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Outside St Paul and the Acts the term charis—whence our ‘grace’—is rather rare in the New Testament, but the idea, as Dr Ryder Smith has said, ‘is everywhere.’ Common alike in secular Greek and the Septuagint, charis was a wonderfully apt term for Christian uses. In the Septuagint it renders the Hebrew chen, meaning favour or goodwill freely bestowed and presupposing the idea of love and of a love active and generous. Again charis, as derived from chairein, ‘to be glad,’ carried a sense of joy—-joy on both sides for the gift bestowed, both in the giver and in the receiver, or more precisely in the relation arising between the two as a result of the gift. Thus it could denote a state of being in communion or fellowship, and in the New Testament (especially in St Paul, but cf. John i, 14-16) it became the chief term signifying the specifically Christian situation of being loved by God, in Christ, and of returning this love, in Christ—or simply of being ‘in Christ.’ Certainly the Church was fortunate in having to hand a word so flexible and beautiful.
Around charis gathered the other Christian words, faith, love, peace, etc., as well as, in St Paul particularly, the contrast-term ‘law’ and the term for grace’s antagonist, ‘sin’. In time these words came to be defined more precisely, and as each one became more precise all the rest were affected too. The Church could not understand ‘love’ or ‘faith’ except in the context of grace, and in particular, and more quickly, she found she could not understand grace except in relation to sin and vice versa.
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- Copyright © 1961 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 The Bible Doctrine of Grace, p.59
2 This capacity came to be identified with the image of God ‘to which’ man was originally created. St Thomas will refer to this imagehood as the reason for holding that grace is not, strictly speaking, ‘miraculous’, 1a 2ae, 113.10.
3 P. Tillich, e.g., likes to speak of grace as ‘the New Being,’ but hastens to add that this does not contradict ‘the message’ of the Reformers, Theology of Culture, p.209. It is not clear however how, on his terms, he avoids a contradiction here.
4 Boethius of Dacia De summo bono (text in Grabmann MittelalterlichesGeistesleben II, pp. 200–24). This Boethius, an M.A. at Paris, was involved with Siger of Brabant in the great condemnation of Averroism in that university in 1277. The naturalism he represented spread to Bologna about the same time, as appears from the Quaestio de felicitate of James of Pistoia, dedicated to Dante's friend Guide Cavalcanti; see Medioevo e rinascimento, Studi in onorediB. Nardi, II, pp. 427–63.Google Scholar
5 Denzinger, Enchiridion, nos. 501–29.
6 ibid., no. 475.
7 Ia 2ae, 112.5; confirmed by Trent, Denzinger, nos. 802, 825–6.
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