The Concept of Grace: Essays on the Way of Divine Love in Human Life

The word grace already current in classical and Hellenistic Greek, received a great enrichment of meaning in the New Testament. In the course of Christian history, this meaning has frequently been obscured and even debased, though it has never been wholly lost. During the Reformation it was largely rediscovered; in the Evangelical Revival it was reaffirmed, though not without some differences of emphasis; and today, through the revival of biblical theology, it is again coming into its own. In the first chapter, the author examines the use of the term by Saint Paul, who must be regarded as the classic exponent of its Christian meaning. The next three chapters illustrate the variety of ways in which the idea of grace finds expression in New Testament Christianity. The fifth shows how essentially the same idea is embodied in the creedal formulations of the early church-and how it is distorted in some more recent dogmatic pronouncements. The sixth reviews the rise and controversial progress of a specific doctrine of grace, describing its main features as they appear in the work of the Fathers, the Schoolmen, and the Reformers. In the concluding chapter, in which traditional theological language is all but discarded, an attempt is made to consider how far the facts of our human experience justify us in speaking of the reality of grace.