Grace
“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.”
Definition
Grace is God’s unmerited favor toward sinners, the free kindness by which he saves those who have no claim on him and no power to save themselves. Hodge states the principle without qualification: “the great design of the whole scheme of redemption is to display the glory of that divine attribute — to exhibit… God’s unmerited love and boundless beneficence to guilty and polluted creatures.” He presses the point to its logical end: “unless our salvation from beginning to end be of grace it is not an exhibition of grace” — introducing merit anywhere into the scheme, at any stage, “vitiates its nature and frustrates its design.”1
Confessional Definition
The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession grounds justification itself in grace alone: believers are justified “not for anything wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ’s sake alone,” their faith itself being “the gift of God,” so that “their justification is only of free grace, that both the exact justice and rich grace of God might be glorified in the justification of sinners.”2
Biblical Basis
Paul states as plainly as possible that grace and human contribution are mutually exclusive as the ground of salvation: “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” (Eph. 2:8-9). Hodge reads Scripture’s account of salvation the same way at every stage: the sinner’s condition (“sunk into a state of sin and misery… they cannot deliver themselves”), Christ’s own sending (“God sent his own eternal Son to assume their nature, obey, and suffer in their place”), and the Spirit’s application of what Christ purchased are alike acts of grace, not of merit at any point.1 This grace is not abstract: it “came… through Jesus Christ” (John 1:17), and believers may “draw near to the throne of grace with confidence, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb. 4:16).