A Roman Catholic View of Nature and Grace Part 2

The source of synergistic justification and holy water

I’m continuing the Gregg Allison’s explication of “nature and grace” in Roman Catholicism that was started here:

In one sense, these two divergent views reflect in part the different models of the nature-grace relationship as developed by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas: “[W]hereas the Augustinian tradition has stressed the concept of natura vitiate [spoiled or fallen nature], therefore underlining the pervasive and corrupting reality of sin and the utter primacy of grace, the Thomistic tradition has instead insisted on the inner resources of nature’s capacitas dei [capacity for God], giving a more positive account of its intrinsic disposition towards the elevating operations of grace” (citing De Chirico, pg 228. See footnote [1] below for more information).

On this issue, [following the Reformers] evangelical theology follows the Augustinian tradition, with its pessimistic view of nature because of the devastating impact of sin on it, while Catholic theology follows the Thomistic tradition, with its relatively optimistic perspective on nature and its openness to and capacity for grace.

A Roman Catholic View of Nature and Grace Part 1

When Protestants think of the various topics or loci that comprise the various systems of “systematic theology” that have been studied over the centuries, the lists of these loci might include the “prolegomena” (which might encompass a discussion of philosophy and a doctrine of Scripture or a doctrine of “revelation”) – and following that we might find the doctrines of God, the Trinity, creation, humanity, sin, the person of Christ, the atonement, the Holy Spirit, soteriology, “the church”, “last things” – we tend to see these things as inter-related, but each having their own “self-contained-ness” as well.

In Roman Catholicism, which (following De Chirico and Allison) may and should be thought of as a “system”, there are two “core doctrines” or ideas or themes which underlay all of the other loci -- these two are what Allison has referred to as the nature-grace interdependence.

Now, one of the first things I’ll say is that, as Reformed believers, we tend to think we know what is meant by “grace” – after all, we talk about things like “salvation by grace” and the “doctrines of grace”.

But the word “grace” in the context of all of church history has a long and convoluted history and meaning, and we do need to be careful of context if we are to understand what is meant by “grace” in any given instance. For example:

General Revelation and Special Revelation, Nature and Grace, and how and why Roman Catholicism Minimizes the Effects of Sin

Sorry for the very snappy title there. But this is foundational material to understanding the differences between Rome and the Reformation, both as they existed at the time of the Reformation, and as they exist today (in a much more subtle form).

In recent weeks, I’ve put together several short blog posts from Bavinck on the role of “General Revelation” generally, and how that ties in with the concept of “nature and grace”. Gregg Allison touches on the topic, but before we get into his explanations, I’d like to provide a bit of context from Bavinck, whom I would consider to be an unimpeachable Reformed source.

The first three installments are:

Herman Bavinck on “General Revelation and Christian Discipleship”. The payoff here is: “dogmaticians do not first divest themselves of their Christian faith in order to construct a rational doctrine of God and humanity … in order later to supplement it with the revelation in Christ. But they draw their knowledge solely and alone from special revelation, i.e., from Scripture. This is their unique principle.”

When Bavinck speaks of “the Christian faith”, he is considering it in the area of what he calls “religion”, which is roughly “the human practice of things”. That is, it falls on the “ectypal” side of things – and not on the “archetypal” side (God as God knows it). More ....

Peter Escalante puts his finger on the root of the “Two Kingdoms” debates

From Peter Escalante at “The Calvinist International”:

John Calvin, of course, said that reason and natural law themselves both point to the architectonic necessity of civil theology, ...

But more is involved here than reason and revelation. For [Roman Catholic writers], the papalist distinction between nature and supernature, and it is important to understand this lest we simply assume that evangelicals and papalists are really talking about quite the same things in these discussions.

Thus a brief reflection on the end of man is in order, since the end of man is the central affair of politics. Both [Roman Catholic writers he is referring to -- see the original articles at the link above] assert the papalist doctrine of the two ends of man, though neither really deal with the controversy about this doctrine among papalist doctors, let alone between those and the evangelical doctors. But in short the idea is that man has a temporal end – roughly what Aristotle calls happiness – and also a “supernatural” end, which is the beatific vision, in which the original nature will be aufgehoben [repealed].

The beatific vision is St Paul’s “face to face,” the final and perfect communion of man with God. Christians have always wondered what exactly the relation of this world, not simply as fallen, but even in original integrity, is to that final status promised by the Scriptures, and the controversy about that relation long predates the great reformation of religion five hundred years ago. And it continues to this day. Although it has become something of an Arcanum, it is the crucial center of the question of what it is for Christians to live in the world.

Attentive readers will see in [the Roman Catholic’s] reply not only the idea of the two ends of man, but also the idea of the donum superadditum.

Sin

Just how serious is it? And who has the correct understanding of its seriousness?

Rome’s view of sin is based on an allegorical interpretation of Luke 10:30, as I describe below, as well as a view of reality provided by the neoplatonist imposter Pseudo-Dionysius. The Reformers had a much more honestly biblical view of sin, especially as it offends the holiness of God:

The Donum Superadditum, Aquinas, Pseudo-Dionysius, and the false and empty nature of Roman Catholic Tradition

WSC professor of historical theology Scott Clark has put up a post that I think gets to the heart of the disagreement between the Reformers and Rome.

http://heidelblog.net/2012/10/defining-nature-grace-dualism/

To begin to come to some understanding consider these passages from an essay by Herman Bavinck, “Calvin and Common Grace,” trans. Geerhardus Vos The Princeton Theological Review 7 (1909): 437–65, in which he gave an account of his understanding of the differences between the medieval and Reformation churches on the relations between nature and grace. In the medieval period,

The Church, however, is not merely the possessor of supernatural truth; in the second plea it is also the depository and dispenser of supernatural grace. As the Church doctrine is infinitely exalted above all human knowledge and science, so the grace kept and distributed by the Church far transcends nature. It is true this grace is, among other things, gratia medicinal is, but this is an accidental and adventitious quality. Before all else it is gratia elevans, something added to and elevating above nature. As such it entered into the image of God given to Adam before the Fall, and as such it again appears in the restoration to that original state. In view of its adding to exalted nature a supernatural element, it is conceived as something material, enclosed in the sacrament, and as such dispensed by the priest. Thus every man becomes, for his knowledge of supernatural truth and for his reception of supernatural grace, that is, for his heavenly salvation, absolutely dependent on the Church, the priest and the sacrament. Extra ecclesiam null salus.

The most important thing to observe here is that, in this conception, grace elevates nature. Thomas (Aquinas) taught that grace “perfects” nature, that creation is inherently imperfect. It is not that, as the Reformed would say later, creation was created awaiting glorification. It was, rather, that creation was inherently corrupt. As Bavinck wrote,

The world, the state, natural life, marriage and culture are not sinful in themselves; only they are of a lower order, of a secular nature, and unless consecrated by the Church, easily become an occasion for sinning.

Again, the thing to notice is the hierarchical conception of existence. Gradually, through the medieval period, the Western church came to think of the relations between God and man as an ontologically hierarchy with man at the bottom and God at the top.

The whole hierarchical idea is built on the sharp distinction between nature and grace.

This gets at the crux of the issue: “the sharp distinction between nature and grace.” Which, distinction, according to Bavinck, was repudiated by the Reformation.

…the Reformation of the sixteenth century differed from all these attempts in that it not merely opposed the Roman system in its excresences but attacked it internally in the foundations on which it rested and in the principles out of which it had been developed. The Reformation rejected the entire system, and substituted for it a totally different conception of veritias, gratia, and bona opera.

This is an under appreciated element of the Reformation, the reassertion of the distinction between the Creator and the creature. That distinction destroyed the hierarchy and asserted a strict analogy between God and man. According to the Reformation, salvation was no longer to be considered deification, participating in the divine being, or “elevation” but deliverance from wrath, free acceptance by God on the basis of Christ’s righteousness imputed and received through faith (trusting in Christ). Sanctification, conformity to Christ, became the consequence of justification.

This account of the difference between the medieval and Reformation is consistent with the way the Reformed saw the issue.

Thus, for Bavinck, the issue seems to have been two things: a hierarchical ontology (view of being) and the “sharp distinction” (dualism) between nature and grace.

The key difference is this: in the Protestant scheme, the Biblical statement (Gen 1:31) is authoritative: that “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good”. Man, as created, was “very good”.

But in the Roman Catholic scheme, created man was not “good enough”, and a “donum superadditum” (“superadded grace”) needed to be “added”. In the Roman Catholic scheme, in the fall, man only lost this “donum superadditum”. But in the Protestant scheme, there was no “superadded grace” to lose. Man simply became dead in sin.

This “ontological” distinction had some history in the early church.

Another egregious difference, more importantly, that Clark points out, is “the hierarchical conception of existence”. As he says, “gradually, through the medieval period, the Western church came to think of the relations between God and man as an ontologically hierarchy with man at the bottom and God at the top.”

Aquinas relies heavily on this “hierarchy”, which is a neo-Platonic concept, which Aquinas got from a sixth century theologian named “Pseudo-Dionysius”. He is “pseudo” because he tried to portray himself as the first-century Dionysius, a companion of Paul, from Acts 17:34.

Aquinas believed that Pseudo-Dionysius was the real thing, and he relied on him as a source almost as authoritative as Scripture. Such is the vacuous nature of Roman Catholic “Tradition” that it relies so heavily on an imposter, and they didn’t even know it.

I suspect more of this sort of thing will follow.

[Bryan Cross’s name inserted here so it comes up on a Google Alert, and he can try to respond to this one.]

How the Donum Superadditum Works

See also:

Sacramental Treadmill

James White and the Pope Agree!

Original Sin and the Donum Superadditum

The introduction to "The Origin of Sin", Bavinck, Vol 3, pg 26, the editors write:

[In philosophy and other religions], outside of special revelation sin is either treated deistically in terms of human will alone or derived pantheistically from the very necessary nature of things.

Both views also found their way into Christianity. The British monk Pelagius rejected all notions of original sin and considered every person as having Adam's full moral choice of will. The fall did not happen at the beginning but is repeated in every human sin. Though the church rejected Pelagianism in its extreme form, Roman Catholicism maintained the notion of a less than completely fallen will, limiting the fall to the loss of the donum superadditum, which can only be restored by sacramental grace.

When the Reformation rejected Roman Catholic dualism, streams within Protestantism, notable rationalist groups such as the Socinians as well as the Remonstrants robbed robbed Christianity of its absolute character by dispensing with the need for grace in some measure. The image of God is regarded as the fully free will, which, like that of the pre-fall Adam, remains intact. While we are born with an inclination to sin, this inclination is not itself culpable; atonement is needed only for actual sin. Suffering is not necessarily linked to sin; it is simply part of our human condition.

Later on they discuss this donum superadditum in context:

The apostle Paul and after him Augustine were instructed by the contrasting model of Christ as the second Adam and placed the blame for universal and original sin at the feet of the first Adam. The only way to understand the crushing yoke of sin's miseries on all people is to believe that all share Adam's guilt. Augustine did not, however, adequately describe the transmission of guilt and pollution to Adam's posterity, and his understanding of concupiscence is too closely linked to spontaneous sexual desire. Roman Catholic scholastic theology modified this view to understand original sin as the loss of a superadded gift of grace (original righteousness) to which was added the active element of concupiscence. In Roman Catholic theology, the center of gravity shifted from concupiscence to loss of original righteousness. When concupiscence is not itself seen as sinful, it is hard to see what concrete effects still remain of original sin except for the imputation of Adam's trespass. The state of man after Adam's fall differs little from the pre-fallen Adam. We are left in only a state of "naked naturalness," not a state of depravity.

The Reformation opposed this Roman Catholic weakening of original sin. It is not just a loss of something but a total corruption of our nature. If we call this "concupiscence," we must define it in terms of the totality of human appetites. In this sense, contrary to Augustine, concupiscence is itself sin. …

The doctrine of original sin is one of the weightiest and most difficult subjects in Christian theology. Without it we cannot comprehend ourselves, and yet it remains finally an incomprehensible mystery to us. Adam's disobedience is the originating sin; that is the clear teaching of Scripture. How can that not be seen as arbitrary? Only by recognizing the organic unity and solidarity of the human race. This unity is first of all physical and organic, but, more importantly, also representative. Here too we must begin with Christ, who is our representative mediator in redemption. Physical unity and a realistic understanding of the transmission of sin is inadequate. For one thing, the strict parallel between Adam and Christ breaks down. How could Christ then, being truly human, Adam's son, be without sin? AMong human beings there is a moral solidarity that is greater than the physical. Reformed theology tries to explain this through the doctrine of the covenant--the covenant of works with Adam and the covenant of grace in Christ. The covenant of works and the covenant of grace are the forms by which the organism of humanity is maintained, also in a religious and ethical sense. This is God's ordinance (76-77).

“God needs our help”

I’d like to take off on something that Joshua Lim said, and the hope is that it will have some value in showing what some of the differences are here.

Only what the Catholic Church teaches as binding is binding. The Church is fairly clear as to what is binding and what is not binding. If you have a particular issue in mind it might be better to speak of it specifically rather than in generalities. A Protestant confession or teaching authority has no authority to say what is binding--the only authority a pastor has is to say that he (or she) thinks that Scripture teaches that such-and-such a thing is binding, but going back to the first question, it is not always clear from Scripture whether certain things are binding or not and it ultimately comes back down to the issue of who has the authority to interpret Scripture…

This phrase caught my eye: Only what the Catholic Church teaches as binding is binding. The Church is fairly clear as to what is binding and what is not binding.

Consider this scenario, which I offer as a summary:

1. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.


2. God created merely by speaking things into existence. God said “Let there be…” and there was.

a. What God says has power; it actually accomplishes things.

b. This is the point at which the Roman Catholic insistence on “interpretation” presses itself, saying “God’s word is insufficient; therefore, you need an infallible interpreter”.

c. Protestants accept (a), and resist (b).


3. “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Gen 1:31). I suppose you would say “this is a verse that requires interpretation”.

a. An exegetical understanding of this verse is given in John Currid, (“A Study Commentary on Genesis”, Volume 1, Genesis 1:1-25:18, Darlington, UK an Webster, NY: Evangelical Press ©2003). “And he pronounces a verdict: ‘Behold it was very good.’ The term ‘Behold…’ [Hebrew hinneh] often serves to call special attention to a declarative statement. And when the word for ‘very’ [Hebrew meod] occurs after an adjective it is an absolute superlative. Therefore, the writer is describing God’s judgement of his own creation with great emphasis – it is perfect in every detail, even down to the very intricacies of its being.” (Currid, pg 89).

b. Creation being “very good”, language also is “very good”.

c. Man, as created, was also “very good”.

i. Roman Catholic Church holds that man was somewhat less “very good” than God says he was, and introduces a “ donum superadditum”, some kind of “superadded gift” of grace an “ontic” (or “ontological” gift) that “elevates” man into supernatural fellowship with God.

ii. Protestants, however, accept that Man was “very good” and reject the notion of a “superadded gift” of grace. Man, in the condition in which God created him to be, was lacking nothing “ontologically” necessary to be in “fellowship” with God, and was already in a “very good” [“perfect in every detail”] fellowship with God.


4. Man fell

a. Roman Catholics hold that sinful man is only “wounded” in his nature – only having lost this “superadded gift” in the fall. The result of this is: “original sin does not have the character of a personal fault in any of Adam’s descendants. It is a deprivation of original holiness and justice, but human nature has not been totally corrupted: it is wounded in the natural powers proper to it, subject to ignorance, suffering and the dominion of death, and inclined to sin - an inclination to evil that is called ‘concupiscence’”.

b. Protestants hold that sinful man is far worse than wounded:

i. WCF: By this sin [our original parents] fell from their original righteousness and communion with God, and so became dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body.

ii. They being the root of mankind, the guilt of this sin was imputed, and the same death in sin and corrupted nature conveyed to all their posterity, descending from them by original generation.


5. God’s remedy:

a. in Roman Catholicism: “Baptism, by imparting the life of Christ’s grace, erases original sin and turns a man back towards God, but the consequences for nature, weakened and inclined to evil, persist in man and summon him to spiritual battle.” God’s “grace” comes through an “infusion” [“ontological”] and man must “co-operate” with this “grace”.

i. An imperfect metaphor of this is that “grace” is a kind of “oil” that provides for a kind of “healing”; it “enables” the parts to get moving again. But it is imperfect, of course.

ii. Eschatologically, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger looks at the “ontological” meaning and asserts: “we are inserted into Christ and united with him as a single subject” (“Called to Communion” Herder and Ignatius ©1991, 1996, pg 25), a “fusion of existences”; just as in the taking of nourishment the body assimilates foreign matter to itself … in the same way my “I” is assimilated to that of Jesus”.

But as I’ll relate below, this is a misunderstanding of the eschatological end that God has in store for us.

b. Michael Horton, in “Covenant and Salvation” (Louisville, KY and London, UK: Westminster John Knox Press ©2007), [summarizing Reformed theologians] posits that what really happened to man in the fall was not “ontic” – no “loss” of “superadded grace”, but rather, it is an “estrangement”, a broken fellowship based on a judgment of “guilty”.

i. Man, being created “very good”, did not change ontologically in the fall; hence, God’s solution, “forensic justification”, re-enables the koinonia, or “fellowship”, that man lost with God.

ii. This restored fellowship manifests itself not in a “fusion of existences”, but rather, a restoring of the original fellowship [again, rejecting the need for some “superadded grace”]. The “unity” of fellowship is rather a gathering together by God, and his everlasting covenant:

This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: I will surely gather them from all the lands where I banish them in my furious anger and great wrath; I will bring them back to this place and let them live in safety. They will be my people, and I will be their God. I will give them singleness of heart and action, so that they will always fear me and that all will then go well for them and for their children after them. I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will never stop doing good to them, and I will inspire them to fear me, so that they will never turn away from me. I will rejoice in doing them good and [I] will assuredly plant them in this land with all my heart and soul.

This is very simple, I admit, again, it is only an outline, and it only contains the emphases I’d like to make here.

The Protestant theologian Herman Bavinck (“Reformed Dogmatics”, Vol 1, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, trans. John Vriend, ©2003, pg. 359) speaks of this:

The doctrine of a supernatural end … is integral to the entire Catholic system, which is constructed, not on the religious antithesis between sin and grace, but on the graduated scale of the good, on the ranking of creatures and virtues, on hierarchy both in a physical and an ethical sense.

The Reformation, by contrast, had but one idea, one conception of human beings, that is, of human beings as the image bearers of God, and this was true for all human beings.

The question comes down to, “what is God doing?” And in this, we need to be very careful to understand what he is doing, and not to “read into” what he is doing, things that he is not doing. (See Deuteronomy, as I have cited it above, says: “You shall not add to the word that I command you, nor take from it, that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God that I command you … Everything that I command you, you shall be careful to do. You shall not add to it or take from it.”

Bryan qualified this to say “another possible interpretation of those verses is that they are prohibiting adding to or subtracting from divine commands. And the existence of a divinely authorized oral Tradition and Magisterium is fully compatible with that interpretation of these passages.”

Nevertheless, I would rather rely on an exegesis of the text, using a hermeneutic that seeks to understand the original meaning of the text – what the writer wrote, in the cultural context, with an eye toward understanding it as the original readers would have understood it.

In this context, the “donum superadditum” is something that is “added” by the Magisterium; if you’re Roman Catholic, you accept it, and if you are a Protestant, it is just one more reason to ask, “how infallible is the Magisterium if it’s adding such things all the way through the Scriptures?”

Just how “binding” should something like this be?

[This notion of a “donum superadditum” has an element, too, that touches on the idea of “special revelation”; it is the notion that “God’s revelation is not sufficient” – in the Genesis 1 sense. What the Roman Catholic Church adds to this is something like the notion that its own “interpretation” is required as a kind of “superadded gift” because God’s own word is somehow not able to be understood properly by God’s own creation. I’ll talk more about this at some future point, Lord willing.]

The donum superadditum and the doctrine of man: a foundational difference between Protestants and Roman Catholics

This is a slightly edited re-post of a topic I put up at Beggars All some time ago. The topic is relevant to some of the discussions of panentheism, which have been showing up in some of the comments.

At the heart of the differences between Roman Catholics and Protestants, there are key differences understandings, both in terms of their understanding of the doctrine of God, but also of the doctrine of Man.

Peter Escalante has, in the context of a discussion about civil authority, given a fairly succinct overview of one of the key differences. I’m not fully prepared to engage in a discussion of all of this -- it involves different concepts of man, and different consequences in terms of the doctrine of justification. But I’ve been following this excellent discussion, and I wanted to pass it along while it was still fresh in my mind.

It involves Rome’s understanding of the donum superadditum with regard to the state that Adam was in before he fell. Briefly, Protestants say that man, created in the image of God, was “very good,” and when he fell, it resulted in a spiritual death. God’s legal declaration, imputation of righteousness and union with Christ are what’s required to restore man back to his pristine, pre-fall state. Rome, on the other hand, holds that, not only was Adam “very good,” but that he had some “super-added gift of grace”, which made him what he was. (Why God would not have created him “complete”, but “needing some super-added grace, is beyond me). But according to the Roman Catholic paradigm, man lost only this “super-added grace” in the fall, all other things being equal, and it is that “superadded grace” that needs to be restored. Hence the need for an “infusion of grace” in Roman doctrine. [This accounts for the difference in which Calvin described man as “spiritually dead,” and hence “totally inable” or “totally depraved,” whereas Roman Catholics merely believe that man was “impaired” but with an otherwise full capacity to please God with his own grace-assisted works.]

Peter describes it this way:

For us, man originally had connatural beatitude, and when he fell, the reduced and superficial participation in that beatitude still possible to him, in an extrinsic way, was what we call temporal felicity or civic righteousness. But for RC, original felicity was a donum superadditum, and the status of original creation was thus left unclear, with at the very least a strong suggestion that much of what we think of as creation is in fact the effect of the Fall- an anti-Hebraic gnosticism which marred the thought of the ancient Greek church (and modern EO), and Rome too, though a more Biblical countertendency was present in the West and finally came into full victory with the Reformation. Given that the RC think of the New Covenant as the restoration of the donum superadditum, its relation to the temporal is ambivalent at best and hostile at worst. But for us, the New Covenant a) disables the heteronomous and unattainable Law which measured our alienation, and b) grants full citizenship in the Kingdom of God, simply by trust in Christ and union with Him. This means that the reality of original beatitude is poured into the forms of the creational order, and slowly transforms it spiritually, until all things shall be made new (emphasis added).

There are many, many concepts tied up in this one little paragraph, and it would take a long time to extract the meaning from them. But the one I want to focus on is that, right from the outset of their understanding of man, Protestants and Catholics differ.

John Fesko, in his Justification: Understanding the Classic Reformed Doctrine, describes this situation with respect to the “donum superadditum”:

It seems as though much of the debate over infused versus imputed righteousness hinges upon the presuppositions of each party. The typical Reformed understanding is that Adam was created upright, or righteous, and that God justified, or declared righteous, the initial creation as well as man in his declaration that everything was “very good” (Gen 1:31). We see the Westminster Larger Catechism echo this point when it states that God created man in “righteousness, and holiness, having the law of God written in their hearts, and the power to fulfill it” (q. 17). By way of contrast, the typical Roman Catholic understanding of Adam’s original state holds to the necessity of infused righteousness. Roman Catholic theologians typically hold to the idea of the donum superadditum (“superadded gift”). Medieval Roman Catholic theologians, for example, argue that the donum superadditum was a part of the original constitution of man, that it represented his original capacity for righteousness. We see then, from the outset, that man in his fallen state required infused righteousness in the form of the donum superadditum. If man requires infused righteousness in the prefall state, then he would most assuredly require it in his sin-fallen but redeemed state. The original state of man, then, is an issue that must feature in any dialogues over the question of imputation (John Fesko “Justification: Understanding the Classic Reformed Doctrine” Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing Company, pg 372.)

Michael Horton, in his Covenant and Salvation: Union with Christ, expands on this concept greatly. “According to the federal theologians, Adam and Eve were never in a state of grace before the fall. Endowed in their creation with all of the requisite gifts for fulfilling God’s eschatological purposes, there was nothing lacking requiring a gracious supplement” (194). If anyone is interested, Horton develops this topic quite extensively, relying on Bavinck’s account.

This is one of the key differences between Protestants and Roman Catholics, and it is one of the distinctions that the Reformers made -- a (very likely unwitting) Roman misunderstanding and accretion that somehow became the law of the land at Trent.