RSSOn Grace and Nature…W.H. ChellisDarryl Hart w…
On Grace and Nature…
W.H. Chellis
Darryl Hart writes:
“If you really think that grace perfects nature, then we may have finally arrived at the chief difference (at least for me). I don’t think Calvinism is compatible with that construction of grace and nature (H. Richard Niebuhr didn’t think so), nor am I sure about Augustinianism.”
Chellis responds:
I know that the grace perfects nature idea is not popular in our circles. Still it certainly has a prominent place within the Reformed tradition. Long before I had read anything from Aquinas, I read Samuel Rutherford say:
“neither civility nor grace destroyeth but perfecteth nature…” (Lex Rex, pg 68,)
Coffey notes,”Although written by a Calvinist, it [Lex, Rex] was in some ways a deeply Thomistic book… In several places he appealed to Aquinas’s classic maxim, ‘grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.’ This maxim is perhaps the key to Lex, Rex, because Rutherford insisted on the compatibility of natural reasons conclusions and God’s revelation in Scripture.”
Politics, Religion, and the British Revolutions, John Coffey, pg. 152-153
Richard Muller writes, “Given, moreover, that “nature and grace are not opposed,” there can be a Christian natural theology, one which, in Alsted’s view, is grounded in ‘reason, universal experience, and Holy Scripture.”
Post-Reformation Dogmatics,Vol. 1, pg. 280
Herman Bavinck suggests the problems with the radical division between nature and grace found in Roman Catholic theology and notes,
“And that, too, was what the Reformation wanted: Christianity that was hostile, not to nature but only to sin. Such a Christianity was not externally imposed in the name of an infallible church but was inwardly assumed in one’s conscience by a free personality. Thus, through this personality, it had a reforming and sanctifying effect upon natural life as a whole. We are far from having reached the ideal and will presumably never reach it in this dispensation. Still, it is full of fascination and beauty and worthy of being pursued with all our strength. Coming again into its own in the Reformation was the old adage: nature commends grace; grace emends nature.” Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. 1, pg. 362.
Bavinck’s English editor John Bolt writes, “Put more simply, the fundamental theme that shapes Bavinck’s entire theology is the trinitarian idea that grace restores nature.” pg. 18.
A. Hoekema, in his standard work The Bible and the Future, puts the matter in perspective:
“It is commonly thought by many Christians that the relationship between the present world and the new earth which is to come is one of absolute discontinuity. The new earth, so many think, will fall like a bomb into our midst. There will be no continuity whatever between this world and the next; all will be totally different.
This understanding, however, does not do justice to the teaching of Scripture. There is continuity as well as discontinuity between this world and the next. The principles involved is well expressed in words which were often used by the medieval theologians, “grace does not destroy but restores nature.” In His redemptive activity God does not destroy the works of His hands, but cleanses them from sin and perfects them, so they may finally reach the goal for which He created them. (pg. 73).
D Hart
September 8th, 2006 at 10:16 am
Uncle (with the quotes). I figured this would stir up the hornets.
One of the points worth noting in the various sources is the concession of discontinuity between grace and nature. I am by no means a fan of the anti-natural law school. Neither, however, am I one of Roman Catholic arguments that sacramentalize the natural world and see no real or basic discontinuity.
Here are some points to consider in favor of discontinuity:
In Scripture, grace always upends human expectations (read: nature). God chooses David, the youngest and perhaps smallest of the litter. God uses Mary to deliver his only begotten son; she was not from the highest ranks of Jewish society.
Marriage will not exist in the new heavens and new earth even though we will still be male and female (and supposedly capable of procreation).
The lesson for me is that while natural revelation is true, it is true only so far as it goes. It’s smarter and a better investment to bet on Goliath. Our eyes and experience do not deceive. But God does not seem to play according to the rules of the natural order even while he has created, sustained and ordained them.
Go figure.
solarblogger
September 12th, 2006 at 3:43 am
According to C.S. Lewis in his Studies in Words, what the different senses of the term “nature” have in common is not interfering with something. Nature is what you have when you let things go their own way. However when things are fallen, to let them continue in that way means to allow them to continue to act outside of character, or perhaps outside of their natures, what they would be doing if they had not been interfered with by the fall.
“Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly” can mean acting subhuman, since it is a fallen nature to which we give in in some cases.
The idea that “Grace perfects nature” can be read different ways here, in part depending on whether nature is considered fallen or not. But it gets trickier if it is acknowledged that it is fallen, but even before the fall nature needed an extra ingredient to be good. And we find such a situation. The idea that a man needed to tend the garden may figure in here. The garden was to be natural in some senses of the term, but not all.
We could have everything continuous if there had been no fall, though man himself apparently had a job intervening in appropriate ways so that nature could be raised from a wilderness to a garden.
To cite a Scripture that makes for both continuity and discontinuity, what about where St. Paul speaks of what dies being just a mere seed of what is raised (1 Corinthians 15:37-38). Here an appeal is made to our own experience of nature to see that within nature, there is a familiar discontinuity where what comes up doesn’t resemble what was buried.