2014/06/10/grace-oecumenical/

What is grace? Back in the 1950s a group of theologians in France met regularly for ecumenial dialogue.  The results of their conversations were published in the theological journal Irénikon. The participants represented the Catholic, Reformed, and Orthodox traditions. Because the discussions on grace were so well received, Charles Mœller and Gérard Philips decided to share them with the wider Church: The Theology of Grace and the Oecumenical Movement (1961). The book is a model of ecumenical engagement—irenic, constructive, insightful.

Deification, created grace, and extrinsic grace are the three terms that are characteristically used to describe the views of Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and the Reformed. The authors note that at first glance it is difficult to see much common ground between the three traditions. The problem is compounded by misunderstanding and confusion. Catholic theologians typically “get no further than the over-simplified picture of justification in Protestantism which hides the sinner under the cloak of Christ, but leaves him in his sin.” Protestant theologians typically misconstrue the Catholic notion of created grace as a “‘thing’ that is at man’s disposal, like a kind of accumulator of divine energy with the human will operating the switchboard,” while Orthodox theologians reject the proposal of “something both supernatural and created, affirming that only God can give God, and that no created reality, whatever it may be, can be commensurate with him.” And both Protestant and Catholic theologians suspect the Orthodox view of deification “as implying a dangerous exaltation of man, brought about by overlooking original sin.” Yet, the authors insist, the experience of ecumenical discussion has confirmed their conviction that “the three views of grace are not so irreconcilable as might appear.” The Orthodox position, particularly as expressed in Palamism, is concerned to assert the deification in Christ of the whole man, “not only of the soul, but also, and perhaps above all, of the body.” The Catholic position begins with the indwelling Spirit, the Spirit present to or in the soul of the regenerate human being. “While therefore,” writes Mœller and Philips, “Eastern theology is chiefly preoccupied with finding out what, in God, makes Him able to give Himself, that of the West is concerned particularly with what it is, in man, which allows him to receive God.” This insight, I think, is particularly important. We should not, the authors explain, be surprised by differing formulations of the mystery of grace:

Christianity is, in fact, a complexio oppositorum, which asserts in one breath two truths that at first might seem very difficult to reconcile: on the one hand, all Christian confessions grant that God truly gives Himself to man, and that He alone can do this, because His creature is in this respect utterly powerless; on the other hand, this gift would be a sham if God did not in reality make man live by His own divine life. There is a paradox here: in one sense, everything comes from God, and in another, everything comes from man, because no one is saved or damned who has not willed it. St. John’s phrase expresses this two-sided aspect of grace—that we should be called and should be the sons of God [1 John 3:1]. In other words, any theology of grace must insist both on the primacy of God who justifies and sanctifies man, and at the same time on the reality of regeneration. (p. 4)

In subsequent posts we will look at how each tradition works out the affirmation of the primacy of God and the gift of sanctifying union in Jesus Christ.

P.S. I trust that all Orthodox, Catholics, and Protestants can at least agree that Grace Kelly was a luminescent, oecumenical beauty! And as my friend Fr Stephen Freeman repeatedly likes to remind us, we are saved by beauty! And if anyone is wondering whether I would sink so low as to post a photo of a Hollywood celebrity just to attract new readers … well … I am a blogger … :)

Oecumenical Grace: Eastern Orthodoxy on Theosis

http://afkimel.wordpress.com/2014/06/12/oecumenical-grace-eastern-orthodoxy-on-theosis/

“It is too little realized,” write Charles Mœller and Gérard Philips, “that opposition to neo-platonism is as important in the East as that to Pelagianism in the West” (The Theology of Grace and the Oecumenical Movement, p. 6). In the person of Barlaam, Byzantine Christianity confronted a form of Hellenistic apophaticism that rejected the possibility that the baptized can directly and personally experience divinity in their earthly life. In response the Byzantine Church argued that “theology provides the most certain knowledge of God because it is God who is the agent in revealing Himself therein; thus theology, in the context of revelation, becomes an objective and positive mode of cognisance” (p.7). The God who is beyond all being truly communicates himself to man. Here is the import of the Palamite distinction between the incommunicable divine essence and the communicable divine energies. The distinction allows theology to assert the profound truth that God directly shares himself with humanity:

The gulf between the creature and the Creator makes it necessary that the divine energies through which we see God should not themselves belong to the creation. … Of course, the essence of God remains in itself unknowable, for only the three divine hypostases share in it. There is simply a total participation in the divine energy, that is, in that mysterious mode of God’s presence by which He reveals Himself and acts in the believer. The difficult Palamite doctrine of the ἐνεργείαι, at once distinct from God, and yet uncreated, is a systematic way of expressing a simple truth: that the divine life is really given to us. The choice of the term ‘uncreated energies’ emphasizes first that God reveals Himself by acting, which excludes any idea of ‘passion’ in God, and secondly, that since the communication of the divine life is ‘uncreated,’ there can never be any question of making it, by any means whatsoever, the reward of human ‘merit.’ (p. 8)

Deification is nothing less than experience of and participation in the divine life of the Holy Trinity. The baptized know God, not something created by God. The theology of the divine energies thus excludes any suggestion of a created grace. Viewed through Orthodox eyes, the scholastic teaching on created grace appears to deny genuine deification, as if God can only bestow upon his creatures a created supernatural life instead of the uncreated existence that is his.

Mœller and Philips, however, believe that Palamism is ultimately reconcilable with the the scholastic formulation of the mystery of grace:

Without going into the details of this discussion, it is enough to say that the distinction between uncreated and created energies can be expressed in Western terminology by the distinction between the natural and the supernatural. The desire of the scholastics to lay down a doctrine of created grace is explained by their different point of view: the East is concerned … with what it is in God that makes it possible for Him to give Himself; while the West is also concerned—though not to the exclusion of all else—with what it is in man that makes it possible for him to receive and take to himself God and His divine life.  In other words, the East has never attempted a philosophical explanation of deification; and yet if it were satisfactorily described, the doctrine of the habitus would probably be less unacceptable to them; in the same way, catholic theologians, anxious to explain as much as possible about the recipient of divine life, obviously do not deny the ‘uncreated’ character of the life itself; they merely introduce distinctions that are useful to them, but which the East has always distrusted, especially when they are taken from the philosophy of Aristotle. (pp. 8-9)

I wonder whether Mœller and Philips were successful in persuading Fr John Meyendorff, who shared in these ecumenical conversations, of the possibility of reconciling theosis and created grace. I have my doubts.

The authors cite a magnificent passage from St Gregory Palamas, which Meyendorff shared with the dialogue group:

Since the Son of God, in His ineffable love for mankind, has not only united His divine hypostasis to our nature, and taking a body with a rational soul, has appeared on earth and lived among men; but, more, than this—Oh how splendid a miracle!—He unites Himself to the human hypostases themselves, and mingling Himself with every believer by the communion of His holy Body, becomes one body with us and makes us into a temple of the whole Godhead; for the fullness of the Godhead dwells corporeally in Him; how then should He not enlighten the souls of those who partake worthily, surrounding them with light through the divine splendour of His Body which is in us, just as His light shone on the bodies of the disciples on Thabor? It is true that then the body that possessed the source of the light of grace was not yet mingled with our bodies; it enlightened from outside those who approached worthily and caused the light to enter their souls through the sight of their eyes. But to-day it is mingled with us, it dwells in us and, naturally, it enlightens our souls from within. … One alone can see God; that is, Christ. We must be united with Christ—and how close a union it is—in order to see God.’ (pp. 34-35)

In this passage we see Gregory’s concern to join together Incarnation, theosis, and the hesychastic experience of God.  Deification is not restricted to the soul but embraces the whole human being, body and soul.

The Byzantine understanding of theosis emphatically asserts the priority of divine grace:God gives God, and only God can give God. There is nothing human beings can do to merit the gift of participating in the divine nature. It is also clear that Eastern Christianity strongly affirms the reality of regeneration: the believer is not abandoned to an external relationship to the Creator. By faith and repentance he is filled with the Holy Spirit and penetrated and transformed by the uncreated energies. As the authors explain, “It is Christ, God and man, who is present in the being of the redeemed man; it is the mysterious uncreated energies which become as it were the ‘soul’ of the Christian’s life” (p. 10).

Oecumenical Grace: Roman Catholicism and Created Grace

http://afkimel.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/oecumenical-grace-roman-catholicism-and-created-grace/

We begin with St Augustine of Hippo. Of course. His reflections on the mystery of grace have been determinative for Western Christianity. He taught the Latin Church that from beginning to end the Christian life is completely dependent upon the gratuitous love, mercy, and power of God; but he also directed the Church down paths which have subsequently proven deleterious to the preaching of the gospel—the massa damnata, absolute predestination, limited atonement, infant damnation. The past 1500 years, as Henri Rondet remarked, may be understood as a purification of Augustine’s legacy. The purification began with the Second Council of Orange in A.D. 529, continued with St Thomas Aquinas and the subsequent debates between Bañez and Molina on the nature of grace, received clarity with the magisterial condemnation of Jansenism, and intensified with the 19th and 20th century rediscovery of the Eastern Fathers. Martin Luther, in his own way, also contributed to the purification. With the Roman Catholic Church’s confession of the universal salvific will of the God, so clearly enunciated in the decrees of Vatican II, the encyclicals of Pope John Paul II, and the Lutheran/Catholic Agreement on Justification, the purification would seem to be complete. Augustine’s theological greatness remains, but his reflections on grace have been integrated into a wider and more ecumenical Roman Catholic vision.

If the Eastern Fathers speak of the deification of the whole man in Christ, St Augustine speaks of the Holy Spirit indwelling the heart of the believer, thus bringing him into the divine Love that is God the Holy Trinity. We are called, says Augustine, to love God and our neighbor de Deo, for it is the Holy Spirit who loves in us and through us. As Charles Mœller and Gérard Philips explain: “God causes us to believe and hope through the virtues of faith and hope; but He makes us love ‘through God’; it is God in us who loves our neighbor. In this sense we can talk of ‘uncreated grace’ in the thought of Augustine” (The Theology of Grace and the Oecumenical Movement, p. 12). Augustine’s concern is the gift of the indwelling Spirit who makes sinners righteous.  He has no explicit understanding of grace as a habitual, created state. One of his favorite texts is Romans 5:5: “The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost who is given unto us.” In his insightful chapter on Augustine in The Dynamics of Grace, Stephen J. Duffy writes, “Charity is the indwelling and operation of the Spirit, not a created quality of the person” (p. 115). “It is not surprising, then,” he concludes, “that ‘Love and do what you will’ is the final summation of Augustine’s teaching on grace, for that love is the dynamic love of the Spirit within transforming the human heart and freeing the will to order its many loves” (p. 104). To be made righteous by the Spirit, therefore, is nothing less than deification, as the Doctor of Grace clearly states:

It is evident, therefore, that He called men gods because they were deified by His grace and not because they were born of His substance. For He justifies, being just of Himself and not from another; and He deifies, being God of Himself and not by participation in another. But He that justifies does also deify, because by justifying He makes sons of God. For, “He has given them power to become sons of God.” If we are made sons of God, we are also made gods; but this is by grace adopting, and not by nature begetting. (Ennar. in Ps. 49.2)

The baptism of infants always poses a problem for theologians. How can the Holy Spirit come to indwell those who are incapable of saving faith? Augustine wrestled with this question throughout his career. He finally appears to have concluded that while by baptism infants are truly filled with the Spirit, but because of their spiritual and moral incapacity, they do not yet possess him in love. “Baptized infants are already indwelt by the Spirit,” Mœller and Philips write, “but this indwelling is not yet in actuality” (p. 12).

In the 12th century Peter Lombard reasserted the Augustinian view in his Four Books of Sentences: “The Holy Spirit is the charity by which we love God and neighbor.” The authors elaborate:

In I Sent. distinc. 17, Lombard states that there is no virtue of charity, for it is replaced by the person of the Holy Spirit. The Master of the Sentences does not, of course, deny that it can be properly said that a man makes an act of love. The acts of faith and hope, he says, come from the virtue present in us, but the act of love comes from the Spirit Himself, without there being in man a habitus of love.

This opinion is inspired by faithfulness to St Augustine, albeit subject to a considerable misunderstanding. Struck by the text ‘God is love’ Lombard tries to give due weight to the transcendence of love; he has failed to see that it is possible to speak of a habitus of love that is at the same time a direct participation of the Holy Spirit. In any case, Lombard knows nothing of any created habitus. Richard Fishacre, an Oxford Franciscan, followed Lombard in this opinion and even spoke of a parallelism between the hypostatic union and union with the Spirit in grace; this theory is curiously reminiscent of Palamas. (p. 15)

The Lombardian thesis was subsequently discussed, analyzed, and rejected by the great scholastics. In what sense is it correct to say that the Holy Spirit directly loves in and through us? Do we not participate in this act of love? Must not the bestowal of uncreated grace necessarily entail a modification of human nature? Thus enters the controverted notion of a created habitus disposing an individual to the love of God and enabling union with the transcendent Deity.

Medieval scholasticism adopted the term habitus to signify a permanent disposition of the soul and stable orientation. A habit can be innate or acquired; but in the case of supernatural union and the theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity), it is infused directly into the soul by God, adapting the human being for deifying union with God. Thehabitus thus becomes the enduring principle of spiritual life within the believer. The scholastics came to refer to this habitus as created grace; but it must not be seen as a thing or entity. It refers, rather, to the modification of human nature effected by the Spirit that enables the tabernacling of the Spirit within the human being. The habitus is a dynamic reality that only exists through the direct and continuous action of God. Think of a pitch-black room. We turn on a light and the walls, floor, and ceiling are illumined. The turning on of the light and the illumination of the room are simultaneous. The Holy Spirit is the light; the illumined room is created grace. But this poor example does not capture the essential point, though. Underlying scholastic reflection is the Latin conviction that because of humanity’s finitude and sinfulness, human nature must be elevated if human beings are to participate in the divine nature. God accomplishes this ontological change by bestowing sanctifying grace, which makes possible supernatural union; but it may also be said that he accomplishes this change by giving the Holy Spirit, who regenerates the soul at the moment of gifting. Created grace is the result of the coming of the indwelling Spirit and at the same time its condition.

The authors devote a couple of paragraphs to St Bonaventure:

The two principal foundations of St Bonaventure’s view are very remarkable, for they show that the idea of created grace is in no way opposed to the primacy of God in saving and justifying in a permanent action. The first is that we must speak of a created habitus, in order to emphasize the fundamental impotence of man, and exclude the righteousness of works. Whereas later, scholasticism and the notion of created grace were attacked in order that Pelagianism might be the more surely avoided, the fact is that the historical development of the idea came about primarily as the result of an effort to avoid Pelagianism: St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas both say that if there were no created grace, one might think that man by his own works gives himself grace. Created grace, therefore, manifests the indigentia hominis; that is why a man must be given a disposition to receive justification.

This reasoning implies that created grace is not in any sense considered as a sort of ‘autonomous possession’ of a man, permitting him in a way to do without the continual saving activity of God; on the contrary, it is always produced by God Himself, ‘present in the soul.’ This view of the matter is also found in St. Bonaventure—and it provides the second foundation of his reasoning. Arguing this time from the point of view of God, St. Bonaventure explains that the love of God, giving itself, is effective, producing a change in man. Consequently, the disposition, the created habitus is the result of the presence of the God of love. In other words, gratia creata is the result of the continual influence of the divine light; the soul possesses the Spirit, or rather, is possessed by Him. St. Bonaventure sums all this up in the striking formula, which succeeds in avoiding any ambiguity, ‘Habere est haberi, to possess (a habitus) is to be possessed by God.’ (pp. 17-18)

The intent of created grace, therefore, is to clearly assert the regeneration of the human being by grace: man becomes a new creation indwelt by God himself. Three points in particular should be noted.  First, behind the scholastic formulation of created grace lies an anti-Pelagian concern: God himself must prepare the human being for deifying union. Second, created grace is not a created “thing” which a human being possesses.  It is a disposition given to the sinner that allows him to freely receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Third, created grace is itself caused by the Spirit, who effects the change of man by his tabernacling presence. In Bonaventure’s words: “To enjoy God means to possess Him. Hence together with grace which, by its God-conforming nature, leads to the enjoyment of God, there is given to man an uncreated Gift, the Holy Spirit, to possess whom is indeed to possess God Himself” (Breviloquium V.1.4)

To the inevitable question “Which comes first, grace or Grace?” perhaps the proper scholastic answer is, yes.

And so Mœller and Philips explicate the position of Aquinas:

The love of God works effectively—a man is changed if the Spirit dwells in him; the habitus is the result of this; there is no question, therefore, of ahabitus being required in advance, or produced by any other causality than that of God Himself at the very moment He gives Himself. One must speak in this case of a reciprocal causality, an idea that expresses the unbreakable union between God sanctifying and the soul really changed by God’s entering it. In other words, the idea of created grace simply expresses the reality of regeneration; it is in no way an intermediate reality, a thing, complete in itself, which man possesses as his own. …

St. Thomas realizes that this habitus (this dunamis) operates like a kind of continuous impulse, and that the idea presents certain difficulties—it is neither a simple action, nor a temporary impulse on a particular occasion, but a continuous impulse from which actions result. In other words, thehabitus is an active tension set up by God at work in man; and this is not intermittent but continuous; it is like a pattern formed of one unbroken line and not a series of separate figures. What is involved is not a series of actual graces (there is very little suggestion of this in Western thought in the Middle Ages), but rather, if one might use the term, an ‘impelling disposition’; better still, the habitus is nothing less than the will of God expressing itself unceasingly within the complex reality of the being of man.

It will be seen that underlying these ideas of Aquinas is the theory of the participation of the soul in the divine life, through the continual action of God. He conceives not of an inert object, or fixed state, cut off, as it were, from its source in God, but a permanent dynamism, built into the very foundation of our being, and causing there a permanent disposition (an inherent disposition, in the words of the Council of Trent); but which has no reality except through the presence and activity of God Himself. (pp. 19-21)

To phrase the matter somewhat differently, created grace is a personal mode of being, being-in-another, life in God.

Under the influence of nominalism, late medieval reflection reduced the created habitus to a “thing” sitting between God and man, precisely what Eastern Orthodox theologians have long feared about the notion. “Because nominalism could conceive of no real contact between the creature and the Creator,” Mœller and Philips explain, “it presented thehabitus as an intermediate being, a separate entity in itself, possessed by man apart from the influence of grace” (p. 21). Martin Luther saw this nominalist reification of created grace as intrinsically Pelagian and rightly protested. Salvation requires that we commune with God, not with a created object. Trapped in the same nominalism, however, Luther found it difficult to articulate an ontological transformation of man by the gift of grace.

Oecumenical Grace: Catholicism and the Divine Life

http://afkimel.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/oecumenical-grace-catholicism-and-the-divine-life/

After briefly reviewing the medieval Latin reflection on uncreated and created grace in their book The Theology of Grace and the Oecumenical Movement (everything in this little book is brief, too brief!), Charles Mœller and Gérard Philips propose that a renewed Catholic theology of grace must preserve the following five elements:

First, God’s love is effective. When God communicates his grace and love, it does not leave the human person as he was but transforms and elevates him. By their assertion of created grace, the scholastics were attempting to give philosophical expression to that participation in the divine life which only God can freely bestow. “If the scholastics laid less emphasis than the Greek Fathers on our participation in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” the authors write, “they do show more fully the extent of the ontological change in man; grace produces not simply a new basis and aim of morality, but brings about an ability, created in man; which is only to express in philosophical terms the ‘new creature’ in regenerate man” (pp. 24-25). Recall Mœller’s and Philips’s critical insight mentioned in thefirst article of this series: whereas Eastern theology is principally concerned with articulating how it is that God gives God (hence the distinction between the divine essence and divine energies), Latin theology is concerned with stating how the finite human being may be united to the infinite Creator.

This is why St Bonaventure and St Thomas Aquinas ultimately found the Augustinian proposal of Peter Lombard unsatisfactory. It seemed to imply that the Spirit can indwell and act in the human being without changing him. But both doctors understood that if man is to achieve the supernatural end for which he was created, namely, the beatific vision of God, then God must not only heal human nature of its sinful disorder but provide the capacity for a life beyond its natural powers. Henri de Lubac puts it this way:

The supernatural, one might say, is that divine element which man’s effort cannot reach (no self-divinization!) but which unites itself to man, “elevating” him as our classical theology used to put it, and as Vatican II still says (Lumen Gentium, 2), penetrating him in order to divinize him, and thus becoming as it were an attribute of the “new man” described by St Paul. While it remains forever “un-naturalizable”, it profoundly penetrates the depths of man’s being. In short, it is what the old Scholastics and especially St. Thomas Aquinas called (using a word borrowed from Aristotle which has often been completely misunderstood) an “accidental form” or an “accident”. Call it an accident, or call it a habitus, or “created grace”: these are all different ways of saying (even if one thinks they need various correctives or precisions) that man becomes in truth a sharer in the divine nature (divinae consortes naturae; θείας κοινωνοὶ φύσεως; 2 Pet 1:4). We do not need to conceive of it as a sort of entity separated from its Source, something like cooled lava—which man would appropriate to himself. On the contrary, we wish to affirm by these words that the influx of God’s Spirit does not remain external to man; that without any commingling of natures it really leaves its mark on our nature and becomes in us a principle of life. This scholastic notion of created grace, so often belittled today, does express the incontrovertible fact that “it is we ourselves, and our creaturely being, which the active presence in us of the Spirit makes divine, without for that reason absorbing us and annihilating us in God” [Louis Bouyer]. (A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, pp. 41-42)

Here we see a concern shared with St Gregory Palamas—trying to find a way to speak of humanity’s deification in Christ that does not result in its absorption into anonymous divinity. On the other hand, Eastern theology has never seen the need to appropriate the notion of a supernaturally infused habitus of grace, perhaps because it cannot conceive of a graceless human nature. Created in the image of God, the human being is not only destined but ontologically constituted for participation in the eternal life of the Holy Spirit. This divine image has not been obliterated by the fall. Despite all sinful corruptions and bondages, fallen human nature remains dynamically open to communion with God and is only fully realized in this communion.

Second, the change effected in man by the indwelling Spirit endures. The nature of the scholastic habitus is that it is neither a state that we possess independent of God nor a single act of grace in us: it is something in-between, ever dependent upon living union with God. The alteration in human nature effected by the gift of sanctifying grace can never be subsequently lost, even by mortal sin. The human being is permanently changed. Thehabitus thus provides a solution to the question with which St Augustine wrestled: “What does infant baptism accomplish?”

Pastors need to be careful, Mœller and Philips warn, when talking about the “state of grace,” as they might be easily misunderstood—and have been so misunderstood—as implying  that the life of grace is a static condition, perhaps even something that we can own or control:

One might even ask here whether perhaps, in using the expression ‘state of grace,’ as preachers and moralists very commonly do, there may be a certain risk of misunderstanding. It is the habitus that causes the state to result in an act; our God-given knowledge and love and posed ready for action. Therefore grace can be increased, simply because when the union with God grows closer, His grace is more freely implanted. … So when thehabitus grows deeper and more powerful, it is the union with God that is being made closer; in this sense, for one’s acts to be more supernatural, does not mean an increase in the quantity of the state of grace (seen as a thing, like a sum of money increasing at compound interest), but simply to be governed more by the Spirit, to be more receptive to Him. (p. 25)

Third, God acts directly in the habitus. It is neither a barrier between man and God nor some sort of intermediate object that we can contemplate on its own and use for our own purposes.  Our principal concern is the Triune God who gives himself to us in transformative and unmediated union.

The habitus, so St. Bonaventure says, does not make us possess God, but makes us possess an action that guides us towards Him, in the sense that we are set free (from our compassion and faults) on account of having made that act of love—which never ceases to be caused in us by the love of God. In the same way St. Thomas, speaking of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, makes use of the words Quibus fruimur [divinis personis], which means, not that they are an object we enjoy, but that they are an instrument by means of which (this is the meaning of quibus) the enjoyment of the divine persons is possible, and it is only through the divine persons that we enjoy the divine gifts as well; for the other way round, the gifts are merely means. The soul ’sees God in God.’ (p. 26)

Hence it is more accurate to say with St Thomas Aquinas that God gives himself to us inthe gift of grace rather than with St Albert the Great that God gives himself with it.

Contemporary Roman Catholic theologians have striven during the past fifty years to emphasize the dynamic and personal aspects of grace, both in its uncreated and created dimensions. One of my favorite books is The New Life of Grace by Piet Fransen. Fransen moves beyond the metaphysical categories of scholasticism and seeks to express the mystery of grace in a personalist conceptuality, with an abiding awareness of its mystical and ineffable facets:

The Father, through His indwelling love, introduces us into the very life of the divine Persons. We are chosen to stand before the Father with the Son in the strength of Their mutual Spirit. Through grace, therefore, we become children of God in the Son. In theological language this is called the elevating aspect of grace, because of which a truly supernatural life arises in us. A moment ago we mentioned that we were unable by our own effort to free ourselves from the anathema of sin; now we have to say that it is absolutely unthinkable that we should raise ourselves by our unaided effort to the level of the divine life, which is God’s sovereign possession. Our elevation is an utterly gratuitous gift, the totally unexpected surprise the message of grace holds in store for us. …

It should be abundantly clear by now that created grace may not be conceived of apart from the divine indwelling. … Created grace is not something standing in between God and us; it is no path to approach God, no ladder to climb up to God, no means to God—at least, not primarily. But these are negative concepts; unless we go beyond such representations of grace, we shall make no progress in knowledge. The Eastern Christians are quite justified when they refuse to accept such descriptions of grace. They find it self-evident, to put it rather bluntly, that creaturehood plus created grace cannot possibly bring about a divine life or constitute a share in the divine life.

Created grace does not act as a screen between God and us since it comes into being only because of and within the gesture by which God unites us immediately to Himself. He gives Himself without an intervening medium; He comes to dwell in us and takes us back to Himself. Emile Mersche called this grace “un être d’union,” “a unifying being.” Created grace is at once the fruit and bond of the indwelling, originating in the indwelling and sustained by the indwelling; it raises us into an ever-deepening actualization of the indwelling on earth and in heaven. Latin expresses it more tersely: ex unione, in unione et ad unionem—arising from our immediate union with God, granted in that union and urging us to that union. We need a dynamic concept, one that lives because it is enveloped in “the divine life” which is none other than God himself. (pp. 101-103)

Thus formulated, it’s difficult to see why either Orthodox or Reformation theology would seriously object to Roman Catholic teaching on created grace, especially when presented within the model of participation in the divine life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Whatever may have been the deficiencies of post-Tridentine Catholic construals of grace (and everyone admits they were deficient), such is no longer the case. Eastern Orthodox apologists, take note!

Fourth, the habitus is vital and dynamic. Even our ability to make an act of love toward God is itself “the result of the continual presence and activity of God.” God is the active cause of our free acts. “He makes us act (He ‘works in us both to will and to work’) without its being possible to say that God alone acts (’with fear and trembling work out your own salvation’),” write Mœller and Philips (p. 27). This action of divine grace within us is continuous—such is the depth of the transformation effected by grace. Grace is nothing less than transformative participation in the life in the Holy Trinity:

Essentially, grace consists in this: that God, the Blessed Trinity, loves us. The trinitarian love consists in the union of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit with us; or better, Their drawing us into the intimacy of Their own trinitarian life by uniting us with Themselves.

In conformity with the language of Scripture, this union is generally called the divine indwelling. We have called it also the mystery of God’s presence. God’s active, transforming union in love imprints the divine image on us; and here the well-known dictum holds good: “Amicatia pares invenit aut facit” (“Friendship is either found among equals it makes equals of those it finds”). The notion of divine image is just another approach to the basic conception of grace, which is that we share in the divine life. … All these various conceptions—divine love, presence, indwelling, image and likeness, sanctification and justification—are simply different approaches, through different symbolisms, to one identical reality: that through grace we share in the divine life (Fransen, p. 55)

Fifth, merit is a personal and ontological quality. Mœller and Philips acknowledge that the Latin notion of merit is foreign to the Eastern tradition and vigorously contested by the Reformation churches; hence it needs to be explained carefully, with attention to its personal dimension rooted in sanctifying communion with God

An individual is not rewarded by God because he has accumulated merit, as recorded on a bank ledger. Properly understood merit should be seen as an ontological condition: we are rewarded by God because of what we have become through our free cooperation with divine grace. Hence the evangelical truth of Augustine’s dictum that when God crowns our merits he crowns his own gifts. Merit is thus an expression of the work of the Holy Spirit within the life of the believer: “The life lived by the gifts of the Holy Spirit is simply the normal development of the habitus of grace. Merit is therefore essentially inseparable from the work of the Spirit in us, bringing about an exchange of love and friendship; so merit becomes what it is in us that makes us worthy of God” (p. 28). Fransen picks up this same theme: “Growth in grace is ordained by the Spirit toward its final fulfillment in Christ. This statement of fact is just another way for us to understand how grace on earth can merit heaven. Heaven is nothing else than the final revelation of what we have become through grace” (p. 220).

It is not surprising that the language of merit has virtually disappeared from the modern Roman Catholic pulpit. It is almost always misunderstood and is easily replaced by more biblical and evangelical terminology.

What then is created grace, as taught by the Roman Catholic Church? It is an active receptivity to God in the believer, a receptivity created and constantly renewed by God in direct and immediate union with the human soul. Mœller and Philips, however, recognize that the term may not be the most fortunate expression. As the history of second millennium Latin theology demonstrates, it is all too easy to divorce the created habitusfrom the living God and treat it as a commodity or impersonal energy. Catholic theology, insist the authors, must always remember that created grace is grounded upon the dynamic presence of the Holy Spirit, who indwells the souls of the just. Created grace has no meaning apart from the uncreated life of the Trinity who comes to sinners in infinite love, as Fransen makes clear:

Basically, the mystery of grace rests on the fact that God gives Himself to us. He grants us an immediate share in His life. He comes down to us, or to speak more accurately, He takes us up into His inner glory. We remain men, creatures and sinners, but as men we are enabled to share in His life because He gives Himself to us immediately, that is, without anything intervening between Him and us. (p. 100)

Deo gratias!

Oecumenical Grace: The Protestant Gospel

http://afkimel.wordpress.com/2014/06/19/oecumenical-grace-the-protestant-gospel/

Compared to the previous chapters in The Theology of Grace and the Oecumenical Movement, the chapter devoted to the Protestant understanding of grace is too brief and to my mind unsatisfactory. In the ecumenical dialogue from which this book arose, Protestantism was represented by two Reformed theologians.Perhaps it’s a prejudice on my part, but I have have always found Martin Luther and his friends far more interesting on the topic of justification than their Reformed counterparts. Luther broke the ordo salutis mold; Calvin simply rearranged the deck chairs. Because John Calvin grounded justification in saving union with Christ by the Spirit, I have long thought that a constructive dialogue between Catholics and the Reformed should be easier and more productive than a dialogue between Catholics and Lutherans. Ironically, the opposite historically appears to have been the case.

The Protestant conception of grace includes three elements—justification, sanctification (regeneration), and redemption. Justification depends on an unmerited decision of God and brings about an absolute change in status, from condemned to righteous. It is thus extrinsic to the sinner. In his mercy God comes to the sinner and declares him forgiven in Christ; right-standing with God is imputed to him—simul iustus et peccator. Justification is completely a free gift and will only be perfectly realized in the final redemption of the Eschaton. Between justification and final redemption the sinner lives in the Holy Spirit and strives to become holy as Christ is holy.

“Grace cannot be a thing we possess,” Charles Mœller and Gérard Philips affirm; “it is always inseparable from a person who loves, who gives Himself, who brings us into communion with Himself. This is the essential point in Reformation theology” (p. 30). My first reaction to this claim, no doubt because of my past reading of various Lutheran theologians, was something like “Was this really the essential point of the Reformation?” Protestant theologians universally agree that grace is not a substance but God’s personal bestowal of his forgiveness and mercy; but this way of phrasing it doesn’t quite capture the driving concern of the Reformers. Theirs was not a scholastic critique of the nominalist reduction of created grace but a prophetic attack on the perceived works-righteousness of the Latin penitential system, against which they proclaimed, “Sola gratia! Sola fide!” But Mœller’s and Philips’s principal intention in this chapter is not to unpack the evangelical significance of the Protestant gospel but to demonstrate Reformed belief in the reality of regeneration. In other words, they want to correct the popular Roman Catholic caricature that Protestants are antinomians who believe they can get into heaven without spiritual and moral transformation. We all have heard, I’m sure, the (undocumented) saying attributed to Luther that the justified Christian is but a snow-covered dunghill.

The authors offer this quotation from John Calvin as determinative for the Reformed understanding of the relationship between justification and sanctification (InstitutesIII.16.1):

You cannot receive this justification without receiving sanctification at the same time. … We may distinguish them, but Christ contains both inseparably in Himself. Do you wish to obtain righteousness in Christ? You must first possess Christ: but you cannot possess Him without being made a partaker of his sanctification, seeing that He cannot be torn in pieces. (p. 30)

Justification and sanctification, in other words, are inseparable and complementary, not parallel. Both are simultaneously communicated to the believer by incorporation into Christ; but neither may they be confused. “Justification is absolute, perfect and extrinsic,” the authors explain, “whereas sanctification is relative, imperfect and intrinsic” (p. 30). Justification by faith alone, precisely because “it rests on a decision by God without any consideration of human acts,” provides the foundation for the absolute certainty of the believer. From this confident faith arise obedience and grateful love in the Holy Spirit.

The above mention of the assurance of salvation raises questions, particularly within a Reformed context, and makes me wish again that a Lutheran or two had also participated in the dialogue. In his illuminating essay “Why Luther is not quite Protestant,” Phillip Cary argues that unlike the Lutheran, who puts his faith completely in the word of forgiveness spoken to him in the name of Christ and who thus can indeed be totally assured of his justification, the Calvinist must always find assurance of salvation problematic. To achieve assurance he must introspectively reflect on his experience and discern whether he possesses authentic faith or not. Cary compares the respective syllogisms of assurance:

Reformed:

Major Premise: Whoever believes in Christ is saved.
Minor Premise: I believe in Christ.
Conclusion: I am saved.

For the believer to know that he is saved, he must not only believe in the promise of Christ but must also know that he believes it. The assurance of faith is thus reflective: it must include the believer’s awareness that he genuinely believes.

Lutheran:

Major Premise: Christ told me, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”
Minor Premise: Christ never lies but only tells the truth.
Conclusion: I am baptized (i.e., I have new life in Christ).

Luther construes saving faith as radically unreflective. Faith does not include knowing that one truly believes. Faith simply believes the unconditional promise that has been directly spoken in Word and Sacrament. At no point does it step out of the communication-event to reflect on itself.

Mœller and Philips elaborate further on the intertwining of justification and sanctification, of extrinsic grace and intrinsic grace:

When Calvin stresses that what is brought about by the judicial pronouncement of justification is external and imputed, he is trying to make crystal clear that God’s act is a completely free gift, and that it is eschatological in nature. It always remains a free gift; and as for the realization of redemption, this is still awaited. Reformed theologians are very ill at east with what they call ‘the theology of glory.’

In his doctrine of sanctification, described in the chapter of the Institutes entitled ‘De vita hominis Christiani,’ Calvin takes it for granted that the union of God with man (salvation) is the foundation of the whole of the Christian’s life. The direct result of this union is the sanctification by the Holy Spirit, of the man who gives himself to God in faith. The Holy Spirit acts throughout the life of the believer, transforming him little by little into the image of Christ. The gift of the Spirit has a creative, life-giving and real effect on the man who denies himself and puts his trust in God. (p. 32)

We partake of salvation through our incorporation into Christ. Both justification and sanctification are the fruit and direct result of union with Christ Jesus. Alister McGrath confirms the authors’ interpretation of Calvin:

The two consequences of the believer’s incorporation into Christ areiustificatio and sanctificatio, which are distinct and inseparable. … Justification and sanctification are aspects of the believer’s new life in Christ, and just as one receives the whole Christ, and not part of him, through faith, so any separation of these two soteriological elements—which Calvin refers to as les deux principales grâces is inconceivable. … Calvin understands both justification and sanctification to be the chiefbeneficia Christi, bestowed simultaneously and inseparably upon believers as a consequence of their insitio in Christum. Sanctification is not the effect of justification; both justification and sanctification are effects of union with Christ. (Iustitia Dei, pp. 255-256)

It is clear that the polemical charge of antinomianism cannot be properly directed against the Reformed. Reformed Christians confess the real regeneration of the believer by the Spirit. “The true mark of the Reformation,” Mœller and Philips state, “is a joyful acceptance of what is freely given, and a growing readiness and willingness before the creative work of the Spirit” (p. 33). Reformed theologians resist the use of “merit” to describe the process of sanctification; but “they would accept the term ‘created grace’ if it could be taken as equivalent to the biblical passage where God is said to ‘work in us both to will and to work’ (energeia), because in this way it would be seen more clearly how this is always a free gift from God’s point of view, and with what joy and trust man puts himself at God’s disposal” (p. 33).

Oecumenical Grace: Comparisons

http://afkimel.wordpress.com/2014/06/22/oecumenical-grace-comparisons/

In the concluding chapter of their book The Theology of Grace and the Oecumenical Movement, Charles Mœller and Gérard Philips address the differences between the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Reformed Churches on the mystery of grace. The Churches agree on the primacy of God and the gratuity of grace, and they agree that divine grace truly transforms the human being. Yet they describe the life of Christian living in different terms:

An Orthodox would say that the change made by grace makes a divine life possible; a Catholic, a holy life; while a Protestant would stress the battle against sin and the Devil. The encounter between God and man, in the process of salvation would be described as a ’synergism’ (Orthodoxy), an ‘enduring creation’ (Protestantism), or ‘actuation créée par acte incréé’ (Catholicism). (p. 37)

[The translator notes that the French phrase "actuation créée par acte incréé," coined by Maurice de La Taille, is impossible to render in English. He suggests the following translations: “God’s uncreated act supplies a created actualizing to the creature” or “The creature is perfected in its nature by an uncreated act.” I'm sure the reader finds these renderings as illuminating as I do. (cough, cough)]

The authors believe that each tradition’s formulation of grace expresses an important dimension of Christian life. The Churches diverge, however, on the question of created grace. For Roman Catholicism the fundamental distinction lies in the difference between nature and the supernatural: man must be given created grace if he is to participate in the divine nature. For Reformation Protestantism grace is fundamentally the love and mercy that God showers upon sinners: God justifies the ungodly for the sake of Christ. Though the Reformed most certainly do affirm regeneration in the Spirit, justification remains a forensic, imputational event. Catholicism contrasts natural and supernatural; Protestantism, sin and grace. But what about Orthodoxy? The authors cryptically suggest that Orthodoxy shares with Protestantism the contrast between sin and grace, yet in a very different way.

Ultimately, Mœller and Philips believe, the differences between the Christian traditions lie in the employment of different philosophies in the articulation of the faith, specifically, Platonism and Aristotelianism. It would be simplistic to say that Eastern theology is Platonist and Latin theology is Aristotelian, for features of both philosophies can be seen in both traditions. Each has adapted and changed philosophical categories to make them suitable for theological expression. But the authors believe that Platonism and Aristotelianism have profoundly shaped the respective anthropological visions of Orthodoxy and Catholicism:

An Aristotelian anthropology sees man as a self-sufficient unity enclosed within himself, his highest functions or actions never surpassing the limits of ‘nature.’ His elevation to a supernatural state would therefore appear as an elevation to an action or mode of action which he cannot attain to in his natural state. It would also be seen as the production of a quality giving the ability to carry out such an action; a quality which without changing the soul, would be supernatural, although created.

On the other hand, Platonist anthropology, even as corrected by the Greek Fathers, in order to deal with the dynamic aspect of Christianity, sees in man a being capable from the very beginning of reaching the highest degree of spiritual life, union with God, although unable to reach it by his own efforts.

What in the Aristotelian formulation is ‘nature,’ always appears as a deficiency to the Platonist, but this means that there is no barrier between man and the supernatural; one might say he has a potentiality to ‘move’ towards his goal; his essence is to ascend towards the highest end. He is essentially free in doing this, and fails or succeeds according to his own decision. There is an ‘existentialist’ element in the Platonist conception of the Greek Fathers, while according to the Aristotelian idea, freedom is an extra faculty given to man.

In both cases, however, there is a divine intervention. It can be looked at either in its uncreated source, or in its created effect, bringing about perfection in a creature, and consequently a created perfection. Those who see in grace the introduction of a new faculty, see it in its effect; those who see in it the re-establishment of the God-like condition of man, lay more stress on the divine, uncreated character of this progress towards deification. But the former cannot forget that the presence of the Holy Spirit (uncreated grace) comes before created grace; nor the other, that grace works in a creature and produces created effects. (pp. 39-40)

I find this long citation exceptionally helpful, as it helps to explain why Roman Catholic theology has been so obsessed with the distinction between nature and the supernatural (Catholic theologians typically do not speak of “supernature”). If human nature is a clearly defined and closed reality, then something new must be effected by God to enable its participation of humanity in his divine life. Eastern theology, on the other hand, understands human nature as constituted by a fundamental openness to divine self-communication. This fundamental openness defines mankind as created in the image of God, nor has it been eradicated by the Fall. Consequently Orthodoxy cannot conceive of an dis-graced human nature and thus sees no need to entertain its possibility. As Fr Stephen Freeman likes to remind us, we do not live in a two-storey universe. Perhaps we might expand the image to say that divine grace does not add a second floor to the human building; it restores us, rather, to the communion with the Holy Trinity for which we were originally created. As Freeman avers, “Created in the image of God, human beings have an inherent transcendence” (Everywhere Present, p. 90).

In his book The Openness of Being, E. L. Mascall offers a Western correction to the Aristotelian constriction of nature: all finite beings, by their ontological dependence upon the self-existent Deity, are inherently open to “fresh influxes of creative activity from God”:

The view that all finite beings depend for their very existence as well as for their particular natures on the incessant creative activity of God implies that, while they are relatively autonomous, in that God conserves in each its own particular pattern of finite activity, they are, by the very fact that they are dependent and not self-existent realities, open to fresh influxes of creative activity from God, which will not destroy their spontaneity but will elevate and enhance it. Nor is there any antecedently specifiable limit to such influxes; anything that a finite being receives will be finite, but there is no greatest finite quantity. As the scholastics say, grace does not destroy nature but perfects it. By their very dependence upon God, finite beings are inherently open to him; an absolutely autonomous and incapsulated finite entity would be a contradiction in terms. A created universe—and there can be no other—is necessarily not only a finite but also an open one. Nature has, simply as nature, a potentia oboedientialis for the supernatural. (p. 146)

Mascall contrasts this Christian understanding of nature with the philosophies of antiquity, which thought of created beings as closed, incapsulated entities. What something is, with all of its original potentialities, is what that something will always be. A properly Christianunderstanding of God and creation, argues the Anglican Thomist, must express a fundamental openness of the world to the creative and recreative activity of the transcendent Creator. This ontological openness to God grounds the deification of human beings and their elevation into the divine life of the Holy Trinity. Because human nature is not closed in on itself, it can receive from God new and unimagined graces, powers, and possibilities; indeed, it can receive God himself. With this correction Latin theology draws a tad closer to Eastern theology on theosis.

The Reformers rejected scholasticism and all notions of created grace and returned to St Augustine and a more biblical understanding of grace. Yet as much as they honored Augustine, they did not embrace Augustine’s vision of deification, which he shared with the Eastern Fathers. “It is difficult,” Mœller and Philips write, “to see why the perfectly Christian and biblical stress they put on the uncreated nature of the divine operation that justifies and sanctifies … did not lead them to the reality of the whole process of deification which begins in faith but will be manifested in glory” (p. 41).

Mœller and Philips suggest two reasons for this truncation of the apostolic tradition. First, the dominating presence of Augustine himself—but not the whole Augustine but an Augustine divorced from the wider patristic tradition and reduced to his idiosyncratic positions. By their rejection of scholasticism, the Reformers missed the important qualifications and purifications of Augustine that had been made by Bonaventure and Aquinas:

Through the great Doctor, the Reformers remained in contact not only with a large part of Christian Platonism, but also with the Bible itself. But at the same time, the Reformers, receiving their Platonism through the medium of certain theories peculiar to Augustine (on concupiscence, the concept of original sin, and anti-pelagianism), took it over in a reduced form, without its ‘realistic’ developments, and only saw the Bible in the light of certain somewhat constricting preconceptions. … But we have always had the impression that St. Augustine is one of that kind of thinker, at once a genius and yet incomplete, whose influence is always of very mixed value. There is no doubt that it weighed very heavily on the theology of the West, and it was only where Augustinian thought was balanced and completed by that of the Greek Fathers (as in St. Thomas, and more and more in Catholic theology nowadays), that it could show its more wholesome effects. The absence of St. Augustine in the East was, to our minds at least, a blessing there, while his work so dominated Western theology in the Middle Ages that it took a very long time to recover its balance. (p. 43)

Second, the Reformers were themselves fettered by the same philosophical views that had perverted late scholasticism, namely, nominalism. The Reformation formulation of extrinsic grace is unconsciously rooted in a philosophical system that makes it difficult to conceive of real relations between the transcendent Deity and his finite creatures.  Mœller and Philips are relying on the influential analysis of Louis Bouyer:

What, in fact, is the essential characteristic of Ockham’s thought, and of nominalism in general, but a radical empiricism, reducing all being to what is perceived, which empties out with the idea of substance, all possibility of real relations between beings, as well as the stable subsistence of any of them, and ends by denying all intelligibility to the real, conceiving God Himself only as a Protean figure impossible to apprehend.  In these circumstances, a grace that produces a real change in us, while remaining purely the grace of God, becomes inconceivable.  If some change is effected in us, then it comes from us, and to suppose it could come also and primarily from God amounts to confusing God with the creature. (Bouyer,The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism, pp. 184-185)

How can there be a divinization of humanity when humanity is reduced to the perceptible?  Within the context of the Reformers’ repudiation of created grace, the logic of nominalism virtually mandated a purely forensic construal of justification. Protestantism thus ended up breaking with the catholic understanding of salvation as ontological participation in the divine life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Grace was reduced to divine attitude, and humanity’s relation to its Creator construed through juridical categories, even while ultimately negating those categories.