“For nothing is impossible to God”
The Christian call is hard and, quite frankly, impossible without the grace of God. There may be things to which the Christian is called that the rest of the world thinks is downright impossible. But in and through and even beyond all of them, the grace of God endows the Christian with a true sense of peace in accomplishing the Lord’s will. This peace and even joy can never be taken away. On that note, let us look at how we are to be saved.
What is Salvation?
Salvation, in Scripture, refers to a spectrum of realities grounded in the idea of liberation from one’s obstacles or enemies. We see this in numerous scriptural accounts where Israel prays to God for salvation from the assault of their foes or for salvation from famine.[1] Within the context of this lesson, however, we’re talking about salvation from evil, sin, and death. These three things are the greatest enemies of mankind.
More than anything else, salvation is the work of the Holy Spirit to deliver us from sin, death, and the devil. The Catechism tells us that the grace of the Holy Spirit has the power to justify us, that is to cleanse us from our sins and to communicate to us the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ and through baptism.[2] In other words, in the Sacrament of Baptism, you and I have died with Christ; and if we have faith, then we shall also live with Him, because when Christ rose from the dead, He conquered the power of death for us as well.
Because of Jesus, death no longer has dominion over us. Christ died once for all, so that He lives now forever in God — and so you and I must consider ourselves as dead to sin but alive to God through Jesus Christ. In Him, we have eternal life. What is “eternal life?” Eternal life is “divine beatitude,” or, simply speaking, heaven: never-ending happiness in God’s presence. So Jesus justifies, sanctifies, and saves us for eternal happiness. But why is this even necessary? What’s the problem?
Grace and Sin
The father and mother of the human race, Adam and Eve, were created in friendship with God. In theological terms, we say that they enjoyed the gift of God’s grace. Grace is the free and unmerited gift of God’s life within us so that enables us to respond to His call. In grace, we become children of God, partakers of his divine nature, so that we may enjoy the gift of eternal life — Of never-ending happiness in God’s presence; in other words: heaven.
Unfortunately, Adam and Eve sinned against God by disobeying Him. Their sin, known in Catholic theology as “Original Sin,” robbed all mankind of the potential to enjoy eternal life in heaven. Original sin brought about corruption in our nature, and put us under the dominion of sin, death, and the devil. To put it simply, we fell away from God’s grace.
The corruption and slavery of Original Sin means that you and I can no longer go before the all just, all merciful, all loving, all-holy God, without some means of reparation, and a “new divine initiative” of grace. The cross and resurrection of Jesus is this means of reparation, and it is the “new divine initiative” that we need.
The grace of Christ guides and sustains us in preserving and strengthening this gift of new and everlasting life. This is why St. Paul writes, “work out your salvation with fear and trembling for God is at work in you both to will and to work for his delight and good pleasure.”[3] In Acts 4:12, we find that salvation is to be found in no one else but Jesus Christ, and there’s no other name under Heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved except the name of Jesus Christ. This is why we must continue to place ourselves in a disposition to receive grace from Him. We must be His loving disciples.
The Council of Trent on Grace and Salvation
The Bishops of the great 16th century Council of Trent describe the process of salvation from sin (especially when it comes to adults) with great detail. It begins with the grace of God. God’s grace touches the sinner’s heart and calls it to repentance. This grace cannot be earned, it cannot be merited, and it is given as a gratuitous gift from God. Then, man’s free will either receives or rejects this inspiration. In receiving or rejecting this inspiration, Man turns to God and is established in grace or turns away from God and remains in sin.[4]
The beautiful thing about grace is that, by it, God becomes a non-competitive agent in stirring up and moving man’s will.[5] In other words, God activates our wills by grace, truly drawing us to Himself, and yet does not tamper with or coerce our free will. As soon as we are disposed, in grace, to receive God, we are called to make an assent of our intellect and will to believe in the revelation of Jesus Christ, and the promises that God has made in and through his prophets and His Son Jesus.
Believing in God’s revelation, we are aware of our sins and the need to fear God’s justice, and yet we know that we can hope in His mercy. In this, we are called to have a sense of trustful abandonment to the goodness of God our Father. To hope that, for the sake of Christ, He will continue to work out our salvation within us. Knowing that we come from Him, we are called to love God as the source and summit of our very life. As a result, we are called to hate and detest all that God hates and detests, namely our sins.
When the Council of Trent discusses these matters, it is speaking about the process that leads to what is known as “justification” and “sanctification.” Justification is principally the work of the Holy Spirit in renewing our souls and granting us sanctifying grace — the grace that makes us holy and just in God’s eyes. Sanctification, on the other hand, is the process of being made holy as we continually work out our salvation by striving to do God’s will.[6]
Through justification, man is initiated into the process of growing into sainthood and is no longer merely a creature. A just man is a friend of God and, as a friend of God, now possesses the hope of eternal life; this hope grows continually through small and great acts of charity. Here, man makes the conscious effort to grow deeper in love with Christ and his Church, for the greater glory of God.[7]
Sanctification and justification are first and foremost the works of the Holy Trinity within us. It is the Holy Spirit who comes into us and begins this good work in us and sees it to completion until the day of Jesus Christ. Which means, none of us can buy our way to Heaven. The Catholic Church does not teach salvation by works alone. The Catholic Church has always taught salvation by the grace of God. What this means for us is that God, as a benevolent Father, constantly beckons us, his children, to come before Him in absolute confidence knowing that He will supply for all of our needs to mold us into the image of His perfect Son, Jesus Christ.
There are particular points that need to be held as true and definitive when we talk about grace and salvation:
- that the initial grace is truly gratuitous (that is, not owed to us) and supernatural;
- that the human will remains free under the influence of this grace;
- that man really cooperates in his personal salvation from sin;
- that by justification man is really made just, in his inner being, and not merely declared or reputed to be so;
- that justification and sanctification are two aspects of the same work the Holy Spirit does in the soul;
- that justification excludes all mortal sin from the soul, so that the just man is no way liable to the sentence of death at God’s judgment seat.[8]
Deification
What is God’s end-goal here for us? We said earlier, that it was divine beatitude – happiness in God’s presence. But there is a deeper answer we can give. The purpose of initial justification and the journey of sanctification is “deification.” What is deification? It is the process of being elevated from our natural state, by divine grace, to become true partakers (or participants) of God’s own divine nature.[9] Deification is also known as “divinization,” and “theosis.”
Sacred Scripture attests to deification in both explicit and implicit ways. St. Peter writes of deification in passing — it is presumed that his readers understood what he was talking about. In his second letter, he writes, “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, … by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, that through these you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion, and become partakers of the divine nature.”[10] St. Paul also writes that “…if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself.”[11]
The Catechism tells us that “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. It is the sanctifying or deifying grace received in Baptism. It is in us the source of the work of sanctification.”[12]
The beauty of this theological hope is that the reason for our elevation by grace into Divine glory is precisely so that we can become so much like God that we may finally behold His face, which is the highest desire of the human soul that loves God.[13] This vision of God’s face (his essence) is called the beatific vision. St. John, aware of this, urged his disciples in the early Church toward this beatific vision in his epistle by writing, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”[14]
There are moving parts to the organic process of deification. The process includes being reconciled to God the Father in Christ, being grafted to Christ, putting away the old ways of life that were displeasing to God, living as a new creation, and being brought from grace to grace, glory to glory, while being transformed into the Image of the Son of God. The multifaceted grace of Baptism achieves all of this as an initial grace, with the goal of being elevated in the order of grace, that we will one day enjoy Heavenly, divine glory. It is this hope that compels the early Church Father, St. Athanasius, to write, “For the Son of God was made man so that we might be made gods.”[15] This is the heart of the Catholic doctrine of deification.
[1] Cf. 1 Samuel 11:13; 14:45; 2 Samuel 23:10; 2 Kings 13:17; Isaiah 45:8.
[3] Philippians 2:13.
[4] Council of Trent, Session 6, “Canons Concerning Justification, 13 January, 1547,” in Norman P. Tanner (edit.), Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils: Trent to Vatican II, vol. 2 (London: Sheed & Ward, 1990), chap. 12.
[5] Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, ST I.83.1; ST I-II. Q. 10. a. 4.
[6] Cf. Phil 2:12.
[7] Council of Trent, Session 6, “Canons Concerning Justification, January 13, 1547,” in Tanner, chap. 12. Saint Teresa of Avila speaks of the importance of being conformed to God at the end of our life:“In a very short time we shall find ourselves at the end of our journey and shall drink of the fountain of living water … . But unless we resign and conform our will entirely to the Divine Will, we shall never obtain that water (F. Benedict Zimmeran (edit.), The Way of Perfection 2ed [London: Thomas Baker, 1919], 193).
[8] Council of Trent, Session 6, “Canons Concerning Justification, January 13, 1547,” in Tanner, chap. 12.
[10] 2 Peter 1:3-4.
[11] Cf. 2 Cor. 5:17.
[13] St. Thomas Aquinas, ST Supp. Q. 92. a. 1.
[14] 1 John 3:2.
[15] St. Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation §54 – 3. The English translation here renders this as “that we might be made God.” This is problematic, or at least concerning, for obvious reasons and has been the cause of much contention within theological spheres. The Latin reads, “Ipse siquidem homo factus est, ut nos dii efficeremur.” A closer translation should read “that we might be made gods.” For the Latin text, see J.F. de Groot, De Verbo Incarnato: pro manuscripto (Rome, Italy: Ex Pontificia Universitate Gregoriana, 1918), 140.