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 through love. This faith is alive, and by its very nature, entails good works.
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.
The other extreme is a kind of spiritual irreverence that is encapsulated in the common Protestant doctrine of “once saved always saved.” In this error, no matter what a person does, a man can never lose his salvation. Spiritual irreverence and laziness can set in here. This disposition inadvertently, if not deliberately, “cheapens” 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.
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.”
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.