Accountable Animal

de Brendan Case, Brian Brock, Susan F. Parsons

"The Accountable Animal: Justice, Justification and Judgement offers a theological meditation on the human being as an accountable animal. Brendan Case introduces the idea of accountability, not merely as a structural feature of human institutions, but as a disposition to submit to rightly-constituted authority, whether divine or human. He relates this conception of accountability to the key themes of 'justice, justification, and judgment'. The book's central theme is that natural justice and God's impartial judgment of humanity are not in tension with salvation by grace, which, as Thomas Aquinas insisted, 'does not destroy nature, but perfects it' (Summa Theologiae 1.1.8 ad 2). Nor are they in tension with St. Paul's insistence that God 'justifies the ungodly' (Rom. 4:5), if it is also true that only 'the doers of the Law will be justified' (Rom. 2:13). Case proposes that our natural calling to mutual accountability as moral and rational animals is not overturned but amplified in our supernatural calling to friendship with God, as is clear from the teaching, pervasive in the Old and New Testaments alike, that God's judgment is according to one's works (cf. Ps. 62:12; Rom. 2:6, 13). It is true that these works are made possible only by the gracious mediation of Christ and the church, but that grace does not eliminate each person's ultimate accountability to God for the ultimate shape of her life, even if only after death"--