Grace: What It Is and What It Does
If you took your parish’s catechism classes when
you were growing up, you at least remember that there are two kinds of
grace, sanctifying and actual. That may be all you recall. The names being
so similar, you might have the impression sanctifying grace is nearly identical
to actual grace. Not so.
Sanctifying grace stays in the soul. It’s what
makes the soul holy; it gives the soul supernatural life. More properly,
it is supernatural life.
Actual grace, by contrast, is a supernatural push
or encouragement. It’s transient. It doesn’t live in the soul, but acts
on the soul from the outside, so to speak. It’s a supernatural kick in
the pants. It gets the will and intellect moving so we can seek out and
keep sanctifying grace.
Imagine yourself transported instantaneously to
the bottom of the ocean. What’s the very first thing you’ll do? That’s
right: die. You’d die because you aren’t equipped to live underwater. You
don’t have the right breathing apparatus.
If you want to live in the deep blue sea, you need
equipment you aren’t provided with naturally; you need something that will
elevate you above your nature, something super- (that is, "above") natural,
such as oxygen tanks.
It’s much the same with your soul. In its natural
state, it isn’t fit for heaven. It doesn’t have the right equipment, and
if you die with your soul in its natural state, heaven won’t be for you.
What you need to live there is supernatural life, not just natural life.
That supernatural life is called sanctifying grace. The reason you need
sanctifying grace to be able to live in heaven is because you will be in
perfect and absolute union with God, the source of all life (cf. Gal. 2:19,
1 Pet. 3:18).
If sanctifying grace dwells in your soul when you
die, then you have the equipment you need, and you can live in heaven (though
you may need to be purified first in purgatory; cf. 1 Cor. 3:12–16). If
it doesn’t dwell in your soul when you die—in other words, if your soul
is spiritually dead by being in the state of mortal sin (Gal. 5:19-21)—
you cannot live in heaven. You then have to face an eternity of spiritual
death: the utter separation of your spirit from God (Eph. 2:1, 2:5, 4:18).
The worst part of this eternal separation will be that you yourself would
have caused it to be that way.
Spiritual Suicide
You can obtain supernatural life by yielding to
actual graces you receive. God keeps giving you these divine pushes, and
all you have to do is go along.
For instance, he moves you to repentance, and if
you take the hint you can find yourself in the
confessional, where the guilt for your sins is
remitted (John 20:21–23). Through the sacrament of penance, through your
reconciliation to God, you receive sanctifying grace. But you can lose
it again by sinning mortally (1 John 5:16–17).
Keep that word in mind: mortal. It means death.
Mortal sins are deadly sins because they kill off this supernatural life,
this sanctifying grace. Mortal sins can’t coexist with the supernatural
life, because by their nature such sins are saying "No" to God, while sanctifying
grace would be saying "Yes."
Venial sins don’t destroy supernatural life, and
they don’t even lessen it. Mortal sins destroy it outright. The trouble
with venial sins is that they weaken us, making us more vulnerable to mortal
sins.
When you lose supernatural life, there’s nothing
you can do on your own to regain it. You’re reduced to the merely natural
life again, and no natural act can merit a supernatural reward. You can
merit a supernatural reward only by being made able to act above your nature,
which you can do only if you have help—grace.
To regain supernatural life, you have to receive
actual graces from God. Think of these as helping graces. Such graces differ
from sanctifying grace in that they aren’t a quality of the soul and don’t
abide in it. Rather, actual graces enable the soul to perform some supernatural
act, such as an act of faith or repentance. If the soul responds to actual
grace and makes the appropriate supernatural act, it again receives supernatural
life.
Really Cleansed
Sanctifying grace implies a real transformation
of the soul. Recall that most of the Protestant Reformers denied that a
real transformation takes place. They said God doesn’t actually wipe away
our sins. Our souls don’t become spotless and holy in themselves. Instead,
they remain corrupted, sinful, full of sin. God merely throws a cloak over
them and treats them as if they were spotless, knowing all the while that
they’re not.
But that isn’t the Catholic view. We believe souls
really are cleansed by an infusion of the supernatural life. Paul speaks
of us as "a new creation" (2 Cor. 5:17), "created after the likeness of
God in true righteousness and holiness" (Eph. 4:24). Of course, we’re still
subject to temptations to sin; we still suffer the effects of Adam’s Fall
in that sense (what theologians call "concupiscence"); but God removes
the guilt from our souls. We may still have a tendency to sin, but God
has removed the sins we have, much like a mother might wash the dirt off
of a child who has a tendency to get dirty again.
Our souls don’t become something other than souls
when God cleanses them and pours his grace into them (what the Bible refers
to as "infused" ["poured"] grace, cf. Acts 10:45, Rom. 5:5 Titus 3:5–7);
they don’t cease to be what they were before. When grace elevates nature,
our intellects are given the new power of faith, something they don’t have
at the merely natural level. Our wills are given the new powers of hope
and charity, things also absent at the merely natural level.
Justification and Sanctification
We’ve mentioned that we need sanctifying grace
in our souls if we’re to be equipped for heaven. Another way of saying
this is that we need to be justified. "But you were washed, you were sanctified,
you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit
of our God" (1 Cor. 6:11).
The Protestant misunderstanding of justification
lies in its claim that justification is merely a forensic (i.e., purely
declaratory) legal declaration by God that the sinner is now "justified."
If you "accept Christ as your personal Lord and Savior," he declares
you justified, though he doesn’t really make you justified or sanctified;
your soul is in the same state as it was before; but you’re eligible for
heaven.
A person is expected thereafter to undergo sanctification
(don’t make the mistake of thinking Protestants say sanctification is unimportant),
but the degree of sanctification achieved is, ultimately, immaterial to
the question of whether you’ll get to heaven. You will, since you’re justified;
and justification as a purely legal declaration is what counts. Unfortunately,
this scheme is a legal fiction. It amounts to God telling an untruth by
saying the sinner has been justified, while all along he knows that the
sinner is not really justified, but is only covered under the "cloak" of
Christ’s righteousness. But, what God declares, he does. "[S]o shall my
word be that goes forth from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and prosper in the thing
for which I sent it" (Is. 55:11). So, when God declares you justified,
he makes you justified. Any justification that is not woven together with
sanctification is no justification at all.
The Bible’s teaching on justification is much more
nuanced. Paul indicates that there is a real transformation which occurs
in justification, that it is not just a change in legal status. This is
seen, for example, in Romans 6:7, which every standard translation—Protestant
ones included—renders as "For he who has died is freed from sin" (or a
close variant).
Paul is obviously speaking about being freed from
sin in an experiential sense, for this is the passage where he is at pains
to stress the fact that we have made a decisive break with sin that must
be reflected in our behavior: "What shall we say then? Are we to continue
in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still
live in it?" (Rom. 6:1-2). "Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal
bodies, to make you obey their passions. Do not yield your members to sin
as instruments of wickedness, but yield yourselves to God as men who have
been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments
of righteousness" (6:12-13).
The context here is what Protestants call sanctification,
the process of being made holy. Sanctification is the sense in which we
are said to be "freed from sin" in this passage. Yet in the Greek text,
what is actually said is "he who has died has been justified from
sin." The term in Greek (dikaioo) is the word for being justified,
yet the context indicates sanctification, which is why every standard translation
renders the word "freed" rather than "justified." This shows that, in Paul’s
mind, justification involves a real transformation, a real, experiential
freeing from sin, not just a change of legal status. And it shows that,
the way he uses terms, there is not the rigid wall between justification
and sanctification that Protestants imagine.
According to Scripture, sanctification and justification
aren’t just one-time events, but are ongoing processes in the life of the
believer. Both can be spoken of as past-time events, as Paul mentions in
1 Corinthians 6:11: "But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but
you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our
God." Sanctification is also a present, ongoing process, as the author
of Hebrews notes: "For by one offering he has perfected forever those who
are being sanctified" (Heb. 10:14). In regard to justification also being
an on-going process, compare Romans 4:3; Genesis 15:6 with both Hebrews
11:8; Genesis 12:1-4 and James 2:21-23; Genesis 22:1-18. In these passages,
Abraham's justification is advanced on three separate occasions.
Can Justification Be Lost?
Most Fundamentalists go on to say that losing ground
in the sanctification battle won’t jeopardize your justification. You might
sin worse than you did before "getting saved," but you’ll enter heaven
anyway, because you can’t undo your justification, which has nothing to
do with whether you have supernatural life in your soul.
Calvin taught the absolute impossibility of losing
justification. Luther said it could be lost only through the sin of unbelief;
that is, by undoing the act of faith and rejecting Christ; but not by what
Catholics call mortal sins.
Catholics see it differently. If you sin grievously,
the supernatural life in your soul disappears, since it can’t co-exist
with serious sin. You then cease to be justified. If you were to die while
unjustified, you’d go to hell. But you can become re-justified by having
the supernatural life renewed in your soul, and you can do that by responding
to the actual graces God sends you.
Acting on Actual Graces
He sends you an actual grace, say, in the form
of a nagging voice that whispers, "You need to repent! Go to confession!"
You do, your sins are forgiven, you’re reconciled to God, and you have
supernatural life again (John 20:21–23). Or you say to yourself, "Maybe
tomorrow," and that particular supernatural impulse, that actual grace,
passes you by. But another is always on the way, God never abandoning us
to our own stupidity (1 Tim. 2:4).
Once you have supernatural life, once sanctifying
grace is in your soul, you can increase it by every supernaturally good
action you do: receiving Communion, saying prayers, performing the corporal
works of mercy. Is it worth increasing sanctifying grace once you have
it; isn’t the minimum enough? Yes and no. It’s enough to get you into heaven,
but it may not be enough to sustain itself. It’s easy to fall from grace,
as you know. The more solidly you’re wed to sanctifying grace, the more
likely you can withstand temptations.
And if you do that, you maintain sanctifying grace.
In other words, once you achieve the supernatural life, you don’t want
to take it easy. The minimum isn’t good enough because it’s easy to lose
the minimum. We must continually seek God’s grace, continually respond
to the actual graces God is working within us, inclining us to turn to
him and do good. This is what Paul discusses when he instructs us: "Therefore,
my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence
but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and
trembling; for God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his
good pleasure. Do all things without grumbling or questioning, that you
may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst
of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in
the world, holding fast the word of life, so that in the day of Christ
I may be proud that I did not run in vain or labor in vain" (Phil. 2:12–16).
NIHIL OBSTAT:
I have concluded that the materials
presented in this work are free of doctrinal or moral errors.
Bernadeane Carr, STL, Censor Librorum, August 10, 2004
IMPRIMATUR:
In accord with 1983 CIC 827
permission to publish this work is hereby granted.
+Robert H. Brom, Bishop of San Diego, August 10, 2004
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