On Grace

Consider the following construal of grace by Luther in his Preface to Romans:

  "[G]race is the kindness or favor which God bears towards us of His own choice, and through which He is willing to give us Christ, and to pour the Holy Spirit and His blessings upon us".

First of all, I take delight in the fact that Luther's conception of grace here is very trinitarian.  Unlike the common answer to the question "What is grace?" (which is usually followed with the reply "God's undeserved favor"), Luther situates this undeserved favor within a trinitarian framework.  But is that enough?  The trumped up competition of grace vs. works suggests that grace is solely a matter of what God does to us, which is something along the lines of being regarded as righteous because of Christ.

Although I fully agree with Luther that God has shown a favor that we do not deserve (for certainly no one deserves entrance into the family of God), I'm not sure if that is the only notion of grace at play in the Scriptures.  Indeed, consider what St. Paul states in Ephesians 3:2 regarding the "stewardship of God's grace", which implies a task and some measure of responsibility.  I take it that the concept of grace is much richer than the standard notion of undeserved favor (even if it includes a trinitarian element).

It is important to also realize that RC often uses the term 'grace' in a different sense, such that grace is the activity of God enabling and infusing the virtues of faith, hope and love into the life of a Christian.  Of course, God doing so is certainly undeserved by the believer, but more than receiving forgiveness and being declared righteous, the Christian is able to have such supernatural gifts of which the believer could not possess by his own human powers and abilities.

Although I find much good in both the Lutheran and the RC conceptions of grace, again, I find both still short of what can be said of grace.  As one of my favorite evangelical theologians has stated, grace is more than undeserved favor and more than the infusion of virtues, but it is God giving His very Self to us. Now this may sound as someone waxing poetic, but I think this latter conception includes both the Lutheran and the Catholic conception.  For when God gives Himself to us, we certainly don't deserve it, and the reception of God will certainly involve the infusion of virtues which cannot be attained by human power alone.  But it also involves so much more.  What more?  Well, that's a topic for a later time.  But one thing to note, grace should be understood in terms of God's love expressed in His covenantal plan to redeem the human race; and I take it that such an understanding of grace with the covenants will lead to a much richer concept of grace than merely a passive reception of transmitted righteousness (moreover, it seems that contrary to the notion of "grace perfecting nature", the Lutheran conception would have grace precluding or undermining our nature, which would be problematic).

One final note.  It's often thought that Catholics believe that along with grace, the believer must also engage in works in order to be justified.  Although there might have been some notable theologians who held to something like this (Ockham? Molina?), the dominant and currently dogmatic view of justification for RC is that it is solely the work of God.  For consider the Council of Trent, which declares that  "the efficient cause [of justification] is the merciful God who washes and sanctifies--gratuitously, placing his seal and anointing with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance" (Session 6, VII).  That is, the sufficient cause of our justification is entirely an act of God.