Sola gratia — Ephesians 2:8–9 and Romans 9:16

These chapters are generated from arguments/TestimonyArguments/SolaGratia. Every heading and paragraph is a docstring in those files; every formula is rendered from the encoding they check. If a chapter and the source disagree, the chapter is the one that is wrong, and regenerating it is the fix.

Claims are numbered once for the whole argument, so P₁ means the same claim in every chapter; the numbered list is in Appendix: the claims and their sources. Reading the logic is the short version of what the notation means. A result marked ⚗ is one this library constructs rather than reports.

Every argument is also set for print, the claims linked and the derivations in words as here, in one PDF, and each tagged release of the project carries a copy.

This argument is set in 6 chapters:

• Sola gratia: what everyone grants, and what divides them
• Two routes: Ephesians 2 and Romans 9
• Freedom to refuse, and the ability God gives
• Aquinas and the Catholic schools
• Weighing the positions
• Appendix: the claims and their sources

"For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast" (Ephesians 2:8–9). Every party to this dispute reads the verse and agrees with it. So sola gratia, "by grace alone", has to be stated more sharply than the slogan if it is to separate anyone.

Everyone says "by grace"

The Council of Trent, answering the Reformers in 1547, taught that "in adults, the beginning of the said Justification is to be derived from the prevenient grace of God", the grace that goes before, by which they are called "without any merits existing on their parts". It quoted Paul: "if it be a grace, it is not now by works, otherwise … grace is no more grace" (Romans 11:6). The Remonstrants, the followers of Arminius who petitioned the States of Holland in 1610, called grace "the beginning, continuance, and accomplishment of all good". Neither is Pelagian, after Pelagius, who was taken to teach that a person can turn to God by their own power: neither thinks a person can so much as begin.

So a conclusion stated as "salvation is by grace" would follow from all three positions and separate none of them. When the Synod of Dort answered the Remonstrants in 1619, it meant something sharper. The grace that saves brings about the consent it asks for, rather than waiting on a will that could refuse it. And the new life is, in the Canons' words, "a making alive, which God works in us without our aid"; the Westminster Confession says the sinner "is altogether passive therein, until, being quickened and renewed by the Holy Spirit, he is thereby enabled to answer this call". The older name for this is monergism, from the Greek for "one at work".

The conclusion here has those three parts. Salvation is by grace; the grace that saves is effectual of itself, that is, it brings about the consent it asks for; and the will is passive in being made alive. Each rival holds the first part. Trent's canon, as most read it, denies both the others, and the Thomists read it otherwise, in the chapter on Aquinas; the Remonstrants deny the second.

• Trent, on the Molinist reading, denies the third and the second. Its fourth canon on justification condemns anyone who says that the free will, "moved and excited by God", does not cooperate "by assenting to God exciting and calling", but "as something inanimate, … is merely passive". The same canon condemns anyone who says the will "cannot refuse its consent, if it would".
• The Remonstrants deny the second. Their fourth article says that grace "is not irresistible, inasmuch as it is written concerning many, that they have resisted the Holy Ghost", citing Stephen's charge to the council: "you always resist the Holy Spirit" (Acts 7:51).

Two routes to the conclusion

The Reformed case has two routes, called strands below, each from a different text. Each begins from a reading of its text and takes one or two steps from that reading to the conclusion.

Ephesians 2. Paul has just said that his readers "were dead in the trespasses and sins", and that God "made us alive together with Christ" (2:1, 5). Then: "by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing". The Greek word for "this" (τοῦτο) is neuter, while "faith" (πίστις) and "grace" (χάρις) are both feminine, so the pronoun does not point to either word on its own. Hoehner and Robertson read it as pointing to the whole of being saved by grace through faith. The strand then takes two steps: since faith is part of that whole, faith is God's gift; and since it is given to people who were dead until God made them alive, the turning is his work alone.

Romans 9. "So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy" (Romans 9:16). Read as being about God's mercy in saving, and not only about his choice of a people for a part in history, the verse says that receiving mercy does not hang on anyone's willing. The Romans strand does not use the Ephesians grammar at all.

What follows from each position

Lean checks, for each position written as a list of premises, whether the conclusion follows. It does not check whether the premises are true.

The Reformed premises reach the conclusion, and neither rival's do, though both reach its first part. A reading is called load-bearing when removing it, with everything else kept, stops the conclusion following. Neither reading is load-bearing alone, because each strand reaches the conclusion without the other. Removed together, the conclusion no longer follows: the Reformed case needs at least one of the two readings, and either will do.

Readers who grant both readings still deny what the Reformed draw from them. Robertson reads "this" exactly as Hoehner does, and still takes the whole to be "conditioned on faith on our part": grace is "God's part, 'faith' ours". So the step from the pronoun to faith as a gift is rated disputed, which means that a reader the library cites grants its grounds and denies its conclusion. Calvin, himself Reformed and elsewhere clear that faith is God's gift, still says this verse does not teach it: Paul's "meaning is, not that faith is the gift of God, but that salvation is given to us by God".

The next step is disputed too. Arminius acknowledged faith to be God's "benefit and gift", and ascribed to grace "the commencement, the continuance and the consummation of all good". He could grant everything the Ephesians strand rests on, up to its last step. He refused that step, believing "that many persons resist the Holy Spirit and reject the grace that is offered". Dort's answer is its article on faith, which it calls the gift of God "not on account of its being offered by God to man, to be accepted or rejected at his pleasure, but because it is in reality conferred". The two mean different things by gift. The encoding writes both as one claim, so the difference shows as Arminius refusing the step: grant the texts, the reading of "this" and faith as God's gift, leave out that step, and sola gratia does not follow (gift_of_faith_does_not_settle_resistibility).

Romans goes the same way. Arminius read Romans 9 as being about salvation, "not to him that worketh, but to him that believeth". Abasciano, who reads its election as of a people rather than of individuals, still grants that "Paul's argument in Romans 9 surely concerns the salvation of Israel". The reading is widely granted, and no reader who denies it is cited here with a verified location. It is the step from it to God's work alone that Arminius denies.

Each half of Trent's canon meets a reader who grants its ground and denies its conclusion, and both times the reader is Aquinas. That the will "cannot refuse its consent, if it would" is condemned, which seems to deny that grace is effectual of itself. But Aquinas held both that if God moves the will, "it is incompatible with this supposition, that the will be not moved thereto. But it is not impossible simply", and that the man God moves to grace "will infallibly attain to it". And the canon's "cooperates" speaks of the will "disposing and preparing itself" for justification, while Aquinas and Dort both place the will's own activity after a first moment in which, in Aquinas's words, it "is moved and does not move"; Dort says the will once renewed "becomes itself active". So both of Trent's steps are rated disputed. Not every Catholic reads the canon so: the Molinists, after Luis de Molina, take its "can refuse" to rule out a grace effectual of itself. Paul V's decree of 1607 "allowed each party to defend its own doctrine, enjoined each from censoring or condemning the opposite opinion" (Astrain, "Congregatio de Auxiliis"). The rating stands on the Thomist reading, because one reader who grants the ground and denies the conclusion is enough.

Aquinas and the Catholic schools

The Thomists are a position of their own, in the chapter on Aquinas. They reach the second part of sola gratia, grace effectual of itself (thomists_reach_effectual_grace), at a step the Molinists dispute. On the third part, the will's passivity, they say the will "does not remain passive" under operating grace, and Garrigou-Lagrange lists Calvin's "merely passive" among the errors. But he places the will's consent after grace "in the genus or order of formal, efficient, and final cause", so whether that contradicts Dort depends on what "passive" means. Their own premises leave it open (thomists_leave_passivity_open), and the dilemma over the phrase answers both readings (whatNotMerelyPassiveMeans). Weighed with the others, neither Dort nor the Thomists defeats the other, because the Thomist position weighed takes no side on the will's passivity; faith alone and perseverance, on which they part, Dort's position here does not carry.

Freedom to refuse, and two more positions

The strongest objection comes from the other side, and it is an objection from Scripture: the Spirit is resisted (Acts 7:51), grieved (Ephesians 4:30) and quenched (1 Thessalonians 5:19), and one sin against him is never forgiven (Matthew 12:31–32). Every party grants that the Spirit's work is resisted. What divides them is whether the grace that saves can be finally refused, and each route from the texts to that claim needs a reading that a cited reader denies. The chapter on freedom to refuse sets them out, with two positions between Dort and the Remonstrants: the Lutherans of the Formula of Concord, for whom the will is passive in conversion and grace resistible all the same, and Wesley, for whom preventing grace restores to everyone an ability that can be used or refused.

The Lutherans are why the step from God's work alone to grace that cannot be finally refused is rated disputed. They hold conversion to be "altogether an operation, gift, and present, and work of the Holy Ghost alone", and they deny that grace cannot be refused: "God does not force man to become godly", and the perverse will "resists the Holy Ghost, who wishes to be efficacious".

The third way, as it was put to this argument, is that God gives the ability to believe as Adam and Eve were made able to stand or to fall, and that the offer is received by faith alone. As stated, it leaves open whether grace can be finally refused (third_way_leaves_resistibility_open). Augustine's distinction between the help "without which" a thing does not come to pass, which Adam had, and the help "by which" it does, which the saints have, is the dilemma it meets. Read the first way, it is the reading Wesley gives, and it cannot be held together with Dort's position; read the second, it is Dort's, and it cannot be held together with Trent's canon 4, nor, by what the claims mean, with the Remonstrants. Both breaks at a premise come at steps rated disputed, so neither shows the other side right (whatTheAbilityIs).

Suppose instead that the Remonstrants are right, and the grace that saves can be finally refused. Set beside the Scriptures as the Reformed read them, with the claims read as they mean, the supposition has no model at all, and the same holds of Ephesians 2 or Romans 9:16 alone (final_refusal_cannot_be_held_with_the_scriptures). That is sola gratia shown from its texts by the contrary, and it is exactly as strong as the readings and the disputed steps it rests on.

Weighed as one dispute, only what every party holds is settled before any choice: salvation is by grace (only_grace_prevails). Every other position, Dort's included, can be defended and is not forced, and the third way can be defended with Dort or with Wesley.

What is not encoded

The Remonstrants' denial of the will's passivity, and Wesley's view of it, are not encoded: each position here concludes only what its cited sources say. Nor is the cooperation of the renewed will, which Dort, the Formula of Concord and Trent all grant in some sense, and which a dilemma over "cooperate" would split.

The perseverance of the saints, which Dort holds and the Thomists and Trent deny, is not weighed: the Thomists' claim that justifying grace can be lost is encoded, and no Reformed claim against it. Nor is Molina's own Concordia, which no public English text could be checked against; the Molinist readings are cited from Pohle's report of them.

John 6:44 ("No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him") is the third text most often cited for the Reformed view, and is not encoded either. Nor is election, the subject of the first of the Remonstrants' articles, which is a dispute of its own.

Where things are