{"id":9539,"date":"2015-03-24T21:42:51","date_gmt":"2015-03-24T19:42:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aomoi.net\/blogg\/?p=9539"},"modified":"2015-03-25T09:53:49","modified_gmt":"2015-03-25T07:53:49","slug":"diskusjon-om-kardinal-kaspers-bok-om-naden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aomoi.net\/blogg\/2015\/03\/diskusjon-om-kardinal-kaspers-bok-om-naden\/","title":{"rendered":"Diskusjon om kardinal Kaspers bok om N\u00e5den"},"content":{"rendered":"

P\u00e5 First Things nettsider leste jeg nettopp<\/a> en diskusjon om kardinal Kaspers bok «Mercy: The Essence of the Gospel and the Key to Christian Existence». En prest i Boston, Fr. Daniel Patrick Moloney, hadde tidligere i vinter skrevet en anmeldelse av denne boka<\/a>, som Kasper her svarer p\u00e5 og som Moloney igjen f\u00e5r svare p\u00e5 – bl.a. p\u00e5 denne m\u00e5ten: <\/p>\n

… As a reader trying to be charitable, I face an unattractive choice: accept that His Eminence does hold the mistaken view that mercy is essential to God; or assume that when he emphatically made the multiple important statements at key points in his book that mercy is essential to God, that he didn\u2019t mean them. I\u2019d like to think my argument was logical and theological, not ideological. I just was trying to work out the problems that flow from his claims about mercy in relation to God\u2019s essence, claims that imply unorthodox conclusions.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not true, however, that others in the tradition think as he does. In his letter, Cardinal Kasper cites St. Thomas Aquinas, particularly in Summa Theologiae I.21.3\u20134, as his \u201cmain support\u201d for his claims that mercy is \u201cthe greatest attribute of God,\u201d that mercy takes \u201cprecedence over and against justice,\u201d and that \u201cmercy presupposes justice and is its plenitude.\u201d He also refers to II-II.30.4 as concluding that mercy is the summit of the Christian life. I\u2019m not sure that last article helps his cause\u2014St. Thomas is talking there about mercy in humans, not divine mercy, and he says explicitly, following St. Paul, that charity, not mercy is the highest human virtue (caritas, per quam Deo unitur, est potior quam misericordia, per quam defectus proximorum supplet). But maybe he has a different reading.<\/p>\n

In the other passage, St. Thomas does address divine mercy and justice, but he is talking about God\u2019s work towards creation, so those passages aren\u2019t directly relevant to the question of the divine essence considered in itself. I don\u2019t see any claim that mercy is the greatest attribute or is essential to God, nor am I aware of any place where Aquinas asserted that mercy is of God\u2019s essence. Aquinas actually says in I.21.3 that mercy is simply God\u2019s goodness when directed toward creatures and considered from a certain perspective (ratio). That\u2019s hardly an argument for its being central.<\/p>\n

Aquinas does make a number of statements that sound like the view Cardinal Kasper wants to defend: he says in I.21.3\u20134 that \u201cthe work of divine justice always presupposes the work of mercy and is founded upon it,\u201d and that in acting mercifully God is \u201cdoing something more than justice,\u201d for mercy \u201cis the fullness of justice.\u201d In his book, Cardinal Kasper also quotes Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict, and others using similar language about mercy \u201csurpassing\u201d justice. There are many ways in which such language can be given an orthodox construction: If, for example, you take your definition of \u201cjustice\u201d from a law textbook (Aquinas likes the Roman jurist Ulpian) or from ordinary political usage, then there\u2019s no problem in saying God\u2019s mercy surpasses that. But that sort of justice (imperfect, worldly, human) is not a divine perfection, and so can\u2019t be what we mean when we say God is Justice itself. When John Paul II in Dives in Misericordia invokes the saying \u201csumma ius, summa iniuria\u201d (the greatest justice leads to the greatest injustice), which Cardinal Kasper cites twice in the book, he\u2019s not referring to perfect divine justice, but the excesses of human justice absent love. …<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Les gjerne hele diskusjonen her<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

P\u00e5 First Things nettsider leste jeg nettopp en diskusjon om kardinal Kaspers bok «Mercy: The Essence of the Gospel and the Key to Christian Existence». En prest i Boston, Fr. Daniel Patrick Moloney, hadde tidligere i vinter skrevet en anmeldelse av denne boka, som Kasper her svarer p\u00e5 og som Moloney igjen f\u00e5r svare p\u00e5 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-katolsk","category-teologi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aomoi.net\/blogg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aomoi.net\/blogg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aomoi.net\/blogg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aomoi.net\/blogg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aomoi.net\/blogg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9539"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/aomoi.net\/blogg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9540,"href":"https:\/\/aomoi.net\/blogg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9539\/revisions\/9540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aomoi.net\/blogg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aomoi.net\/blogg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aomoi.net\/blogg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}