Merits The Grace....

[thessalonian]

I've been studying for my debate Monday and have one question that has always bothered me a bit. The Catechism says that good works merit us the grace for eternal life. My understanding has always been that we receive the grace via the sacraments that brings about the works that merit eternal life. Thus I have a hard time understanding how the works can merit the grace. Where is my disconnect on this? Is it like prayer? The prayers don't actually bring about the grace as in God says you said x number of hail mary's so I give you y units of grace, but they open us up to it? I.e. if we do good works we are opened up to do more good works and perhaps God opens avenues for us to do more good works, i.e. like the parable of the talents, where they did good and were given more to do?

Thanks for your help.

[Thy Geekdom Come]

[quote name='thessalonian' post='1657536' date='Sep 17 2008, 05:54 PM']I've been studying for my debate Monday and have one question that has always bothered me a bit. The Catechism says that good works merit us the grace for eternal life. My understanding has always been that we receive the grace via the sacraments that brings about the works that merit eternal life. Thus I have a hard time understanding how the works can merit the grace. Where is my disconnect on this? Is it like prayer? The prayers don't actually bring about the grace as in God says you said x number of hail mary's so I give you y units of grace, but they open us up to it? I.e. if we do good works we are opened up to do more good works and perhaps God opens avenues for us to do more good works, i.e. like the parable of the talents, where they did good and were given more to do?

Thanks for your help.[/quote]

Salvation needs to be viewed as an act of God in which we participate. We do not merit grace apart from Jesus Christ. Rather, by our participation ("faith working through love" - Gal. 5:6), we open ourselves to the grace of Jesus Christ.

John 15 is VERY Catholic in it's theology of justification. We have to be attached to the Vine. Jesus is the Person who is quintessentially saved, the suffering servant who rose from the dead after three days and is now in heaven with His Almighty Father. We need to be in a personal relationship of love with Him in order to be saved. Our faith is worthless without love (1 Cor. 13:2), because true faith must be followed, must be living faith. Protestants will accuse the Catholic Church of believing that we have two separate things that must coexist for salvation to take place: faith and works. This is inaccurate. Faith and works are bound up in one another. Luther would say that good works are a sign of faith, but that the faith alone saves, regardless of works. Jesus makes it clear numerous times (as does St. Paul) that those who have faith (believe in Jesus) and continue living life as if they had no faith will not get to heaven. Protestants will then argue that a person who continues to sin never really had faith, but that's not what 1 Cor. 13:2 says. St. Paul says in the positive sense that a person can have faith but not love and therefore will not be saved. This is because believing that Jesus is Lord, believing that He died and rose for you...none of that is any more salvific than believing any other bit of information. Giving intellectual assent to an abstract idea cannot save. Being united with Jesus (John 15 again) does save. Being united with Jesus requires following God's will, especially in the moral life, and thus Jesus sites the 10 Commandments (John 15 again). Being united with Jesus requires putting on the new man. Love is nothing more than allowing our faith to take root in our hearts and lives. Love is faith-lived-out. In a sense, love is faith. This applies also to works done out of love.

Now, notice that in Catholic theology, we must be joined to Christ to be saved. We must be attached to the Vine. This happens through the sacraments, first through Baptism, but also in a much deeper way through the continual reception of Holy Communion, as well as the other sacraments in their respective ways. All the sacraments are acts of love, again, us cooperating with God, not us taking the initiative and God supplying grace afterward (semi-pelagianism) or us doing everything ourselves and earning salvation (pelagianism). It is a dance between God and man and grace is the love of God first outside of a closed soul, working to open it (prevenient grace) and then working on an open soul to guide it further and further to God.

In Catholic theology, we are joined to Jesus. We should be so close to Him in our personal relationship that we are truly united with Him, becoming one with Him, and together with other Christians, one in Him (which is why the Church is called the Body of Christ). In Protestant theology, salvation is all about getting us into heaven. In Catholic theology, salvation is all about getting us into heaven and getting heaven into us. In Protestant theology, God the Father allows a dirty soul into heaven because he claims to follow Jesus and wears a mask to cover his shame with the image of the Son of God. In Catholic theology, God the Father purifies souls throughout life by washing the soul with grace, and, if necessary, continues to wash the soul in Purgatory, so that when the soul enters heaven, God sees not a sinner in disguise, not dung covered in snow, but His beloved Son, living in the heart of His adopted son and shining through, having remade the sinner into His own image. In Protestant theology, a sinner has to lie to get into heaven by calling on Christ's name to cover his sins, thinking that calling himself worthy and believing he has been made worthy will make him worthy. In Catholic theology, a sinner becomes a saint, and tells the honest truth at the pearly gates, "I am a sinner by God's grace united with Jesus Christ and transformed into His image." Catholic theology makes salvation much more than having the security of knowing your saved (which was Luther's main concern, being a scrupulant); in Catholic theology, salvation is not just about getting off the hook, salvation is about getting back up from the fall, brushing off the dust, and standing upright, becoming godly. This was the teaching of the Early Church Fathers (CCC 460).

In Catholic theology, all merit any sinner earns is a participation in the merit of Jesus Christ. It is not as if we earn grace, it is that Jesus Christ merited all the grace in the world and we, united with Him, participate so fully in His salvific act that we in some sense go through what He went through. That is why we die and rise again in Baptism. That is why our Holy Communion is a participation in Christ's suffering and death, as well as in His life. We open ourselves to grace because we cooperate with grace. Grace knocks and we open, but grace gives us every bit of strength to turn the knob and open the door also. Grace is there in every action. The only thing grace does not dictate is our free choice, although it is only by grace that we have the ability to make a free choice, but grace allows us to reject God as well.

It goes like this (let's use a situation where a man is not baptized as an infant):

Man is conceived in original sin.
Man is born, still in original sin.
God's (prevenient) grace comes to incline man's heart toward God (knocking at the door).
God's (prevenient) grace comes to give man the opportunity to answer.
God's (actual) grace allows man to open the door, if he chooses.
God's (actual) grace allows man to be Baptized, which gives him (sanctifying) grace.
Sanctifying grace makes a man holy, giving him ever-greater faith, but only if he participates with actual grace by living out his faith in love.

All man's cooperation with grace is prompted by and led by grace. He participates and cooperates, and through that merits that grace be infused into him, but it is not his merit that earns the grace nor his merit that gives the grace, but only merit (via cooperation, not via his own initiative) that opens him to grace.

By opening ourselves to grace and being united with Jesus through faith-working-in-love, we have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and are being transformed to be like Him. This is why St. John says of heaven: "we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is" (1 John 3:2). Thus the saints are united to Jesus Christ via participation and truly merit grace because they not only know, love, and serve Christ, but because that faith-lived-out unites them with Him, such that they can be called "other Christs." I know your opponent in debate probably won't care to hear that, but it's true. Catholic theology of justification falls apart entirely unless we believe that the faithful are truly bound to Christ in such a way that they identify themselves with Him. Because we live in Him (and He lives in us by grace, in fact, I believe some of the Eastern Fathers said that grace was God Himself, living in the souls of the faithful, which makes perfect sense), we share in His life, and anything that can be said of Him by nature can be said of us by grace, thus He is naturally divine, and we, by grace, are also divine. In that sense, we truly merit Christ's grace, not because we merited it on our own, but because our supreme level of cooperation with Christ makes all that is His ours.

I hope this helps. I really want to hear that you had a great and fruitful debate. I'm sorry this is such a long post, but I'm writing a book on this topic and I find that having the broader picture really makes the individual aspects seem a lot more coherent.

God bless,

Micah