Salvation in Henri de Lubac: Divine Grace, Human Nature, and the Mystery of the Cross by Eugene R.Schlesinger (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2023), xxvii +250 pp.
Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: What is the unifying center of Henri de Lubac's theology?This question has occupied scholars since Hans Urs von Balthasar's 1976 monograph, The Theology of Henri de Lubac, in which he likens engaging the whole of de Lubac's corpus to standing before "the entrance of a primeval forest."Salvation in Henri de Lubac: Divine Grace, Human Nature, and the Mystery of the Cross by Eugene R. Schlesinger (2023) makes a formidable contribution to de Lubacian secondary scholarship and to the question of the ressourcement figure's primary focus.Schlesinger acknowledges that de Lubac considered mysticism to be his driving force.Yet, he also argues that along with and inclusive of mysticism, de Lubac had a soteriological preoccupation that undergirded all of his written legacy, from his controversial position on the relationship between nature and grace, to his critique of Western and Eastern atheisms, to his interpretation of the senses of Scripture, to his theological epistemology, to his ecclesiology and sacramental theology, and even to his somewhat puzzling engagement with the writings of the twelfth-century abbot, Joachim of Fiore, and his own controversial contemporary, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.Schlesinger's thesis falls in the line of other scholars who have attempted to discern a fundamental impetus to de Lubac's thought.In his 2015 book, Between Apocalypse and Eschaton: History and Eternity in Henri de Lubac, Joseph Flipper organizes these attempts along two trajectories: ontological (e.g., Hans Boersma and John Milbank) and historical (e.g., Balthasar, Susan Wood, and Flipper himself).Schlesinger presents his work as being a third way between the ontological and historical trajectories, encompassing the insights of each, insofar as salvation occurs in and at the end of history, but also "affects humanity at the core of its being: calling us beyond ourselves and to God" (xxiii).Schlesinger's focus in the first chapter, "Saving Grace: Soteriology in the Works on Nature and Grace," is not to defend de Lubac's view on the relationship between nature and grace, but to show the hermeneutical key to its interpretation.The hermeneutical key, Schlesinger maintains, is soteriology: "De Lubac's works on nature and grace are primarily concerned with offering an account of salvation through Christ" (3).Moreover, his principal contention with the pure nature theory is that "it made the salvation achieved by Jesus Christ something ancillary to what it means to be human" (18).Thus, Schlesinger integrates the ontological trajectory within a more historically dynamic framework: we are not static beings but are always moving towards (or away from) salvation in Christ.
Source: Modern Theology
DOI: 10.1111/moth.12990
Author: Sara Hulse Kirby
Institution: DeSales University
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4409676301