Reno on Nature/Grace

Rusty Reno’s discussion of nature and grace ( The Ordinary Transformed ) is not so satisfying as Jenson’s. Reno says that theology’s challenge is to explain the real relationship between nature and grace without detaching them or conflating them. Too intimate a relationship “implies a partnership between the ordinary and the extraordinary which threatens the sovereign gratuity of grace. How could the extraordinary be truly grace if it were already bound up with the ordinary, whether in the form of a natural need, a natural capacity, or a natural desire?” To avoid this, “the great difference between nature and grace must be emphasized, even if such courts the dangers of divine unreality and irrelevance.”

Reno comments that “Grace is extraordinary because it is unnecessary, unexpected, and in some respects, perhaps, even unwanted.” That description, it seems to me, points back to Jensonian solution. After all, isn’t existence itself “unnecessary, unexpected, and in some respects, perhaps, even unwanted”? Isn’t the ordinary always already extraordinary?