Favour That Is Not Earned

Grace, in Christian usage, is God's favour freely given rather than earned, together with the help God supplies to turn and to do good. The doctrine's permanent question is what, if anything, the human being then contributes.

Paul supplies the charter texts, "by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing" (Ephesians 2:8-9), and the shape of the later argument was set by the clash between Augustine and the British monk Pelagius in the early fifth century. Pelagius, defending human responsibility, taught that people can take the first step toward God by their own effort and that grace assists a capacity already intact. Augustine answered that sin has so wounded the will that grace must precede, enable and carry the whole movement of conversion. The Western church sided with Augustine: the Council of Orange in 529 condemned Pelagianism and the compromise later called semi-Pelagianism, establishing that even the beginning of faith is a gift, while stopping short of the hardest predestinarian conclusions.