The Grace of God

So too at the present time there is a remnant, chosen by grace. But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works; otherwise grace would no longer be grace.

--Romans II: 5-6 (Revised Standard Version)

So wrote Saint Paul, to whom God's grace was one of the cornerstones of his religion. In his epistles he referred to charis (grace) 100 times. What is grace? Neither the Apostles' nor the Nicene Creed defines it, and the nature of grace has been the subject of theological controversy since the Church was young. Those who want to hear more about it will welcome a little book, published last week, by the Church of England's Rev. Oscar Hardman--The Christian Doctrine of Grace (Macmillan; $2).

"Man, Who Art Thou?" Most of the early writing on grace was done by Saint Paul and Saint Augustine.* Both had special reason to know what they were talking about. Before they experienced grace, Paul was a Christian-persecuting Pharisee and Augustine was a brilliant, dissolute young Manichee about 4th Century Carthage. Each felt himself to have been saved by God through no merit or initiative of his own, indeed almost against his will. This, they said, was the grace of God: a divine gift bestowed not on the worthy--for all men are equally deserving of damnation--but to a few selected by God for His own unfathomable reasons.

To think it unfair that God does not save everyone would be presumptuous: "O man, who art thou that repliest against God?" warned Paul (Romans 9:20). The uncomfortable fact is, said Augustine, that ever since Eden, man has possessed virtually no initiative for good at all. He is almost entirely dependent upon God's "prevenient grace," which gives him the desire to do God's will, and "subsequent grace," which enables him to do it.

To this formidable view, a British monk called Pelagius/- took flat exception. Augustine's austere teachings, he felt, would inevitably lead man into a fatal moral apathy. Instead, he argued that all men have the free will to earn their own salvation by good works. Grace, said Pelagius, consists simply of man's natural gifts, God's forgiveness of sins to the baptized, and His issuance of instructions and examples to men.

Prayer Book v. Pulpit. Pelagius made many converts to his more optimistic doctrine; but after years of vigorous controversy between him and Augustine, the Church decided that Pelagianism was heresy. Heresy or not, Pelagianism was a good deal easier to live with. By the close of the Middle Ages, says Dr. Hardman, the Pelagian doctrine of merit had virtually replaced Augustinian predestination in the practical workings of the Church.

It was the Church's pragmatic departure from the orthodoxy of Paul and Augustine that gave the leaders of the Protestant Reformation their main theological ammunition against Rome. This Protestant return to Augustinianism, writes Anglican Hardman, led Rome to make "a verbal compromise which suggested the retention of the full Augustinian position but at the same time allowed for those modifications in the position which had been accepted by the Church."

Luther, writes Professor Hardman, "gradually relaxed his hold on the doctrine of predestination, and he deprecated the undue attention which was being given to it by some of his followers. . . . Calvin gave predestination the clearest and most emphatic expression it has ever received, making it an essential article of faith in the system which he based upon belief in the absolute sovereignty of God. . . .

"In the Church of England a remarkable balance was achieved. . . . Today it is not infrequently remarked by observers from without who do us the honor of visiting . . . our Church that we have an Augustinian Prayer Book and a Pelagian pulpit, and that few seem to be aware of the inconsistency. If this is true, it provides a very strong recommendation to the renewed study of the doctrine of grace."

* Bishop of Hippo (in North Africa) and not to be confused with 6th Century Saint Augustine, first Archbishop of Canterbury.

/-Real name: Morgan, which means "sea-born," as does "Pelagius" in Greek.

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