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CHICAGO STUDIES
of god" mean to a modem, 20th century mind for whom all effective force does not depend upon¡ the arbitrariness of grace or will or disposition of a dubious God, but is available within this world? How can the word, "the grace of God," mean anything to a generation that, regardless of how it talks, does not really depend upon grace? We all talk Augustinian and we all act Arian. If we set out to do a certain job, we have to have knowledge, skill, time, resoUl'ce and pull these all together. If we succeed, we do not ascribe our success to the grace of God. If we fail, we say that our theory may be wrong or our resources not adequate. We don't blame the grace of God. That is, the whole formation, the empiricizing of the mentality of modem man has simply meant that the operational vocabularly of the great Christian tradition has got to be relocated within the matrix of that empirical, phenomenological matrix. And this is a vast theological operation. Karl Rahner's great little book on Nature and Grace is one big step in that direction. What I'm trying to do is relocate the occasions of grace within secular experience; to find the occasions, the intersections, the places whose interior moment of surprise, joy, illumination can be specified within ordinary experience in such a way as to permit the old vocabulary again to point to the transcendental in the experiential, the beyond in the among. The sheer givenness of the infinite variety of the human community, the sheer surprise quality about the givenness of the cosmos, the surprise that there is the primal human fact, of which Paul Tillich used to say, "We wonder why is there something rather than nothing." To find an ontology of being which does not depend upon a priori postulations of transcendentality, but rather that its demensions shall be broadened and cracked open experientially. This is the kind of theological job that confronts us, and a part of my post-graduate education for the doing of it has been the delightful and brain-wearying years I have spent in the Roman Catholic-Lutheran dialogue.