Grace and Free Will
CHAPTER 25.
THE LAW IS NOT THAT GRACE BY WHICH WE ARE CHRISTIANS,
NOR IS OUR NATURE ITSELF
Now who can be so insensible to the words of the apostle, so foolish—no, so insanely ignorant of the purport of his statement—as to venture to affirm that the law is grace, when he who knew very well what he was saying, emphatically declares, “You who are justified by the law have fallen from grace”?Gal 5.4 Well, if the law is not grace—seeing that in order that the law itself may be kept, it is not the law, but only grace which can give help—will not our nature at any rate be grace? For this too the Pelagians have been bold enough to aver: that grace is the nature in which we were created so as to possess a rational mind by which we are enabled to understand—formed as we are in the image of God, so as to have “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that creeps upon the earth.”Gen 1.28 This, however, is not the grace which the apostle commends to us through the faith of Jesus Christ. For it is certain that we possess this nature in common with ungodly men and unbelievers; whereas the grace which comes through the faith of Jesus Christ belongs only to those to whom faith itself pertains. “For all men do not have faith.”2Thes 3.2 Now the apostle says with perfect truth to those who by wishing to be justified by the law have fallen from grace, “If righteousness comes by the law, then Christ is dead in vain.”Gal 2.21 So likewise, to those who think that the grace which he commends, and which faith in Christ receives, is nature, he might use the same language, with the same degree of applicable truth: if righteousness comes from nature, then Christ is dead in vain. But the law was in existence up to that time, and it did not justify; and nature existed too, but it did not justify. It was not then in vain that Christ died, in order that the law might be fulfilled through Him who said, “I have not come to destroy the law, but to fulfil it;”Mat 5.17 and in order that our nature, which was lost through Adam, might be recovered through Him who said he “has come to seek and to save that which was lost;”Luk 19.10 in whose coming the old fathers who loved God likewise believed.