«The hypertraditionalists romanticize and idealize a past that never was for the sake of terrorizing the present as they seek a field of wheat without tares. They freeze-frame postmedieval Catholicism, and especially Tridentine Catholicism, and hold it up as the only "true" form of the Church; then, with anachronistic fervor, they read the early Fathers through the lens of scholastic categories rather than the other way around and accuse ressourcement thinkers of introducing novelties as they seek to interpret the tradition nonanachronistically. Furthermore, they separate nature and grace into principles extrinsic to each other in order to preserve the idea that God owes us precisely nothing, all the while ignoring the fact that God actually wants to give us—all of us—everything. Theirs is a misinterpreted and hypertrophic Pauline world of undeserved grace that causes them to posit the absurd idea that God did not create us as constitutively oriented to divine life as our natural final end and that, therefore, salvation is some kind of "add on" to our nature that we can, in theory, live happily without (limbo) […]
The point is this: resourcement theology, through a retrieval of Scripture and the Church Fathers (a return to the sources), sought a more expansive view of the relationship between nature and grace as well as the related issue of the relationship between the Church and the world. And it did so precisely in order to widen the Church's eschatological horizon beyond the narrow confines of the anathematizing of errors (necessary as those were) and into a vision of the Church as the sacramental locus of a cosmic liturgy marked by our participation in Christ's vicarious suffering for the life of the world. Ours is a mediatory and intercessory vocation, and the resourcement theologians returned to the Fathers and their notion of theosis for a more wholistic understanding of the corporate and cosmic nature of what it means to be saved.»
— Larry Chapp: Confession of a Catholic Worker
