Eph 2:8-10 is the perfect Catholic understanding of salvation and justification…
Concur heisenburg.
It is the Protestant “model of salvation” that makes these weird formula like constructs of “by faith alone”, or “OSAS” etc. that put Catholicism in a foreign light when we step into their strange world and try to convince using concepts that they are familiar with in their distorted perception to teach what our own faith is. This has the unfortunate side-effect of creating “accidentals” that are by themselves not Catholic positions at all but are partial truths that resemble things that they can relate to but don’t stand alone and can be refuted by them. We can’t step them into a full understanding by a decomposition of our faith - it needs to be given and taught holistically rather than argued defensively piecewise. We can’t spoon feed them the peas-and-the-carrots together since one only like peas and another only like carrots and we conform to their tastes rather than feeding holistically what they really need ( I think a spanking
). It takes a lot of time.
It’s almost like protestantism has over studied scripture so badly into bite size bits of truth that it can’t enjoy the texture and the presentation of the meal with all the flavors combined. We Catholics put our own faith at risk or risk doing more harm by even trying to step in to cure the patient since we are forced to present our faith piecewise to conform to the manner that they think. Its a shame since they can’t absorb the entire medicine in one holistic application.
I think that Protestant’s tradition of proselytizing by reducing key scriptural principals into a glib marketing buzz phrases that made it easy for uneducated common men to understand enough to get a part of the Christian message is the issue we face today. This “quantized” truth into bite-sized marketing phrases has become as a seperate sacrosanct protestant scripture and tradition onto itself (e.g. “one must believe”, “one must be born again”, “one must be baptised”, “one must know Jesus as one’s personal Lord and savior”, "by faith alone ", “by grace alone”, “by scripture alone” etc. ad-nauseum).
So I agree that Ephesians really is very integrative:
**For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; **
But what is missing literally is the implicit message that only common human tradition teaches. That is one must accept the gift. It was often an insult to many human cultures to be given a gift that one could not repay. It was an affront to one’s pride and dignity to take a gift from a friend (or an enemy) if one could not return an equal or “one up” better gift.
Such people would NOT accept the gift out of pride. Thus God asks us to accept a gift out of love knowing full well we CAN NOT repay Him. Thus by God asking us to accept eternal salvation out of trust and love knowing we can not pay is asking us to be humble and accept humility as divine medicine to cure us of the pride that led to us falling from God in the first place. Thus accepting the gift becomes medicine and salvific. A medicinal pill that is prescribed by the Dr. and not taken by the patient is not in and of itself going to save anyone. No doubt the Divine Doctor will force some on their death beds to take their medicine but in general God wants us to take the gift/medicine and cooperate with its healing power and staying away from things that make us sick.
God could do a fly over of the whole planet like in a large C130 cargo plane and drop care-packages of gifts down all over the place. But if one did not come out of their house to pick up the gift, open it and use it , it would become useless to ones benefit. God could carpet bomb the planet with grace and force everyone to rapture spontaneously to heaven - but He chooses not to impose Himself on anyone.
God wants us to make clear choices through His primal gift that is intrinsic in our very humanity through the facility of freewill.
The only gift God gave us that we had no conscious choice in accepting was the gift of Life. Except for cases of rape even life was given through the combined cooperation of our parents consenting to work with God’s creative grace.
James
