Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics – serie

The nineteenth-century German dogmatician Matthias Joseph Schee­ben here turns to an in-depth study of Christ's redemptive deed. He begins this work with an exploration of the prerequisites for the In­carnate Word's redemptive efficacy - his personal/capital grace and resultant perfections of intellect and will.Scheeben then examines the various states or mysteries of Christ's life as well as the efficacy proper to his redemptive deed, by which the God-man restores and superabundantly perfects the supernatural or­der ruined by the first human sin.In this connection, Scheeben also includes his Mariology in this volume precisely insofar as Mary is the mother of the Redeemer. Located here in his Dogmatics, the figure of Mary thus serves as the point of departure for his planned treatment of the grace of Christ in its ecclesial mediation.

Matthias Joseph Scheeben here delineates who and what Jesus Christ is as the Incarnate Son of God in Person. With characteristic brilliance, Scheeben sets forth in this first half-volume the essential nature and attributes proper to Christ as the hypostatic union of God and man.Beginning with the Scriptural and traditional foundations, he elucidates the Catholic Church's traditional teaching on Christ's unity of Person in two natures as they were developed in response to the main Christological heresies of the early Christian centuries. On this basis, he then delves into the speculative depths of the hypostatic union itself as well as the attributes of the God-man that arise from this union.

Volume 2 of Matthias Joseph Scheeben's Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics treats the Doctrine about God. It consists of perennially important topics such as the natural knowledge of God, analogical discourse about God, the divine perfections, and the trinitarian nature of God. Especially notable is Scheeben's identification of God's absolute beauty as a discrete attribute.His treatment of the divine life (intellect and will) is similarly rewarding and serves as the transition point to the Trinity of persons. Scheeben's treatise on the Trinity begins with an overview of Magisterial definitions as well as a survey of the development of the doctrine of the Trinity in the Ante-Nicene Patristic tradition. What follows is another noteworthy aspect of Scheeben's theology proper. His careful treatment of the Spirit's procession enables a fruitful attempt at reconciling the divergent Western and Eastern Patristic conceptions thereof that underlie later disputes about the Filioque.

Building on Book Five's considerations of the person and redemptive deed of Christ, Book Six of Matthias Joseph Scheeben's Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics offers his account of the subjective realization of salvation through Christ's bestowal of grace. This stands as Scheeben's fullest treatment of the much-contested notion of actual grace and the issues related to the sixteenth-century de auxiliis controversy concerning predestination and how God moves the human will.Progressing in three parts, Book Six commences with an analysis of the concept of actual grace, establishing how God can move the will without compelling it and providing a richly developed context for understanding God's motive influence. The second part examines three principal heresies concerning grace - namely, Pelagianism, Semi-Pelagianism, and the Reformation doctrines - using these as a basis for evaluating the Catholic dogmas about grace that were articulated against them. Finally, in the third part Scheeben explores the necessity of grace in light of man's fallen condition and his supernatural end.

Book 3 of Matthias Joseph Scheeben's Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics contains his fullest treatments of the divine act of creation and of the created order as a whole, inclusive of both the visible cosmos and the invisible angelic hierarchies. Especially notable is his richly developed account of the nature of the human person as made in the image and likeness of God.It is in Book 3 that Scheeben provides his most detailed study of grace as the supernatural, considered both in the abstract in its nature and in its actual instantiation in the human and angelic worlds. Scheeben carefully defines and lays out his distinctive doctrine of grace as a "supernature" that elevates and divinizes human beings so that they can partake of the Triune God in the beatific vision as their supernatural final end. He offers a detailed treatment of the relation of grace to created freedom, he clarifies the nature of human receptivity for grace as obediential potency, and he gives his most sustained rendering of man's natural desire to see God.This book also contains Scheeben's fullest account of his controversial teaching on the substantial indwelling of the Holy Spirit within the just.

Building on Book 3 of the Dogmatics's consideration of creation and grace and anticipating Book 5's treatment of salvation, Book 4 of Scheeben's Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics presents his theory of sin and its concrete realizations among the angelic order and humankind. Notable is his stress on the character of original sin as an offense against the supernatural order, that is, against our adoptive sonship - and so as the biblical mysterium iniquitatis. Also noteworthy is the nuanced way he handles the relation between sin as a privation of grace and the wounding of human nature, original sin's hereditary character, and the mysterious nature of angelic sin.