Earlier this morning I listened to Credo Magazine’s podcast in which Matthew Barrett interviews Louis Markos, the author of From Plato to Christ, among other books. You can listen to that podcast here. They were discussing, of course, the role and impact that Plato had, and continues to have on the development of Christian theology. Barrett often likes to 
refer to the Great Tradition of the Church, which of course is really more of a Latin way to think about things theological and ecclesial (the Greeks have the Consensus Patrum, ha!) I of course repudiate the general prolegomenon, or theological methodology that broadly funds said Tradition. The following were some thoughts I ticked off, in response to the podcast, while at work, in a moment of free-time, and then posted them on my Twitter and Facebook accounts, respectively. I thought I’d share that here too.
One problem with the so-called Great Tradition of the Church, is its methodological direction; insofar that it offers one. It allows the shadowland of the philosophers—the accidents of history as given—to lead to the being of all reality in Jesus Christ. It supposes that there are vestigial logoi of God generally diffuse in the created order, and that profane humanity itself has the capacity to see it by way of an abstract and methodologically speculative reasoning. It then allows this framework to shape our respective knowledge of God when we are confronted with God’s “special revelation.” As if the heavens themselves declare the glory of the LORD in a way that is intellectually discernible outwith God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. In other words, an actus purus (pure being) notion of godness (as the Great Trad is supposedly funded by vis-à-vis a doctrine of God) presupposes upon the reality of a natura pura (pure nature) wherein grace and nature are asymmetrically independent domains of God’s greater reality. The result is that nature simply is awaiting, even as it supplies the preparation and mediation, of its own perfection as God comes to it in the grace of Jesus Christ. And yet nowhere in canonical reality do we see this supposition operative. ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and earth’ … and in the beginning the seed of the women would crush the serpent’s head while bruising its heel. The canonical reality, just as creational reality in general, has always already been suffused by the concreto of God’s Grace. His first Word of creation was from and for the Word who was with God, and was God. As such the Great Tradition allows the creation itself to predicate God’s perfection, as if the instrument of nature’s perfection; instead of understanding that God has always already been creation’s inner reality just as sure “as the world was created so that Christ might be born.”[1]
I need to refine my thinking a bit further, but all-in-all I think what I have posited above represents a type of critique I would make of the Great Tradition’s grace-nature dualism whereby we get things like the analogia entis, among other loci.
[1] I stole the quote “the world was created so that Christ might be born,” from Scottish theologian, David Fergusson. I often refer to this quote, and thought it was a nice way to close out my previous thoughts leading into it.