The Prior Grace: Before Every Tradition
Combined Hardbound Volume — All Seven CGA Booklets — Theology
All seven Cosmological Grace Anchor booklets assembled in one volume, with a new Introduction and a synthesis chapter called “One Prior Reality” that does what no individual booklet could do alone: show the single root beneath six different wounds, and the single prior grace that every tradition was approaching from different terrain.
The volume’s three-part structure moves from Foundation to Traditions to Convergence. The Foundation section establishes the CGA thesis and the prior grace as the theological ground. The Traditions section addresses each of the six — Reformed, Progressive, Pentecostal, Baptist, Catholic, Methodist — in the same four-movement form: naming the wound, returning to the text, making the prior grace visible, offering a threshold. The Convergence section is new writing: the synthesis chapter that reads all six traditions together and shows what they have in common beneath what divides them.
What the synthesis chapter shows: the Reformed tradition’s unconditional election and the Pentecostal tradition’s immediate presence and the Catholic tradition’s sacramental embodiment and the Baptist tradition’s centrality of the cross and the Methodist tradition’s prevenient grace and the Progressive tradition’s God of justice — all of them were pointing at the same prior reality from different directions. The directions were different. The reality was the same. The prior grace was never the property of any tradition. It was there before all of them. It will be there after all of them.
The Prior Grace is written for the reader who wants the complete argument, for pastors and ministry workers who want a single volume addressing the full spectrum of what their congregations carry, and for anyone who has been inside any Christian tradition and wants to understand what every tradition was always, at its best, reaching toward. It is the fullest statement of the CGA thesis in one place.
The foundational chapter establishes the theological ground. The six tradition-specific chapters address six distinct terrains. And the synthesis chapter, One Prior Reality, does what no individual chapter can: shows that underneath six different frameworks, six different wounds, and six different accounts of where grace was kept or withheld — there is one common root, and one prior reality every tradition was always pointing toward.
The prior grace was given before the ages began. Before every confession, every sacrament, every transaction, every method. It was there before your tradition arrived to describe it. It is there still.