Rethinking Nature and Grace: The Logic of Creation's Consummation

Church Podmatics

In this episode we discuss Ian McFarland's 2022 article "Rethinking Nature and Grace: The Logic of Creation 's Consummation", available in the International Journal of Systematic Theology.
Professor McFarland address an old and important theological problem, of how to construe the relation between 'nature' and 'grace' in such a way that both continuity and discontinuity may be maintained between the life of creatures now and that of eschatological consummation. Arguing that both Catholic and Protestant treatments of the problem have left the conundrum intact, McFarland proposes to reframe the question around David Kelsey's notion of different modes of grace. It's a novel approach that has some intriguing possibilities for how we think of both this life and the life to come.