REJECTION AND ACCEPTANCE OF GOD’S SELF-COMMUNICATION IN GRACE

By Fr. Dr. Charles Ndhlovu – Mkhalirachiuta

Emmaus productions

Fr. Charles Ndhlovu, PhD, studied and graduated with a Doctorate in Social Communication specializing in Communication Theology at the Pontifical University of Salesianum in Rome – Italy. Some of his publications can be found on his website: charlesndhlovu.wordpress.com; he is also on Youtube (Fr. Charles Ndhlovu – Mkhalirachiuta). He is the founder and proprietor of Emmaus. In this paper, he has looked at the concept of freedom as a context in which God invites the human person to accept or reject his offer of Grace.

Sin “is opposition to the holy will of the eternal God; it is opposition to the love which he offers us and in which he wants to give and communicate himself more and more, so that we might participate, or increase our participation, ‘in the divine nature.”^[1]

When someone sins, he or she sins against God, against one’s own nature and against the invitation to a life of grace that he has been offered. Sin is an offence against the Church which is a holy communion.^[2]

There is the ecclesiological dimension of sin which refers to the fact that when one sins, he or she “offends against her Spirit, against her mission and against the unquestioning obedience he owes to her. He for his part renders the Church herself sinful in a certain regard. This ecclesiological aspect of sin can already be clearly perceived in Holy Scripture [...].”^[3]

Through God’s self-communication in Christ’s salvific mystery, our sins are forgiven. We cannot absolve our own sins, probably because, sin is not a private affair. If sin was a private affair, we would be able to absolve our own sins. The problem today however is that there is a general lack of consciousness for sin and the need for God’s mercy and pardon. But “it cannot be denied that man is responsible, that he is accountable, that at least in certain dimensions of his existence he has the experience of being able to come and of actually coming into conflict with himself and his original self-understanding.”^[4]

We, however, experience the need to accept God and his self-communication because of the transcendental experience which makes us realise our fragility, finiteness and our own ambiguity. We experience ambiguity and dilemma on what we are and what we are supposed to be. We also experience evil and guilt in a much broader perspective of the unhappy and

unpleasant condition of so many people in the world today. What is needed now is to be attentive to the voice of our conscience so that we can be able to interpret the signs of the times.^[5]

There is a circle between our experience of guilt and forgiveness. It’s only when we have been forgiven that we can know the guilt from which we have been forgiven. It only then that we come to understand that guilt demolishes each one of us and that guilt has a false nature. In fact, “the ultimate and radical nature of guilt itself lies in the fact that it takes place in the face of a loving and self-communicating God, and only when a person knows this and makes this truth his own can he understand the depths of guilt.”^[6]

We can thus see here that the freedom and responsibility of the human being is a very important part of human existence. In fact, “freedom of choice (or of decision), is a “basic condition of the person [...].^[7] The freedom of humans is not pseudo-empirical. This means that human freedom is not only limited to making choices of what they want to do and what they do not want to do but it has to do with human beings as subjects that are responsible for themselves. “In real freedom the subject always intends himself, understands, and posits himself.”^[8]

There is always temptation to interpret freedom as the capacity of the person to decide about the totality of themselves and in this case freedom is not subjective physiological, biological, historical, or exterior temporality but it concerns the whole person. The problem with this understanding of freedom is that it sounds as if it is something that is pre-corporeal, pre-historic, and already decided. The right understanding however is that one exercises freedom in relation to herself or himself, and the aim of freedom is that it helps in the self- actualisation of the subject in the totality of history. The human person is free when he or she can do something that is final and definitive to realise their irrevocable self. It is the capability of the person to choose what is eternal and ineradicable and this is achieved through transcendental freedom in which humans come to realise that which is final.^[9] Freedom is the “affirmative or negative attitude towards the finite goods (or those conceived as finite) in their divinely caused order, in virtue of the necessary relation of the spirit to the absolute which supports freedom, freedom is in the last analysis the possibility, through and beyond the finite, of taking up a position towards God himself.”^[10] “Freedom is, so to speak, the capacity for establishing something necessary, something which lasts, something final and definitive, and wherever there is no freedom, there is always just something which by its nature goes on generating itself, and becoming something else and being reduced to something else in its antecedents and consequences. Freedom is the event of something eternal.”^[11]

In addition, freedom is the “self-achievement of the person, using a finite material, before the infinite God. It is, therefore, a datum of theology, of theological anthropology. For without freedom man could not stand before God as a responsible agent, in dialogue and partnership with God; without it he could not be the subject of guilt before God nor of proffered and accepted redemption and pardon.”^[12]

This means that humans in freedom are free to respond affirmatively or negatively to God’s call. Through this process of freedom, humans are free to appropriate and realize themselves through the daily decisions that they make. This capacity of freedom is part of the dignity of the human person and total lack of it would mean the degradation of the person. That is why, it is important to have an area of freedom in areas of the economic life, cultural values, and personal life in general.^[13]

That is why, there are organs in the state and Church which are important in the education of the individual in the proper use of freedom. Otherwise, there are influences within the society which can lead us to be “swept away involuntarily (before any action of his freedom takes place) to do actions which either lack freedom and responsibility completely or possess them only to a diminished degree, and which then become an obstacle to and restriction of the possibilities of freedom.”^[14]

Freedom is transcendental. But there are some categorical objectifications of freedom which take place in the categorical, in which, the human person performs and undertakes the event of freedom. Transcendental freedom does not remain isolated but it finds expression in objectified freedom of the daily-lived life of the person. It is a freedom lived in the context of the world.^[15]

The freedom of the human person is the capacity for something that has final and definitive implications and all this finds actualisation in a person’s free “yes” or “no” to God,

as the source of transcendence. There is a connection between freedom for something valid and definitive and the freedom to accept or reject God. Human beings are free because of the offer of absolute transcendentality to which they can respond with a “yes” or a “no.”

Without God, human beings would be locked up in themselves definitively and intrinsically and therefore would not be free. Human freedom is mediated in history and the human person in freedom can accept or reject the call to God’s self-communication in Grace.^[16]This is the connection between sin, rejection and acceptance. Human beings are free to accept God’s invitation to a life of Grace. One is free to accept God’s self-communication but one is also free to reject this offer. God gives the human person the Grace to accept and choose properly – namely to accept God’s self-communication.

^[1] Karl RAHNER, Forgotten truths concerning penance, in Karl RAHNER, “Theological investigations, Volume 2: Man in the Church,” New York, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1963, 136.

^[2] Cf. RAHNER, Forgotten truths concerning penance, 137.

^[3] RAHNER, Forgotten truths concerning penance, 136-137.

^[4] RAHNER, Foundations of Christian faith, 91.

^[5] Cf. RAHNER, Foundations of Christian faith, 93..

^[6] RAHNER, Foundations of Christian faith, 93.

^[7] RAHNER, The dignity and freedom of man, 246.

^[8] RAHNER, Foundations of Christian faith, 94.

^[9] Cf. RAHNER, Foundations of Christian faith, 94-96.

^[10] RAHNER, The dignity and freedom of man, 246.

^[11] RAHNER, Foundations of Christian faith, 96.

^[12] RAHNER, The dignity and freedom of man, 246-247.

^[13] RAHNER, The dignity and freedom of man, 248-249.