Autor: Stebbins, J. Michael

Buch: The Divine Initiative

Titel: The Divine Initiative

Stichwort: Frühscholastik: rechtfertigende Gnade (gratia sanans; Sünde -> Glaube, Liebe); psychologische Erklärung d. Gnade (Lonergan)

Kurzinhalt: ... was conceived only as justifying grace; complicated by the fact ... of equating justifying grace with the virtues of faith and charity; linking the necessity of grace to sin and sin's effects; the psychological interpretation of grace

Textausschnitt: 7/3 Until the early part of the thirteenth century, grace in the strict sense -that is, the divine help necessary for salvation - was conceived only as justifying grace. As a consequence, there was no explicit recognition of a grace bestowed prior to justification; although the early scholastics acknowledged that God prepares sinners for justification, they shied away from using the term gratia to designate such divine assistance. This restricted notion predominated chiefly because theologians took the Pauline passages on justification (which de facto are the context of Paul's discussion of the necessity of grace) as the fundamental data for much of their speculation on grace. There Paul speaks of grace expressly as the cause of justification (for example, Romans 3:24). (69; Fs)

8/3 The speculative situation was further complicated by the fact that theologians generally followed Augustine's practice of equating justifying grace with the virtues of faith and charity. As evidence for this position they could point to certain passages of the Pauline letters in which justification is attributed to faith (for example, Romans 3:28, 4:5) and faith is said to be operative and effective only when it is linked to love (for instance, Galatians 5:6 and 1 Corinthians 13:2). Hence, the manuscripts of the early scholastic period commonly designate grace as 'faith which operates through love' {fides quae per dilectionem operatur). (69f; Fs)

9/3 Given the pervasive influence of Paul and Augustine (or perhaps more accurately, of Paul as interpreted by Augustine), it is hardly surprising to find the Pauline commentaries of the early scholastic era laying great stress on the gratuity of grace and citing Augustine's interpretation of Romans 3:24:

12/3 Here grace is taken to be essentially something given gratuitously {gratis data), an unmerited gift of God, and its gratuity seems to lie in the fact that its recipients are undeserving of grace precisely because they are sinners. (70; Fs) (notabene)
13/3 Theologians of this period regarded sin, or the state of injustice, as an infirmity of nature that darkens the intellect and enslaves the will. In this crippled condition, humans left to their own devices are unable either to discern or to carry out God's commandments; and it is this failure of obedience that, in turn, renders a person unworthy of salvation. Hence there is no salvation without grace. Humans are powerless to save themselves: only the gifts of faith and charity (which bring all the other virtues in their train) can obliterate sin and establish the state of justice by restoring the primordial integrity of intellect and will. On this view, the function of grace is essentially restorative: grace is conceived as gratia sanans, healing the wounds inflicted on us by sin and thus making it possible for us to fulfil the commands of the divine law. Lonergan refers to this as 'the psychological interpretation of grace.' (70f; Fs) (notabene)
14/3 Now it is certainly true that human nature is disordered by sin and can be healed only through the bestowal of grace, and that sin makes one unworthy of salvation. Nevertheless, as Lonergan asserts in the introduction to De ente supernaturali, this insight only partially explains the necessity of grace for salvation. The deficiency of early scholastic speculation lay in its inability to recognize explicitly an additional aspect of grace, namely, its function as gratia elevans, by which the recipients are raised gratuitously to an order of being and operating that exceeds the proportion of their own natures. This lack of a theoretical distinction between the natural and the supernatural orders skewed, in an unsuspected but none the less pervasive manner, the orientation of speculative thought on grace. (71; Fs) (notabene)