An Excerpt from “An Analogy of Grace” by Henry Shea, S.J.

Amid the present decline in religious affiliation, a pervasive question for many is “why bother” with faith and its practices. An Analogy of Grace engages this question in the context of grace, or our participation in the life and love of God, and investigates the difference made by the diverse ways in which the self-communication of God is received and participated. Shea begins with the contrasting models provided by twentieth-century theologians Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Rahner focused on how grace is universally accessible within the heart, while Balthasar envisioned grace as found principally through an encounter with the incarnate Word. Henry Shea charts a course within and beyond this difference, bolstered by fresh and insightful analysis of the work of Erich Przywara, Henri de Lubac, and other major theologians.

From the letters of the New Testament onward, the Greek word χάρις (charis), or grace in English, has been employed to express the salvific and divinizing activity of God. Yet even before the Apostle Paul chose this word to explain the mystery of our salvation and sharing in divine life, the meaning of χάρις enjoyed an expansive range. Its ancient connotation of beauty and charm made it a fitting name for the three mythical “Graces” (Χάριτες), whose mere glance, relates Hesiod, elicited a love that “melts limbs.” Homer likewise tells of Athena pouring “godlike favor” (θεσπέσιος χάρις) upon Odysseus to prepare him for the rigorous games of the Phaeacians, endowing the shipwrecked hero with newfound strength and splendor. So does the favor of χάρις flow down from its benefactor as a free and disinterested gift, explains Aristotle in the Rhetoric, rendering its gratuity distinct from what is owed. Yet, as the elders of Argos caution in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, the “favor of the gods” (χάρις δαιμόνων) may appear awful and severe, for “wisdom comes by suffering.” When such favor finally shines through, however, there is thanksgiving, and as if to complete within itself a cycle of both giving and receiving, the meaning of χάρις has also long corresponded with gratitude. The gift that each human being is to make in return for what is received from the divine goodness is likewise χάρις, reason Socrates and Euthyphro in Plato’s eponymous dialogue. This return, they conclude, is fulfilled through a life of “holiness.” The many associated uses of χάρις in antiquity were thereby entwined in a broader matrix of meaning that both evoked the aesthetic splendor induced by divine favor and entailed cyclical dynamics of giving and receiving. When the translators of the Hebrew Scriptures employed the same word, χάρις, in the Septuagint to render the Hebrew word hén חֵן))—and later also hésèd (חסד)—into Greek, however, this original semantic matrix was transposed according to the unique, personal love of the God of Israel. There, within the context of history and a covenantal relationship with the Creator of “heaven and earth,” “the Lord, a God gracious and merciful,” freely “favors” (Ex 20:11; 33:19; 34:6) his people by saving and leading them from the land of slavery into a kingdom where they are to flourish in justice and peace.

Yet even this remains only a foreshadowing of the χάρις of the New Testament, in which its semantic range is further transformed so as to encompass from a point, like an umbrella term, the entire saving and divinizing activity of God in Christ. While channeling its Greek and Hebrew antecedents, the New Testament both focuses and expands the range of χάρις according to the human and divine dimensions of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, in whom it finds its definitive meaning. The Word made flesh, explains the Gospel of John, as “full of grace and truth (πλήρης χάριτος καὶ ἀληθείας),” becomes the “fullness (πληρώμα)” from which his followers receive “grace upon grace (χάριν ἀντὶ χάριτος)” (Jn 1:14, 16). In them, beginning in the virgin Mary as the one who is “graced” in a complete and continual way (κεχαριτωμένη) (Lk 1:28), a χάρις that justifies freely (Rom 3:24) and saves from sin and death (Eph 2:8) likewise imparts supernatural life (χάριτος ζωῆς, 1 Pet 3:7). By a marvelous elevation, grace thereby emerges in the New Testament not only as a mystery of salvation but of exchange in which the sharing of God in humanity enables our sharing in divine life. “For you know the grace (χάριν) of our Lord Jesus Christ, who, being rich, became poor for your sake,” Paul recalls in his Second Letter to the Corinthians, “so that through his poverty you might become rich” (8:9). As wholly free and unexacted, this “sweet exchange” does not begin with us but in the gratuitous love of God whose gift entreats a free response in kind: “we love because God first loved us” (1 Jn 4:19).

The χάρις of the New Testament so connotes the loveliness of living in divine favor even as God’s favoring gaze communicates divine life in Christ, rendering grace nothing less than “the offered love and being” of God. When openly received, the divine giver in the gift transforms and deifies its recipients such that they “will be like him,” in seeing “him as he is” (1 Jn 3:2). Yet while the divine will to bestow this wonder is established “before the foundation of the world” (Eph 1:4) and remains “beyond variation” (Jas 1:17), its reception in creation transpires only in time. If to be in the world is to be in motion, the participation of human beings in divine life must likewise be diachronic—as an ongoing movement born of faith, as a journey made in hope. The gift by which it begins is “not of ourselves but of God,” and yet “we” are to “walk” in it (Eph 2:8–10). Whereas Karl Rahner could accordingly construe grace as the “self-communication (Selbstmitteilung) of God in love,” Thomas Aquinas could also render it a “participation in the divine goodness” and “nature” (cf. 2 Peter 1:3–4). Both descriptions in a sense presume the other, even if the first takes precedence by its priority. No one partakes of a gift without the giving of a giver, and no one communicates themselves without someone to receive what is communicated. Any exchange of love, like any amorous dance, takes two, with a rhythm that advances at the mutual pace of the partners. For the “sweet” and “wondrous exchange” of grace, as the consummation of love between Creator and creation, is also at its heart a nuptial mystery, an admirabile commercium et connubium. Its “wedding feast” or “marriage supper” (Rev. 19:9) is nonetheless to be approached “in due order and harmony” and “at the appointed time” (aptum tempus), recollects Irenaeus, for love cannot be “awakened and stirred up” “until it is ready” (Song of Songs 2:7). While Rahner’s definition of grace features the part of God in this mystery, Aquinas’s spotlights that of creation. Yet between the initial self-communication of God and the plenary participation of creation in what is communicated, the movement of grace has untold iterations, for each creature as for creation as a whole.

(excerpted from chapter 1)

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