Foreign Nature

Matthias Scheeben makes explicit the troubling underpinnings of the nature/supernatural distinction. When we are refashioned by grace “on the model of the higher, divine nature,” we enter into a “new, special relationship with God, who now draws near to man in His own essence, and not only as Creator of a nature foreign to Him.”

Two things: First, isn’t man created on the “model” of a divine nature? What else does the image of God mean? Second, whyever should we think of created humanity as “foreign” to God?

You only need the apparatus of two orders of knowledge and being if you begin with Scheeben’s assumption that man as created is “foreign” to God. If he’s not, you can accomplish all that the natural/supernatural wants to accomplish without the difficulties, both of terminology and substance.

Thought Scheeben roots his whole scheme in an account of Trinitarian self-communication, his assumption seems sub-Trinitarian. It might be rooted in the residual Hellenism that assumes that the Absolute is inherently unrelated. But the Triune God is Absolute and Related, and so He’s not doing anything “foreign” when He enters relation with an Other.