Martin Luther’s doctrine of grace was of a personalist sort, contra the Thomist Catholic concept of grace as a ‘created grace’ or habitus (a disposition given by God to elect humanity in their “accidents” whereby they might habituate [cooperate] with God by way of gratia infusa [infused grace, which is created and thus derivative grace] and merit the possibility to ultimately be justified before God wherein the iustitia Christi finally consummates as the iustitia Dei [‘righteousness of Christ’ … ‘righteousness of God’]). This is significant to underscore, not just because it offers an alternative, “biblical,” account of grace, contra Roman Catholicism, but this implicates Reformed orthodoxy insofar that it received, and repristinated this doctrine of Grace, the Thomist doctrine, in the development and codification of its so-called “orthodox” Reformed theology. Here is Luther with some commentary by Helmut Thielicke:

‘I take grace in the proper sense,’ writes Luther in his treatise Against Latomus (1521), ‘as the favor of God—not a quality of the soul, as is taught by our more recent writers. This grace truly produces peace of heart until finally a man is healed from his corruption and feels he has a gracious God.’ LW 32, 227. In his 1519 commentary on Psalm 1:2 Luther says: ‘Here “delight” [in the Law of the Lord] stands, first of all, neither for ability [potentia] nor for the indolent habit [habitus] which was introduced from Aristotle by the new theologians in order to subvert the understanding of the Scriptures, nor for the action [actus] out of which, as they say, that ability or habit proceeds. All human nature does not have this delight, but it must necessarily come from heaven. For human nature is intent and inclined to evil, . . . The Law of the Lord is truly good, holy, and just. Then it follows that the desire of man is the opposite of the Law.” LW 14, 295.1

Thielicke develops Luther’s critique with greater depth, but for our purposes this quote will have to suffice. What should be understood though, as I highlighted previously, is that for the scholastics (Catholic or the Reformed orthodox latterly), what was most important was to recognize that ontologically nature retained its esse (essence), even post-fall; in other words, the intellect remained intact, retained a “point of contact” with God even after its rupture from God in the fall. In this frame, then, grace was only needed as an addition to the ‘accidents’ (not the essence) of humanity whereby the elect person might synergistically cooperate and perform ‘their’ salvation with God (in the Catholic frame this took place sacramentally through the Church; for the orthodox Reformed this was understood through Federal or Covenantal theology as that developed progressively along the way). But significantly, grace for the Aristotelian (as that was appropriated in various iterations of “Thomism”), was not, and would not be God himself, personally. The need, in the scholastic frame was not that desperate; that is, that God himself be grace for us (pro nobis). For the scholastic, as already noted, the fall did not plunge humanity into a rupture with God wherein the whole of what it means to be human was lost, just part, essentialistically, was lost. And it was ‘this part’ that a created grace, as a ‘medicine’ would make perfect (e.g. ‘grace perfects nature’). As the reader can see, though, Luther opposed this type of Aristotelian rambunctiousness.

For Luther, and others, even in the 16th and 17th century Reformed ambit, grace was in fact God for and with us. We of course see this theme picked up by people like Barth and TF Torrance in their contexts and under their own respective ideational periods of reference. Insofar that the Post Reformed orthodox have imbibed, retrieved, appropriated, repristinated the Thomist mantle, and they are doing that currently with exuberance, this is the doctrine of grace they are ingesting. There is a better way forward, and this is why I am so intent on introducing people to Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance. They are retrievers of the ‘Chalcedonian pattern,’ and the Athanasian frame wherein grace is indeed God for us in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. As such, salvation obtains for us, ‘in Christ,’ fully, and not through a synergistic frame of cooperating (or persevering) with God by way of ‘created grace’ wherein nature is perfected and not re-created through apocalyptic resurrection, ascension, and the Parousia.

There is a better way for the genuinely evangelical (historically understood) Christian, and it certainly isn’t by retrieving, whole hog, Post Reformed orthodoxy, or the type of mediaeval classical theism so many are attempting to “revive” the Protestant church with today. The biblical faith is intentionally trinitarian, relational, and thus personalistic. The ‘ground and grammar’ of any truly evangelical theology must be pollinated by biblical and revelational categories rather than philosophical and speculative ones (of the sort that we get through Aristotelian Christianity). Luther knew this, this was the basis of his reforming work. He understood God’s grace in personal, relational ways, and thus genuinely evangelical ways rather than in the philosophical categories that the schoolmen did.

1 Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics: Foundations (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 225 n. 3.