The Nature-Grace Controversy

Henri de Lubac recognized long ago what was at stake in the nature-grace controversy. A true understanding of and challenge to the secularization of the modern world can begin only when one understands that nature is given as ordered from its depths to religious form - to the form, that is, which, concretely, is the love of the trinitarian God revealed in Jesus Christ and received into Mary and the Church by the Holy Spirit. But now we can see better the radical implications of the work wrought by de Lubac. There is and can be - in the concrete historical order which is ours - no nature or natural laws which are neutral of religious form. The claim which would make nature neutral of religious form merely succeeds thereby in giving nature the religious form of liberalism. This holds true also for the praxis, the appeal to social justice or morality, which would claim to proceed in innocence of religious form.

But the point here can be put more radically still. When we recall de Lubac's work on Nietzsche and other such thinkers, we become aware that the liberal claim that nature and hence culture is neutral of religious form is in fact one of the forms the death of God can take. It bears emphasis: liberalism is one of the forms of the death of God. It is the West's way of pushing God to the margins of culture, and thereby of turning questions from their depths to their surfaces. Indeed, we might summarize what we have written here in the name of de Lubac's work by saying that the god of the West has not really had the courage to die; he has merely become a liberal.

David L. Schindler, Catholicism and Secularization in America, p. 24.