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The Finite Supernatural: Theological Perspectives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Charles Stinson
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, Dartmouth College

Extract

Since the last half of the nineteenth century western Christian theologians have argued periodically about the supernatural, with liberals ordinarily denying the value of the concept and conservatives affirming it. The debate has usually turned around its function or disfunction within apologetics or the philosophy of religion. The anti-supernaturalists have claimed that the concept seriously inhibits the conversation between Christianity and contemporary culture. The pro-supernaturalists have replied that, whatever its current cultural status, the supernatural is absolutely essential to Christianity. And any attempt to abandon it for apologetic or philosophical reasons would falsify the very meaning of the Christian message itself. The debate commonly ends there with both sides fixed in disagreement.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1973

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References

page 325 note 1 There have been notable exceptions. The liberal Presbyterian John Oman found an honourable use for the word—as describing ‘absolute’ experience—in his The Natural and the Supernatural (Cambridge: 1931).Google Scholar More recently the sociologist of religion Peter Berger used supernatural' to mean the transcendent dimension of religious feeling. A Rumor of Angels (New York, Doubleday, 1969).Google Scholar The recently the sociologist of religion Peter Berger used supernatural' to mean the transcendent dimension of religious feeling. A Rumor of Angels (New York, Doubleday, 1969).Google Scholar The recently the sociologist of religion Peter Berger used supernatural' to mean the transcendent dimension of religious feeling. A Rumor of Angels (New York, Doubleday, 1969).Google Scholar The theologian Arthur Cohen takes the term over to denote the inward aspect of Judaism, its life of the spirit. The Natural and the Supernatural Jew (New York, Pantheon, 1963).Google Scholar

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page 329 note 5 Aquinas, , Summa Theologiae, 12Google Scholar, Q. 110, Art. 2. Supernatural grace, if given permantly to man, is ‘habitual’; it is a stable created ‘quality’, a new ‘form’ of being in man's ‘soul’. It inheres in his ‘nature’. But the ontological problem is not whether God specially causes or ‘posits’ such a quality in man. Rather, the problem is to differentiate the content of that quality from natural human experience. How does Adam's ‘original justice’ or a saint's ‘faith and love’ transcend the limits of human ‘nature’ ?

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page 330 note 4 This distinction is widely accepted among modern Roman theologians and writers of manuals. Cf. Tanqueray, Adolphe, Synopsis Theologiae Dogmaticae (Paris and Rome: Desclée, 1937), Vol. 2Google Scholar, secs. 848 f. For Tanqueray, God is the ‘absolute supernatural’. In the category of the merely ‘relative supernatural’ is Jesus ‘hypostatic union’ with the Word. Here also are ‘grace’ and the ‘beatific vision’. Like God, these three are all supernatural ‘in substance’. Jesus' resurrection, however, is supernatural ‘in mode only’. It is ‘a supernatural fact’ and ‘a supernatural product’ in nature, but it is not ‘intrinsically supernatural’ in its ‘essence’. Vol. 1, sec. 517.

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page 333 note 2 Cf. Landgraf, Arthur M., Dogmengeschichte der Frühscholastik, Vol. 1/1, p. 243.Google Scholar The concept appears as ‘potentia obedientiae’ in Alexander of Hales, Summa, la, 21. It becomes ‘potentia obedientialis’ in Albert, Aquinas and Bonaventura. Cf. Gillon, L. B., ‘Aux Origines de la Puissance Obédientielle’ in Revue Thomiste 47 (1947), pp. 304310.Google Scholar

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page 334 note 8 This approach antedates De Lubac and Rahner in Jesuit circles. Erich Pryzwara writes that ‘the supernatural exceeds any and every claim the creature can make’. Yet the supernatural ‘does not denote anything which transcends its [the creature's‘ own limits’. And ‘even the natural endowment [of the creature] appears ultimately as unmerited’. Polarity, tr. by Bouquet, A. C. (Oxford: 1935), pp. 79 and 80.Google Scholar

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