Kathryn Tanner and "Grace Without Nature"

In her recent theological work, Kathryn Tanner, professor of Religious Studies at Yale University, has stressed that theological anthropology is only viable when it is carried out in close association with christology. In her book, Christ the Key, she begins with an extensive foray into discussing human nature in order to press this point. This reinforce a related goal which is that Christology needs to pay close attention to theological anthropology. In another contribution to a book that summarizes some of the same theological terrain, (titled "Grace without Nature" in a volume titled Without Nature? A New Condition for Theology), Tanner develops one aspect of this theme: the relationship between nature and grace.

Her argument in this article, "Grace Without Nature", is essentially twofold:
1) "The image of God... is primarily a divine image and not a human one. Human beings do not image God in and of themselves." (364) and

2) There is no human nature, at least not a human nature that is understood as something defined, cast in stone or unchanging. Rather, because of rationality, humans are different from other creatures with stable natures: "While humans are a definite sort of creature distinct from others and in that sense of course still have a particular nature (they are not God who alone is different from others by not being a kind of thing), humans still stand out by their failure to be clearly limited by a particular nature as other creatures are." (367) She goes on to claim, among other things, that there is warrant from patristic sources for this idea of a human nature that is "not a nature."

In such a short space as a book chapter, Tanner's sweeping comments on human nature are liable to misinterpretation and although I find her argument convoluted, I think it is nevertheless necessary to draw out of it the essential insights of her argument.

The key to Christ, in alluding to the book for the moment, is that the Spirit of God may be said to work most effectively in ordinary situations, in the everyday life of human operations (274-5). One can see a strategy of mutual reinforcement at work: the true image of God is identifiable in the person of Christ, a divine person. In order to support the re-location of the imago dei away from human nature to Christ's divine person, human nature is said to be unstable enough to support such an image. It needs a different account of the Holy Spirit which does not start to work when human thinking stops.

Yet, from Tanner's perspective, the doctrine of grace not only emphasizes the significance of transformation of the human person, it does so at the expense of the nature of humans. Where this argument goes next is the part that begins to baffle the reader. The focus of Tanner's argument shifts quickly to the body: having justified the non-nature of human nature through the plasticity entailed by rationality (and in the book, faith), she then claims that "plastic or nonnatured bodies are the ultimate issue even for these early church theologians. at the end of the day, it is human bodies that are to be remade into Christ's body." (368)

So, here is the question: can a creature whose body is created in an evolutionary lineage of descent from other creatures with whom it shares so many morphological and genetic features be said to lack its own nature? Can the embodied human, a creature who is promised the resurrected life on account of Christ's own resurrected human body be said to be non-natural therefore? Essentially, Tanner says yes.

She says yes, amazingly, on the basis of a critique of Henri de Lubac's position on the relationship between nature and grace. de Lubac had argued for the natural human desire for the beatific vision, a desire that is naturally gifted to us. It is not bestowed on us by "our own powers." Where she goes wrong here is in elaborating the Thomist view of de Lubac as the view that "humans are moving on their own accord toward God on the basis of their natural capacities." (369) But which is it? Is de Lubac saying that we rely on some human capacity in order to attain the state of grace or is de Lubac affirming ? Tanner seems to say both of these in order to suit her argument.

I think that Tanner wants to say that grace is both divinely initiated and as such it is a process with which human beings can cooperate. This is why she speaks of the ordinary character of the Holy Spirit in her book. For this reason, grace has been traditionally understood as both operative (divinely initiated) and cooperative (humanly mediated). de Lubac is simply correcting the modern neo-thomist characterization of the relationship between nature and grace in order to say that it is consistent with the Augustinian-Thomist adage that "grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it." In contrast, Tanner can only see tension between the gratuity of grace and its effects via human freedom. She sees tension as between faithful existence and nothing. But God did not create us as nothing.

She critiques de Lubac essentially for not going far enough in his critique of the idea of 'pure nature'. What she does in the process however is she advocates the overwhelming of nature with a univocal form of grace. This way of conceiving grace will end up being burdensome by not having any relevance for the salvation of the body, an issue of ostensible concern to her. Human beings have natures because we are formed bodies. Christ's resurrection is the template for our salvation because he rescues human nature, including our bodies. Our human nature cannot be incidental to the salvific process. Christ does not wipe it out completely in his transforming action made effective in the work of the Spirit.