That makes no sense because it requires grace to even choose grace. All is under God’s control.
Greg, read the whole paragraph I wrote:
We have enough grace to choose God, but not so much that we have no choice but to choose God, in fact, we can choose to reject God and even return some of the graces He has given us back to Him.
Then how can we be held responsible for our actions if God does not give us the grace to do His will?
By reaching this conclusion, you do two things:
T.A.Stobie:
We have the sufficient grace to do His will if we choose to do so.
You are probing the mystery better however:
penWindow(‘cr/396.htm’)
God created man in his image and established him in his friendship. A spiritual creature, man can live this friendship only in free submission to God. The prohibition against eating “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” spells this out: "for in the day that you eat of it, you shall die."276 The "tree of the knowledge of good and evil"277 symbolically evokes the insurmountable limits that man, being a creature, must freely recognize and respect with trust. Man is dependent on his Creator, and subject to the laws of creation and to the moral norms that govern the use of freedom.penWindow(‘cr/397.htm’) Man, tempted by the devil, let his trust in his Creator die in his heart and, abusing his freedom, disobeyed God’s command. This is what man’s first sin consisted of.278 All subsequent sin would be disobedience toward God and lack of trust in his goodness.penWindow(‘cr/398.htm’) In that sin man *preferred *himself to God and by that very act scorned him. He chose himself over and against God, against the requirements of his creaturely status and therefore against his own good. Constituted in a state of holiness, man was destined to be fully “divinized” by God in glory. Seduced by the devil, he wanted to “be like God”, but “without God, before God, and not in accordance with God”.279penWindow(‘cr/403.htm’) Following St. Paul, the Church has always taught that the overwhelming misery which oppresses men and their inclination towards evil and death cannot be understood apart from their connection with Adam’s sin and the fact that he has transmitted to us a sin with which we are all born afflicted, a sin which is the “death of the soul”.291 Because of this certainty of faith, the Church baptizes for the remission of sins even tiny infants who have not committed personal sin.292penWindow(‘cr/404.htm’) How did the sin of Adam become the sin of all his descendants? The whole human race is in Adam “as one body of one man”.293 By this “unity of the human race” all men are implicated in Adam’s sin, as all are implicated in Christ’s justice. Still, the transmission of original sin is a mystery that we cannot fully understand. But we do know by Revelation that Adam had received original holiness and justice not for himself alone, but for all human nature. By yielding to the tempter, Adam and Eve committed a personal sin, but this sin affected the human nature that they would then transmit in a fallen state.294 It is a sin which will be transmitted by propagation to all mankind, that is, by the transmission of a human nature deprived of original holiness and justice. And that is why original sin is called “sin” only in an analogical sense: it is a sin “contracted” and not “committed” - a state and not an act.penWindow(‘cr/405.htm’) Although it is proper to each individual,295 original sin does not have the character of a personal fault in any of Adam’s descendants. It is a deprivation of original holiness and justice, but human nature has not been totally corrupted: it is wounded in the natural powers proper to it, subject to ignorance, suffering and the dominion of death, and inclined to sin - an inclination to evil that is called concupiscence". Baptism, by imparting the life of Christ’s grace, erases original sin and turns a man back towards God, but the consequences for nature, weakened and inclined to evil, persist in man and summon him to spiritual battle.Greg_McPherran said:
How did either of those two things affect their free will? They could still make decisions of their own free will.
Greg, you are mistaken here.
Good point. Your comment on “superabundant grace” gives me a different perspective on it.
Some of these graces we have to choose to take. God does not force them upon us. We choose them and then choose to take more or choose to take no more. We can even choose to return some of them.
I think that Paul’s further exposition illustrates our proper attitude. The fact that God chooses to harden some leads naturally to the question about how a person could be held responsible. Paul does not answer this directly. He simply appeals to God’s authority and expressly says that we, as humans, are not qualified to judge God. In other words, what God does is beyond our judgment.
This is an appeal to authority. I think it applies equally to your question about why God chooses some over others. God took the same approach with Job, to whom He never revealed His purposes.