Theopedia

Sola Gratia

“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.”

— Ephesians 2:8-9 (ESV)

Definition

Sola Gratia (Latin for “grace alone”) is the doctrine that a sinner’s entire salvation, from the first movement of faith to final glory, comes from God’s unmerited favor alone, not from any foreseen merit, cooperation, or condition supplied by the sinner himself.1 Faith itself, the means by which salvation is received, is included in what grace supplies rather than standing outside it as the sinner’s own contribution.1

Confessional Witness

The Canons of Dort (1619) state the doctrine against the Remonstrant claim that grace only makes salvation possible while the sinner’s own choice makes it actual. Faith, the Canons state, is “the gift of God, not on account of its being offered by God to man, to be accepted or rejected at his pleasure; but because it is in reality conferred, breathed, and infused into him,” since God himself “produces both the will to believe, and the act of believing also.”1 The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states the same doctrine for effectual calling: those God calls are drawn “out of that state of sin and death… to grace and salvation by Jesus Christ,” their will renewed “by his almighty power,” so that they come “most freely, being made willing by his grace.”2 Their justification, likewise, is “only of free grace.”3

Biblical Basis

Paul states the principle as an absolute: “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). He grounds salvation in God’s own purpose rather than human effort or desire: “it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy” (Rom. 9:16). Titus states that salvation comes “not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy” (Titus 3:5), and John attributes the new birth itself to God alone, a birth “not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13).

Historical Development

The doctrine’s classic formulation traces to Augustine’s dispute with Pelagius, who taught that human beings could take the first step toward God by their own unaided will, with grace assisting rather than originating that movement.4 Augustine answered that grace precedes and produces the sinner’s own willing, not merely his acting, grounding this in his reading of Romans 9.4 The Reformation-era version of the same dispute set the Reformers against Rome’s own synergism: the Council of Trent anathematized anyone who says that “a person’s free will when moved and roused by God gives no co-operation… and cannot, if it so wishes, dissent.”5 The dispute reached its confessional resolution for Reformed churches at the Synod of Dort (1618-19), called specifically to answer the Remonstrants who had reasserted a version of this same synergism regarding election, the atonement, and the resistibility of grace.6

Opposing Views

Arminian theology, following the Synod of Dort’s own Remonstrant opponents, holds that God’s grace makes salvation genuinely possible for every sinner but leaves the final, decisive act, whether to accept or resist that grace, to the sinner’s own free will.7 On this view God’s election of individuals to salvation is itself conditioned on his foreknowledge of who would freely believe, rather than being the cause of that belief.7 Roman Catholic theology holds a related but distinct synergism, that grace enables and elevates the human will to cooperate with God in salvation, so that the will’s own free assent, though itself moved by grace, remains a real, distinct contribution alongside grace rather than grace’s own product.5

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t grace alone destroy human responsibility, since a sinner who cannot even will his own faith cannot be blamed for lacking it? Reformed theology answers that inability to originate saving faith does not remove the obligation to believe, since the same Scripture that teaches faith is a gift also commands all people to repent and believe (Acts 17:30). The Canons of Dort locate the fault entirely in the sinner, not in any defect of the invitation: whoever fails to receive grace either disregards these spiritual gifts or vainly supposes he possesses what he does not, “for the secret recesses of the heart are unknown to us.”8

If grace alone saves apart from any human cooperation, doesn’t that make God responsible for those he leaves without it? The Reformed answer distinguishes what God owes from what he freely gives: “God is under no obligation to confer this grace upon any; for how can he be indebted to man, who had no precious gifts to bestow… but sin and falsehood?”8 Grace, by definition, is favor no one has a claim on; withholding what no one is owed is not the same act as inflicting an injury.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Canons of Dort (Dordrecht, 1619), Third and Fourth Heads of Doctrine, art. 14. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 10, “Of Effectual Calling,” para. 1. ↩

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 11, “Of Justification,” para. 3. ↩

  4. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 9, “The Divine Decrees.” ↩ ↩2

  5. Council of Trent, Sixth Session (1547), “Canons Concerning Justification,” canon 4, quoted in Matthew Michael Barrett, “Monergism in the Calvinist Tradition,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 45. ↩ ↩2

  6. Matthew Michael Barrett, “Exploring the Relationship between Effectual Calling and Regeneration in the Reformed Ordo Salutis,” in “Reclaiming Monergism” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), citing Michael Horton on the seventeenth-century Reformed defense of a sola gratia “emphatically monergistic: that is, salvation in its entirety can be ascribed to God and his grace alone.” ↩

  7. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 11, “Predestination,” 206-207. ↩ ↩2

  8. Canons of Dort (Dordrecht, 1619), Third and Fourth Heads of Doctrine, art. 15. ↩ ↩2