Grace (religion)

Liberal Protestant thought in the 19th and early 20th centuries developed an optimistic and almost Pelagian view of human nature. After the disillusionment of World War I and its aftermath, however, the most influential Protestant theologians, including Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul Tillich, sought to recover a more Augustinian doctrine of sin and grace. This neoorthodox movement did not, however, revive Augustine's idea of the transmission of sin by procreation, and it retained the traditional Protestant emphasis on the personal quality of grace without denying the centrality of sacraments. The work of certain 20th-century Roman Catholic theologians, such as Karl Rahner and Hans Küng, moves in similar directions, under the influence of existentialism.