Luther and Aquinas

A further note from Haight: One of the criticisms he lodges against Aquinas and scholasticism is that it tended to treat grace and conversion in a mechanistic fashion: “This is a fundamental distortion of the dynamics of grace when it is seen contrasted with a personalist description, and it has had enormous consequences in the history of the conception of grace. One has only to think of the seemingly mechanical loss and gain through sin and confession that has characterized conceptions in Catholic spirituality.” Luther comes off well in this regard. Luther insists that grace refers finally not to any habitus or quality of soul but to the favor of God (Haight, p. 92), but this favor of God is worked out in such a way that it radically changes the sinner because of the power of the indwelling Christ. For Luther, further, faith is not merely assent to propositions, but “an infinitely more complex attitude toward and relationship with God,” and he “highlighted [faith’s] necessarily personal and existential aspect, and even its psychologically actual dimension” (p. 93). Haight suggests that Luther is an important resource for Catholic theologians who are “calling for a theology of grace in personalist categories” (p. 96).