Grace Poured In
Infused at baptism, increased by the sacraments, lost by mortal sin · Trent’s anathema on grace as “only the favour of God” · the Reformers’ sola gratia.
Rome teaches that salvation is by grace. Trent anathematized anyone who says a man may be justified “by his own works … without the divine grace through Jesus Christ.”1 Protestants who say that Rome teaches salvation by works alone have not read her. Yet the Reformers saw in the Roman doctrine of grace the very thing that kept sinners from peace. As Carl Trueman observes, to say that salvation is by grace “is, in itself, to claim very little at all”; what divides Augustine from Pelagius, and Luther from Rome, “is how grace is understood.”2 For Rome, grace is a supernatural power poured into the soul that enables a person to cooperate with God and merit eternal life. For the Reformers, grace is God’s undeserved favor toward sinners in Christ, and it saves by itself, alone.
Background
The debate began with Pelagius, a fifth-century monk who denied that Adam’s sin corrupted his descendants and taught that man can obey God without inward grace. Augustine opposed him, and his teaching was condemned at Carthage in 418. But as Manuel Pereira notes, “the Church quickly drifted toward a middle ground between Augustine and Pelagius,” voiced by John Cassian: “For when God sees us inclined to will what is good, He meets, guides, and strengthens us.”3 The Second Council of Orange (529) reaffirmed the priority of grace against this semi-Pelagianism, but its canons were largely forgotten in the medieval West, and Augustine himself was known mainly through excerpts in Peter Lombard’s Sentences, cut loose from their context.4
History and Development
The scholastics gave grace a precise definition. Thomas Aquinas described sanctifying grace as a created habit, a supernatural quality infused into the essence of the soul, from which the virtues of faith, hope, and charity flow. Grace became something the soul possesses, can increase, and can lose. The late medieval “modern way” of Gabriel Biel went further. God, Biel taught, had made a pact to give grace to those who facere quod in se est, “do what is in them.” That first effort earned congruent merit; works done in grace earned condign merit, worthy of eternal life.5 Luther was trained in this system and taught it as a young lecturer: “to a man who does what is in him God gives grace without fail.”6
By 1518 he had turned against it. In the Heidelberg Disputation he declared, “The person who believes that he can obtain grace by doing what is in him adds sin to sin so that he becomes doubly guilty” (Thesis 16).7 Rome answered at Trent. In January 1547 the council rejected Biel’s crude Pelagianism, teaching that the beginning of justification comes from God’s prevenient grace “without the existence of any merits on their parts.” But it insisted that sinners are disposed to justification “by freely assenting to, and co-operating with that said grace,” and that man is not “utterly inactive” since “he is also able to reject it.”8 Two months later, on March 3, 1547, the council defined that the sacraments confer grace “through the act performed” (ex opere operato).9
What Rome Teaches
Trent’s canons define the Roman doctrine by what they condemn:
If any one shall say, that men are justified either by the sole imputation of the righteousness of Christ, or by the sole remission of sins, to the exclusion of the grace and the charity which is shed abroad in their hearts by the Holy Ghost, and is inherent in them; or even that the grace, by which we are justified, is only the favour of God; let him be anathema.10 Council of TrentSession VI, Canon XI, 1547
Canon IV condemns anyone who says that the will, moved by God, “nowise co-operates” and “is merely in a passive state,” and canon XXXII condemns anyone who says that the justified man, by his good works, “does not truly merit increase of grace, eternal life, and the attainment of that eternal life.”10
The Catechism of the Catholic Church opens its treatment warmly: “Grace is favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call” (§ 1996). But it defines that help as a gift within: “The grace of Christ is the gratuitous gift that God makes to us of his own life, infused by the Holy Spirit into our soul to heal it of sin and to sanctify it” (§ 1999). Sanctifying grace is “an habitual gift, a stable and supernatural disposition that perfects the soul itself” (§ 2000). It comes through the sacraments, which “are necessary for salvation” (§ 1129); the Roman Catechism calls them “certain wonderful instruments of obtaining justification.”11 And while “no one can merit the initial grace of forgiveness and justification,” the justified “can then merit for ourselves and for others the graces needed for our sanctification, for the increase of grace and charity, and for the attainment of eternal life” (§ 2010; see also § 2027).
Michael Reeves likens this view of grace to “a can of spiritual Red Bull”: a boost that makes us able to become holy enough for heaven. It is salvation by grace, he notes, “but it was absolutely not a theology of salvation by grace alone.”12
The Reformers’ Response
The Reformers changed the meaning of the word. Grace is not first a substance in us but a disposition in God, His free favor toward the undeserving. Melanchthon defined it so in his Loci Communes of 1521, and Trent’s canon XI was aimed squarely at that definition. Luther’s last thesis at Heidelberg became the anthem of the Reformation doctrine:
The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it.13 Martin LutherHeidelberg Disputation, Thesis 28, 1518
Because God’s love creates rather than finds, grace does not wait on our cooperation. In The Bondage of the Will (1525) Luther rejoiced that God “has taken my salvation out of the control of my own will, and put it under the control of His,” so that “I have the comfortable certainty that He is faithful and will not lie to me.”14 The Reformers did not deny that grace renews. The same Spirit who unites us to Christ makes us holy. But they refused to make that renewal the ground of acceptance. In the end, as Reeves puts it, “there is no such ‘thing’ as grace; there is only Christ, who is the blessing of God freely given to us.”15
Rome’s Teaching and Scripture
Grace is favor, not wages. “To the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due. And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness” (Romans 4:4–5). Paul sets grace and merit against each other: “If it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works; otherwise grace would no longer be grace” (Romans 11:6). Trent applied this verse only to the beginning of justification; Paul applies it to the whole.
Eternal life is a gift, not a reward merited. “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23). God “saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began” (2 Timothy 1:9). Canon XXXII says the justified man truly merits eternal life; Paul says it is “the free gift.”
Grace raises the dead. Trent condemns the view that the sinner is “merely passive” in his calling. Scripture says that we were “dead in our trespasses” and that God “made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved” (Ephesians 2:5). The dead do not cooperate in their resurrection. God promised, “I will give you a new heart” (Ezekiel 36:26), and the new heart then believes and obeys.
Grace is found in Christ, not dispensed by rites. We are “justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24), and blessed “in the Beloved” (Ephesians 1:6). Rome reads Romans 5:5, God’s love “poured into our hearts,” as the infusion that justifies, but verse 1 has already said, “since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God.” The pouring out of love is the fruit of justification, not its cause.
Conclusion
The difference between grace and grace alone is the difference between help and rescue. If grace is a power infused to help us become worthy, then the sinner must keep asking whether he has cooperated enough, whether he still possesses grace, and whether his merits will suffice. If grace is God’s free favor in Christ, then the sinner’s whole hope rests outside himself, and the glory goes to God alone. “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9). That is why the Reformers would not surrender one word of sola gratia.
Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version.
