Page History

...

According to Blumenberg, "the supranatural to begin with is the future, that which is temporally transcendent of the world; it is only the weakening of eschatology that makes out of this a permanent 'level' of being above nature, and thus makes human life into an existence in two realities. This scheme, subtly worked out by the scholastics, already implies the antithesis; what it actualizes can be entirely reduced to one theological element: the voluntarism in the concept of God. Since what one may call the supranaturalism of the theology of grace is at bottom only an aspect of voluntarism, it is naturalism and voluntarism that finally stand over against one another in our tradition" (RGG^3^ RGG³ , IV, 1333).

But, if this be so, then, insofar as it is the genius of neoclassical theism to be both voluntaristic and naturalistic -- without compromising either or sacrificing one to the other -- it is presumably the heir to the tradition of which classical theism is but a first, crude expression.

...