While the analogy limned here is only a provisional framework, it considers a space in theology that has long been underdeveloped. Yet its underlying question could hardly be more pertinent, namely, what difference do distinct contexts and forms of life make in respect of what Christian faith considers to be most important for us: grace. Or to frame the question more broadly, how is the self-communication of God realized for the salvation and divinization of the world? Previous reflection on grace was dominated by abstract distinctions that were the common parlance of theology from Augustine into scholasticism—as gratia praeveniens et cooperans, santificans et actualis. Each has an abiding usefulness. The pivotal distinction used to mark the transition into a manifestly Christian grace, however, was between implicit and explicit. While this distinction also has its place, it is not without significant limitations. For it is not adequately capable of conveying how the self-communication of God is participated by a gradual process of christomorphic growth that entails recurrent and reciprocal interaction.
This work thereby endeavors to provide a framework to negotiate and explain the development of grace without, on the one hand, reducing this movement to any one set of theoretical distinctions, or, on the other, retreating from abstract considerations as too general for the particularity of Christian faith. It proposes that the way between is the way of analogy. The internal difficulties identified in chapters two and three in Rahner and Balthasar likewise open onto a way of envisioning grace analogously. While this framework is crafted through both the method and ideas of Przywara, it also moves beyond his work. Its basic thesis is that while the self-communication of God is always participable, its realization in creation advances by an analogy that moves in and through the christoforming sacramentality of contexts, as is primordially embodied and enacted in the Gestalt Christi, toward the gradual, reciprocal, and recurrent actualization of christic forms of life. This dynamic is also realsymbolic and trinitarian. It processively circumincesses through the incarnate Son in the oscillating movement of the Spirit to integrate potentially the whole of creation in the totus Christus, in-and-beyond its analogous subsistence in the meantime.
As illustrated in the first and last chapters, the underlying tension that gives rise to this thesis is original to Scripture and to the mystery of Christ as universal and particular. But in the twentieth century this same tension became especially acute in the theologies of Rahner and Balthasar, whose differences long dominated and even polarized theological conversation. Here, too, this framework proffers a way forward. The predominant terms in their respective theologies of grace, as the immer schon in Rahner and the Gestalt Christi in Balthasar, are placed within a moving analogy that nonetheless advances beyond them in oscillating tension toward a third integrative term, the totus Christus. Underlying these terms, several recurring forces drive the argument. It begins with the initial inner horizon through which the self-communication of the triune God may originally enter, as the primordial Word is heard and the Spirit is received. This communication remains inchoate, however. “I had experienced (God) in my heart,” noted Bakhita, “without knowing who he was.” By the oscillating tension of Przywara, every knower is thereby thrust out into history to seek and find God on its horizons, in all its aesthetic, dramatic, and sacramental aspects. This search ultimately culminates in Jesus Christ. As grace upon grace, the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and the form of the incarnate Word, as Balthasar elucidates, becomes the definitive embodiment and enactment of the divine self-communication. In its here and now, its distinct access and nearness, we may see, hear, and touch the unique form of God among us such that its perception enables new depths of participation in divine life. But the term of the Gestalt Christi is not the terminus, and its reciprocal dynamic of grace is also to engender mimetic, non-identical repetitions in others as members of an expanding, even all-inclusive body.
Rahner described the Realsymbol as a reditio completa in seipsum. It was a term of Neoplatonic provenance that Aquinas had also used to explain the process of human knowing, as moving from the apprehended phantasm into the abstracted universal and back to the phantasm and judgment. This same dynamic renders the knower present to himself as distinct from what is known, thereby constituting an original reditio completa in seipsum. In the same way that we know ourselves only through another, there is no movement of grace apart from mediation. This mediation, moreover, remains differentiated such that by gradual, reciprocal, and recurrent ways, we ever come to know and realize ourselves through the commensurability of what is without us with what we ourselves are meant to be. As incarnate Word in and through which creation is made, the Gestalt Christi is the defining form not only of our own meaning and entelechy but that of the whole world. Yet the horizon that looms in the same epistemic process by which we are constituted also serves to limit the absoluteness of any claim about a particular and finite reality—even this Gestalt. The particular Christ-form from which the Spirit “abstracts,” as Balthasar himself describes it, to form further participants in divine life, remains finite. The “phantasm” of Jesus is recapitulative and definitive but not exhaustive. The horizons of human history, in turn, remain open to an ever greater scope of participation in divine life according to the design of God for all creation. By a direct parallel, the trinitarian movement of grace in forming creation into Realsymbolen passes in and through the sacramental christoformity of creation, of which the Gestalt Christi is the font and apex. But the ultimate reditio of this movement, which is ever always begun, continues in gradual, reciprocal, and recurrent movements toward the filling out of this head into its body. Grace is fully rendered completa in seipsum only when the self-communication of God reaches its eschatological fullness in the embodied and enacted totus Christus.
(excerpted from chapter 6)
