Theological Studies

Theological ethicists rarely allow the virtues to perform the heavyweight work of guiding action. This article contests this tradition and argues that, and demonstrates how, virtue ethics provides a practicable method of normative action guidance. The article contends that there are five interrelated but distinct modes of virtue action guidance. The first three modes—dialogue, emulation, and substituted judgment—invite the agent to take counsel with moral exemplars. The interrogative and discovery modes direct agents to morally deliberate using thick accounts of the virtues.

This article draws on the Dutch neo-Calvinist dogmatician Herman Bavinck’s notion of conscience to explore the question of whether Christ’s assumed humanity is fallen or unfallen. It will demonstrate that, for Bavinck, Christ’s conscience was silent and did not accuse or exonerate him according to the moral law (the word of God) as occurs in the postlapsarian conscience. Such a unique conscience reflects the unfallenness of Christ’s humanity and his impeccability. Moreover, Christ’s impeccability is concomitant with Christ’s permanent response to God’s word in faith. This suggests that in the eschaton, the human conscience will become silent in a faithful trust in the word of God.

This article presents a reconstruction of an important but neglected element of the trinitarian theology of Thomas Aquinas: namely, his teaching on the notional acts, the intratrinitarian acts attributed to the Divine Persons, and how they relate to individual Divine Persons. In the process, this article shows that, for Aquinas, and for medieval theologians more generally, although we can distinguish between the Divine Persons and their respective intratrinitarian acts according to our human mode of understanding, each Divine Person is, in reality (literally, in the res, or in the thing), nothing other than a single eternal act. This article also explains how thinking of the Divine Persons as divine acts offers significant resources for contemporary theology and corrects against certain perceived weaknesses of Aquinas’s trinitarian theology and relation-centered accounts of the Trinity more generally.

Bernard Lonergan and Hans Urs von Balthasar would appear to be worlds apart in their trinitarian theologies. The former championed while the latter eschewed the traditional Western psychological analogy. And yet, Robert Doran’s Lonergan-inflected trinitarian theology presented a revised version of the psychological analogy, drawn from the order of grace. This analogy is in fact isomorphic to Balthasar’s primary eucharistic analogy for the trinitarian processions. Recognizing formal similarity invites a rapprochement between these two theologies and a call for a renewal of boldness in speculative theology.

A traditional account of the beatific vision has focused attention on our vision of the divine essence. However, little attention has been paid to the trinitarian aspects of the vision. This article proposes a trinitarian account of the beatific vision drawing on the work of Bernard Lonergan and Robert Doran and the so-called four-point hypothesis. It concludes that, so conceived, the beatific vision is analogous to an exchange of wedding vows.

This essay argues that the Catholic Common Ground Initiative, founded twenty-five years ago, needs to shift focus to deal with the pervasiveness of anger among American Catholics. Instead of striving to achieve agreement through rational dialogue, American Catholics should aim to find common ground in our sorrow by developing liturgies of lamentation to address the pervasive devastation arising from crises such as clergy sex abuse. Lamentation finds common ground in the common experience of loss, without insisting that everyone attribute the loss to the same cause or agree upon the same path toward renewal.