A Theology of Grace in Six Controversies by Edward T. Oakes (review)

The late Fr. Edward T. Oakes's ingenious work reads mostly like a collection of essays in which he draws on a relatively significant array of literature, scholarly and popular (although mostly scholarly), primary and secondary (although mostly secondary), to address some of the most difficult topics in theology from a broadly ecumenical perspective. Six topics are addressed in this order: (1) the relationship between nature and grace, (2) the question of justification, (3) the problem of whether the empirical data of contemporary science and the theological stances of the Catholic Church on original sin may cohere, (4) the debate concerning the nature of human freedom and the divine gift of supernatural life (grace), (5) the an sit and quid sit of divinization/deification, and (6) whether Protestants and Catholics can agree on the predestination of Mary by divine grace. Although the book's primary purpose does not seem to be ecumenical rapprochement, the second and sixth chapters are the most overtly ecumenical. The chapters that most directly concern intra-Catholic debates, but nonetheless certainly have ecumenical ramifications that Oakes does not take the time to explicate, are the first and fourth; there are sections of the third chapter that are also relevant to the fourth (not to mention the relevance of the second to the fourth). As Oakes acknowledges, there is no way for a single book or a single author to resolve all of these debates.

In this review I will focus primarily on the chapters that have indirect ecumenical import, which concern perhaps the two most contentious and still largely unresolved debates in Catholic theology. Oakes advances in chapter 1 a somewhat surprising solution to the twentieth-century debate between the nouvelle theologie and the "Thomists of the strict observance" concerning the relationship between the natural realm of created being and the supernatural realm of participation in the Trinitarian life (i.e., divine grace): the nineteenth-century "romantic" Thomist articulation of the issue by Matthias Joseph Scheeben. Relying on Andrew Swafford, John Courtney Murray, and Aidan Nichols, O.P., Oakes proposes Scheeben as a kind of via media between Henri de Lubac and recent defenders of the hardline position of Thomists like Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., principally Lawrence Feingold and Steven A. Long. Most of the time Scheeben sounds more like the latter, but Oakes points to a couple passages where it sounds like he might question the autonomy of ethics as a science apart from revelation (see 42–43)—I think he is actually only minimizing its efficacy—and to his utilization of the metaphor of nuptiality for the relationship between nature and grace (see 35 and 44). I might argue that this metaphor is more equipped to help illuminate how nature and grace actually interact in the redeemed than to elucidate how they operate as speculative principles in the economy of creation and salvation history. But, certainly, Oakes would have done well to turn to a fellow Jesuit who lived during the heat of the debate, but stayed out of (or stood above?) the fray of the debate, Bernard J. F. Lonergan. Lonergan's precise technical treatment of the natural desire for God would have been a welcome complement to Scheeben's metaphorical-romantic solution. Nonetheless, Oakes demonstrates cogency in a number of theses: (1) that the intrinsicist– extrinsicist division of parties in the debate is too easy (see 34 and 43), (2) that Lubac's intention to break down the two-tiered approach was laudable, even if his metaphysical analysis of the question is faulty, but his understanding of the commentator tradition was superficial (see 16–20 and 32n47), (3) that there are sets of texts supporting each school in Thomas's corpus, although the Thomist school has stronger arguments on its side (21n32 and 24–32), and (4) that the Thomists correctly insist that nature and grace must be distinguished properly before they may be united (see 33–35 and 37...