“The Twofold Affection”: The Background to John Chrysostom’s Use of Φύσις and Χάρις

John Chrysostom’s pairing of φύσις and χάρις, which tends to be read exclusively in light of the Pelagian controversies, reflects the influence of distinct models in early Christianity for conceptualizing the interaction between created nature(s) and the divine creator. The first, informed especially by Pauline categories, understands “nature” (φύσις; natura) to refer to an inborn relationship that stands in contrast to the adopted sonship qualified by “grace” (χάρις; gratia). The second, evident especially in Philo and Alexandrian theologians, takes nature as an individual essence, to which grace is superadded as a property. In the final portion of the essay I show evidence that Chrysostom tends to prioritize the property model over the filial model of nature and grace.

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Ethics: Created, Fallen, and Converted Humanity

Herman Bavinck (1854–1921), the Dutch master of dogmatic theology, wrote a systematic treatise in theological ethics. Bavinck is a theistic moral realist whose ethics is deontological and virtue centered. His realism—both ontological and epistemic—is reflected in his understanding of conscience and its relation to the objective moral law. Furthermore, this review article discusses issues in Christian anthropology, particularly the selfhood of the human person, the relation between nature and grace, creation and redemption, and philosophy and theology, and the distinction between objective and subjective religion. It concludes with a brief reflection on Bavinck’s hermeneutics of renewal and reform in the continuity of the catholicity of the Reformed tradition.

Ethical Adjacency in Piers Plowman

The chapter argues that the intellectual tradition that underlies medieval personification debate is Aristotelian and medieval logical teaching on ‘opposites’, the relationship by which opposed terms illuminate each other—available in Aristotle’s elementary logical works. This teaching has a special relevance to personification debate, where the heuristic drive is dramatized in speakers that represent opposed positions and phenomena, each of which is explored in the process of debate itself. This suggests why personification debate provides for over a thousand years one of the main tools with which allegory unpacks its structuring terms and reflects on its conflictual work. Aristotle’s teaching on opposites also enables us to query some aspects of the literary history of medieval debate literature; it suggests that a critical concern about resolution in debate, or its lack, fails to see where the real intellectual work of debate occurs. It also suggests that the critical distinction between supposedly open ‘horizontal’ debates and closed ‘vertical’ debates may be misguided. In fact, Aristotle’s subcategory of the ‘relative’ opposition (master and slave, artisan and tool) often involves a hierarchy. The chapter uses these materials to argue that personification debate can be formally unresolved and ‘vertical’, and yet also challenging and seriously investigative. This is illustrated with analyses of some debates, several hierarchical: ‘four daughters of God’, body and soul, Nature and Grace (Deguileville) and the Middle English Pearl.

“While We Were Yet Enemies”

A distinctive contribution of Protestant dogmatics is its account of the interrelation of divine grace and human sin in which saving grace comes upon fallen, sinful humanity. What is most evangelically interesting and significant to Reformed faith is that God graciously acts precisely for creatures who are turned away from and pitched against divine goodness, against divine vocation, and against divine love. Thus, to ask and answer the question of ‘nature and grace’ as such is not yet to have set the question of grace in its most significant and telling register. In conversation with insights from the Didache, the apostle Paul, and early modern Reformed doctrines of sin, this essay argues that we do not win the measure of divine grace unless and until we meet it in connection with our godlessness and enmity, that is, in God’s saving confrontation with radical human sinfulness.

Die Theologie der Vermählung

Matthias Joseph Scheeben (1835–1888), theologian from Cologne, is regarded as a representative of 19th century scholasticism and nature-grace dualism. Hans Urs von Balthasar considered Scheeben the greatest German theologian of the post-romantic period. Using traditional 19th century scholasticism as a starting point, Scheeben creates a theology which is deeply influenced by the Church Fathers, Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure, by mystical theology and the theological school of Rome. Understanding the Trinity, Christology and Grace as something intimately interwoven, the mystical marriage between nature and grace becomes the centre of his entire theology. The term, “Connubium divinum” characterises this unique form of the spiritual Eros.

“Heaven and Earth Conspire”: Grace and Nature in Sor Juana's The Divine Narcissus

This essay highlights the dynamic theology of nature and grace expressed within The Divine Narcissus by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–95). Inspired by thinkers such as Augustine and Bernard of Clairvaux and, later in her life, an emphasis on the Immaculate Conception, she details an aesthetic relationship between grace and nature: human nature is created to reflect, in grace, the perfect beauty of the incarnate Son of God. Moreover, by securing positive roles for the contributions of women and for indigenous Mexican religious devotion, she highlights the way in which this dynamic between nature and grace recovers the authentic voice of the least in society—those whose voices have been unjustly suppressed by violent domination.