Neither Nature nor Grace

Neither Nature nor Grace
Author: T. Adam Van Wart
Publisher: Catholic University of America Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2020-10-21
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0813233496

Neither Nature nor Grace operates at the intersection of systematic and philosophical theology, exploring in particular how St. Thomas Aquinas variously uses the latter in service to the clarification and faithful advancement of the former. More specifically, Neither Nature nor Grace explores the overlooked logical difficulties that have followed the late modern debates in ecumenical Christian theology as to whether knowledge of God is available solely through God’s gracious self-revelation (e.g., Jesus Christ and Holy Scripture), or through revelation and the deliverances of natural reason. Van Wart takes the prominent French Dominican Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange as paradigmatic for the case that knowledge of God can be had by both revelation and natural reason. Representing the opposing position, that God can only be known through divine revelation, Van Wart highlights the work of influential Protestant theologian Karl Barth. By placing these two imposing 20th century theologians in conversation, and by providing a careful theo-philosophical analysis of the logical mechanics of each thinker’s respective arguments, Van Wart shows how both inadvertently overreach their self-professed epistemological bounds and just so run into significant problems maintaining the coherence of their relative theological positions. That is, against their expressed intentions to the contrary, both thinkers unwittingly evacuate the divine essence of the mystery Christian tradition has always previously claimed it to have, effectively reducing the being of God to mere creaturely being writ large. As a contrasting corrective to this problem, Van Wart proffers a constructive grammatical reading of Aquinas’s measured account of the crucial but often overlooked logical differences between what can be said of the divine, on the one hand, versus what can be known of God, on the other. While many recent works have attempted to solve the ongoing arguments which Garrigou-Lagrange and Barth epitomize regarding the epistemic use of God’s effects, Van Wart’s contribution constructively pushes the conversation to a different level in showing how Aquinas’s grammar of God provides a salutary means of dissolving and moving beyond these contentious debates altogether.

Nature and Grace in Herman Bavinck

Nature and Grace in Herman Bavinck
Author: Jan Veenhof
Publisher: Dordt Coll Press
Total Pages: 52
Release: 2006
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780932914699

This booklet highlights Herman Bavinck's basic thesis that GRACE RESTORES NATURE, or that salvation means the restoration of creation. Veenhof focuses on this succinct formulation of a dimension of biblical teaching that has been a distinctive strength of the Calvinist tradition of Christian thought, both in theology and in a wide range of other academic disciplines.

On Nature and Grace

On Nature and Grace
Author: St Augustine of Hippo
Publisher:
Total Pages: 70
Release: 2019-07-05
Genre:
ISBN: 9781078330923

Extract from Augustine's Retractions (Book II, Chapter 42): At that time also there came into my hands a certain book of Pelagius', in which he defends, with all the argumentative skill he could muster, the nature of man, in opposition to the grace of God whereby the unrighteous is justified and we become Christians. The treatise which contains my reply to him, and in which I defend grace, not indeed as in opposition to nature, but as that which liberates and controls nature, I have entitled On Nature and Grace. In this work sundry short passages, which were quoted by Pelagius as the words of the Roman bishop and martyr, Xystus, were vindicated by myself as if they really were the words of this Sixtus. For this I thought them at the time; but I afterwards discovered, that Sextus the heathen philosopher, and not Xystus the Christian bishop, was their author. This treatise of mine begins with the words: 'The book which you sent me.'"

On the Grace of Christ, and on Original Sin

On the Grace of Christ, and on Original Sin
Author: Saint Augustine
Publisher: CreateSpace
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2015-06-08
Genre:
ISBN: 9781514267349

Augustine, the man with upturned eye, with pen in the left hand, and a burning heart in the right (as he is usually represented), is a philosophical and theological genius of the first order, towering like a pyramid above his age, and looking down commandingly upon succeeding centuries. He had a mind uncommonly fertile and deep, bold and soaring; and with it, what is better, a heart full of Christian love and humility. He stands of right by the side of the greatest philosophers of antiquity and of modern times. We meet him alike on the broad highways and the narrow footpaths, on the giddy Alpine heights and in the awful depths of speculation, wherever philosophical thinkers before him or after him have trod. As a theologian he is facile princeps, at least surpassed by no church father, schoolman, or reformer. With royal munificence he scattered ideas in passing, which have set in mighty motion other lands and later times. He combined the creative power of Tertullian with the churchly spirit of Cyprian, the speculative intellect of the Greek church with the practical tact of the Latin. He was a Christian philosopher and a philosophical theologian to the full.

The Selected Works of Isaac of Stella

The Selected Works of Isaac of Stella
Author: Daniel Deme
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 135188204X

This book presents an invaluable selection of sermons and theological treatises of the twelfth century author, Isaac of Stella. The English born abbot of the French Cistercian monastery of Stella on the Isle of Ré is one of the most inspiring, yet equally elusive, representatives of the great twelfth-century Cistercian Renaissance more widely associated with the person of Bernard of Clairvaux. The astonishing spiritual and intellectual depth of Isaac's surviving writings makes him a valuable read for anyone aiming to receive a complete picture of the intellectual heritage of the Middle Ages. Of the twenty-five sermons by Isaac presented in this volume, ten are made available here in an English translation for the first time. These are accompanied with two new studies examining Isaac of Stella's work from an historical, literary as well as theological perspective.

Gleaning Modernity

Gleaning Modernity
Author: Eric Rothstein
Publisher: Associated University Presse
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2007
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780874139846

"Through rigorously historical but not univocal readings of several widely familiar works, the book also argues that this literature does socially constitutive work in a way that differs from commonly made neofoucauldian, marxisant claims. Its (non-cynical) consumer-driven model, in which artworks offer variously instructive make-believe, does not require or invoke transgression, subversion, finger-wagging, or complaisance as means of social efficacy."--BOOK JACKET.

Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scripture, Volume 8

Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scripture, Volume 8
Author: Lange, John Peter
Publisher: Delmarva Publications, Inc.
Total Pages: 2111
Release:
Genre:
ISBN:

All sixty-three of the original volumes are included in a nine volumes set. There are two linked indexes in this volume, a main index at the front of this volume that will take you to the beginning each of the books of the bible and another index at the beginning of each book there is a linked scripture index leading to the particular subject. Lange’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments, translated, revised, edited and enlarged from the German editions of John Peter Lange and many contributors, and edited by Philip Schaff. Lange’s Commentary on the entire Bible has remained one of the most useful and valuable work of its kind. It is conservative in theology and universal in hermeneutics. Delmarva Publications is proud to make it available in digital format. The original work was completed in 63 volumes, but we have made it available in 9 volumes they are: Volume 1 - Genesis to Ruth Volume 2 -1 Samuel to Esther Volume 3 - Job to Ecclesiastes Volume 4 - Song of Songs to Lamentations Volume 5 - Ezekiel to Malachi Volume 6 - Matthew to John Volume 7 - Acts to 2 Corinthians Volume 8 - Galatians to 2 Timothy Volume 9 -Titus to Revelation