Nature, Grace, Church

How does de Lubac’s interest in nature/grace fit into his ecclesiological concerns? It might seem that his effort to integrate nature and grace could support the juridical notion of the church expressed in Vatican I.

Operating on a strict nature/supernatural distinction, one might see the church as an “invisible” body that has virtually nothing in common with “natural” societies. When the two are integrated, and nature is infused with supernature, the natural structures of society might be seen as perfected by supernatural grace; but the natural structures would not be left behind, but sanctified. That the nature/supernatural dualism coexisted with a juridical understanding of the church is quite interesting.

In any case, de Lubac does not go in this direction, but is as critical of the juridical understanding of the church as he is of the nature/supernatural dualism. In his Brief Catechism on Nature and Grace, de Lubac warns that “Every notion which tends to bring down the supernatural order to the level of nature tends, by that very fact, to mistake the Church for the world, to conceive of her after the model of human societies, to expect her to change even in her essential structures and her faith in order to suit the world’s changes.” When authoritarian regimes were the order of the day in Europe, the church was threatened with a “theocratic temptation,” but now, when democracy is the order of the ages, “some would like a representative, liberal and constitutional papacy.”

Because the church has a divine mission, she cannot be conformed to any worldly order: “The church of Christ’s primary, essential, irreplaceable mission is to remind us constantly, opportune, importune, of our divine supernatural vocation and to communicate to us through her sacred ministry the seed, still fragile and hidden, yet real and living, of our divine life.”

The seed grows, not only within but also “in the affairs of time and history,” and in this the “supernatural impulse” achieves good only by using “all the resources of human knowledge, experience and wisdom,” that is, by making use of natural knowledge and culture. Yet, the church’s work, and especially the work of her ministers, cannot be reduced to the promotion of good in the affairs of time and history; these always remain “a secondary end.”

The end result would be that the church would “be reduced to a mere human organization, and a totally ineffective one at that.” She would become “a parasite, duplicating or trying to duplicate . . . the institutions that men can freely create for themselves.”