Reconciling Grace and Free Will (Part II)

The debate surrounding the relationship of grace and free will is at least as old as Christianity itself.  Over the course of 2000+ years, these debates have swung between two extremes.  On one extreme, we have complete determinism.  Because of the fall, man is totally depraved.  Salvation only comes through God’s grace which is always efficacious and necessary (human will cannot resist).  God definitively predetermines some who will be saved and others who will be damned. 

The other extreme is Pelagianism – which gives absolute pre-eminence to human will.  The fall only affected Adam and Eve not the entire human race.  Humans are able to freely choose good or evil without any Divine aid or grace.  Humans are able to fully obey the Gospel without grace and are able to reach perfection through their own efforts.

Both extremes have been repeatedly rejected by the Church throughout its history – in Scripture, in Church Councils, in writings of the Fathers, and in the consistent teaching of the Church.  But the Church has never definitively answered the basic question – defined it in such a way as to say “this is the answer – the one and only answer to this question”.  Rather, the Church has provided the basic truths/principles that must be included and guide any such attempted answer.

So what are these basic truths?

1.       Original sin is inherited by humans due to the fall of Adam and Eve.  Consequences of the fall are sin and death.  God’s grace is necessary for salvation.

2.       Humans have a free will by which they can choose to accept and cooperate with God’s grace or reject and block God’s grace.  In rejecting and blocking grace, humans freely choose to sin.

3.       There is a grace from God that is sufficient for enabling one to perform a salutary act, but this sufficient grace is not efficacious, meaning that it doesn’t compel or overpower the human will to actually perform the act.  The individual receives the grace to perform the act that God desires but is still free to, indeed, not act.

4.       There is another grace from God that is efficacious but not necessary.  By a truly efficacious grace is meant one that will be (is) infallibly followed by the act to which it tends, e.g. contrition. If you receive such a grace, even before your will consents to it, that grace is infallibly “sure of success;” it will infallibly procure your consent, produce that act – of contrition. But although it infallibly procures your consent, it does not necessitate you to consent: it leaves you free to dissent. Your will will infallibly say "yes" to it, but it is free to say "no.”

Pretty clear, eh?

Here is one solution to the problem.  It is the one that I feel most comfortable with, although there are others that are held to be equally valid by the Church.  Again, the Church is only concerned with the truth of the principles outlined above – and is not concerned with definitively stating exactly “how” those principles work out.

This explanation is an abridged excerpt from a Course on Grace given by Fr. John Hardon, S.J.

God gives us an actual grace that we may place a definite salutary act; if it is a truly sufficient grace (and what other kind would He give?), then it gives me the full power here and now to place that act which He wants and which without this grace I could not place. So everything must be in this grace that is needed for it to be immediately sufficient for this salutary act. If I freely consent to it, to use it, then this salutary act is produced by my grace-aided will. If I dissent to it, resist it, the salutary act toward which it was urging me does not take place. The truly sufficient grace is thus inefficacious (and so God foresaw it would be from all eternity). But it was by itself truly sufficient, and it is my fault that the act did not take place: I did not want to place the act, which I should have and could have placed then and there.

An efficacious grace, to be non-necessitating must leave me my freedom to resist it, to dissent from it. It must give me the full power to place a salutary act, e.g. of contrition, and at the same time leave me free not to place that act of contrition or to place another act. For that is what the Ecumenical Councils say such a grace must do: it must not necessitate me, it must leave me free to dissent, to resist it. But if it is to leave me free to dissent, to resist it, then it cannot predetermine me to consent, either physically, or morally. It simply cannot be a predetermining grace, for such a grace seems utterly incompatible with any real freedom. It cannot be an intrinsically efficacious grace, one that by its very intrinsic nature says infallibly that this precise effect will take place now. It must be a grace that is extrinsically efficacious, so that its infallibility does not derive from the intrinsic nature of the grace but from God’s infallible pre-vision from eternity of my free consent to this grace. If this grace cannot be a physical predetermination of my will, what is it? It is a physical premotion, not a predetermining one but an "indifferent" or rather an "impedible" one (it impels rather than compels), to which God foresaw from all eternity that I would consent, and moved by it would place the salutary act for which it would be given, e.g. contrition. It is a grace which pre-moves me (impels, not compels predeterminingly) to this salutary act in such a way that I freely consent to it, although I am fully and proximately able to dissent to it.

The "crux" of this explanation is said to be scientia media, God's infallible, non-predetermining knowledge of futuribles (the free acts that rational creatures would place in various circumstances). By scientia media, God foresaw from eternity that given these circumstances I would freely consent to this grace, without being physically predetermined by Him to do so, and hence it would be an efficacious grace for me.

Of course, there are problems with this “answer” but it is the one that I have found makes the most sense to me – and of course maintains the integrity of human free will and the grace of God.

In my next post, I will return to Our Blessed Mother, and how grace was active in her life – and the ramifications of grace in her life.