Kishkumen, your "if" got me to look again. I looked up, leaves in the Wind, and find a blog by the individual you are most likely thinking of. His picture matches the widely published author. I also checked google and found an article by him which relates to the discussion above. I found it striking. I will impose on this thread a bit to express myself. I have something between horror and distaste for some aspects of modern Christianity. I find it very difficult to see anything Christian in Left Behind, Late Great Planet Earth, end of the world preppers. I am disturbed by the gross rejection of science held by people insisting only their young earth creationism is correct. I am deeply repulsed by the hard core Calvinist view of grace which sees the natural as totally corrupt. These may be three different centers of attention but they are clearly different versions of the same basic idea.
Mr. Hart addresses this in the article I stumbled upon:
https://www.christiancentury.org/articl ... -about-godIt sought to affirm the gratuity of God’s goodness by creating an absolute distinction between the natural and supernatural ends of rational creatures.
This tradition came to assert that spiritual beings are so undeserving of grace, so incapable of meriting or rising to the grace that God may or may not elect to give them, that in their own natures they don’t even have the supernatural knowledge of God as their proper end. In that way of thinking, humans might be curious about God in a kind of etiological sense, as an explanatory principle. In other words, they might be moved to wonder where the world came from. But as purely natural beings they would not have the insatiable longing for God that Augustine describes as the unquiet heart—“our hearts are restless till they rest in you.”
Put simply, it suggests that grace cannot truly complete human nature but that it must be superadded.
Where do you think this touches the ground for the Christian story? What difference would it make to how someone articulates the faith?
Well, there are any number of immediate problems with this. One is that it is basically a rejection of the whole Christian tradition on what a spiritual being is. Any coherent consideration of a natural being’s nature requires that all of its desires and wills occur in the context of a consuming rational desire for the good, the true, the beautiful; otherwise nothing would prompt the rational will into action. But this consuming rational desire is, in fact, simply a way of naming the essence of God. Every other Christian tradition affirms this.
Another problem is that it creates a logical or metaphysical impossibility. It says that when God superadds grace to our natures, we are transformed into beings at once natural and supernatural, though there is no premise, either in faculty nor in potency, for the supernatural in us. Despite the Thomistic claim that grace perfects—rather than abolishes—nature, this view requires just the latter. If human beings—in receiving the fullness of grace—are transformed into something for which we have neither the potency nor the faculty already, then we’re not actually transformed:
I suppose I can add this further quote from near the end of the article. I may hope it a bit extreme but I have been troubled by the same thought.
Christianity has never really taken deep root in America; we’ve all been much more committed to Mammon. I’m not talking conservative and liberal in the American cultural sense. It’s absurd to suggest that you can have any actual devotion to who Jesus of Nazareth was and embrace laissez-faire capitalism or the entrepreneurial principle or erecting a border wall and keeping out asylum seekers. National conservatives—the people who think Jesus would have loved the Second Amendment and hated Mexicans—are simply not Christians. There’s nothing about their vision of reality and their relations to their fellow human beings that bears the slightest resemblance to who and what Christ was and what he taught.
There’s not even a meaningful debate to be held on this: the Christian right is a movement whose ultimate ends are to extinguish real Christian convictions in society.
