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

Introduction

Introduction This study attempts to address a doctrinal problem is theology. It is no longer common for theologians to attempt to resolve specific predicaments of doctrine. Theology has recently tended instead to focus on the academic studies of figures or the relationship of theological questions to more general intellectual concerns. The working assumption of contemporary theology, at least as a specifically academic discipline, seems to be that questions of doctrinal coherence are either already largely resolved or have no important consequence for the discipline. Nevertheless, such problems remain of enormous importance for both academic theology and the life and mission of the church. Perhaps the most salient instance of this continued incoherence is the continued division of Protestant and Catholic churches over the issues of human cooperation in redemption and the final authority in matters of doctrine and discipline. In their different ways, each of these positions is a conviction about God’s grace and its relationship to the world. And, in fact, this study grows out of the conviction that these more conspicuous of the confessional differences between Catholics and Protestants are largely presenting symptoms of the more cunning wiles by which we have sought to conceal from view the persistent incoherence of our doctrines of creation and grace. It is for this reason, I believe, that recent theology has become much more attuned to this separation than in previous periods, as I will discuss in more detail in chapter 1. Yet even in those places where the problem is brought to the foreground, as with the work of Henri de Lubac and Karl Rahner, or Friedrich Schleiermacher and Karl Barth, the separation of the doctrines continues in ways that elude detection. I first encountered this problem after initially puzzling over the discontinuity I saw between Augustine’s early theology of creation and his later theology of grace. The Augustine scholar J. Patout Burns helped me to see that on these specific questions Augustine was not, in fact, the Augustine of the theologians. He was neither the monster that one half of the theological world repudiated nor the paragon of ontological participation that the other half championed. He was instead a much more complicated, honest, and passionate thinker than these caricatures allowed. Though certainly not immune to selfdeception , he was the kind of thinker who relentlessly followed his convictions to their conclusions, and even abruptly and skillfully changed his mind in radical ways. He pursued and tackled the most difficult of theological 1 problems—creatio ex nihilo, grace, sacramental validity, freedom, election—and illuminated each one. It was for this reason that the development of Augustine’s theology of grace, which led him to embrace a position so out of sync with his most fundamental convictions about creation, was so intriguing. But it was also particularly troubling, given that the theologians to whom I was most draw relied so heavily on that same doctrine of creation. But though I was determined to uncover a theological connection between the late theology of creation and the early theology of creation, I was forced to conclude that such a connection could only be made by suppressing the Augustine’s most important insights into the nature of grace and the human will. I was left with an Augustine who was much less amenable to the purposes to which contemporary theologians wanted to put him but who had illuminated the complexities of the relationship between grace and creation in decisive and unavoidable ways. On these points, my treatment of Augustine in this study is indebted to the historical work of J. Patout Burns and Robert J. O’Connell. The original inspiration for the study was a remark made by Tracy in his afterword to the collection Mystics: Presence and Aporia, which I read at the height of wrestling with Augustine. Tracy states there that additional work needs to be done on the ways that Augustine is the source for Catholic theology’s nature/grace paradigm and Protestant theology’s sin/grace paradigm. This study is the result of the reflection that Tracy’s comment inspired. Additionally, my close reading of Gillian Rose over the last two years, and particularly Hegel Contra Sociology, also shed light on this particular set of issues I had been exploring in the Augustinian legacy, and did so by connecting them to the wider cultural and philosophical influences on modern theology. Like Augustine, Rose too ran headlong toward the great problems of thought and confronted them with gravity and uninhibited...