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THE CHURCH AS A COMMUNITY OF (UN)COMMON GRACE: Toward a Postmodern Ecclesiology by D. Lyle Dabney Marquette University Milwaukee, Wisconsin It is trite but true to say that we live in a time of profound cultural and intellectual change. As one might expect, that change has been reflected in Christian theology - and not least in Ecclesiology, the doctrine of the Church. For in the last century we have seen the Ecumenical movement emerge out of the soil of the eighteenth and nineteenth century Evangelical revival and missionary movements and flower in the renewed debate over the nature and mission of the Church in the Faith and Order commission of the World Council of Churches;1 we have seen a surprising expression of that flowering in the struggle of Orthodox theologians in ecumenical dialogue to come to a new and more open understanding of their own ecclesiological traditions as communities of Eastern Christians reappear in the west after centuries of de facto absence;2 and finally, we have seen in this century Roman Catholicism, in an act that might very well herald the close of a defensive era in their history that stretches all the way back to the Reformation, seek to balance if not reject the absolutist, heirarchical Ecclesiology of Vatican I with an emphasis upon the Church as the whole 'people of God' in Vatican II.3 Ecclesiology is thus being debated in this century in a way not seen, perhaps, since the Reformation. The thesis of this paper is that this debate is by no means over. For one of the most fundamental changes occurring in this century is the erosion of the epistemological foundationalism regnant in the west since the early Enlightenment; an erosion of foundations which threatens the entire intellectual construct of modernity with collapse. The result is the emergence of a broad, if by no means undifferentiated, cultural perception that the era of the modern has reached its end and that we live today in the uncertain world of the 'postmodern'.4 In such a world, I suggest, the Church finds itself facing what amounts to a new and different challenge to its own self-understanding; a challenge that will require us to think through Ecclesiology again by thinking through the most basic categories of Christian theology anew. In the following, I will, first, offer a brief sketch of modernity and postmodernity; secondly, indicate the challenge I believe the passing of modernity leaves in its wake for the Church and its understanding of itself; and finally, reflect on how we might respond to that challenge in the days ahead. Let us begin with modernity and its successor. In answer to the question, 'When are we?', a host of voices tell us today that we are living in a period best defined as 'postmodernity', an emergent consciousness which is rapidly displacing the era of the modern. 'Modernity' is portrayed by these thinkers as that period beginning with the Enlightenment which laid claim to the discovery of a form of universal rationality yielding a scientific method suited for the objective examination and explication of all reality and resulting in sure and certain knowledge. Possessing a rational soul, in the words of Descartes, the individual as res cogitans was claimed to be the subject in the act of coming to knowledge of the object of investigation, the res extensa. As such, the human subject gained mastery over the object of knowledge, and could manipulate that object to human ends. It was thus intrinsically an age, these thinkers urge, of chauvinistic intellectual and cultural triumphalism in which humanity, as subject of the investigation and progressive control of the world as object, discovered in its science a new faith, and that not just in its science but also in itself. For in the first flush of that conversion those experiencing Enlightenment disclaimed dependence upon both the many gods of the classical world as well as upon the metaphysical God of the medieval world and proclaimed responsibility for themselves as those who had at long last reached their majority. In so doing, they turned from bewailing the fall to praising the progress of humanity, from the 'superstition' of medieval theism to the 'rationality' of modern humanism, and from servitude under what was portrayed as the burden of an oppressive past to the freedom of what was declared to be a humanly attainable future. For the first time in the history of western civilization, authority was seen as vested not in those who had gone before, be they poets or prophets or philosophers, but in the present and above all in those present. For by dint of universal reason, nature and history were being, and were yet to be, it was thought, bent to humanity's will; thus the human dilemma was to be resolved, human suffering assuaged, and human longing fulfilled. 'Is humanity enlightened?', asked Kant on behalf of the Neuzeit. 'No', was his emphatic answer, 'but we live in an age of enlightenment'. And developing science and technology, it was expected, would increasingly usher us all into the light at the end of modernity's tunnel. 'Postmodernity' on the other hand, these same voices tell us, is beyond all that. It is a period which declares its utter rejection of all claims to universal knowledge and makes what seems at first glance the more modest assertion that there exists (albeit, universally) only local, or particular knowledge. That form of knowledge, it is said, is neither objective nor individual, but rather is the product of a particular community of discourse which construes reality through language in a way both congruent with and creative of its communal experience. Postmodernity traces its genealogy, therefore, not back to the bright suns of the modern, Descartes and Kant and their ilk, but rather to the dark stars of their age, their younger siblings, Nietzsche and Marx and Freud, and to their twentieth century offspring Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida among others. Following their lead, the known world of postmodernity is anything but objectively clear and self-evident, it is rather inherently complex and ambiguous, a matter of interpretation rather than fact, of paradigm rather than law, and of perspective rather than truth. For the postmodern world is said to be a social construct and not that which is objectively 'given' for the mind to 'mirror'; that, it is emphasized, was modernity's delusion. Not the individual mind, therefore, but the common tongue is for postmodernity the true nexus of understanding. For in the beginning was indeed the word, but that postmodern word, by which 'all things are made', is not Divine Logos but human speech. It is precisely at this point, I would suggest, that what is perhaps the critical problem in postmodernity's account of itself emerges, in that speech is not only the possibility of the postmodern world, but also the locus of its problematic. For human language, although exalted as that by which particular communities construe their reality, is subject at the same time to a two-fold critique which calls into question the fundamental role it plays in a world postmodern; indeed, which calls into question the very kind of world such speech creates. On the one hand, speech, especially in the form of written text, is subject to a devastating deconstructive analysis which challenges the notion that it has any secure meaning in itself or reference to anything outside of itself.5 And on the other hand, the related and perhaps even more devastating argument is made that, when all is said and done, the various particular construals of reality achieved by the various particular communities through their various particular languages are incommensurate to one another, and there can be, therefore, no real discourse between them, because they share no common tongue and thus no common world.6 For since these languages are ultimately self-referential, they purchase commonality for those within the shared linguistic world at the price of any possibility of meaningful relationship or communication with those without. Precisely therein one comes face to face with the supreme irony - not to say tragedy, in the classical sense of the word - of the postmodern world. For postmodernism is at its best a protest against an atomized, modern world of individualized subjects of knowledge and control in the name of community and mutuality of understanding. Yet in turning to the particular in its rejection of the universal, it succeeds only in finally further absolutizing and isolating these disparate communities of discourse in their particularity. They become 'private publics', so to speak; immediately welcoming to those within but virtually impervious to those without. The ironic consequence of postmodernity is, therefore, the rise of the specter of radical relativism and the polyrational dissolution of humankind into a plethora of incommensurate and unrelated communities of discourse which, in hearing and speaking to one another, become deaf and mute to all others. The tragedy of postmodernity is, thus, that it threatens to result in what might best be called an 'uncommon' world; a world, that is, made up of a series of solipsistic societies of similar selves, each capable of having no true communication with nor real knowledge of that which is genuinely 'other' than themselves. Indeed, postmodern life can be described, in this sense, as life in lieu of the other.7 This brings to light exactly how this uncommon world of the postmodern represents a new and different challenge to the Church and its self-understanding in both social and intellectual terms. For if modernity urged Christianity to see itself as one expression of some aspect of a universal anthropology - be it the 'religion of reason' in the early Enlightenment, or the ethical imperative of Kant, or Schleiermacher's 'feeling of absolute dependence', or more recently Tillich's 'ultimate concern' - then the postmodern would force Christianity in the opposite direction and urge the Church to embrace itself utterly as a cultural and historical particular. To the extent that it succeeds in doing so, it profoundly effects the being and thinking and doing of the Church in such a world. For just as modernity sought to dissolve Christianity in the ocean of universal religion, so postmodernity would wall up the faith in the ghetto of its own particular community of discourse and would thereby reduce the Church to one more incommensurate and unrelated society of similar selves. Thus, if the problematic of the postmodern is that it produces an 'uncommon world', then the problematic of the Christian community in such a world is that it is threatened with becoming an 'uncommon' Church. But if the Church of Jesus Christ is that community which worships the God who is both Creator and Redeemer, and as such insists upon a real relationship between creation and redemption, nature and grace, world and Church, then such an 'uncommon community' threatens to cease being the Church at all. What compounds this postmodern dilemma for the Christian Ecclesia and its Ecclesiology is that, when we seek to discover how we might respond to this new challenge, we find we have precious few theological resources upon which to draw. For the western theological tradition has produced two dominate models of theology, one stressing continuity and the other discontinuity between nature and grace and creation and redemption; and these two models have largely defined the ways in which the Church has understood itself and its relationship to the greater world of which it is a part. The problem, I suggest, is that both were responses to a very different intellectual and cultural context than our own and neither is fully adequate to meet the challenge we face today. Thus, to get at the issue of the nature of the Church in the midst of a postmodern world, Christian theology is forced to grapple with the most basic issues animating the western tradition. Postmodernity forces us, that is to say, to think take up the fundamental categories of Christian theology anew in order to think through the doctrine of the Church again. Let us briefly sketch the two dominant theological models in the western tradition and how they shape distinctive accounts of the Church. The first is seen most clearly in medieval Scholasticism, a form of theology which makes creation, i.e. the capacities of created nature, its point of departure, and interprets salvation accordingly as an ascent to knowledge of God the Creator through the assistance of grace.8 This type of theology can be said to begin, therefore, with a kind of syllogism: God is good in being and act; creation is an act of God; ergo, creation is essentially good and in search of its highest good. Now that is by no means to be understood as denying the presence and pervasiveness of sin in the world, nor as implying that creation is somehow complete. Rather, according to this theology, despite the acknowledged imperfection and incompleteness in the world, it is ultimately the goodness of God's creating that defines the creation.9 That goodness expresses itself above all in an innate human capacity for God (homo capax Dei), an openness to or a desire to ascend to the fulfillment of our nature in union with our Creator;10 a yearning for that which human nature cannot by itself attain. Catholic theology of this sort is, therefore, cast as an appeal to the created nature of human beings to find the fulfillment of their being by ascending to God through a receiving of an infusion of the grace which the Father has provided in Christ through the Church, the societas perfecta.11 Hence, while Scholasticism explicitly differentiates between nature and grace, the 'world' and the Church, it does not contrast but rather orders them in an unbroken hierarchical relationship;12 a relationship, moreover, in which the Church plays a central role as the mediator of the grace enabling nature to come to its proper end. The clear tendency of this model, then, is to posit a fundamental continuum between nature and grace, the Creator and the created, creation and redemption, God's world and God's Church; for it is a theology of nature fulfilled by grace. Thus the representative affirmation of medieval Scholasticism was: "Grace does not destroy, but rather presupposes and perfects nature."13 Over and against that claim stands the theology of the sixteenth-century Reformation, the second dominant theological model in the west. The fundamental logic of Reformation theology is protest, indeed, Reformation theology is protesting, or Protestant theology.14 What Reformation theology protests against is above all the root affirmation of Scholastic theology: that human nature by virtue of being God's good creation possesses an innate capax Dei and is therefore intrinsically open to and in search of its Creator. Thus, Luther argued in his Disputation Against Scholastic Theology of 1517 that, "on the part of man however nothing precedes grace except ill will and even rebellion against grace."15 For not the goodness but the sin and consequent incapacity of the creature for the Creator, not the yearning for but the flight from God, is this theology's point of departure; and that sin and incapacity and flight is seen as the defining reality in all of creaturely existence. Now that is not to say that all is interpreted as simply evil: when Calvin spoke of the 'depravity' of nature,16 for instance, he did not mean that there was no good in the world, what he meant was there was no unalloyed good in the world, no part or capacity or desire untouched by the fall (homo non capax Dei). For sin has spoiled all, according to this theology, and there is no untouched humanum or residual imago to which one can appeal as purely good, as open to and in search of its Creator. Indeed, according to this reading of the faith, the claim that there is such a possibility, such a capax Dei, is the essence of sin itself, in that it constitutes the implicit claim that one can by one's own efforts be redeemed. Reformation theology, therefore, is cast not in the form of an appeal to the good, but in the form of a dialectic,17 according to which the Redeemer Jesus Christ as the Divine Word stands over and against creation, extra nos, confronting human beings in their sin and shame and summoning them to faith in the free grace of God made manifest in his death on the cross pro nobis. We come to right relationship with God, it is claimed, not through being enabled by infused grace to fulfill nature's law and so ascend to our Creator, but rather by forswearing such reliance on law and placing our trust in Christ the Redeemer who by grace freely imputes his righteousness to those whom God has freely elected. Thus, while formally the Church is the place where this message is proclaimed in word and sacrament, materially the Church embodies this theology in that it is made up not of the saints in our midst but rather of the chosen from among us. This sort of theology, therefore, finds its point of departure not in creaturely good, but in creaturely sin, and takes the form not of creation's ascent to its God and Father, but of God's descent to creation in Jesus Christ the Son.18 Its clear tendency, then, is to assert utter contradiction between law and Gospel, God and world, creation and redemption, Redeemer and those in need of redemption, reprobate world and the elect of God's true Church. Not creation and anything, most certainly not nature and grace, but rather solus Christus, sola fide, sola scriptura, sola gratia were the Reformation watchwords. Indeed the one 'and' the Reformers allowed, law and Gospel, simply underlines that point, for the 'and' in this instance marks a relation not of continuity but of discontinuity; for this is a theology of law contradicted by Gospel.19 Reformation theology is a theology, therefore, not of continuum but of contradiction. As the Anglo-Catholic John Burnaby expressed the issue in the midst of a conflict with such theology earlier in this century: "Against the 'Both-And' of the Catholic, Protestantism here as everywhere sets with...insistence its 'Either-Or'."20 As even this brief overview intimates, the two theological models that have dominated the western tradition offer us little help today. For a postmodern world calls into question intellectually as well as culturally both the theologies and Ecclesiologies of Scholasticism and the Reformation. Medieval Scholasticism sought to demonstrate the continuity between classical reason and Christian revelation as two expressions of the one rationality of the one God and Creator of the world, and then sought to justify the central role of the Church as the mediator of grace enabling individuals to ascend from one through the other to their Maker. While we must today clearly and unambiguously affirm the truth of their insistence that the Redeemer is the Creator, especially as that came to its initial expression during the patristic era in response to the pagan and quasi-Christian dualisms which tried in various ways to assert that the God who was savior in Christ was other than the Creator of the world, we must also question the adequacy of such a theology now. What is the sense of such a theology in a context such as our own in which the notion of a created rationality has long been abandoned and any and all universal epistemic claims are rejected? Indeed, one of the primary reasons medieval Scholasticism - as well as modern Protestant Liberal theology, which in its day employed the same strategy - was so powerfully effective was precisely because it could address a situation in which such a universal claim for human rationality as reflecting a divine rationality was widely accepted and could then trade on that presupposition in its reading of the Christian faith in a culture that already explicitly understood itself as Christian. In that context, the Church could plausibly claim a central role in society as those who had already begun the ascent to the vision of God and, as such, mediated grace to those who came behind. But what, we must ask, is the appropriateness of such a theology now in the absence of any such epistemological or cultural claims - indeed, the utter dismissal of any such claims? It is for this reason that twentieth-century heirs of Tridentine Scholasticism of the stature of Bernard Lonergan and Avery Dulles, to name but two, argue that theology today "is entering a new age and cannot continue to be what it has been since the sixteenth century."21 The situation in which Reformation theology now finds itself is no better. For while the Reformation protest in the name of utter discontinuity between law and gospel was a necessary and profoundly meaningful response to a late medieval world dominated by Papal self-assertion and Scholastic nominalism, and furthermore, while this "No" has even served yet again as a potent response to the evil pretensions of nineteenth and early twentieth century European and American 'Kulturprotestantismus', it seems nevertheless clear that in the contemporary context of postmodernity the adequacy and appropriateness of such a Protestant theology must be seriously doubted. What is the sense of the Reformation protest today in the absence of any established claim for continuum between Creator and creation or Church and world like the one against which the protest was first fashioned? Moreover, what is the sense of an Ecclesiology which emphasizes only contradiction between God's elect and God's creation in such a situation? It is one thing to protest in the face of an established and dominant evil, it is an entirely different thing to stage a protest in the midst of collapse. It was precisely this realization that led Karl Barth in post-war Europe to modify his pre-war insistence that God is "wholly other" and undertake his 'turn to the world' in which he came to speak of that which earlier would have been unthinkable to him: the "humanity of God" in Jesus Christ.22 And it was this same insight that led Paul Tillich a generation ago to warn that Protestant theology in North America was itself was in danger of "participating in the increasing disintegration" of our age.23 The theological protest of the Reformation - along with its protesting Ecclesiology - is, therefore, just as questionable at the end of the twentieth century as is the theological assertion of the high middle ages. In the 'uncommon world' of postmodernity, therefore, the Church finds itself today with traditional theological and ecclesiological models which trade upon or protest against a 'common world' that is rapidly ceasing to exist. We are thus confronted with the urgent question as to how we are to understand ourselves as the Church in the world in which we now live; the question as to how, that is to say, we are to give an account of the Christian faith and the identity of the Christian community which can answer the postmodern insistence upon defining that faith and that community as just another particular community of discourse - as incommensurate, as unrelated, indeed, as uncommon as the next. This question and the dilemma it presupposes, it seems to me, makes it incumbent upon us today to reexamine our understanding of the most basic categories of western theology anew so that we might think through Ecclesiology again. If, as we have argued above, the two theological models which have dominated the western tradition may be characterized as, on the one hand, a theology of the first article stressing God the Father as Creator and the continuum of the inherent created capacities of the creature for relationship with its Maker, and, on the other hand, a theology of the second article which stresses the Redeeming work of God the Son and the contradiction of human sin by Divine grace in which sinners are freely elect to redemption, then I suggest, we might very well look today to what I have elsewhere called a theology of the third article:24 a theology of continuity through discontinuity which begins its witness to Christ with the Holy Spirit, is rooted in the Trinitarian event of the cross, and then defines the Christian community in those categories. Such a theology begins neither with the assertion of human capacity for God due to creation nor with a protest about the incapacity of the human for the Divine due to sin, but takes rather as its own particular point of departure the Holy Spirit as the possibility of God for us as well as our possibility that we might yet be for God. The Spirit of which such a theology speaks, therefore, is defined neither in terms of a general anthropology nor simply as the bearer of a redemptive message from the God who stands over and against us in Christ. Rather, the Spirit of God, this theology insists, is the Spirit of the cross; the Spirit, that is to say, of the Trinitarian event of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, an event in which God has entered into our death and made it God's own and has thereby taken us into God's life and made it our own. For according to the witness of the New Testament, the Spirit of God is that 'Lord and Giver of Life' which raised Christ from the dead, having first lead Christ to that suffering and death on the cross for the sake of new life for all creation. It is, furthermore, that same Spirit which is then mediated by the risen Son of God for the new creation of creation in which the old is encompassed in a new and transforming relationship to God. Thus it is that all four Gospels announce at the very beginning of their narratives that the ministry of Jesus Christ is to be understood in explicitly Pneumatological terms: "I baptize you in water", John the Baptist declares, "but he shall baptize you in the Holy Spirit" (Mk 1:8 par). For the Spirit of God, whose brooding over the waters of the deep in the beginning meant that even that chaos became promise, who as the very breath of God was breathed into the dust of the earth producing human life, and who was promised by the prophets of old as that which was to be breathed anew into the dead and dry bones of the people of promise was now to be poured out in an act of new covenant and new creation. Building on that notion, the Gospel according to John portrays therefore the very first encounter between the resurrected Christ and his fearful disciples as one in which, echoing those Old Testament creation traditions, Jesus fulfills the Baptizer's promise by "breath[ing] on them and [saying] to them 'Receive the Holy Spirit'" (20:22). It is that Pneumatological definition of the salvation that is realized in and mediated by the crucified and resurrected Son which is then reflected in Paul's Epistle to the Romans when he points to the work of the "Spirit of sonship" (pne_ma u_oqes_aV, Rom 8:15) as that which marks the Church of Jesus Christ: "When we cry 'Abba! Father!'", the apostle writes, "it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ - if", Paul adds, lest the work of the Spirit be separated from the cross in ecclesiastical triumphalism, if "in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him" (Rom 8:15b-17). A community which understands itself in terms of such a theology of the third article is prepared, I suggest, to be the Church of Jesus Christ in a postmodern world facing a new and complex set of challenges. There it is brought to the realization that the Church is a community of (un)common grace. For in rejecting with postmodernity all claims for an anthropological universal and turning to the particularity of its own historical traditions and practices it discovers in such a theology that the new and (un)common grace that it encounters in the particularity of the Gospel of Jesus Christ does not simply separate us from but also unites us with the world of common grace as the creation of a gracious God. The Church discovers, that is to say, in its own particularity that which does not render it an 'uncommon' community, but rather points beyond itself to and joins us with the common in all creation: the Spirit of Life, which in raising the Christian community to emergent, new life on the way to the cross is involved in the same life-giving work it has been about since the beginning. The (un)common grace of God given in the Spirit and through the Son, therefore, that very grace which produces the cry of 'Abba! Father!' in our midst, joins us with and does not alienate us from the creation whose life is the product of the common grace of God. And just as it joins us with all of creation's life in the Spirit, so it joins us in creation's suffering and yearning and hope. For in the words of the Apostle Paul: "We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruit of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait"and hope for final redemption (Rom 8:22-23). In the uncommon world of the postmodern, then, I suggest that the Church must discover itself anew as a community of (un)common grace. As such, it is a Church which understands itself as an emergent community of God's Spirit, arising in the midst of estrangement and death in an event of eschatological foretaste of new life in transformed relationship with God and all creation; a community claiming neither antecedent cause in itself nor any final contradiction to the world as other. It is thus a community able to speak not just of continuum between the world and God, nor simply of contradiction between God and the world, but rather of both continuity and discontinuity, of both grace and sin, of both the free grace of nature and the free nature of grace. For a theology of the third article can enable the Christian community both to socially and intellectually affirm and contradict various aspects of the age in which we live. Thereby it can come to express both that which defines it in common with all God's creation as well as that which marks it as an emergent community of the (un)common grace of the Spirit of God, the Spirit of the cross, the Spirit of the resurrection and death of Jesus Christ. 1 See R. Newton Flew, Jesus and His Church. A Study of the Idea of the Ecclesia in the New Testament, (London: Epworth Press, 1938); Paul Avis, Christians in Communion, (London: Mowbray, 1990). 2 See Alexander Schmemann, Church, World, Mission: Reflections on Orthodoxy in the West, (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1979); John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church, (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1993). 3 For an overview, see Avery Dulles, "A Half Century of Ecclesiology", Theolgical Studies, 50 (1989), 419-442; A. Anton, "Postconciliar Ecclesiology", Vatican II: Assessment and Perspectives, Twenty-Five Years After, (1962-1987), Rene Latourelle (ed.), (New York: Paulist Press, c1988-c1989). 4 The terms 'postmodern' and 'postmodernity' have become much used and much abused terms in recent discourse, and as such, suffer from imprecision. I know, however, of no better way to characterize the broad transformation in the fields of philosophy, aesthetics, and social theory beginning in the last part of the nineteenth and continuing through the twentieth century; a transformation increasingly making itself felt not simply in the scholarly but also in the popular realm. For an attempt to clarify the terminology cf. Michael W. Messmer, "Making Sense Of/With Postmodernism", Soundings 68 (1985), 404-426. The amount of literature treating this transformation has become immense. For an introduction and overview cf. Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture. An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), and Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory. Critical Interrogations, (New York: The Guilford Press, 1991). For what is perhaps the best general account of the dissolution of the modern from the perspective of the postmodern, cf. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). For a different kind of analysis of various descriptions of postmodernity in recent philosophical/theological discourse, and an account of some of the ways theologians are currently responding to it, see David Ray Griffen, William A. Beardslee, and Joe Holland, Varieties of Postmodern Theology, (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989). 5 As with postmodernity, so here the literature on the subject of deconstruction has become immense. For a good overview by a scholar currently involved in deconstructive postmodern theology, see Mark C. Taylor, Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). See further, Griffin, Beardslee, and Holland, Varieties of Postmodern Theology. 6 For an excellent account of the issue of incommensurability in the current discussion, with a good bibliography, cf. Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), esp. pp. 51-108. 7 Cp. Anselm Kyongsuk Min, "Liberation, the Other, and Hegel in Recent Pneumatologies", Religious Studies Review 22 (1996), 28-33, p. 29: "We are living in a postmodern world where societies are endangering themselves because of the extreme functional differentiation of society into a pluralism of subsystems, their respective self-absolutization at the expense of the whole, and the irreducibly 'polycentric' organization and perception of society, which leaves the whole or totality impossible either to envision or to control". 8 Cf. Brian Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), chp. II, esp. p. 33: "So God, for Aquinas, is the reason or cause of there being anything apart from himself. Or, as we may also say, God for him, is the Creator". 9 Thus, for instance, already by the time of Anselm original sin was defined not as an active but a passive reality, i.e. as a privation or lack of original righteousness, and the subsequent Scholastic tradition followed him in this. Cf. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 3: The Growth of Medieval Theology (600-1300), (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 112f. 10 Martin Anton Schmidt, "Dogma und Lehre im Abendland, Zweiter Abschnitt: Die Zeit der Scholastik", Carl Andressen (Hg.), Handbuch der Dogmen- und Theologiegeschichte, Bd. 1; Die Lehrentwicklung im Rahmen der Katholizität, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982), 567-754, 650ff, esp. 654f. 11 Joseph Ratzinger, Theologie III. Katholische Theologie, RGG, 3. Aufl., 6:775-779, 775f; idem, Kirche II.-III., LThK, 6:172-183. Further, see the excellent overview of Ratzinger's Ecclesiology in Miroslav Volf, Trinität und Gemeinschaft. Eine ökumenische Ekklesiologie, (Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag/Neukirchener Verlag: Mainz/ Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1996), 26-69. 12 The locus classicus for this schema is, of course, Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1a.1. Further, see A. M. Fairwather (ed.), Aquinas on Nature and Grace, (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1956). 13 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1a.1.8. et al. Further, see Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 3: The Growth of Medieval Theology (600-1300), 103f, 284-293, esp. 292; Eric Przywara, Der Grundsatz »Gratia non destruit, sed supponit et perficit naturam«, Scholastik 17 (1942), 178-186. 14 Cf. the description of "the Protestant principle" in the discussion of Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era, (Abridged Edition), James Luther Mays (trans.), (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 226. 15 LW 31, 11. See Bernhard Lohse, "Dogma und Bekenntnis in der Reformation: Von Luther bis zum Konkordienbuch", Carl Andressen (Hg.), Handbuch der Dogmen- und Theologiegeschichte, Bd. 2: Die Lehrentwicklung im Rahman der Konfessionalität, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980), 1-166, 22f. 16 See Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, J. T. McNeill (ed.), F. L. Battles (trans.), (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975), II.1.viii-xi. Cf. Wilhelm Niesel, The Theology of Calvin, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1980), 80ff. 17 See Ernest B. Koenker, "Man: Simul Justus et Pecator", Accents in Luther's Theology, Heino O. Kadai (ed.), (St. Louis: Concordia: 1967), 98-123. 18 Cf. the language of 'ascent/descent' in Luther, "The Babylonian Captivity of the Church", LW 36: 56, and in Calvin, Institutes, II, xii, 1. 19 Cf. The discussion of both medieval Scholastic and modern Protestant Liberal theology in regard to such an 'and' in Karl Barth, CD, I/2, 557. 20 John Burnaby, Amor Dei. A Study of the Religion of St. Augustine, (Norwich: The Canterbury Press, 1938, reissued 1991), 4. 21 Avery Dulles, The Craft of Theology. From Symbol to System, (New Expanded Edition), (New York: Crossroad, 1995), 53; Bernard J. F. Lonergan, "Theology in Its New Context", A Second Collection, Philadelphia: Westminster, 1974), 55-67. 22 Karl Barth, The Humanity of God, John Newton Thomas (trans.), (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1960), 37-65. 23 Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era, 226. 24 See D. Lyle Dabney, Die Kenosis des Geistes: Kontinuität zwischen Schöpfung und Erlösung im Werk des Heiligen Geistes, (Neukirchenr Verlag: Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1997).

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