As we've noted in this series, such a view dispenses with soteriological understandings of grace and, consequently, much of the biblical narrative. The entire economy of salvation is set aside.
A related concern here is how intrinsicism seems to undermine our view of grace as a gratuitous, super-added gift. Simply put, if nature already has grace, then grace is no longer a gift that comes to nature as, to borrow from Tolkien, a eucatastrophic surprise. Relatedly, if nature is already graced, then nature has a power unto itself that it can actualize toward its supernatural end. Such a striving would marginalize our need for God's super-added help. We cannot get to God under our own power.
Insofar as de Lubac has been taken to be supportive of intrinsicism, these are the sorts of concerns that have been raised about his "natural desire for the supernatural." And in fact, as described by Jordan Hillebert, many modern readers of de Lubac read him as arguing for intrinsicism. But as Jordan Hillebert argues in his book Henri de Lubac and the Drama of Human Existence, this very influential reading of de Lubac isn't accurate.
According to Hillebert, and I find his analysis convincing, while de Lubac resisted extrinsicist accounts of grace, he did not fold grace wholly into nature. As Hillebert describes it, de Lubac articulated a "paradoxical" account that navigated between the reductive accounts of extrinsicism on the one side and intrinsicism on the other.
At the heart of this paradoxical account regarding the relationship between nature and grace is de Lubac's description of how the "natural desire for the supernatural" is a "longing born of lack." That is, our desire for God is born out of our ontological insufficiency. Human nature cannot, on its own, actualize its desire for its supernatural end. This tracks with how Thomas Aquinas described our longing for God: "The nature that can attain perfect good, although it needs help from without in order to attain it, is of more noble condition than a nature which cannot attain perfect good, but attains some imperfect good, although it need no help from without in order to attain it." That is to say, human nature cannot, on its own, realize its perfect good in God. Due to this ontological lack, human nature needs outside assistance, "help from without," in order for us to attain union with God. But this lack, this need for assistance, doesn't mean human nature is defective. While it needs outside help to achieve its good, human nature is "more noble" than animal natures that can achieve their natural ends without supernatural aid, simply because human destiny in God infinitely surpasses any purely earthly good. But the key point to observe here in Thomas is the notion that humans cannot achieve their perfect end without the participation of grace.
Again, Hillebert points out that, for de Lubac, our desire for God is "a longing born of lack," a restlessness for our supernatural end that we cannot satisfy on our own. As de Lubac observes, "The fact that the nature of spiritual being...is not conceived as an order destined to close in finally upon itself, but [is] in a sense open to an inevitably supernatural end, does not mean that it already has in itself, or as a part of its basis, the smallest positively supernatural element. It does not mean that this nature, 'as nature, and by nature' is elevated." The reason for this, again, is the ontological insufficiency of nature to realize a supernatural end. As de Lubac puts it, between nature and grace "the distance is as great, the difference is as radical, as that between non-being and being." While human nature is marked by the supernatural, this mark is, in its essence, a capacity for receptivity within nature rather than a power or potency. Nature is naturally ordered to and open to the supernatural, but it has to await the gift of grace.
In short, while we have a natural desire for the supernatural, it is a longing born of lack.
