Holy Saturday: Nature and Grace
Von Balthasar’s insistence, which I wrote of yesterday, that the Paschal Mystery not be made natural reveals something of his approach to the perennial issue of the interrelationship of nature and grace. He has an absolute conviction of the chasm between the two, between infinite and finite, between Creator and creature, that is only bridged from the other side when God, by grace and gift, makes the move to which we can respond.
How differently von Balthasar’s contemporary Karl Rahner approaches the subject. For Rahner nature is only ever a ‘limit concept’. As we experience the world ‘nature’ is always ‘graced’ and the two can only be spoken about separately on the understanding that they can never be prised apart. It leads Rahner in a somewhat different direction to von Balthasar:
2 comments April 7th, 2007