Final Thoughts
The Catholic teaching on salvation by grace can be summed up in the following words: By the gift of the grace of God, we are saved by faith working in love. This faith is alive, and by its very nature, entails good works. This is why James writes in his Epistle that “faith without works is dead” (2:17, 26).
We run the risk of a couple of errors if we swing to one or two extremes. On the one hand, there is the extreme of Pelagianism, a heresy that teaches that man can and should work out, to earn, his salvation entirely on his own merits. This is a heresy because salvation is a gratuitous gift given by the Almighty God and Father.
The other extreme is a kind of spiritual irreverence that is encapsulated in the common Protestant doctrine of “once saved always saved.”1 In this error, no matter what a person does, a man can never lose his salvation. Spiritual irreverence can set in here because one begins to take for granted the onus of a holy, sacrificial life that grace demands of the soul. This disposition inadvertently, if not deliberately, “cheapens” the gravitas of grace. The great German Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood this reality all too well and wrote in his work Discipleship:
Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.2
It is not within my scope or intention to explore these issues further. I do hope, however, that these thoughts spark your interest to explore deeper the Catholic Church’s teaching on salvation by the gift of God’s grace. Here are 5 Bible verses to help your further reflection:
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Acts 15:11. . . we shall be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, . . .;
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Acts 18:27 . . . When he arrived, he greatly helped those who through grace had believed;
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Acts 20:24, 32 . . . the Gospel of the grace of God.. . . And now I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified;
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Romans 3:24: they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus;
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Titus 3:7 so that we might be justified by his grace and become heirs in hope of eternal life (cf. 2:11).
I would like to end by quoting Saint Paul of the Cross in his brilliant yet succinct analysis of the gift of our salvation: “If your eternal salvation depended on yourself alone, you would have serious cause for alarm, but since it is in the hands of your Heavenly Father, what have you to fear? My hopes rest on the Passion of Jesus and on the dolors of Mary.”3
I hope that this lesson series has benefited you greatly. It has been a great blessing for me to prepare and present it to you and it is my prayer that the material may serve to enhance further your work in the ministry of evangelization. God bless you and keep you always.
1 For more on this, see Jason Evert’s article “Once Saved Always Saved?” with Catholic Answers.
2 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship. Vol. 4 (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 2003), 44.
3 Louis Th. de Jésus-Agonisant (edit.) and Ella A. Mulligan (tran.), Flowers of the Passion: Thoughts of St. Paul of the Cross (New York: Benzinger Brothers, 1893), 81.