Sublime

This is at the heart of the way in which I believe we can today restate the doctrine of final judgment. I find it quite impossible, reading the New Testament on the one hand and the newspaper on the other, to suppose that there will be no ultimate condemnation, no final loss, no human beings to whom, as C. S. Lewis put it, God will eventually say,

I suspect that no figure in Christian history has suffered a greater injustice as a result of the desperate inventiveness of the Christian moral imagination than the Apostle Paul, since it was the violent misprision of his theology of grace—starting with the great Augustine, it grieves me to say—that gave rise to almost all of these grim distortion

All his writings are imbued by a quintessentially ‘Greek’ optimism regarding the dignity and divine destiny of the human being.

All his writings are imbued by a quintessentially ‘Greek’ optimism regarding the dignity and divine destiny of the human being.

The biblical vision refuses any dichotomy between the natural and the supernatural. Rather, as Henri de Lubac put it, humanity is created with a natural desire for the supernatural, and the supernatural operations of grace enable us to realize the natural ends for which we were created.