That the notion of grace pervades the Christian theological tradition is fitting, because the tradition affirms that the reality of grace pervades creation, bestowing divine favour upon humanity and inviting humanity to share the divine life. Due to its centrality to the Christian conception of reality, the theology of grace has been a battleground at several junctures in the history of Christianity: disputes in the New Testament, the Pelagian controversy, the sixteenth-century reformations, the De Auxiliis controversy, and the resurgent nature and grace controversies of the twentieth century. With An Analogy of Grace, Henry Shea offers his own intervention into this much-contested field, urging that those who speak of grace do so in particularly Christic and eucharistic terms.
The work is organised into six chapters, of which the first and sixth serve as introduction and conclusion. Chapter 1 introduces the problem, tracing the trajectory of the doctrine of grace’s development, beginning with etymological study, wending its way through patristic, medieval, and modern theologies while providing a serviceable status quaestionis along the way, and setting up the book’s principal argument, which focuses on the thought of three twentieth-century Jesuits.
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 are devoted to the theologies of Karl Rahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Erich Przywara, respectively. Rahner and Balthasar are presented as something of tensive poles in a dialectic, with complementary, perhaps inverse strengths and liabilities. Rahner effectively constructs a transcendental account of grace and its universality. However, his theology also turns upon categorical symbolic mediation: the constitution of humanity is such that, while we are endlessly open to this universal grace, we also only ever encounter it in historically embodied mediation. Shea contends that Rahner’s theology never satisfactorily resolves the aporia between these two commitments. It is indeed an oddity to affirm that the majority of humanity embraces grace transcendentally, even as they fundamentally misinterpret it categorically. In this connection, Shea suggests that ‘the unthematically graced can appear not so much “anonymous” as schizophrenic’ (p. 63). Balthasar, on the other hand, ably develops his account of the Gestalt Christi as the perpetually replete locus of God’s self-communication to the creation. It is through participation in the Christ form that any graced encounter occurs. And yet, Shea contends, no account of how this highly concrete form is universally participable is provided by Balthasar.
It is at this point that Przywara enters the argument. Helpfully, Shea positions him not so much as a midway between two extremes, whether a Goldilocks or a via media, but rather as an invitation to a ‘parallax’ coordination of the insights of Rahner and Balthasar. Przywara’s rigorous pursuit of the distinction between essence and existence, coordinated with the Fourth Lateran Council’s insistence on the ever-greater dissimilitude between God and any creature, leads him to develop a particularly kenotic and cruciform account of grace, one which fulfills all things, even as it relinquishes its grasp on them, along with any pretensions of mastery. Depending on where one sits, this is a compelling vision: The invitation for the ostensibly powerful to embrace the infinite generosity of the mind of Christ is salutary. However, as Shea notes, there is ‘an abiding danger’ in such appeal to the cross, namely, its potential to ‘be misinterpreted to unduly glorify the victimizing effects of injustice’ (p. 215). While Shea states clearly that to do so is an anti-gospel impulse, still, something more than that single proviso, provided in the epilogue, would have been welcome, given how pervasive such abusive misuses of cross traditions are.
This sets the stage for the book’s major constructive contribution in chapter 5, which retrieves the Augustinian trope of the whole Christ to articulate a theology of grace grounded in the historic particularity of the incarnate Word and advancing throughout the history of humanity, as human beings and cultures are integrated into that vital and irreplaceable fullness. Here, in a nod to de Lubac’s famous, ‘The Eucharist makes the church’, Shea also locates this movement within a dynamic of sacramentality: ‘The grace that flows directly from the Incarnation is not discontinuous with the ordinariness of human life but is rather its transformation from within. To celebrate the Eucharist…is to confect, by the most inconspicuous and ordinary accidents of bread and wine, a substantive theosis’ (pp. 178–9). Along the way, forays into theories of inculturation, making use of Marian interpretations (with the mestiza Our Lady of Guadalupe and the bodhisattva Guanyin serving as centerpieces), bear out the dynamic of universality within symbolic particularity.
All in all, Shea makes his case persuasively, though I am not sure that his foils are quite as susceptible to the charges he brings against them as he suggests. For instance, my reading of Balthasar yields something rather close to the analogy derived from Przywara; and, while Rahner’s theological vision exhibits tensions, I am not convinced that they rise to the level of contradiction. That said, the positive case Shea makes, and particularly his kenotic, christomorphic, eucharistic account of the totus Christus is compelling and worthy of consideration.
