Grace And Humanness

These essays, by one of the foremost U.S. Latino theologians, offer far-ranging insights on the relation between theology and culture. Orlando O. Espin addresses the challenge of culture and insightfully attempts to construct Christian theology from perspectives that are neither culturally, historically, nor ethically naive. These essays open new theological ground and ask theologians to acknowledge and name their cultural perspectives and locations in the construction of their theologies.

Offering a fresh approach to one significant aspect of the soteriology of Thomas Aquinas, God's Grace and Human Action brings new scholarship and insights to the issue of merit in Aquinas's theology. Through a careful historical analysis, Joseph P. Wawrykow delineates the precise function of merit in Aquinas's account of salvation. Wawrykow accounts for the changes in Thomas's teaching on merit from the early Scriptum on the Sentences of Peter Lombard to the later Summa theologiae in two ways. First, he demonstrates how the teaching of the Summa theologiae discloses the impact of Thomas's profound encounter with the later writings of Augustine on predestination and grace. Second, Wawrykow notes the implications of Thomas's mature theological judgment that merit is best understood in the context of the plan of divine wisdom. The portrayal of merit in sapiential terms in the Summa permits Thomas to insist that the attainment of salvation through merit testifies not only to the dignity of the human person but even more to the goodness of God.

A new approach to the idea of grace. The author isolates certain common themes consistently present in the traditional language of grace and reinterprets them in terms of the concept of liberation.

The doctrine of grace, concerning the healing, freeing, and empowering presence of the Spirit in human life, is central in Christianity. This readable, yet in-depth, historical and interpretive study retraces the long trajectory of the theology of grace as thinkers grappled with the mystery that envelops the interplay between God's life with us and our common life together. Retrieving the rich symbols of the Christian past and reinterpreting them within their own cultural context, theologians in different eras shaped the development of a Christian anthropology that plays upon all the registers of the greatness and misery of the human condition. The presuppositions, questions, and benchmark anthropologies of early Christianity, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Trent, and Rahner are critically analyzed in light of recent historical studies and in light of a new climate of ecumenical convergence. The exploration ends by probing the anthropology of contemporary liberation theologies that mark another turning point in the tradition by breaking grace out of the realm of privacy and into the sociopolitical arena.

The relationship between grace and freedom is among the more significant focal points in Christian theological reflection, and Gregory of Nyssa's thought in this area provides abundant material for detailed analysis of the Eastern alternative. This study examines his view of grace and freedom within his own historical setting, and particularly in the context of his thought as a whole. It should be of significance to centithetical thinking, which is important in much patristic and Byzantine theology.

Mark Mann seeks to renew discussion of the doctrine of holiness in Christian theology by using the human sciences as a tool for theological reconstruction. He identifies the anthropological presuppositions of the holiness tradition and explores the ways that those presuppositions have led to particular assertions regarding the nature of Christian holiness as that doctrine is affirmed by the holiness tradition. He asks to what extent holiness is possible in this life. How is holiness obtained, and to what extent can people gain knowledge of having acheived holiness? Mann uses the resources of the neurosciences, the sociology of knowledge, and psychology to help answer these questions and to provide constructive theological analysis of these questions.