Theopedia

Prevenient grace

Definition

Prevenient grace — from the Latin for “going before” — is any grace of God that precedes a sinner’s conversion. The term names a shared concern, not a shared doctrine: Reformed, Wesleyan/Arminian, and Roman Catholic theology all affirm that grace must come before faith, but disagree sharply over what that grace does and whether it can be resisted. In Reformed theology, this prior grace is the effectual call itself — see Irresistible grace — not a distinct, resistible grace of the kind described below.

Opposing Views

Wesleyan/Arminian prevenient grace holds that a universal, resistible grace restores to every person the ability to freely accept or reject the gospel, undoing the noetic effects of the Fall enough to make a real choice possible again. Wesley states the position in his own words: “no man living is without some preventing grace, and every degree of grace is a degree of life,” adding elsewhere, “I assert that there is a measure of free will supernaturally restored to every man, together with that supernatural light which enlightens every man that cometh into the world.”1 On this view, God decreed to send Christ to satisfy for the sins of the whole world and to impart enough grace and light to every person to make eternal life genuinely attainable; those who “duly improve that grace, and persevere to the end” are the ones God, foreseeing their perseverance, has ordained to be saved.1

Roman Catholic prevenient grace, per the Second Council of Orange and the Council of Trent, “confers the capacity (posse) to believe but not the act of believing itself.” It is granted to all adults who hear the gospel, “but it lies in their power to accept or reject it.” This assent, even when given, is not yet justifying faith on its own; it is only preparatory, an assent to the truth of Christianity that “does not justify” until sacramental grace is infused, after which believers can, by the merit of condignity, do good and merit heavenly blessedness.2

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t a truly free, uncoerced human choice require some resistible grace that merely enables, rather than effectually produces, faith? Bavinck argues the Pelagian and Remonstrant framework this question assumes cannot actually deliver what it promises: “if grace is resistible, God is deprived of his sovereignty; if the human will is capable on its own of assenting to God, then regeneration is unnecessary; and if… some prevenient grace is necessary to prompt human willing, then the notion of an indifferent will remains a fiction.” The scheme’s supposed gain in preserving human freedom is “an apparent but not real one,” exposed starkly by the case of infants who die before any capacity to choose: either they are saved by sovereign grace alone with no choosing on their part at all, or the same enabling grace that supposedly makes salvation available to everyone leaves every infant who dies before choosing without hope.3

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Charles Hodge, “Chapter I. The Plan of Salvation,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 327-328. ↩ ↩2

  2. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 17, “The Order of Salvation.” ↩

  3. Bavinck, chap. 18, “Calling and Regeneration.” ↩