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Justin over at ressourcement started up a new blog on Henri de Lubac. And he graciously offered to post one of my papers on de Lubac on his new site. If you don’t know de Lubac, you should. He’s one of the theological greats of the 20th century. I imagine a hightened North American, protestant interest in his work since John Milbank recently wrote a book about de Lubac: The Suspended Middle. I read it in manuscript form last year, and picked up the published copy a few weeks ago. Maybe I’ll do a little book review. But, in the meantime, I wanted to post a paper I wrote on Henri de Lubac’s supernatural anthropology. De Lubac’s work on the relationship between nature and grace is said to have inaugurated a revolution in theology. Hopefully my paper encourages further explorations into de Lubac’s profound theological work. Here’s a quote from my paper:

De Lubac pulls from the storehouse of the great tradition of the church and finds resources for the liberation of the human from the suffocating grip of strict naturalism. Instead of allowing an independent reality for a natural end devoid of the supernatural, he brings the order of knowledge “explained by the ‘natural philosophers’” under the nourishing order of the supernatural: there is no “last end” of the human apart from that which “transcends the earthly horizon.” The horizon of the naturalist is located within the order of the supernatural that whispers the divine calling in the depths of the human: de Lubac’s consistent refrain is “the natural is pulled by the supernatural.” De Lubac will not allow a naturalist anthropology that closes off the deep groaning of the restless human heart from the “unceasing exploration of the infinite abyss of the Godhead.”

You can find my paper here as a pdf document: Henri de Lubac: a dynamic anthropology