There are various senses in which this word is used in Scripture; but the general idea of it, as it relates to God, is his free favour and love. As it respects men, it implies the happy state of reconciliation and favour with God wherein they stand, and the holy endowments, qualities, or habits of faith, hope, love, &c., which they possess. Divines have distinguished grace into common or general, special or particular. Common grace, if it may be so called, is what all men have; as the light of nature and reason, convictions of conscience, &c., Rom 2:4. 1Ti 4:10. Special grace is that which is peculiar to some people only; such as electing, redeeming, justifying, pardoning, adopting, establishing, and sanctifying grace, Rom 8:30. This special grace is by some distinguished into imputed and inherent: imputed grace consists in the holiness, obedience, and righteousness of Christ, imputed to us for our justification; inherent grace is what is wrought in the heart by the Spirit of God in regeneration.
Grace is also said to be irresistible, efficacious, and victorious; not but that there are in human nature, in the first moments of conviction, some struggles, opposition, or conflict; but by these terms we are to understand, that, in the end, victory declares for the grace of the Gospel. There have been many other distinctions of grace; but as they are of too frivolous a nature, and are now obsolete, they need not a place here. Growth in grace is the progress we make in the divine life. It discovers itself by an increase of spiritual light and knowledge; by our renouncing self, and depending more upon Christ; by growing more spiritual in duties; by being more humble, submissive, and thankful; by rising superior to the corruptions of our nature, and finding the power of sin more weakened in us; by being less attached to the world, and possessing more of a heavenly disposition. M’Laurin’s Essays, essay 3.; Gill’s Body of Div. vol. 1: p. 118.; Doddridge’s Lec., part 8: prop. 139.; Pike and Hayward’s Cases of Conscience; Saurin on 1Co 9:26-27. vol. 4:; Booth’s reign of Grace.
This word hath a variety of meanings in the word of God, as it relates to the divine power, and as it relates to man. When we speak of grace in relation to God, it hath a vast comprehension of meaning. The whole gospel is called the grace of God. And the application of it, in any individual instance of its saving power, is called "the grace of God. By grace ye are saved (saith the apostle, ) through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God." (Eph. 2: 8.) The grace of God is free, like the light, or the dew of heaven. Graceacts from itself to itself; nothing of human power, Or merit, disposing to it, nor of unworthiness keeping from it. So that every thing by Christ is grace; and to suppose any one pre - disposing act in the creature, or any merit in the creature, would altogether alter and destroy the very property of grace. (See Rom. xi. 6.) What is meant by grace in man, means altogether favour and affection. Thus Joseph found grace; that is, favour in the sight of his master. (Gen. x29. 4. So Abraham, Gen. 18: 1 - 3. The case is similar in thecase of Lydia, Acts 16. 15.)
This word is understood in several senses: for beauty, graceful form, and agreeableness of person, Pro 1:9; Pro 3:22. For favour, friendship, kindness, Gen 6:8; Gen 18:3; Rom 11:6; 2Ti 1:9. For pardon, mercy, undeserved remission of offences, Eph 2:5; Col 1:6. For certain gifts of God, which he bestows freely, when, where, and on whom, he pleases; such are the gifts of miracles, prophecy, languages, &c, Rom 15:15; 1Co 15:10; Eph 3:8, &c. For the Gospel dispensation, in contradistinction to that of the law, Rom 6:14; 1Pe 5:12. For a liberal and charitable disposition, 2Co 8:7. For eternal life, or final salvation, 1Pe 1:13. In theological language grace also signifies divine influence upon the soul; and it derives the name from this being the effect of the great grace or favour of God to mankind. Austin defines inward actual grace to be the inspiration of love, which prompts us to practise according to what we know, out of a religious affection and compliance. He says, likewise, that the grace of God is the blessing of God’s sweet influence, whereby we are induced to take pleasure in that which he commands, to desire and to love it; and that if God does not prevent us with this blessing, what he commands, not only is not perfected, but is not so much as begun in us. Without the inward grace of Jesus Christ, man is not able to do the least thing that is good. He stands in need of this grace to begin, continue, and finish all the good he does, or rather, which God does in him and with him, by his grace. This grace is free; it is not due to us: if it were due to us, it would be no more grace; it would be a debt, Rom 11:6; it is in its nature an assistance so powerful and efficacious, that it surmounts the obstinacy of the most rebellious human heart, without destroying human liberty. There is no subject on which Christian doctors have written so largely, as on the several particulars relating to the grace of God. The difficulty consists in reconciling human liberty with the operation of divine grace; the concurrence of man with the influence and assistance of the Almighty. And who is able to set up an accurate boundary between these two things? Who can pretend to know how far the privileges of grace extend over the heart of man, and what that man’s liberty exactly is, who is prevented, enlightened, moved, and attracted by grace?
Favor, mercy. Divine grace is the free and undeserved love and favor of God towards man as a sinner, especially as exhibited in the plan of redemption through Jesus Christ, Joh 1:17 3:16 1Ch 3:24-26 . It is only by the free grace of god that we embrace the offers of mercy, and appropriate to ourselves the blessings graciously purchased by redeeming blood.\par The "GRACE OF GOD," spontaneous, unmerited, self-directed, and almighty, is the source of the whole scheme of redemption, 1Ch 11:6 2Ti 1:9 . With it are united "the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ," who gave himself for sinners; and that of "the Spirit of grace," by whom alone the grace offered by the Father and purchased by the Son is effectually applied. Thus GRACE in man, or all true holiness, 2Pe 3:18, is traced up to the grace of God as its only source; and the gospel of Christ and the work of the spirit-both pure grace—are its only channels of communication. Hence also all the fruits and blessings of the gospel are termed graces, 2Co 8:7 Php 1:7 ; not only regeneration, pardon, enlightenment, sanctification, etc., but miraculous, official, and prophetic gifts, the peculiar traits of Christian character, and everlasting salvation, 1Pe 1:13 . In Gal 5:4, "grace" means God’s plan of salvation by his mercy, not by our works.\par
(Lat. gratia; Gr.
(1.) Physical beauty (grace of form and person) (Pro 1:9; Pro 3:22; Pro 31:30.; Psa 45:2, aetc.).
(2.) Favor, kindness, goodness, benevolence, friendship of God towards men, or of men towards one another (Gen 6:8; Gen 18:3; Gen 19:19; 1Sa 10:2; 2Ti 1:9).
(3.) God’s forgiving mercy, as gratuitous and opposed to merit (Rom 11:6; Eph 2:5; Col 1:6, etc.).
(4.) The Gospel generally, as, contradistinguished from the law (Joh 1:17; Rom 6:14; 1Pe 5:12, etc.).
(5.) Certain gifts of God,. freely bestowed; e.g. miracles, prophecy, tongues, etc. (Rom 15:15; 1Co 15:10; Eph 3:8, etc.).
(6.) Christian virtues; e.g. charity, liberality, holiness, etc. (2Co 8:7; 2Pe 3:18).
(7.) The glory to be revealed, or eternal life (1Pe 1:13). — Wilson. (Bampton Lecture on the Communion of Saints, Oxford, 1851, 8vo) remarks as follows on the scriptural use of the word:
(1) that of the nature of depravity and regeneration, between the orthodox doctrine of the Church and Pelagianism;
(2) that of the relation between grace and free will, between the Calvinists and the Arminians;
(3) that of means (media) of grace, between the Romanists and Puseyites on the one hand and Protestants on the other. For the treatment of the first, SEE PELAGIANISM; on the second, SEE ARMINIANISM; SEE ELECTION; SEE PREDESTINATION; SEE WILL. On the third, SEE SACRAMENTS.
charis (G5485) Grace, Favor
eleos (G1656) (Free) Gift, Mercy
We have often noted how frequently Greek words are glorified and transformed when adopted for Christian use. These words seem to have waited for this adoption to reveal all the rich, deep meanings they contained or might be made to contain. Charis is such a word, and because it refers to the heart or essence of the Greek mind, it will be beneficial to sketch the history of its development. Charis is first of all that property that produces joy in its hearers or beholders. As Plutarch correctly explained, "Nothing is so productive of joy as charis." Charis also referred to the presence of grace or beauty, which were the most joy-inspiring of all qualities for the Greek. Charis often is used this way in the Septuagint (Psa_45:2; Pro_10:32), Apocrypha (Sir_24:16; Sir_40:22, "charm [charis] and beauty"), and New Testament (Luk_4:22; and perhaps Eph_4:29).
Over a period of time, charis ceased to refer to grace and beauty as qualities and came to refer to gracious or beautiful things, acts, thoughts, speech, or persons. It came to refer to grace that embodied and expressed itself in gracious actions toward objects, not to "favor" in the sense of beauty. Thus charis helps in tracing the history of Greek. In classical Greek and in the Septuagint (Est_5:3), charin often was used to mean "to seek, receive, and give favor." Charis also is used in the New Testament to refer to a merely human grace and favor (thus Act_2:47; Act_25:3; 2 Cor. 9:19). Charis also came to refer to the thankfulness that is a response to the favor, a usage found frequently in the New Testament (Luk_17:9; Rom_6:17; 2Co_8:16), though we will not discuss this nuance since we are only discussing charis as it relates to eleos.
Charis received its highest consecration in the New Testament, where its meaning was not changed but ennobled and glorified. Charis was lifted from referring to an earthly benefit to referring to a heavenly one, from signifying the favor, grace, and goodness of man to man, to signifying the favor, grace, and goodness of God to man. In New Testament usage charis denotes the grace of the worthy to the unworthy, of the holy to the sinful. It had never had this meaning before, even in the Greek Old Testament, where the Hebrew word that approximates the meaning of charis in the New Testament is hsd (H2617), which is not translated by charis (except in Est_2:9) but usually by eleos (Gen_24:12; Job_6:14; Dan_1:9; and often).
An anticipation of charis'sglorification, however, can be seen in the ethical terminology of the Greeks. For the Greeks, charis implied a favor that was freely done without claim or expectation of return, a usage that predisposed charis to receiving its new religious emphasis and the dogmatic significance with which it refers to the absolute freeness of the lovingkindness of God to men. In his definition of charis,Aristotle stressed that it is conferred freely with no expectation of return; its only motive is the bounty and generosity of the giver. Aristotle said: "Let charis be that quality by which he who has it is said to render favor [charin] to one who is in need, not in return for anything, nor that anything be given to him who renders it, but that something be given to that one in need." Charis is opposed to misthos. In Rom_11:6 Paul placed charis and erga (G2041) in direct antithesis, which shows that they are mutually exclusive. The essence of charis is that it is unearned and unmerited; indeed, it is demented, as the faithful man will freely acknowledge.
Although charis is related to sins and is the attribute of God that they evoke, God's eleos, the free gift for the forgiveness of sins, is related to the misery that sin brings. God's tender sense of our misery displays itself in his efforts to lessen and entirely remove itefforts that are hindered and defeated only by man's continued perverseness. As Bengel said: "Grace removes guilt, mercy removes misery."
It is worthwhile to consider how charis was used before it came to refer to God's mercy on all his works. Aristotle defined eleos this way: "Let mercy [eleos] be a certain grief for an apparently destructive and painful evil toward one who experienced what was undeserved in respect to what he himself or one of his family might expect to suffer." Aristotle's definition shows how much charis had to be modified before it could be used to refer to the eleos of God. Grief cannot and does not touch God, in whose presence is fullness of joy. Nor does God demand unworthysuffering to move him. Indeed, in a world of sinners there is no absolutely unworthy suffering. God transcends all chance and change and cannot be involved in the misery he beholds. It is not surprising that the Manichaeans and others who desired a God as unlike man as possible protested the attribution of eleos to him. They used this as a weapon in their warfare against the Old Testament, where God is not ashamed to proclaim himself a God of pity and compassion (Psa_78:38; Psa_86:15; and often). The Manichaeans were aided in this by the Latin word misericordia (tender-heartedness); they appealed to its etymology and demanded whether the miserum cor (miserable heart) could be found in God.With respect to this "blemish of a petty mind," as he called it, Seneca observed: "Mercy is a neighbor of misery, for it possesses and draws something from it." Augustine correctly answered that this and all other words used to express human affections required certain modifications to remove the infirmities of human passions before they could be ascribed to God. Such infirmities were accidental; the essentials remained unchanged. Thus Augustine stated: "Likewise concerning mercy, if you would remove the emotion of participating misery for the one you pity, so that there remains a calm benevolence for healing and freeing from misery, a certain recognition of divine mercy is acknowledged." There is always an element of grief in man's pity; John of Damascus listed eleos as one of the four forms of lype (G3077). This is not the case with God's pity. The charis of God, the gift of his free grace that is displayed in the forgiveness of sins, is extended to men as they are guilty, his eleos as they are miserable. The lower creation is the object of God's eleos, inasmuch as it has been affected by man's sin, but his charis is extended to man alone as the only one who needs it or is capable of receiving it.
In the divine mind, and in the order of our salvation as God conceives it, God's eleos precedes his charis. God so loved the world with a pitying love (eleos) that he gave his only begotten Son (charis) that the world through him might be saved (cf. Luk_1:78-79; Eph_2:4). But in the order of the manifestation of that salvation, God's grace precedes his mercy, charis comes before eleos. The same people are the subjects of both, since they are both guilty and miserable, yet the righteousness of God demands that the guilt should be absolved before the misery can be assuaged: only the forgiven may be blessed. God must pardon before he can heal; men must be justified before they can be sanctified. Just as the righteousness of God absolutely requires relating the two terms, so does man's moral constitution, which links misery with guilt and makes the first the inseparable companion of the second. As a result, in each of the apostolic salutations where these words occur, charis precedes eleos, an order that could not have been reversed. In the more usual Pauline salutations, charis precedes eirene (G1515; 1Co_1:3; 2Co_1:2; and often).
The Bible is pre-eminently occupied in setting forth the gracious feelings with which God regards the children of men; it depicts them not in the abstract, but as manifested in action. It also teaches that those who have tasted of God’s grace and love and mercy are bound to exercise the same dispositions towards their fellow-men. They thus become in reality children of God, and are conformed to the nature of Him from whom their new life is drawn.
Grace is the free bestowal of kindness on one who has neither claim up on our bounty, nor adequate compensation to make for it. Throughout the O.T., with the exception of Hos 14:2, where the word rendered ’graciously’ signifies ’goodness’ (
The adverb ’graciously’ is usually rendered
The verbal form is rendered
An act done with any expectation of a return from the object on which it is wrought, or one which is meted out as a matter of justice, recompense, or reward, is not an act of grace. this is specially noted in Rom 11:6; compare also the words of our Lord, ’If ye love them that love you, what grace (A. V. reward, R. V. thank) have you?’ (Luk 6:32-34). So St. Peter says, ’This is grace (A. V. thankworthy, R. V. acceptable), if a man through consciousness of God endure pains, suffering unjustly’ (1Pe 2:19).
In the great proportion of passages in which the word grace is found in the N.T., it signifies the unmerited operation of God in the heart of man, effected through the agency of the Holy Spirit. We have gradually come to speak of grace as an inherent quality in man, just as we talk of gifts; where as it is in reality the communication of Divine goodness by the inworking of the Spirit, and through the medium of Him who is ’full of grace and truth.’
chen,
The unmerited love and favor of God in Christ; hence, free gift
See Cheap grace
Gracious Women
Pro_11:16.
The Grace Of GOD
Joh_1:17; Act_15:10-11; Rom_5:12-21; 1Co_1:4; 1Co_3:10; 1Co_15:9-10; 2Co_8:9; 2Co_12:8-9; Eph_1:3-7; Eph_2:4-9; Eph_3:7-8; 1Ti_1:14; Tit_2:11-12; Tit_3:3-7; Heb_2:9.
The Heart Being Established With Grace
Heb_13:9.
The LORD Being Gracious
Exo_22:20-27; Exo_33:17-19; Exo_34:6; 2Ch_30:9; Neh_9:16-17; Neh_9:31; Job_33:19-33; Psa_86:15; Psa_103:8; Psa_111:4; Psa_116:5; Psa_145:8; Isa_30:18; Joe_2:12-13; Amo_5:15; 1Pe_2:2-3; 1Pe_5:10.
The Reward For Being Under Grace
Rom_6:1-14.
What Is Gracious
Ecc_10:12.
Who Is Fallen From Grace
Gal_5:4-6.
Who The LORD Gives Grace To
Psa_84:11; Pro_3:33-34; 1Co_15:9-10; Eph_3:7-8; Eph_4:1-7; Jam_4:6; 1Pe_5:5.
GRACE (
1. Grace in the Gospels.—In Authorized Version of the Gospels, ‘grace’ occurs only 4 times, once in Lk. (Luk 2:40) and thrice in Jn. (Joh 1:14; Joh 1:16-17). When we turn to the Revised Version NT 1881, OT 1885 , however, and include the marginal readings, we find the word in 4 other Lukan passages. Thrice it is used as a marginal alternative for ‘favour’ or ‘favoured’ (Luk 1:28; Luk 1:30; Luk 2:52), while in one important passage (Luk 4:22) ‘words of grace’ is substituted for ‘gracious words.’ In every case, both in Lk. and Jn., the corresponding Gr. word is
(1) We observe that grace is not a word or idea that is used by the Synoptists generally, St. Luke being the only one who employs it. It is also worthy of notice that the term is not one which the Evangelist ever attributes to Jesus Himself. It is true that he represents Jesus as using
In 4 out of the 5 Lukan passages in which ‘grace’ occurs, it has the ordinary sense of ‘favour.’ Twice the Virgin Mary is declared to have been the object of the Divine favour (Luk 1:28; Luk 1:30). Of Jesus it is said in one passage that the grace (or favour) of God was upon Him (Luk 2:40), and in another that He advanced in favour (or grace) with both God and men (Luk 2:52). The remaining passage (Luk 4:22) is the only Synoptic one which may possibly carry us on to the peculiar Christian significance of the word. When Jesus preached His first sermon in the synagogue at Nazareth, His fellow-townsmen are said to have wondered
(2) When we come to the Fourth Gospel, we find that in the Prologue the word ‘grace,’ no doubt through the Pauline teaching and its consequences, has blossomed fully into those greater meanings with which the Church had become familiar.* [Note: It is worthy of remark that while in the Prologue χάρις appears as a fundamental note of the revelation of Jesus Christ, the word is not used elsewhere in the work. In the rest of his Gospel, as in his Epistles, the author prefers the idea of love (Joh 3:16; Joh 13:1, 1Jn 3:16 and constantly). Like the Synoptists, he never once puts χάρις into the mouth of Jesus, not even in a passage like Joh 7:19; Joh 7:23 (cf. Joh 5:10-18), where Jesus is speaking of His relation to the law of Moses. Does this not go to support the essential historicity of Christ’s teaching as reported in the Fourth Gospel?] In Joh 1:14 the author describes the Incarnate Logos as ‘full of grace and truth’ in His revelation of the Father’s glory. The phrase recalls the frequent OT combination of ‘mercy and truth’ (
In Joh 1:16 the Evangelist says that out of Christ’s fulness we all received, ‘and grace for grace’ (
‘For the law was given by Moses,’ adds the Evangelist; ‘grace and truth came by Jesus Christ’ (Joh 1:17). Here we have the justification of what we said above as to the
2. The grace of Christ in the Pauline Epistles.—In discussing the meaning of grace in the Third and Fourth Gospels, we have been obliged to anticipate in part what has now to be said about the Pauline teaching. For there can be no doubt that in the minds of both Evangelists that teaching was subsumed. It was the use which St. Paul had made of the word that determined its significance for Christianity ever afterwards.
(1) And first we notice that when the Apostle speaks of grace, he is invariably thinking of Jesus Christ in connexion with it. Most frequently it is the grace of God that he names; for God the Father is always recognized as the primal fountain of all the blessings of the Christian salvation, and no greater misrepresentation can be made of St. Paul’s gospel than to describe him as bringing the grace that is in Christ into some kind of opposition to the justice that is in God. Sometimes again
(2) When we ask how St. Paul arrived at this distinctive conception of the Christian gospel as an economy of grace, and of Jesus Christ as the dispenser of grace, the answer undoubtedly is that he owed it to that revelation of the Lord Jesus Himself near the gates of Damascus by which his whole life was suddenly transformed. As a Pharisee he had sought to earn salvation by his zeal for the Law. But everything he had done had proved ineffectual. The commandment which was unto life he found to be unto death (Rom 7:10). Nay, in his endeavours to be exceedingly zealous according to the Law he had been led into the greatest sin of his career—his furious opposition to Jesus Christ, his savage persecution of the saints. Then came the great, astonishing act of spontaneous grace. Christ appeared in person to this bitter enemy, convincing him beyond the possibility of doubt that that Jesus whom he persecuted was no other than the Lord of glory, and at the same time addressing him in those tender and gracious and yet heart-shaking words of reproach and appeal by which Saul the persecutor was turned into the slave of Christ. From that day Christ was to Paul the Lord of grace no less than the Lord of glory. It was the grace of God in Christ, and that grace alone, which had called him and saved and made him what he was (Gal 1:15, 1Co 15:10). And that same grace which had redeemed Paul at the first was with him all along. It guided him in the path of wisdom (1Co 3:10). It enabled him to be more abundant in labours than all others (1Co 15:10). It taught him how to behave himself in the world (2Co 1:12). And when the messenger of Satan came to buffet him, and he thrice besought the Lord that this thing might depart, it was the Lord Himself who said to His servant, ‘My grace is sufficient for thee’ (2Co 12:7-9).
(3) What did St. Paul understand by the grace of Christ, as he used that term in his fully developed teaching? What distinctive contents did he put into this great Christian idea, which he knew in his own experience to be a great Christian fact? (a) We shall perhaps find our best starting-point in a passage in which he sets a certain view of that grace before the Corinthians as one with which his teaching had made them familiar. He regards it as an act of astonishing self-sacrifice. ‘For ye know,’ he writes, ‘the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might become rich’ (2Co 8:9). How much was involved in this self-sacrifice he shows more fully in another Epistle, where he describes it as a self-emptying, on Christ’s part, of His Divine form, the assumption of a lowly human nature, and the rendering of a lifelong obedience even unto the death of the cross (Php 2:5 ff.). It is in this quality of self-sacrifice most of all that the grace of Christ in the NT differs from the mercy of God as revealed in the earlier dispensation. Christ’s grace is not merely the compassion which a great and strong and blessed nature feels for one which is sinful and sorrowful and weak. It is the self-renouncing love which so yearns to save that it surrenders all the wealth that is its own, and welcomes all the poverty that is another’s. It is that love which finds its crowning symbol, as it found its absolute expression, in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. ‘I am poor and needy,’ said a saint of the OT, ‘yet the Lord thinketh upon me’ (Psa 40:17). ‘The Son of God,’ exclaims St. Paul, ‘loved me, and gave himself up for me’ (Gal 2:20).
(b) The absolute freeness of Christ’s grace was another element in the Apostle’s conception. This brings us to his characteristic antithesis between grace and law. We noticed this antithesis already in the Prologue to the Fourth Gospel, but it was St. Paul who first formulated it when he wrote, ‘Ye are not under law, but under grace’ (Rom 6:14). Formerly the Divine blessings were secured by obedience to the Law. Righteousness was the fruit of works, and rewards were reckoned not as of grace, but as of debt (Rom 4:4). But now we are ‘justified freely (
(e) Again, Christ’s grace, in St. Paul’s view of it, was marked by its sin-conquering power. Besides the great antithesis between grace with its free gifts on the one hand, and the Law with its works and debts on the other, we have in the Apostle’s teaching a further antithesis between grace and sin. This antithesis follows of necessity from the former one, for it is the fact of the Law that leads to the imputation of sin (Rom 5:13), and it is the coming in of the Law that causes trespasses to abound (Rom 5:20). But that same grace of Christ which rises superior to the Law shows its power to master the sin which is the transgression of the Law. ‘Where sin abounded, grace did abound more exceedingly’ (ib.). And this superabundance of grace over sin is manifested in two distinct ways: (
(d) Finally, we may say that in the Pauline teaching the grace of Christ, the ‘riches of his grace’ as we have it in Eph. (Eph 1:7), stood for the sum-total of all Christian blessings. There is an abundance and superabundance in grace (Rom 5:17; Rom 5:20, 2Co 4:15), which makes it a stream of endless benefaction flowing from an inexhaustible fountain. Christ’s riches are unsearchable (Eph 3:8), but all that Christ is His grace is, for grace is the most essential quality of His being, while He Himself is the very incarnation of everything we mean by grace. We are called by grace (Gal 1:15), and justified by grace (Rom 3:24), and sanctified by grace (Rom 6:14). Through grace also we obtain eternal comfort and good hope (2Th 2:16), and strength (2Ti 2:1), and liberality (2Co 8:1), and happy songs (Col 3:16). And so it was the great Apostle’s custom, when he would gather up into a single word all his wishes and hopes and prayers for the Churches, to say, ‘The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all’ (2Th 3:18, Rom 16:24; cf. 1Co 16:23 etc.).* [Note: Besides the use of the word ‘grace’ in the Pauline Epp. to designate the spontaneous favour of God to sinners as revealed and mediated by Jesus Christ, it is employed in various derivative senses, such as (Rom 5:2) the state of grace (status gratiae), a particular gift of grace (Eph 4:7), the special grace required for the Apostolic office (Gal 2:8-9, Eph 3:2; Eph 3:7). The discussion of these, however, lies somewhat beyond the scope of this Dictionary.]
3. The grace of Christ in the rest of the NT.—The material here is very much scantier than in the Pauline writings, but it is quite sufficient to show how deeply the great Pauline word had lodged itself in the general Christian mind. It is true that we do not find grace defined as to its nature by those antitheses of law and works and sin which give the Pauline conception its peculiar colouring, but the word is still used to express the Divine favour as revealed in Christ, and those saving blessings of which He is the Mediator. The chief relevant passages in Acts have been referred to already in connexion with the usage of the Third Evangelist. In 1 Peter we find the grace of salvation made to depend on the revelation of Jesus Christ, and associated in particular with the Saviour’s sufferings and the glories that followed them (1Pe 1:9-13). The author of 2 Peter exhorts his readers to ‘grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’ (2Pe 3:18). In Hebrews the fact that Jesus is our great High Priest is urged as the reason why we should draw near with boldness unto the ‘throne of grace’ (Heb 4:14-16); and the treading under foot of the Son of God is regarded as equivalent to doing despite to ‘the Spirit of grace’ (Heb 10:29). As in the Fourth Gospel apart from the Prologue, so in the other Johannine writings, love takes the place held by the idea of grace in the Pauline teaching. But the familiarity of the thought of Christ’s grace is shown by its appearance in the forms of salutation (2Jn 1:3, Rev 1:4-5). And what could be more fitting than that the NT as a whole, of which grace is the distinctive watchword, and over every page of which we might inscribe the words ‘Grace reigns,’ should conclude, in the last sentence of the Apocalypse, with the benediction, ‘The grace of the Lord Jesus be with the saints’ (Rev 22:21)?
Literature.—The Lexx. of Liddell and Scott, Grimm-Thayer, and Cremer, s.v.
J. C. Lambert.
GRACE (from Lat. gratia [= favour,—either received from or shown to another], through the Fr. grace).—Of the three meanings assigned to this word in the Eng. Dict.—(1) ‘pleasingness,’ (2) ‘favour,’ (3) ‘thanks’ (the sense of favour received)—(1) and (2) belong to the Eng. Bible; (3) attaches to the equivalent Gr. charis, where it is rendered ‘thank(s)’ or ‘thankfulness’ (Heb 12:28 RVm
1. Of the sense charm, winsomeness (of person, bearing, speech, etc.)—a usage conspicuous in common Greek, and personified in the Charites, the three Graces of mythology—the prominent instances in the OT are Psa 45:2 (‘Grace is poured on thy lips’) and probably Zec 4:7; add to these Pro 1:9; Pro 3:22; Pro 4:9; Pro 22:11; Pro 31:30 (‘favour’). The same noun occurs in the Heb. of Pro 5:10; Pro 11:16, and Ecc 10:12, Pro 17:8, under the adjectival renderings ‘pleasant,’ ‘gracious,’ ‘precious,’ and in Nah 3:4 (‘well-favoured’). For the NT, ‘grace’ is charm in Luk 4:22, Col 4:8; in Eph 4:28 there may be a play on the double sense of the word. Charm of speech is designated by charis in Sir 20:18; Sir 21:10; Sir 37:21, in the Apocrypha. in Jas 1:11 ‘grace of the fashion’ renders a single Greek word signifying ‘fair-seemingness,’ quite distinct from charis.
2. The OT passages coming under (2) above, employ ‘grace’ chiefly in the idiom ‘to find grace (or favour),’ which is used indifferently of favour in the eyes of J″
3. Christianity first made grace a leading term in the vocabulary of religion. The prominence and emphasis of its use are due to St. Paul, in whose Epp. the word figures twice as often as in all the NT besides. ‘Grace’ is the first word of greeting and the last of farewell in St. Paul’s letters; for him it includes the sum of all blessing that comes from God through Christ: ‘grace’ the source, ‘peace’ the stream. In the Gospels, the Johannine Prologue (vv. 14–17: contrasted with ‘law,’ and co-extensive with ‘truth’) supplies the only example of ‘grace’ used with the Pauline fulness of meaning. This passage, and the Lukan examples in Acts (Act 6:3; Act 11:23; Act 13:43; Act 14:8; Act 15:11; Act 20:24; Act 20:32), with the kindred uses in Heb 1:1-14, 2 Peter., Jude, 2 Jn., Rev., may be set down to the influence of Paulinism on Apostolic speech. There is little in earlier phraseology to explain the supremacy in the NT of this specific term; a new experience demanded a new name. ‘Grace’ designates the principle in God of man’s salvation through Jesus Christ. It is God’s unmerited, unconstrained love towards sinners, revealed and operative in Christ. Tit 2:11-14, interpreted by Rom 5:1 to Rom 6:23, is the text which approaches nearest to a definition; this passage shows how St. Paul derived from God’s grace not only the soul’s reconciliation and new hopes in Christ (Rom 5:1-11), but the whole moral uplifting and rehabilitation of human life through Christianity. St. Paul’s experience in conversion gave him this watchword; the Divine goodness revealed itself to the ‘chief of sinners’ under the aspect of ‘grace’ (1Co 15:9 f., 1Ti 1:13-16). The spontaneity and generosity of God’s love felt in the act of his salvation, the complete setting aside therein of everything legal and conventional (with, possibly, the added connotation of charm of which charis is redolent), marked out this word as describing what St. Paul had proved of Christ’s redemption; under this name he could commend it to the world of sinful men; his ministry ‘testifies the gospel of the grace of God’ (Act 20:24). Essentially, grace stands opposed to sin; it is God’s way of meeting and conquering man’s sin (Rom 5:20 f., Rom 6:1 ff., Rom 6:15 ff.): He thus effects ‘the impossible task of the Law’ (Rom 7:7 to Rom 8:4). The legal discipline had taught St. Paul to understand, by contrast, the value and the operation of the principle of grace; he was able to handle it with effect in the legalist controversy. Grace supplies, in his theology, the one and sufficient means of deliverance from sin, holding objectively the place which faith holds subjectively in man’s salvation (Eph 2:8, Tit 2:11). Formally, and in point of method, grace stands opposed to ‘the law,’ ‘which worketh wrath’ (Rom 3:19-26; Rom 4:15, Gal 2:15-21; Gal 5:4); it supersedes the futile ‘works’ by which the Jew had hoped, in fulfilling the Law, to merit salvation (Rom 4:2-8; Rom 11:6, Gal 2:16-20, Eph 2:8 f.). Grace excludes, therefore, all notion of ‘debt’ as owing from God to men, all thought of earning the Messianic blessings (Rom 4:4) by establishing ‘a righteousness of one’s own’ (Rom 10:3); through it men are ‘justified gratis’ (Rom 3:24) and ‘receive the gift of righteousness’ (Rom 5:17). In twenty-two instances St. Paul writes of ‘the grace of God’ (or ‘his grace’); In fifteen, of ‘the grace of Christ’ (‘the Lord Jesus Christ,’ etc.). Ten of the latter examples belong to salutation-formulæ (so in Rev 22:21), the fullest of these being 2Co 13:14, where ‘the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ’ is referred to ‘the love of God’ as its fountain-head; In the remaining five detached instances the context dictates the combination ‘grace of Christ’ (‘our Lord,’ etc.),—Rom 5:15, 2Co 8:9; 2Co 12:9, Gal 1:6, 1Ti 1:14 (also in 2Pe 3:16). In other NT writings the complement is predominantly ‘of God’; 1Pe 5:10 inverts the expression—‘the God of all grace.’ Once—in 2Th 1:12—grace is referred conjointly to God and Christ. Christ is the expression and vehicle of the grace of the Father, and is completely identified with it (see Joh 1:14; Joh 1:17), so that God’s grace can equally be called Christ’s; but its reference to the latter is strictly personal in such a passage as 2Co 8:9. A real distinction is implied in the remarkable language of Rom 5:15, where, after positing ‘the grace of God’ as the fundamental ground of redemption, St. Paul adds to this ‘the gift in grace, viz. the grace of the one man Jesus Christ,’ who is the counterpart of the sinful and baleful Adam: the generous bounty of the Man towards men, shown by Jesus Christ, served an essential part in human redemption.
Cognate to charis, and charged in various ways with its meaning, is the vb. rendered (RV
There are two occasional secondary uses of ‘grace,’ derived from the above, in the Pauline Epp.: it may denote (a) a gracious endowment or bestowment, God’s grace to men taking shape in some concrete ministry (so Eph 4:7, in view of the following context, and perhaps Gal 2:9; cf. Act 7:10)—for charis in this sense charisma (charism) is St. Paul’s regular term, as in 1Co 12:4 etc.; and (b) a state of grace, God’s grace realized by the recipient (Rom 5:2, 2Ti 2:1).
G. G. Findlay.
(Latin: gratia, favor)
In its widest meaning, the term signifies any gratuitous gift of God to a rational creature, the bestowal of which is motivated by divine benevolence, whether the gift be natural or supernatural, internal or external to the recipient. In its strict and ordinary sense, however, grace is a supernatural gift of God’s beneficence, gratuitously bestowed upon a rational creature (angel or man), for the ultimate purpose of fitting the recipient for life eternal. It may be inward or external, as is explained under these titles: Inward grace is either actual or habitual, according as it consists in a transitory help conferred for the performance of a good act, or in an abiding perfection elevating the recipient in a manner to a divine plane of being. This latter is usually called sanctifying grace, because of its formal effect on the recipient. Its very presence sanctifies him, makes him holy, a child of God, and an heir of heaven. Sanctifying grace is always accompanied by the infused virtues and the gifts of the Holy Ghost, both of which share in the general nature of supernatural grace. They are permanent perfections of the recipient’s spiritual faculties" intellect and will, bearing a somewhat similar relation to sanctifying grace as the natural faculties and their dispositions bear to the soul. Hence by sanctifying grace, and its concomitant gifts, the recipient is in a manner constituted a supernatural nature, a complete radical principle of salutary action. In reference to its origin, a distinction is made between the grace of God and the grace of Christ. All grace comes indeed from God, but since the fall every grace bestowed upon human beings is based on the merits of Christ. Before the fall Adam received grace directly from God, without reference to the Saviour of mankind; and so did the angels whilst they were oh probation. But now we, the children of the fallen Adam, receive grace only through Christ Our Lord. Grace is so necessary that without it we cannot do anything for life eternal. Hence the words of Christ: "Without me you can do nothing" (John 15). See also:
habitual grace
sufficient grace
New Catholic Dictionary
Actual Grace Explains the concept of actual grace, which is defined in the article as "a supernatural help of God for salutary acts granted in consideration of the merits of Christ."Sanctifying Grace Describes the nature and characteristics of sanctifying grace; also treats of "justification", which is the preparation for sanctifying grace.Controversies on Grace Discusses the various grace-related controversies in history, with a focus on the heresies of the Reformers and the Jansenists. Outlines the various Catholic solutions -- including Thomism, Augustinianism, Molinism, Congruism, and Syncretism.Supernatural Adoption Presents one of the most sublime of mysteries -- the gracious divinization of man, which enables him to partake of the inner life of the Most Blessed Trinity.-----------------------------------The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume VICopyright © 1909 by Robert Appleton CompanyOnline Edition Copyright © 2003 by K. KnightNihil Obstat, September 1, 1909. Remy Lafort, CensorImprimatur. +John M. Farley, Archbishop of New York
1. The Word
In the English New Testament the word “grace” is always a translation of (
2. Grace as Power
Naturally, the various meanings of the word were simply taken over from ordinary language by the New Testament writers. And so it is quite illegitimate to try to construct on the basis of all the occurrences of the word a single doctrine that will account for all the various usages. That one word could express both “charm of speech” and “thankfulness for blessings” was doubtless felt to be a mere accident, if it was thought of at all. But none the less, the very elasticity of the word enabled it to receive still another - new and technically Christian - meaning. This seems to have originated in part by fusing together two of the ordinary significances. In the first place, as in (e) above,
3. Grace in Justification
This meaning of
4. Special Uses
A few special uses of the word may be noted. That the special blessing of God on a particular undertaking (Act 14:26; Act 15:40) should be called a “grace” needs no explanation. In Luk 6:32-34, and 1Pe 2:19, 1Pe 2:20,
5. Teaching of Christ
In the Greek Gospels,
6. In the Old Testament
There is no word in Hebrew that can represent all the meanings of
7. Summary
Most of the discussions of the Biblical doctrine of grace have been faulty in narrowing the meaning of “grace” to some special sense, and then endeavoring to force this special sense on all the Biblical passages. For instance, Roman scholars, starting with the meaning of the word in (say) 2Co 12:9, have made Rom 3:24 state that men are justified by the infusion of Divine holiness into them, an interpretation that utterly ruins Paul’s argument. On the other hand, Protestant extremists have tried to reverse the process and have argued that grace cannot mean anything except favor as an attitude, with results that are equally disastrous from the exegetical standpoint. And a confusion has resulted that has prevented men from seeing that most of the controversies about grace are at cross-purposes. A rigid definition is hardly possible, but still a single conception is actually present in almost every case where “grace” is found - the conception that all a Christian has or is, is centered exclusively in God and Christ, and depends utterly on God through Christ. The kingdom of heaven is reserved for those who become as little children, for those who look to their Father in loving confidence for every benefit, whether it be for the pardon so freely given, or for the strength that comes from Him who works in them both to will and to do.
Literature
All the Biblical theologies contain full discussions of the subject; for the New Testament the closest definitions are given by Bernard Weiss. But for the meaning of “grace” in any particular place the commentaries must be consulted, although the student may be warned against discussions that argue too closely from what may seem to be parallel passages.
1. General meaning and presuppositions
(a) Divine prevenience and generosity.-Grace is a theistic idea. It emerges inevitably in the progress of religious thought and practice with the idea of God’s separateness from man (cf. in India, Brahmanism; in Greece, Orphism). It deepens in character and content in the growing sense of separateness, with the concurrent conviction, ever deepening in intensity, of the Divine goodness in sustaining fellowship with man (cf. in Israel, Hebraism, Judaism). It attains perfect form in Christianity, whose Founder exhibits a personal life so dependent on and penetrated by God as to reach absolute maturity simply through the Divine power immanent within it-the ceaseless sense, possession, and operation of the Divine Spirit. Irresistibly the soul’s interior experience of that fellowship postulates a realm of Divine prevenience and generosity. Generally the postulate embraces three features: the priority of God, His self-donation to man, His regard and care for man’s salvation-all making emphatic the givenness of man’s best life, the Divine action inviting his. Grace is thus a purely religious affirmation expressing the soul’s assurance that God’s goodness is the beginning, medium, and end of its life. Here God is not simply a great First Cause: first in time, foremost in space; He is rather the background and dynamic force of man’s inner being, and, for its sake, of all created being; enfolding and comprehending it, giving it its origin, reason of existence, unity, completeness, final end; the envelope of the whole by which the parts do their best and issue in their most fruitful results, so that the soul is a harmony of linked forces,* [Note: Tennyson’s picture of ‘the awful rose of dawn’ in the Vision of Sin.] Divine and human. Here, too, the soul’s blessedness is not simply the gift of God. The soul’s life is through Himself-‘His very self and essence all-Divine.’† [Note: Newman’s hymn: ‘Praise to the Holiest in the height.’] Its various stages, the growing process of His grace, do not depend, nay, disappear when made to depend, on merely mental reference to His acts, or on merely self-originating impulses. Such attachment of the human to the Divine is too superficial. The inadequacy of man’s spirit to work out its own perfection is irremediable. Salvation is only secure in utter and entire dependence on the Divine Life, distinct from man’s, the life which precedes and from which proceeds all his capacity for good: in which, truly, ‘we live and move and have our being.’
(b) The Christian experience.-The apostolic doctrine of grace presupposes the distinctive Christian experience. The NT teaching falls into three groups: Synoptic, Pauline, Johannine. The first reproduces the most immediately and literally faithful picture of Christ’s sayings; the second and third present the earliest impressive developments of His sayings in individual realization, and are rich in exposition and explanation of the subjective apprehension and appropriation of Divine grace. It is the process in man’s activity that is detailed more than the analysis of the attribute in God. Between the two types we are conscious of marked contrasts, not only in their form but in the substance and mode. Along with a deep underlying unity of fundamental thought, it is true to say that the consciousness of the apostles is not identical with the consciousness of Christ. Christ is not repeated in them.‡ [Note: , for an admirable discussion of this point, P. T. Forsyth, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 1909.] The teaching of both is the direct transcript of their spiritual history; but their spiritual constitution is so radically different that their teaching is bound to have radical differences. ‘He spoke as the sinless Son of God; they wrote from the standpoint of regenerated men.’§ [Note: P. Paterson, The Apostles’ Teaching, pt. i.: ‘The Pauline Theology,’ 1903, p. 5.] The principle of sin alters the whole position. The view-points for estimating grace increase. Thus it is that while Christ speaks little, if at all, of grace, it is a central conception of the apostles. Therefore also, while grace is in both, it is ‘in Christ’ in a vitally intimate way such as cannot be predicated of the apostles except ‘through Christ.’ It is ‘the grace of Christ,’ as ‘of God’; not the grace of the apostles, whose it is only ‘by his grace.’
Again we have to note in Christ’s case no trace of that separateness of the human from the Divine Spirit in their communion and inter-operation in the relationship of grace, which is so clear in the case of the apostles, a distinction of which they are so confident that they claim a special illumination and infusion of supernatural light and energy in this experience. Christ’s mediation of grace to them is basic. It differentiates their doctrine not only from Christ’s, but from all ethnic and prophetic ideas. The apostles are neither mere seekers after God, nor simply seers or servants or interpreters of God: they are sons, the bearers of Himself;| [Note: the early Christian term for believers-×ñéóôïöüñïé.] and the immensely richer experience is reflected in the ampler refinement of their idea of grace and its more commanding place in their system. Nor should we fail to observe that the term ‘grace’ denotes a new economy in human history. Primarily it signifies a fresh advance of the human spirit under the impetus of new Divine redemptive force. That fact implies a fresh out-flow of energy from God and a fresh uplift of the world’s life; man is ‘a new creation,’* [Note: 2Co_5:17, Gal_6:15.] the world ‘a new earth’;† [Note: Rev_21:1; Rev_21:5.] there is revealed a new stage in the fulfilment of the eternal purpose. Grace here has cosmic significance. Sin is over-ruled for good in the whole world-order as it is in the individual Christian heart. History, like the soul, is transformed through Christ. The initial and controlling causes of that whole vast change are discovered to the primitive Christian perception in a great surprise of God’s forgiveness, pronounced and imparted by Christ, and made effective for regeneration by a force none other than, not inferior to, His Holy Spirit. Thereby a new era is inaugurated-the dispensation of ‘the gospel of the grace of God.’‡ [Note: Act_20:24.] Grace, then, comprises three specific moments: a supernatural energy of God, a mystical and moral actuation of man, an immanent economy of Spirit.
(c) Essential characteristics.-Grace, accordingly, is erroneously regarded when defined as a substance or force or any sort of static and uniform quantum. It is ‘spirit and life,’ and as such its characteristics are personality, mutuality, individuality. The experience of grace is that of ‘a gracious relationship’§ [Note: art. ‘Personality and Grace,’ v., by J. Oman in Expositor, 8th ser. iii. [1912] 468 ff.] between two persons, in which the proper nature of either in its integrity and autonomy is never at all invaded. The mode is not impersonal or mechanical. The blessing is not an influx so much as response to an influence; a gift yet a task; a mysterious might overpowering, but not with power, rather with persuasion; the renewal of the entire disposition through implicit trust in God’s goodness and by the diligent exercise of the powers of Spirit, ever latent and now let loose, with which He enables and quickens. It is not only an awakening of the moral self into more active freedom: it is first the conscious springing up and growth of a new life, sudden or gradual and wondrous, from immersion in the mystic bath,|| [Note: | Cf. St. Paul’s ‘baptism with Christ’ (Rom_6:4, Col_2:12). Cf. for the idea, art. ‘St. Paul and the Mystery-Religions,’ III., by H. A. A. Kennedy, in Expositor, 8th ser. iv. [1912] 60 ff.] fed by the heavenly streams, whose cleansing power, if before unknown, is not alien, and invests the finite life with the sense of infinite worth and imperishable interest-a sense welcomed as native and as needful for the life’s predestined end. The process is easily intelligible, yet readily liable to misunderstanding. The traditional doctrine, Catholic and Protestant, in its anxiety to safeguard both the mystical and moral constituents of the experience, has tended towards two grave defects-the separation of the two which in reality are one, and the confusion of the mystical with the magical.¶ [Note: This criticism does not apply to mystical piety or evangelical.] Grace then becomes a material quantity, instead of spiritual quality. Psychologically a person is only insomuch as he is living, growing. Man is, as he lives in God; and his capture** [Note: * It is a seizing by God as well as a yielding by man, ‘apprehension’ on both sides (Php_3:12).] and surrender are achieved not in a thing but in a person, and not to a thing but to the One Person, whose right to claim him and renew his life consists precisely in this, that He is Himself absolutely, infinitely, and actually what man is derivatively, finitely, and potentially. Thus the act which binds man to God does so for growth and enhancement of life. All that comes from the living God is worked out by living souls, and is ever living and enlivening; it is as varied and individual as the variety of individuals concerned.
The apostles were Hebraic, and no true Hebrew could misinterpret this. To the Fathers it was so familiar. The covenant-relation was the central truth of their religion. Its very essence was this mutualness of religious communion. Vital godliness hinged on two realities-the Divine Being willing to be gracious, and the no less ready response man must make to Him. For God and man to come together, both must be individually active. To God’s willingness to help, man comes with his willingness to be helped. To God’s desire to forgive, man comes with a penitent mind. By mutual love, the love of God to man meeting the love of man to God, the two are reconciled. Complete surrender (religion) brings with it growing individuality and independence (morality). Herein, further, let us note, rests the explanation of two conspicuous facts in the life of grace-the fact, viz., that the inspiration of grace is neither infallible nor irresistible;* [Note: See art. Perseverance.] and the fact of the splendid out-burst of fresh forms of goodness. The Church in her materialistic moods has been prone to forget both. The Apostolic Age is so rich spiritually just because so sensible of both. ‘We have this treasure in earthen vessels’ is the precise counterpart of the psalmist’s ‘the spirit of man is the candle of the Lord.’ It is never forgotten that while the Divine Life is the milieu of the human, the human is the medium of the Divine, its assimilative capacity adequate only to the present need, not to the ultimate reality;† [Note: a sermon by Phillips Brooks, The Candle of the Lord’ (The Candle of the Lord and Other Sermons, 1881).] while its readiness to receive is never in vain in any event or circumstance or relation of life. The human spirit may appropriate only within limits; but the indefinite variety of limits alone bounds the operation of grace. Grace is all-sufficient; the ‘fruits of the Spirit’ correspond to its plenitude.
2. Specific redemptive content.-In seeking to analyze the contents of grace, we have no lack of material. What grace is to be seen in the spiritual personality it produces. The Apostolic Letters furnish a complete, typical description, of rare intensity and lucidity, of two such personalities of the loftiest order-St. Paul and St. John, and we possess abundant parallel records of Christian sanctity of every later age, to verify our conclusions. The letters are not so much doctrinal systems as a sort of journal intime of soaring, searching spirits: autobiographies of spirit, ‘confessions’ of what the writers saw and heard and knew of ‘the mystery of Christ.’‡ [Note: The recent extensive literature devoted to the study of the apostles’ teaching has for main result to cast into bolder relief the splendid spiritual stature of, next to Christ, the two great figures, St. Paul and St. John.] As Christ ‘witnessed’ of Himself, the apostles ‘witness’ of Christ. Their witness is offered in two distinct types-the predominantly ethical and the predominantly contemplative-neither of which has ever failed to recur constantly in subsequent history. It may therefore be taken as comprehensive and normative. It is, moreover, offered with a minimum reference to the material through which it has operated-the psycho-physical organism and temperament in which the gracious working has developed itself.§ [Note: Hints occur in St. Paul’s writings (Rom_7:24; Rom_12:1, 1Co_9:27, 2Co_13:7; 2Co_13:3; 2Co_12:2).] The scaffolding has been taken down, and the building is disclosed unencumbered with immaterial detail. From that fact we may trust in the apostles,’ balance of mind and credibility, since the very richness of their spiritual vision points to an unusually large Subconscious life of ‘the natural man’ and its insurgent impulses, not easy to subdue, yet which, instead of dominating, is so exquisitely kept in place as to become a chief instrument and material of their life’s worth and works. Regarding our data in this light, what do we find?-At once a continuity of experience and an identity of essential fact.
(a) Supernatural principle of life.-To begin with, we find the life of grace to be constituted by the supernatural principle, and to be an indivisible entity. The life of the believer is by a new birth from above,* [Note: Joh_1:13; Joh_3:3, 2Co_5:17, Gal_6:15, Jam_1:18; 1Pe_1:23, 1Jn_3:9.] translating men into a new position before God and a new disposition to sustain it.† [Note: Joh_14:6, Rom_5:2, Eph_2:5; Eph_2:10; Eph_2:18; Eph_3:12, Php_3:20, Tit_3:5-6, Heb_7:19; Heb_10:19-20.] That is the consentient testimony of the apostles, as of the saints, of the first and of every age.‡ [Note: for the typical instance mediaeval piety-St. Catherine of Genoa-the remarkable delineation in F. von Hügel’s Mystical Element of Religion, 1908: also Luther, Bunyan, etc.; and for Reformation examples, the life story of Luther. See also ‘Studies in Conversion’, by J, Stalker, in Expositor. 7th ser. vii. [1909] 118, 322, 521.] Grace is initially regeneration, the work of God’s Spirit, ‘whereby we are renewed in the whole man and are enabled more and more to die daily unto sin and to live unto righteousness.’§ [Note: Shorter Catechism; cf. Rom_12:2, 2Co_4:18, Eph_4:23, Col_3:10.] Apostolic and saintly biography shows that this condition may have different levels and values in different natures, and even in the same nature at different times. It shows also that the maintenance of that condition means a constant and immense effort, a practically unbroken grace-getting and ever-growing purity in conflict with the insistent lower self. But the characteristic general fact of renewal remains, as something constant and inalienable-in its inferior planes as a fight against the devil; in its higher, a struggle with lower self, stimulated and impelled by God’s illumination working in and upon the soul: constant and inalienable so long as the soul keeps turning towards the Light. For the grace of conversion|| [Note: | It belongs to the life of ‘perseverance.’] is the concomitant of regeneration. Conversion is an act of the soul made possible by the Spirit, and should be as continuous as an act as regeneration is as a work.¶ [Note: Joh_6:44, Act_2:38; Act_3:19; Act_3:26; Act_3:9; Act_11:21; Act_17:30; Act_26:18, 1Th_1:9, Jam_4:3.] This experience, which on one side is regeneration and on the other is conversion, is one which leaves the soul different for ever from what it was before; yet not in such wise as to prevent the soul itself living on, or as to raise the soul above its limitations and failings, so that it will not fall from grace, and will be kept from sin. But the endeavour to keep from fall and lapse is now on a larger and deeper scale, on a higher plane, on a new vantage-ground. It is always attended by the clear consciousness of the effort being ‘in God,’ ‘in Christ,’ and as wholly their work as the soul’s.
This double consciousness of Divine and human action, nevertheless, does not divide the soul. On the contrary, the more deeply it proceeds, the more does the soul wake up and fuse itself into single vital volition to cast off what is inconsistent with its growing self and to mould what remains into better consistency. The soul as the subject of grace is not an automaton but a person, and the two actions are but two moments of one motion whose activities are not juxtaposed but interpenetrate in an organic unity.** [Note: * Cf. 1Co_15:10, 2Co_3:5; 2Co_12:1-12, Eph_3:7; Eph_3:20, Php_2:12-13.] Spirit and spirit can be each within the other†† [Note: † Cf. Rom_8:9.] -a favourite idea of the apostles.‡‡ [Note: ‡ Cf. Rom_6:3; Rom_8:1; Rom_8:9-11; Rom_14:8, 1Co_10:3-4; 1Co_15:31, 2Co_4:10-11; 2Co_13:5; Gal_3:27, Php_1:21.] In St. John the same thought is ever present under the categories of life, light, knowledge, love.§§ [Note: § Joh_4:14; Joh_5:21-29; Joh_6:35; Joh_6:40; Joh_6:44; Joh_10:10; Joh_12:50; Joh_14:10; Joh_15:1; Joh_15:5; Joh_17:3; Joh_17:23, 1Jn_4:10; 1Jn_4:19.] All here comes from, and leads to, a life lived within the conditions of our own existence in willed touch and deliberate union with God.
(b) Blessings of Christ’s work and Person.-Next we find the life of grace to be a progressive process of moral purification and mental enlightenment in mystical union with Christ. It is a growth in grace and in the knowledge of Christ,* [Note: 2Pe_3:18.] in the grace and truth’ that are come by Jesus Christ.† [Note: Joh_1:17.] St. Paul dwells on this grace as ‘righteousness,’‡ [Note: 1Co_15:47.] St. John dwells on it as ‘truth’ (light, knowledge);§ [Note: Joh_1:9; Joh_3:19; Joh_12:36; 1Jn_1:5; 1Jn_1:7; 1Jn_2:8; 1Jn_5:8, Rev_22:5; Rev_22:8, etc.] never, however, in either case on the one as exclusive or separate from the other. To St. Paul Christ is wisdom as well as righteousness; to St. John He is righteousness as well as truth, although in the former instance the point of emphasis is on righteousness, in the latter on light. For this reason, in the Pauline doctrine the description of the source, sphere, and effects of grace is mainly in juridical terms; in the Johannine, in abstract terms-true to the intellectual influences to which they were subject.|| [Note: | We take St. Paul’s mind to be little influenced, the Johannine writings to be much influenced, by Greek thought.] The two accounts necessarily differ, and in important details. The fundamental conceptions are identical. A broad statement of their unity may well precede the elucidation of their divergences. To both types of idea: (1) Christ is not ‘after the flesh,’ but is Spirit or Life.¶ [Note: Joh_14:6; Joh_11:25, 1Co_15:45; 1Co_15:47, 2Co_3:17, 1Jn_1:1-3.] i.e. the Risen and Glorified Christ who had met St. Paul on the way to Damascus, converting him; whom St. John saw in the Vision of Patmos for his comfort; ‘the second Adam,’** [Note: * 1Co_15:45.] ‘the Man, the Lord†† [Note: † Rom_1:17; Rom_10:4, 1Co_1:30, 2Co_5:21, Php_3:9, etc.] from heaven’; ‘the Lord of glory.’‡‡ [Note: ‡ 1Co_2:8, Jam_2:1.] (2) Righteousness and truth are objective realities as well as subjective qualities, powers of God and qualities in man; the righteousness of God and the sanctity of man-the first creative of the second through faith.§§ [Note: § Act_3:16.] (3) Christ is the Mediator of righteousness and truth, both of which He is Himself;|| || [Note: | || Rom_5:18, 2Co_5:21, Php_1:11, 2Pe_1:1, 1Jn_2:27; 1Jn_5:20.] in virtue of which it is said that ‘the grace of God’ is the ‘grace of Christ,’¶¶ [Note: ¶ Christ is its bearer and bringer, having the pleroma; see esp. Colossians 1.] and the life of grace is ‘life in him’ or ‘life in the Spirit.’*** [Note: ** The Spirit of grace.] (4) This Spirit creates or awakes Spirit (ðíåῦìá) in man through the infusion of its supernatural principle in the gift of righteousness and knowledge (= Spirit), so that men are partakers of these as they are in God, in the measure of men.††† [Note: †† Joh_3:7; Joh_5:20; Rom_1:17; Rom_5:17; Rom_3:22, 2Co_5:21, Php_3:9.] The Apostle finds the possibility, on man’s side, of this infusion, in the nature of the human ðíåῦìá,‡‡‡ [Note: ‡‡ The Pauline anthropology is an intricate subject. For a remarkably interesting and clear statement see H. Wheeler Robinson, Christian Doctrine of Man, 1911, pp. 104-138, St. Paul teaches that in the natural ðíåῦìá of man lies the ground of affinity with the Divine ðíåῦìá.] which then becomes the temple of the indwelling Divine ðíåῦìá, and from which as basis proceeds the sanctification of the whole nature. (5) The righteousness and truth (which are Spirit, and Christ), mediated to faith, are mediated by the human life and historic work of Christ: in the Pauline statement, with special relation to His Death and Resurrection; in the Johannine, with reference to the issues for character which His Coming reveals and makes acute. According to the former, the sacrifice of Christ is deliverance from the curse that rests on sin and the alienation from God. By His Resurrection Christ so completely takes possession of the believer’s heart that he feels his life is not so much his own as that of Christ in him-the indwelling Spirit. According to the latter, the eternal life of the pre-existent Logos, manifested in Christ’s historical Person, is in believing experience incorporated through the mystical fellowship* [Note: the discourses in the Upper Room, Parable of the Vine, etc.] of believers with Christ, who are translated from darkness into light, from death to life, from sin and unrighteousness to love.† [Note: John’s three great antitheses.] (6) In the Epistle to the Hebrews (of the Pauline type) the life of grace is seen at work in Christ’s Personal Life, making it clear that the faith in Him that is receptive of grace is the faith of Him; so that what He did and won for men He did and won for Himself as a work of spiritual and moral power exerted in Him, and not simply upon Him. ‘The grace-enabling faith and the faith enabled by grace to overcome sin and destroy death, the Divine and human conspiring to produce and constitute the new righteousness of God in man and man in God, were so met in Jesus that He Himself was the revelation because He was the thing revealed.’‡ [Note: P. DuBose, The Gospel according to Saint Paul, 1907, pp. 85-86.] (7) The appearance of this Life and its blessings of grace are traced to the spontaneous and unmerited beneficence and initiative of God,§ [Note: Joh_1:12; Joh_6:37; Joh_6:40; Rom_5:8; Rom_5:10, Eph_1:4; Eph_2:8, Col_1:6, 1Jn_3:16; 1Jn_4:10.] who in Christ deals with sinful mankind not on the ground of merit or after the mode of Law, as though they were servants or subjects, but solely from His own natural instinct of Holy Love, as a father towards his sons. Hence the gracious will of God is distinctive in the incomparable fullness and excellency of the motives which it comprehends.|| [Note: | 2Co_9:8, Php_4:19, 1Pe_4:10, 1Jn_3:1.] (8) Divine grace consequently underlies every part of the redemptive process, in an imposing array of objective forces.¶ [Note: Rom_8:30.] What are its parts? Here the schemes of saving grace in the two types widely diverge in their most conspicuous features. St. Paul conceives of the subject of grace thus-the sinner is a criminal whom the Righteous Judge will of His clemency save; and his thought moves in a circle of juristic terms, St. John’s conception, on the other hand, is of the world (=human life) as marred by sin in opposition to God, and his notion moves in a series of antitheses reconciled finally by the manifestation of that pre-existent Logos who is the world’s fundamental principle. Under these leading concepts let us classify the respective terms.
(á) The Pauline scheme.-‘Justification’ is the point of stress in the Pauline list, and with it go ‘redemption’ and ‘righteousness’; ‘adoption’ and ‘reconciliation’ go together; sanctification is their result. The source of the whole is in the Divine predestination, and the goal is man’s glorification. The briefest definitions must suffice. Predestination determines on God’s part His purpose of grace. Election expresses the soul’s experience and certainty of saving grace. Justification is the grace which acquits and accepts the sinner as righteous. By justification the redemption purchased by Christ is made effective. Adoption is the grace that removes the obstacles debarring the sinner from fellowship with God, and inspires him with filial trust, freedom, and inheritance. By adoption reconciliation with God is made effective. Sanctification is the issue of these already mentioned in the renewal of the whole man-spirit, soul, body-a renewal leading eventually to resurrection, life, glory. Though the parts may thus be separated in thought, it is to be remembered that they are inseparable in the actual process. The prescience and prevenience of God are not otiose; they are the active origin and basal ground of man’s salvation. Justification in its attitude of faith implies the implicit energy of sanctification. Sanctification is but a ‘continuous justification.’* [Note: The phrase is Flint’s, in Sermons and Addresses. 1899, p. 230-Christ our Righteousness. It is a merit of Ritschl to have broken down the distinction between justification and sanctification. Cf. his chief work, Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung4, 1900.] Imputed righteousness is vital and is imparted. The ‘peace with God’ which these secure is, through a real remission of sins and rescue from God’s wrath, fitted to partake in the ineffable nature of the Spirit of righteousness and truth, who effects salvation, and the bliss of the Eternal Life, of which it is the foretaste and first-fruit.† [Note: Rom_5:1.]
St. Paul gives two ‘sums’ of grace, the one in 1Co_1:30, the other in Rom_8:30, to which elsewhere are added ‘adoption’ and ‘reconciliation’ (Gal_4:5; Gal_4:7, Rom_5:11, 2Co_5:19). We may tabulate thus:
A.|Predestination and Election.|
|Justification|Adoption|Sanctification|
B.|and|and|and|
|Redemption.|Reconciliation.|Righteousness.|
C.|Resurrection and Glory.|
(â) The Johannine scheme.-Eternal Life is the point of stress in the Johannine scheme. It works itself out in a series of three antitheses subsumed under the general and inclusive one of God versus the world, viz. light v. darkness, life v. death, love v. sin=unrighteousness. God and Christ, working in the Pauline scheme as righteousness and wisdom, work here as light, life, love, driving away darkness, death, sin; restoring life to its full completion by this self-revelation of the Divine Life which is at the same time the principle of the world’s real life (Logos). Resurrection here is just fullness of life, the perfection of personality, which we see in Christ (historic), who is the Resurrection and Life, and who communicates it to believers, with self-evidencing force, in the life of love. This new life is attained from the new birth in an experienced succession‡ [Note: W. R. Inge, art. ‘John, Gospel of,’ in DCG i. 885 ff., where, however, the successiveness of the stages is overdrawn, and the equally true simultaneity is obscured.] of ever-deepening intuitions and acts of faith, in a rich immanence of Christ in the believing soul,§ [Note: Too narrow a content is at times given to St. John’s ‘knowledge’: it includes not only the mental part, but all the parts of a man’s self.] and of such a soul in Christ, like that of the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father.|| [Note: | Joh_14:20-21.] We may tabulate thus:
A.Pre-existent Logos and Life.||
|God||Light|Life|Love|
B.|v.|=|v.|v.|v.|
|World.||Darkness.|Death.|Sin.|
C.|Incarnate Logos, principle of Resurrection and Life.|
The broad result of both descriptions of the life of grace is notable. It vindicates the outstanding fact of the Synoptic presentation of Christ: the uniqueness of His self-estimate for salvation. That is the conspicuous fact likewise of apostolic experience: ‘the mystery of Christ now revealed to his holy apostles.’ Unique as His life was, it yet can be the very law of all life. And it is so, when a relation between men and Christ is established of such a nature as links them to Him, so that they abide in Him as in their element. That relation is not adequately expressed as simply ethical harmony. It is rather an interpenetration of essence, in which the soul, gathering up all its faculties in unitary interplay and under His infusion of His Spirit, enters on a progressive sanctification, the illumination of the mind, the cleansing of the Spirit, until the whole nature is filled with the rich gifts of grace. Man in all this is neither depersonalized nor self-deified. He is, indeed, a self-contained system of spiritual operations-a little cosmos. But he is this in order to take his rightful and ordained place in the larger cosmos; for the fundamental energy in his new life is the wider fundamental energy which is co-extensive with creation vitalizing all that lives. So large is God’s gift.* [Note: Romans 8.]
(c) The gift of the Holy Ghost.-We find the life of grace to be consummated under the pre-ordained Divine ideal by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and the hope of glory. The life of grace is the eternal life in its earlier stage. The gift alone corresponding to the requisite grace is the Holy Spirit. It is a gift, the natural and necessary sequel to the process just described.† [Note: This is prominent in Romanist teaching of gratia, infusion of saving energy by the work of the Spirit, just as in Reformed doctrine ‘grace’ is the free favour of God, manifested in justification, which brings with it assurance. St. Paul’s idea comprises both.] For the Spirit is the agent of the operations of grace. If God justifies, adopts, and sanctifies, regenerates and converts, it is but fitting that He take means to make known the fact to them who are subject to these acts of grace: hence in justification the Spirit ‘sheds abroad in our hearts’ the love of God;‡ [Note: Briefly, the Spirit’s ‘manifestation’ is (a) ecstatical, (b) ethical, (c) religious. St. Paul gives the lowest place to (a), the highest to (c) (1 Corinthians 13).] in adoption ‘the Spirit beareth witness with our spirits that we are the children of God.’§ [Note: Rom_8:16-17.] St. John dwells on the importance of the sending of the Spirit.|| [Note: | John 14, 16, etc.] The Spirit is specially the gift of God; His mission the most important of the consequences of Christ’s Exaltation. As Christ grew Himself in grace by the Spirit, so by the Spirit He did His work for man, does His work in man, and mystically abides in man. The Spirit comes not to supply the place of an absent Christ but to bring a spiritually present Christ. He dwells in the believer as that Divine personal influence that brings Christ into the heart and seats Him there. He joins us to Christ, and in Christ we are joined to God-hence the terms ‘Spirit of Christ.’ ‘Spirit of the Son,’ ‘Spirit of Jesus Christ.’ Again, the Spirit does His work not abstractly, but by producing conviction of sin, righteousness, judgment to come, in relation to Christ whom ‘He glorifies.’¶ [Note: Joh_16:13.] He makes the historic facts of the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Christ the vital points of connexion through which He acts; and because it is so, men experience in grace those energies which constitute the Spirit of the Son, the energies of God.
Hence His indwelling manifests itself in the particular dispositions and graces of character** [Note: * St. Paul gives a fine list (Gal_5:22-23); St. John gives its no less fine spirit-love (1Jn_3:1).] which He calls into existence, called ‘the fruits of the Spirit.’ We need not trace the forms in which the spiritual principle unfolds or the spheres within which it operates.†† [Note: † Rom_5:5.] We point only to the infinite variety and individuality of grace in its exhibition here, and to its limitless prospect and horizon. God in Christ through His Spirit is the Maker, the Creator of this new spiritual character.‡‡ [Note: ‡ Eph_2:10, ‘we are His “poem” created.’] It is the production of the original and underived conception of His mind, not an origination in man’s nature nor within its limits. Hence its freshness, pregnancy, fruitfulness, and hopefulness. It is a life to be worked up to (a Divine ideal), not worked out from-and no man can fix the bounds of its splendour.
It finds exercise in the natural virtues, in the spiritual graces, in the service and worship of God, in the religious emotions, and in the realization of the blessings of salvation. It is ‘unto good works,’ with sublime inclusiveness. There is no fixed pattern. God has no set moulds for character to run in: nothing is fixed but the predestined path ‘that God has ordained that we should walk in.’* [Note: Eph_2:10.] The same idea occurs in another fine setting in St. Peter.† [Note: 1Pe_1:3-5.] The greatness of grace lies quite as much in what it is to be as in its present value; in grace there is an inherent, indefinitely prolonged, and enduring propagativeness, another aspect of grace’s resources. In this regard the Spirit is ‘an earnest.’ An earnest implies two things-more to follow, and more of essentially the same kind. The presence of the Spirit in a man’s life speaks to him with assurance of the future, and the blessedness awaiting; and, if it does not enable him to forecast the particulars of that life, yet it does enable him to foretaste its nobleness and bliss. What grace gives here‡ [Note: ‘The Spirit of glory and of God rests upon us now’ (1Pe_4:14).] will he enjoyed there in perfect glory and perfected fullness. Only let us ‘live in the Spirit’ and ‘walk in the Spirit.’§ [Note: The believer who has the Spirit thus has Him as ‘a seal’ (2Co_1:22, Eph_1:13; Eph_4:30).]
3. Historical controversies.-The subject of grace bristles with controversy. Every fresh epoch, bringing larger thought and fresh foci of emphasis, sees the recurrence of perplexities. The Apostolic Age is no exception. Its apologetic protagonist, St. Paul, discusses at least four points-grace in relation to (a) nature, (b) merit, (c) freedom, (d) the Church and sacraments. A brief note on each may fitly close this exposition.
(a) Grace and nature.-The question is in reality part of the perennial problem of nature and the supernatural, and their relation. With the Apostle it offers two facets: (1) the extent to which unregenerate man may be said to be under grace; (2) the conversion of sinful nature by grace. As to the former, there have been in subsequent times two attitudes: (á) man’s unregenerate nature is wholly outside grace, a massa perditionis (St. Augustine), a ‘total depravity’ (Calvin), ‘in bondage’ (Luther); and (â) it is only in part outside the operation of grace; grace includes natural virtue as well as supernatural gifts; in the working of reason and conscience we see the working of God’s Spirit; the question is one of degree. As to the latter there have been also two attitudes: Is sin radical or superficial, imperfection or perversion? If it is a radical perversion, then the converting grace required is above nature, the free gift of God’s mercy; if a superficial imperfection, moral influence by way of education will suffice to eradicate it.
These attitudes in varying guise have divided Christendom through the centuries. On which side may we range the apostles? The question is not easy to answer. They offer no systematic statement. Two considerations are relevant. First, they inherit the national attitude, the cardinal feature of which is the natural affinity of man for God and the easy access of God’s Spirit to man. The Spirit operated specially but also generally; His grace lay in the ordinary as well as in the exceptional facts of moral and religious life. There is no sign that the apostles broke with this point of view (nor did the Patristic age).|| [Note: | The Greek Fathers teach that the Greek philosophers are under the influence of the Holy Spirit.] They make, however, a most significant addition, due to the vital effect of Christ’s Personality in their experience, introducing an absolutely new strain, forming a new centre round which the problem gathers. The inherited theory is left unreconciled with the new focus; the new focus inevitably leads to the profoundest widening of the gulf between nature and grace; and pre-Christian moral and religious life is conceived of as, in its general disposition, evil, abandoned of God, even if, in its higher tendencies, especially in Israel under the Law, it was propaedeutic and led to demands for revelation of grace. In both St. John and St. Paul the conception of sin is immeasurably deepened-its opposition, even enmity, to God and grace starkly expressed.
(b) Grace and merit.-The doctrine of merit in its full technical sense belongs to later days. It is fully developed in mediaeval scholasticism, where it occupies a large place. It was seriously assaulted by the Reformers. It was prepared for by a long anterior development from small beginnings as early as the sub-apostolic teaching.* [Note: In ‘Hermas’ we have the idea of supererogatory merit; and also of some works better pleasing to God than others.] Many factors entered in the course of history to enhance its theological interest. From the sub-apostolic age there begins the emphasis on works. Again, increasingly, Christianity tends to become a new Law, the Christian life its submissive acceptance. Still more, as the Church-consciousness grew, there grew the ecclesiastical idea of redemption as a great system beginning in baptism and ending in resurrection; grace working not spiritually but mechanically in its mode.† [Note: Not the same as the magical working of the impersonal ‘infusion’ of later scholasticism.] The Latin Fathers gave a strong impetus to the idea of merit in the doctrine and discipline of penance. In the Pauline anthropology the idea is present and is opposed in its most rudimentary form. It has a natural basis, which the Apostle takes up, and, dissociating it from the popular view, makes serve as the foundation of his doctrine of faith as the human factor in the renewal of the believing heart. It is not quite true that in Pauline theology man ‘can do nothing’ and ‘needs to do nothing.’ Grace requires man’s co-operation in faith, which is not simply an initial act, but a constant attitude. Faith, or the receptive heart, implicit, humble trust in God, may be all the sinner has to exercise-but it is a vast deal, and has a distinct moral worth.‡ [Note: Heb_11:6.] Its worth, however, is not extended to the good qualities or good works of which it is the precursor; these are credited solely to the grace whose reception faith renders possible.§ [Note: This is all more fully considered under art. Justification.] The Pharisaic doctrine of merit is before the Apostle’s mind; and his arguments emphasize the gospel of absolute grace in reaction from the conception of Law as conditional reward. He labours to prove that the Law by its very nature cannot unite the sinner to Christ or God, union with whom is the proper idea of grace. The true relation is reversed when character and conduct are made pre-conditions of our obtaining Divine grace instead of the joyous result of our having accepted it. Besides, even faith is the gift of God. The Spirit implants. For that express purpose Christ is exalted.|| [Note: | Act_5:1.] These principles reappear in the Reformers’ polemic against the Catholic dogma. ‘Faith unites the soul to Christ.’ That primary fact it is that outcasts all merit, and faith is ‘the gift of God.’
(c) Grace and freedom.-In the life of grace as a human experience God of His own motion takes part. Another problem is: What is the part God takes, and what is man’s? The problem is one of the most difficult. It is continually emerging in the course of human thought, and, like all of these grace problems, has continuously divided Christian loyalty. Two great answers have been given which in their extreme statement are directly contradictory of one another, but modifications of which are continually proposed. The first is known as Pelagianism, according to which the spiritual life of a man is the direct result of his own choice. The second is known as Augustinianism, according to which the spiritual life is necessitated by God’s will. The best-known modification is Semi-pelagianism, which finds prevailing favour in the Roman Catholic teaching, as Augustinianism does in Reformation doctrine. It is a form of Synergism, according to which Divine grace is insufficient till human effort conjoins with it. The three may be thus defined-in the Pelagian view, grace precedes and assists the natural (unregenerate) will; in the Augustinian, grace prepares and assists the regenerate will; in the Semi-pelagian, grace is not operative at all till man’s will (indifferent) brings it into play. The answer to the problem depends on the philosophy of personality adopted.* [Note: A question into which we need not here enter.] What is here relevant is the fact that the apostolic doctrine has nothing of all this in view, however much it may suggest it. These eternal values are carried up to the eternal purpose of God and at the same time the ethical basis of moral responsibility in human freedom is recognized. The Divine control of human life in the whole of its activities is one of the great conceptions of the OT. It is power animated by a gracious and righteous purpose and conditioned by the recognition of human freedom. The OT idea of providence culminates in the NT idea of salvation. The assertion of human freedom runs through both OT and NT, Divine control and human freedom accompanying each other, in harmonious intimacy, regarded in a purely practical manner. Whatever invasion of ‘freedom’ there is, is due to sin; but the evil tendency is never pressed into determinism. The apostles, as later the Fathers, think in this ancestral descent. Religious dependence has for necessary concomitant moral independence; the deeper the dependence (religious) the richer the independence (morality). It is this independence that St. Paul emphasizes in the blessing which he terms ‘the glorious liberty of the sons of God,’ ‘the freedom wherewith Christ sets us free’† [Note: Gal_5:1.] -a primary feature of the new life. Grace is the personal relation to our moral self by which that self attains emancipation. Modern moral theory approves.
(d) Grace and the Church and sacraments.-In apostolic thought the Church is a visible and Divine institution: the Body and Bride of Christ. It is the appropriate social environment for the sanctified soul, wherein at once the gifts of each are available for the profit of all and the spiritual atmosphere conduces to the uplift and sanctity of all. It is specially the ‘fulness of him that filleth all in all,’‡ [Note: Eph_1:23.] i.e. the complement of His purpose, the means by which He accomplishes His loving scheme for man’s salvation. There are two strata of concepts concerning the Church, one lower than the other, which have given some justification for the belief that the apostles describe the Church in two aspects, visible and invisible, realistic and idealistic. Rather they find in the Church as men see it something evident only to spiritual insight. To them the Church’s life and spirit are but the realization and extension of the Spirit of Christ Himself, and the Church possesses, in the midst of its variety of spiritual influence upon its members, a mysterious unity, which is not only the sum-total of all present variations, but something always beyond and far-reaching, inviting and calling and assisting the believing members upward and onward identically after the manner of Christ Himself with the soul living in Him. To magnify the Church is to magnify this Divine Spirit living and working in the Body of Christ.
The ordinances of the Church possess a particular character. They are not subordinate as mere means of influencing the soul: they are means of grace to the soul. They are of co-ordinate importance with the Incarnation, whose effects they continue, with the Atonement, which they commemorate, for they apply the graces of these. This efficacy hangs on the Living Presence of Christ, whose grace they convey; for the effect of sacraments depends on the action of Christ Himself. In them He communicates what He alone can bestow, for the use of which faith and spiritual affections are required, but which they cannot create.* [Note: The point is not how Christ acts upon us by His Divine Humanity in the Church ordinances, whether by transubstantiation or spiritual power, but the fact that He does so act really and truly, whatever the mode.] Through His Spirit’s operation they unite us with Him in the mystical union. The Church in this sense was purchased by Christ’s blood† [Note: Eph_5:25, Tit_2:14.] and is the object of justification.‡ [Note: Ritschl, Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, ii. 217 ff.] Very early the rapidly growing Christian society seized upon this conception and began to relate the grace of Christ through His Spirit to the sacraments as feeders of the mystery of the inner life. The whole ancient Church, e.g., connects the gift of the Spirit with baptism. Yet there is no disposition to regard the rite as magical or mechanical: the spiritual efficacy of the ordinance is due to the Holy Spirit.§ [Note: H. B. Swete, Holy Spirit in the Ancient Church, 1912.] Not the rite ex opere operato, not the minister, but the Spirit dispenses grace; the visible elements and the ministerial action derive their validity from the Spirit alone. Soon pagan and superstitious elements were to enter in, to alter this free spiritual idea of sacramental grace into ‘another grace’ altogether-a lapse from personal to sub-personal categories, in perfect consonance with the new and attractive idea of the Church in its visibility and authority as the exclusive custodian of grace. Externally as that idea was formulated, and false as its rapid development grew to be to the apostolic mind, its opponents too often forget that to the apostolic mind there is no idea so fundamental as the reality of a great spiritual society living by its own truth and life, having its own laws, and these exclusively spiritual. For the life of grace consists not simply in the new life of the soul. It is the new order of the world, a new permanent order of life, a real supernatural constitution unfolding itself in the world, in absolute rupture with the present world, deeper and more comprehensive than the life of believers, having objective substantiality in the Life of God as the Life of Christ itself, whose embodiment on earth it is-an idea whose present and practical realization the modern social necessities imperatively demand.
Literature.-Besides the books referred to in the body of the article , the following will be found useful: the articles ‘Grace’ in Jewish Encyclopedia , Catholic Encyclopedia , and ‘Gnade’ in Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche 3; the Commentaries on Romans, particularly that of Sanday-Headlam in International Critical Commentary , 1902; C, Piepinbring, Jésus et les Apôtres, Paris. 1911; A. E. Garvie, Studies of Paul and his Gospel, London, 1911; J. R. Cohu, St. Paul in the Light of Modern Research, do. 1911; G. Steven, The Psychology of the Christian Soul, do. 1911; W. A. Cornaby, Prayer and the Human Problem, do. 1912; a series of articles by W. M. Ramsay, A. E. Garvie, and H. A. A. Kennedy in the Expositor, 8th ser. iii. [1912], iv. [1912], v. [1913]; the great work of H. J. Holtzmann, Die Neutest. Theologie2, Tübingen. 1911, and an older work of great merit-J. W. Nevin, The Mystical Presence, Philadelphia, 1846.
A. S. Martin.
There is much in the Bible about grace, partly because there is much in the Bible about sin. Grace is the undeserved favour of God. People repeatedly sin and rebel against God, yet God in his grace is still ready to forgive them when they repent (Exo 34:6; Rom 5:20).
Saved by God’s grace
The only way people have ever been forgiven their sin and saved from condemnation is by God’s grace, and they receive this salvation through faith (Eph 2:8). People have never been saved through obeying the law or offering sacrifices (Rom 3:24-26; Gal 3:17-22). (Concerning the purpose of Old Testament regulations given to Israel see COVENANT; LAW; SACRIFICE.)
So much is grace a characteristic of God that the Bible calls him the God of grace (1Pe 5:10; see also LOVE; MERCY). He chooses to save people because of his sovereign grace alone, not because of their good works (Rom 11:6; Eph 1:5-6; see ELECTION). Many of the stories that Jesus told illustrate God’s grace (e.g. Mat 18:23-34; Mat 20:1-16; Luk 7:36-50; Luk 14:16-24; Luk 15:11-32), but Jesus himself is the greatest demonstration of God’s grace (Joh 1:14). He demonstrated that grace not only by the way he lived (Joh 1:17; 2Co 8:9), but particularly by his death on the cross (Rom 3:24-25; Gal 2:21; Heb 2:9).
Through Jesus’ death, God can forgive freely all who repent of their sins and trust in him. More than that, God brings them into a right relationship with himself and declares them righteous (Rom 3:23-24; Rom 4:5; Rom 5:2; 1Co 1:4; Tit 2:11; Tit 3:4-5). (For further discussion on God’s work of grace through the death and resurrection of Jesus see FORGIVENESS; JUSTIFICATION; PROPITIATION; RECONCILIATION.)
God’s grace in the lives of believers
Although salvation is a gift of God’s grace and not a reward for good works, that is no reason for Christians to ignore good works. They are not free to live as they like or sin as they like. God’s grace continues to work in their lives, giving them the inner power to discipline themselves, to do good, to endure suffering and to triumph over temptation (Rom 6:14-15; 2Co 12:9; 2Ti 2:1; Tit 2:11-14; see FREEDOM; GOOD WORKS). They can carry out their Christian service properly only because God in his grace has given them the ability to do so (Rom 12:6).
God exercised his grace towards believers before they were born. That same grace operates continually towards them throughout life and will continue to be active towards them throughout the ages to come (Gal 1:15; Rom 5:2; Rom 5:21; Eph 2:7; 1Ti 1:12-16).
Paul’s practice was to begin and end his letters by speaking of the grace of God, or the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. In this way he indicated that he was always conscious that the believer’s whole life is lived in the atmosphere of God’s grace (Rom 1:7; Rom 16:20; 1Co 1:3; 1Co 16:23; Gal 1:3; Gal 6:18).
The love and kindness that God
shows in his complete willingness to
give people favors he does not owe them
and blessings they don’t deserve.
The undeserved favor, forgiveness, and acceptance we receive from God through our acceptance of Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior (see Ephes. 2:8-9).
—New Believer’s Bible Glossary
Grace is unmerited favor. It is God’s free action for the benefit of His people. It is different than Justice and Mercy. Justice is getting what we deserve. Mercy is not getting what we deserve. Grace is getting what we do not deserve. In grace we get eternal life, something that, quite obviously, we do not deserve. But because of God’s love and kindness manifested in Jesus on the Cross, we receive the great blessing of redemption.
Grace is God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense. Grace rules out all human merit. It is the product of God that is given by God, because of who He is not because of who we are. It is the means of our salvation (Eph 2:8-9). We are no longer under the Law, but under grace (Rom 6:14). (See 1Co 15:11; Rom 5:2; Rom 5:15-20; 2Co 12:9; and 2Co 9:8).