“I can earn my way to heaven.”
This statement may not be something that any of us would say out loud. And yet, I bet that if I did a little questioning, I would find this assumption laying underneath my thoughts on salvation. Sometimes I hear it phrased this way: “I haven’t done anything bad enough to go to hell.” The hidden assumption is that Heaven is owed to us as long as we don’t screw up too badly.
But this is not at all what the Catholic Church teaches.
One of the early heresies in the Church was Pelagianism. I wrote in an early essay: “Back in the 4th century, a man named Pelagius taught that human beings could earn their way to salvation. If we are only good enough, we can achieve heaven. The good will outweigh the bad.” And I may have it in the back of my own mind that if I just follow God’s commands and give to charity, then I will be given salvation as my just reward.
But St. Augustine showed us why Pelagius is wrong. We are too broken by original sin to save ourselves. I remember when I broke my back and I couldn’t walk. I was powerless to fix the problem. I need my surgeon to fix me. In the same way, our broken nature requires a Savior.
And we need to take that title “Savior” very seriously. Jesus is not my co-equal partner in my salvation. He is the One who saves me. He pays the price for my sins on the cross and rises to give me new life in Him. That is His free gift to me. And this is grace.
Grace is God’s completely gratuitous gift of His love and His goodness. I can do nothing to earn it. It is completely a gift.
I think about my wife and how she is way out of my league. And yet for some reason, she has graced me with her affection. My whole life I know that I can never be good enough to be her husband and there is no way I could “earn” her love.
It is the same with God’s grace. We can never earn it by any good deed. Why? Because even the ability to do those good deeds are gifts of His grace. If I give money to charity, it is only because He has blessed me with wealth or income. If I use my mind to write Christian essays, it is only because God has given me an intellect to use for His service. There is nothing I can point to that is good in me that is not also a gift from God.
Even my ability to say “yes” to Him is grace. For Augustine, I could not even say “yes” to God unless God gave me the grace to do so.
In all this talk of grace, it would understandable to make the mistake of thinking that grace is some “thing” that God gives us apart from Himself. But grace IS the encounter we have with our God and how it affects us. It is His presence in us to make us more like Jesus. In His presence He transforms us and re-orients our hearts. As Augustine says, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” CS Lewis puts it another way in Mere Christianity: “God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”
The gift of grace is the gift of God Himself.
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