GOD'S GRACE IN THE SOCIETY

In what way can grace, or God acting through his grace, be seen as operative in society and history and this in a liberating way?

LIBERATION: A CONTEPORARY LANGUAGE OF GRACED EXPERIENCE

Karl Rahner was always unhappy with the standard understanding prevalent in the  Catholicism of the first half of the twentieth century, according to which grace occurred, one might say, behind the believer’s back. Grace was something in which a good Catholic believed but which had nothing to do with anything she or he could be aware of. One might trust that in, say, going to Mass one was receiving grace, but this was not something that could be actually felt. Having received grace would make a big difference when one died – but very little in the meantime. Grace too easily became, therefore, a very theoretical matter, something which in the day-to-day living of life made no impact whatsoever.

Rahner was firmly convinced, however, that grace, encounter with the living God, can occur and does actually occur in the ordinary routine of secular life. Grace must be able to be experienced – it must really affect us in the here and now. He thinks that all of us should try to discover the experience of absolute mystery which pervades our everyday life. It is an experience available to everyone and is at the very heart of Christianity.

            This is a historical exercise of understanding how past figures like Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Trent and Rahner discussed and helped to determine the meaning of the word grace. Far from being taken as a mere history, Roger Haight tries to understand the meaning of grace through the thoughts of others in the light of our experience and in relation to our situation right now.

                        It has been established that the actions of God in human life can be experienced; that grace, which is God’s ordination of human existence to a personal union with himself is an integral and an indistinguishable part of actual human nature. It is a concrete approach of how grace is played out in conscious religious experience in relation with the problem of evil or dark side of human existence. According to Haight, the existence and the experience of evil in the world is a permanent and internal threat to the doctrine of God’s love which can blind the person to recognize God’s graciousness. For him, evil is experienced by every person and without an appreciation of this persistent element in human experience, there is a danger that an understanding of grace will be superficial and facile in terms of communicating it to people in their situations.

            Ultimately, the problems connected with the doctrine of grace find their solution in the experience of grace itself. This means that to explain and communicate God’s love, one will have to point to the human experience in which it is found and the signs in which it is manifest. Roger Haight brings in the idea that, for grace to be real it has to be operative concretely in people and manifested itself in their lives according to their personalities, temperaments and backgrounds.

            Analyzing the basic problems of the theology of grace, Roger Haight goes through the past theologians. For Augustine, grace is understood in the context of and relative to human freedom and love. He says that it is God’s grace that is responsible for self-transcending love and the expanding of the horizon of freedom beyond mere choice of objects or decisions based on self-centered designs. In the thought of Aquinas grace is seen relative to the human person and race as finite and limited. In this context grace is a new power and nature, elevating, supernatural, and divinizing because through this habitual gift to the soul one participates in God’s own life. For Luther grace is set in the context of interpersonal relationship between God and the human person. Grace is God’s word and promise of mercy, forgiveness and love for the sinner.

In Trent too, grace is forgiveness and an inner renovation of human person, giving one a new birth into a new form of life. Rahner views grace in the context of universal human history and eschatology. God’s salvific will is universal, and grace is God’s personal offer and presence to all people across the whole of history. Grace is God’s love for human beings, a love that affects, converts, and transforms human freedom and loving, a love that is accepting and forgiving, a love that raises a person up to become a new kind of existence. Coming to the Christian vocabulary, Haight defines grace as the favor and love that God bestows upon humanity in Christ. He emphasizes the qualities of that love which is gratuitous, offered to us in complete freedom on God’s part.

What are the essential effects of Grace? Roger Haight mentions first forgiveness as effect of grace. He says that God’s love for people as manifested in Christ and as experienced in his grace is merciful and forgiving. Then he talks about the healing effect. For him, God’s love for a person is manifested as a positive force in his or her life that heals and cures the sickness that is sinfulness and enables one to love God in return. He says that we cannot love God unless we experience the healing love of the God who first loves us. Talking about the elevating effect of grace, Haight says that in every language of grace, the effect of God’s love for human existence is described in one way as elevating. This is expressed in the sharpest and clearest terms of Aquinas, where grace elevates human life not only to a new level in the hierarchy of beings, but even to a sharing in the divine nature itself.

Perhaps the most important effect of the experience of God’s love is freedom. In the mind of Haight, freedom is indeed a function of the other three effects of grace and includes them. God’s grace frees people from their sin. Here, grace breaks the self-closed state of human existence. It liberates human freedom from sin by engendering in the personality in the human mind and will, a delight and desire transcending the self and responding to the value outside the self and for its own safe. The grace frees the person from himself by liberating the will to act as a new person. In the experience of God’s grace, God’s favor, benevolence, mercy and love make the person accepted as he or she is in spite of sin, and give him or her a new absolute identity.

The grace of God gives freedom to love in the sense that, though the grace does not destroy the free choice, it expands it and guarantees it. This freedom to love does not add or multiply the concrete opportunities or objects of free decisions. Rather grace releases freedom from its inner constrictions and positively gives it a new horizon and scope, a new motive. Grace is the force of God working in human existence moving it in love.

Moving ahead, Roger Haight finds that grace is liberation from nature. For him, in the line of Aquinas, grace liberates the human person from finitude, from the limited and limiting aspects of his nature in order to reach the transcendent goal of union with God. It frees the people from the world and all fear of it because it bestows on them a value that transcends the finitude of the world. By union with Christ through grace one shares in Christ’s kingship, so that every Christian is by faith exalted above all things. The world and its history are demythologized and demystified. Grace also liberates from death in the sense that it responds to the human desire to be and turns one towards God. Grace transforms the passion to action and liberates from the terror of time and history constructing energies in the context of hope.

All in all, the experience of graces is liberation for God. Through grace one loves God as source of all goodness. This expands to the liberation for the neighbor to the extent that grace informs the whole person to the gratuitous altruistic love in charity. But at the same time the effects of grace include the liberation of personal existence to the whole world understood as other people in history.

In what way can grace, or God acting through his grace, be seen as operative in society and history and this in a liberating way? By answering this question we approach a liberationist interpretation of salvation in history. According to Roger Haight, Grace is liberation from the world and for the neighbor. Quoting Luther and Augustine, Roger Haight says that the contact with God mediated through Christian revelation or any other religious revelation may be called an effect of God’s Grace insofar as one is grasped by the transcendence of God. One in liberated in gratitude for dedicated service to the neighbor; one is freed for self-transcending love. It seems to be a personal experience, but the point is that there will be no such a thing as a liberation movement for others unless there are people who are freed from this world and fear of its powers and institutions. There can be no authentic or altruistic action for others that is not ultimately the result of God’s grace. The effect of grace is essentially social and urges human personality toward expansiveness and self transcendence.

            God acts in loving human freedom. This assertion is based on Augustine and afterwards the Christian doctrine of the necessity of prevenient for any transcending and saving act of love. To appreciate this insight one must ask as Augustine did: why there s or how there could be any authentic moral goodness or love at all in this world. Relying on his experience and on Scripture Augustine answers with his doctrine of the absolute priority of grace. From this it follows that God and his grace are at the root of all love in this world. Wherever there is authentic love in this world, there God s acting. This is his point against Pelagius. This is not to be understood as an anthropomorphic or interventionist views of God; but, God’s grace, God’s effective presence, is the driving and sustaining force in all human goodness and love, and this is the ultimate basis of every form of authentic human community, no matter how basic and natural any particular communitarian form may seem.

            God acting in the world. The idea of God who is at work in the world in loving human freedom is strengthened by Aquinas’s notion of cooperative grace. In this notion of “operative grace” Aquinas examines the effects of grace within the human personality, namely, justification and sanctification. Cooperative grace refers to the effects of grace as it is seen flowing through human freedom out into the world and the public sphere in action.

            God’s action for God’s Designs. The theology of grace of Aquinas is firmly structures by teleology, which can be seen as eschatology. In Aquinas one has the basic affirmation “that grace opens up a possibility which does not lie within the scope of man’s natural powers and s not implied by his being as a man”. In a historical and eschatological context a doctrine of cooperative grace implies that, through grace and people animated by grace, possibilities in and through history tending toward God’s design in history, but not possible by human power alone, are opened up and worked out by God through graced human agency. In scriptural language, God’s action in and through human loving s moving toward the goal of his kingdom, the kingdom of communion, harmony, peace and reconciliation. Certainly this is not clearly seen because it is an object of faith.

            To sum up, let us consider Luther’s theology of grace because he departs from Aquinas and Augustine on this point of theological dynamism. For Luther, one is saved now, already, in an actual interpersonal relationship with God through Christ’s word. Moreover there is a tendency to distinguish the graced person from his works. In Luther, freedom and action for the neighbor are not in themselves salvific but rather presuppose salvation and flow from it. After that is admitted and assumed an existential and historical point of view, one must affirm that there can be no radical distinction between what a person is and what he does; the two are mutually implied in each other. This leads us to combine the Lutherian and Thomistic emphases in an already-not yet tension that responds in a salutary manner to the question of understanding the Christian life in a broader context of history.

Already: We are saved already by God’s forgiveness and this gives the Christian anabsolute freedom sustained by grace to respond to the neighbor. If there is no salvation experienced in faith now, there can be no ground for hope in the future. Thus salvation experienced now through grace is a precondition for freedom to turn to the world and its future.

Not yet: At the same time we are not yet either personally or as a group or as a race saved.  What we are now must be sustained by grace in our action and this action is likewise constitutive for our being. Thus Lutherian and Thomistic spiritualities can be seen as complementary and held in tension, they serve to correct the dangers on both sides.

v) God’s action through grace against sin:

• The saving and liberating effect of grace occurs primarily in the individual personality.
• Actions for liberation of others on the part of any person or participation in liberation movements, witnesses first of all to his/her own salvation or salvific liberation. Such social actions, if it is authentic, is salvific liberation fist of all for the participants themselves.\
• Actions for liberation, i.e., the concrete performance of love of neighbour, is a participation in God’s action in the world. The assumption here is that all genuine love of neighbour is initiated and sustained by God’s liberating grace.
• The primary objective of liberative action that is an effect of saving grace is the person of the neighbour; this action is a form of love of neighbour. Insofar as the neighbour is a victim of social or institutional oppression or violence, one must, in order to be of any real and permanent assistance, strike at the roots and causes of this objective situation. The social concern that is essentially and constitutive of authentic Christian faith life, therefore, will always include de facto a concern for justice.
• The building of just social structure cannot be simply equated  with salvation since even in the most objectively just social order the inner sinfulness of human beings world remain. One cannot identify Christian salvation with an objective social order or structure without a subjective dimension because there can be no real salvation without an inner conversion of freedom itself. However, institutionalized pattern of valuation and action that increase the probability of loving decision in particular instances may be seen as corresponding in the public, historical and social sphere to the infused virtues that attend upon grace.