THE THEOLOGY OF GRACE: PRESENT TRENDS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS (original) (raw)

ALTHOUGH THE theology of grace has not been an area of great contro-Zìi, versy in recent years, it has been the subject of a considerable amount of writing. In all of this writing there seems to be a certain tendency for each author to go off in a different direction, without much attention to the related efforts of others. It seems opportune, then, to survey the whole field of the theology of grace, to see what has been written of late, to try to discern the general direction in which theological thought is moving, to point out the problems which have arisen as a result of this movement, and to try to foresee the possibilities for future developments. The trend which is apparent in recent writings on grace is toward a theology which can be described as phenomenological, psychological, and personalist. The chief difficulties inherent in this approach seem to be methodological, involving the proper use of "personalist" categories to describe the realities of grace. Of my suggestions for future development, the central one is that we may find in contemporary psychology a model and a vocabulary for a theology of the relationship between God and man.