Abstract

In this dissertation I maintain that some understanding of divine grace, human freedom and their relationship always figure at the center of Christian interpretations of who God is and who we are. Even when these are not the explicit themes of theological reflection, some understanding of them is always in the background. In this work I explicitly take up these themes. ;The basic thesis of this work divides into two parts. The first part concerns the understanding of reality as a whole as constituted by the event of God's self-offer in love to that which is other as other. The second part has to do with the understanding of human beings as co-constituted by the grace of God's self-offer and by our graced ability to accept or reject this offer as the content of our being. In addition to the existential emphasis of the basic thesis, there is the historical emphasis of the corollary thesis of this work. This thesis is that the traditional doctrinal understanding of grace and freedom in Western Christianity has been significantly defined by understandings of grace and freedom which conflict with the one stated in the main thesis. I trace these understandings back to a fundamental turn in the understanding of grace and freedom in Western theology, a turn which occurred in the later works of Augustine against the Pelagians. ;The dissertation is divided into four parts. In the philosophical part, I attempt to show the necessarily historical and hermeneutical character of human understanding. This reflects the influence of Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. In the historical part, I trace the history of the understanding of grace and freedom in the Christian tradition up to the Catholic Reformation. In the third part, I present Karl Rahner's situated retrieval of this history of understanding. In the final and constructive part, I re-think Rahner and the tradition in light of some current political, ecological and theological concerns. This re-thinking is entitled 'an explicitly panentheistic understanding of grace and freedom.'