Nature and Grace (Updated 9/10/16)

I am not a philosopher, so if I misstate some philosophical points below, you can correct me in the comments.  This post contains theses for disputation.

Somewhere in time past theological and philosophical analysts began to study the knowledge obtainable from the logical use of the mind and the observation of nature, and the relationship that this kind of knowledge has to knowledge gained in Christian revelation.  This is the analysis of the relationship between "nature" (or, "natural law") and "grace."

Generally speaking, before the Enlightenment (when the mind of man became the measure of all), it had been put forth, especially effectively by Aquinas, that grace completes nature.  That is, nature can take us a really long way in the knowledge of divine things, but the uppermost echelons of revealed knowledge available to us (the Trinity; the Nature of Christ as the God-Man; the Way of Salvation), could only be reached by revelation (grace) and were not accessible to knowledge which came by nature.

The danger in this synthesis of nature and grace is that the boundary between the two can move.  As time wore on, the boundary between nature and grace moved to include more under nature and less under grace.  Finally, in the eyes of many who saw the supreme doctrines mentioned above as useless or wrong, the mind of man took over, and nature ruled.  Grace appeared to die.  There was nothing left for grace to provide to human knowledge.

One can speculate that this process was due to the sin of man, and that the relationship between nature and grace could supposedly have been kept clear if the sinful kinds of thinking, theologizing and philosophizing had been kept out of the process.  But, this still leaves open the question where the boundary between nature and grace lies.  Things can remain unstable.

We do note in this situation, as it was left by Aquinas, that though grace is seen as supreme, nature is actually the foundation.  This is why nature is always eating away at grace.  It isn't simply that man is a sinner, and therefore always makes mistakes in locating the boundary between nature and grace.  The mistake is that nature -- the knowledge supposedly accessible to all -- is made the foundation of knowledge.  This is close to the doctrine of the Enlightenment, which hypothesized that Nature (natural law) is the foundation of all -- period.  This, I think, is why science (nature) rules in many intellectual circles. For the poor believers struggling under this load so-called science is always eating away at God's Word.

But look at the doctrine of creation.  It is impossible to conceive of the process of creation as entirely natural.  It is impossible to have overall scientific or natural knowledge of the universe as it is being created, because of the miraculous content, and yet that finished creation is supposedly made the ground of natural knowledge (and the testimony to God which is created within it is rejected).  But, the fact that the creation was made under circumstances inaccessible to the human mind implies that nature does not precede and underlie grace.  Natural understanding does not come first.  It is the other way around.  Grace underlies and explains nature.  This changes everything.  The Word of God (grace) rules nature.  The arguments from "nature" which contradict the Word of God are false arguments, prima facie.  Nature is understood in terms given by the Word of God, not the other way around.

Therefore, we must not say that the Book of Nature is a revelation of God accessible under common grace to the mind of the common man, speaking to the common man as clearly about God and nature as the Book of God speaks to the minds of believing men, in the subject matter that they share.  This makes nature superior to grace, and reinstitutes the degenerative process of harm that has been caused by this.

Actually, the Book of Nature first and fundamentally tells men what the Book of God says it tells men -- namely, that God is the creator, sustainer, and giver of all good, in sovereign control of his cosmos, that the creation which is seen and denied by the common eye is testimony to his creative power, and that things in natural revelation only actually work the way that it is said that they work by special revelation.

The idea that the Word of God can be forcefully interpreted against its own claims and intent by the Word of Nature is simply a hoax, perpetrated by a long run of success in the hard sciences, which has supplied the courage to many philosophical "men of science" to proclaim their rule over all things.