Amazing Grace!: Windows in the Christian Tradition of Thinking about Grace

By Owen F. Cummings

Grace is a key reality for all Christians of any denomination. More than that, it is a central experience. The history of grace is fascinating in and of itself. This little book offers a series of windows through which to see and understand how Christians in the past and in the present have thought about grace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Feb 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666756319

Owen F. Cummings

Owen F. Cummings is Academic Dean and Regents' Professor of Theology at Mount Angel Seminary in Oregon. He is the author of sixteen books and many articles in theological and pastoral journals. He is also a Roman Catholic permanent deacon of the Diocese of Salt Lake City.

Book preview

Preface

The defining event in 20th century Roman Catholic theology was the Second Vatican Council. . . . The aftermath of Vatican II has been turbulent. However, as Newman noted in August 1870, there has seldom been a Council without great confusion after it—he cited five of the first six ecumenical councils.

—Fergus Kerr, OP¹

Catholic theology has always been developing and continues to do so. The Scottish Dominican Fergus Kerr is right to affirm that the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) was the defining moment in Catholic theology in the twentieth century. Many things changed in the church. The liturgy was revised and made available in the vernacular languages, Catholics were encouraged to study the Scriptures and the new lectionary for Mass provided them with a much wider range of readings than ever before, a more positive attitude to other Christian traditions as well as to the religions of the world came into play, and so forth. Inevitably, as these developments continue to be received by Catholics, fresher approaches to theology attempted to mediate an understanding of what it meant to be a Catholic, and this affected the way we think about grace.

Fergus Kerr goes on to say:

The Roman Catholic church is not the monolithic entity that her enemies and her most zealous members believe. Beliefs are not held univocally, or with clarity, or across the board. The notion that, in Catholic doctrine there exists an order or ‘hierarchy’ of truths, since they vary in their relationship to the foundation of the Christian faith (Decree on Ecumenism, par.

11

), while regarded quite widely as one more Vatican II innovation, a concession to ecumenists, is actually only a description of what has always been the case.

The very fine book from which these quotations from Fergus Kerr have been taken indicates something of the pluralism, the legitimate pluralism, that prevails today among orthodox Catholic theologians. That pluralism has always been there, as an informed awareness of the history of theology would amply demonstrate. One of the best ways to understand what is meant by pluralism is to think of a conversation, in which agreement and disagreement occur, and further listening and responding are required. This is how theology develops.

One of the greatest achievements of both the Second Vatican Council and the renewal of theology before it and in its aftermath has been the recovery of a view of created reality as intrinsically oriented to God as its source, sustainer, and consummation, in contrast to the ‘extrinsicist’ tendency to view grace and nature, the sacred and the profane, as utterly distinct.² Much of the current unrest and even polarization in the church may be understood around this point. The world of nature and grace understood as separate and not just distinct realities is largely gone. The renewal of theology and of church life has brought this about, but it takes time for the renewal to sink down deep into Catholic soil. Some reflections on this are offered in chapter 11, Thinking about Grace after Vatican II.

It is very easy for the beginning student of theology to get lost in the forest of theological writing about grace, and not see the wood for the trees. This little book is intended to help such a student. It is a primer on grace, sketching something of its development through the tradition and at the present day, dropping in, if you like, into conversations from the past that in different ways perdure into the present. Famously, Fr. David Tracy, theologian at the University of Chicago Divinity School, maintained that theology serves three different but overlapping publics: the public of the academy, the public of the church, and the public of the wider society. This little book on grace is intended primarily for the public of the church: for clergy, lay ministers, especially in the Rite for the Christian Initiation of Adults, lay pastoral associates, seminarians. At the same time, the author has depended on the theological academy for wisdom and insight, and it is also his hope that the book may have something to say to the wider public.

The introductory chapter treats grace very broadly and to some extent ecumenically, and this ecumenical dimension is present throughout the book. After a brief outline on the meaning of grace, the chapter encourages the reader to think about this doctrine within a wider perspective. Catholic theology is not done in isolation from other Christian traditions. With Vatican II’s Decree on Ecumenism and Pope St. John Paul II’s encyclical letter That They Be One we are firmly committed to the cause of Christian unity. This demands genuine and appreciative awareness of the other Christians, again another aspect of the pluralism that is in place in conversation. This is of course an ongoing project, but at least we can make a beginning.

We then move on to consider Scripture, the soul of theology according to the Constitution on Revelation (Dei Verbum) of Vatican II. Attention is given first to the Old Testament. The temptation to the Marcionite heresy in which the Old Testament is judged to be theologically irrelevant is just that, a heresy, but it can remain a constant temptation for Christians. Taking a further look at the Scriptures, we shall see that the world of grace is already present as it gives birth to the fullness of grace in our Lord Jesus Christ, the New Testament. The mystical theology of St. Paul and the horizon of the Gospels will aid our recognition that not only is grace God’s outreach to us, but also God’s embrace of us from within.

Moving into the world of the fathers of the church in chapters 3 and 4 that scriptural understanding of grace both continues and develops. As it unfolds, however, various challenges emerge, the first serious challenge being between the theologies of St. Augustine and the British monk Pelagius. As they struggled with the tension between grace and human freedom in the Latin-speaking Western church, the Greek-speaking Eastern church offered a complementary point of view that looked especially to the future of the Christian life.

The complementarity of East and West reaches a fine comparison in two medieval theologians, St. Thomas Aquinas in the West, and St. Gregory Palamas in the East. They form the substance of chapter 5. Both saints come at their understanding of grace we might say from the perspective of systematic theology, but that is not the situation of the English laywoman Dame Julian of Norwich in chapter 6. Her contribution to the theology of grace is no less rich than theirs, but it comes out of her own experience and reflection within the scriptural and theological tradition.

The Western church split open with the Reformation in the sixteenth century with Martin Luther. Moving beyond the polemics of former times, chapter 7 points out the need for reform in the church and something of Martin Luther’s theology of grace. Chapter 8 examines the Council of Trent’s response to the Reformers. The theology of merit and of indulgences, both problematic features of the theology of grace in the view of the Reformed tradition, is the focus of chapter 9. Chapter 10 goes on to consider briefly the controversies about grace found among Catholic theologians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Chapter 11 brings our windows on grace to a conclusion. It examines the renewal of Catholic theology that came with the Second Vatican Council, and then moves on to look at the renewal of theology of grace from the perspective of three theologians, Karl Rahner, SJ, John Macquarrie, and Peter Groves. My hope is that readers will recognize that God’s grace is simply amazing.

1

. Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians,

204

.

2

. Murray, Roman Catholic Theology after Vatican II,

271

.

1

Grace

An Introduction

Grace becomes an open concept capable of embracing the whole of God’s gift of himself to man, and so capable of indefinitely various further particularization. It is not as though we were to itemize God’s gifts and call one of them grace; it is rather that grace qualifies the whole of God’s self-communication as a gift beyond all telling.

—Cornelius Ernst, OP¹

Different ways of talking about grace can be helpful but they can also provide an unnerving combination of linguistic bog and theological minefield. . . . To receive the grace of God is to be invited into God’s own self.

—Peter Groves²

There will never be too many books on grace, for grace is at the very heart of the Christian experience and, indeed sums it up in a single word.

—John Macquarrie³

Introduction

Since the 1940s, writes Robert Gleason, SJ, there has occurred a refocusing of the entire treatment [of grace]. The reason for this shift of emphasis is the slackening interest of the twentieth-century mind in the controversies which fascinated the preceding three centuries.⁴ We might illustrate Gleason’s point by noting a transition in teaching about grace in Catholic systematic theology. Prior to Vatican II, but with Gleason recognizing the beginnings in the 1940s, especially in the movement known as the nouvelle thèologie/new theology, there was a distinct theological treatise De Gratia/About Grace. Since the Council the contents of that systematic treatise have morphed into courses usually entitled Theological Anthropology, usually taking in creation, the fall and original sin, grace in its various modes, and eschatology. This has been a good development, providing, I believe, a more holistic view of the human person and a more integrated theology of grace. At the same time grace is an omnipresent word in Catholic theology and so it may still be worthwhile having an introduction to it in its own right, so to speak. That’s what this book is about.

Looking over the whole Christian tradition one should say that there are two fundamental emphases in the theology of grace: first, the experience of and the awareness of sin within ourselves and in society at large, requiring healing from outside ourselves. Looking at the horrors and atrocities perpetrated by human beings upon one another and paraded daily in our various news media, alongside a deep and