Waiting and Being: Creation, Freedom, and Grace in Western Theology

5. A Reconstruction: The Union of Creation and Grace as a Social Relation

5 A Reconstruction The Union of Creation and Grace as a Social Relation In the first chapter, I argued that the modern split between the subject and nature, founded on bourgeois selfhood, posed a number of problems for modern theology to which the articulation of the unity of grace and creation has been seen as the remedy. I argued that, because the experience of the division is determined by bourgeois social relations, any proposed solution will only repeat the problem. Whether the reunion is thought in terms of intuitive immediacy or conceptual mediation, it will remain abstract and negative. Contemporary Catholic theology has sought that unity in a metaphysics of the immediate intuition of grace in creation. The concept of the supernatural developed in medieval theology specifically in order to distinguish the gratuity of creation from the gratuity of grace. It is this distinction that de Lubac and Rahner do not sustain in their common appeals to the preconceptual experience of grace. As a result, their rightful recuperation of the natural desire for the supernatural results in a concept of grace that is subsumed into creation. This is most apparent in their reliance on an intellectual illuminationism in which knowledge of the good is presumed to correlate immediately with the capacity for its performance, a concept of the will as an “intellectual appetite” that Aquinas rejected as both determinist and Pelagian. They thus have no sense in which to talk about the supernatural in terms of the will’s innate inability to produce an act of charity. The immediate union of grace with creation forestalls any critical concept of grace that would allow the social determination of this assumption to be recognized as specifically bourgeois. Apart from a critical concept of grace as a social relation, the unity of grace and creation they articulate remains abstract and negative, unwittingly perpetuating the division and reinforcing our actually existing social fragmentation. 123 The same result occurs from the Protestant unions. Abjuring metaphysics, Protestant theology favors the critical principle of grace as a social relation, which resists its immediate conflation with creation. Grace is the experience of God’s interruption of the drive to self-preservation amid the division from nature, and the imposition of redemption, which reveals the truth about reality and reconciles the self within its experience of alienation. Schleiermacher and Barth both develop the doctrine of election as the ontological category of the eternal divine decree in which God’s grace is united with creation. On this model, grace cannot be subsumed into creation, and its status as a social relation is affirmed. Nevertheless, the inverse is true. Creation is dominated by God’s imposition of grace. Because the self’s immediate experience is of a spontaneous separation from nature, as with de Lubac and Rahner, its capacity for selfdetermination remains inviolable. With the right concept of reality as eternally ordered to fellowship with God, the subject can reconcile the divided aspects of experience. Yet this model, too, is abstract and negative. It elevates the separation of grace from creation to a transcendental status in the divine decree, and unifies only in the concept. Again, this model reinforces the social divisions that give rise to the experience of alienation. Both the Catholic metaphysical immediacy of grace and the Protestant status of grace as a social relation derive from the writings of Augustine. His early theology of creation, framed against Manichaean theology, argued that God’s immutability ensures the goodness of material creation. Evil is a moral condition of the will, not an ontological reality. Evil is the illusion of the spiritual creature’s irrational choice to turn away from the unchangeable good of union with God and to pursue the inconsistent and fragmentary goods of material reality. The illusion of evil can be corrected when the mind is illuminated by the true knowledge of the good. Augustine’s social concept of grace began to develop in his letter to Simplician (396 ce). Augustine interpreted Paul as teaching that, because all of humanity shares in Adam’s sin, every return to God is the effect of God’s prior grace. He also noted the importance of internal conflict in Romans 7, where the knowledge of the good does not result in the ability to do it, which led him to distinguish more sharply between the intellect and the will. During the twenty years of controversy with the Donatists and Pelagians that followed, Augustine recognized the importance of the will as the...