Grace: Freely Given, Often Refused

     God's gift of grace, as previously mentioned is freely given, and we can receive His grace in a multitude of ways, but we can also deny His grace, and not receive it at all! How foolish of us to refuse such a great gift! There are many things that would lead us to refusing His grace, and it is mainly due to our attachment to sin, but also due to our freedom of will.

    Our attachment to sin, is just that, we are attached to things, mannerisms, or actions that is opposite to God. We may be slothful and choose to play videogames 24/7 instead of choosing to better ourselves in one way or another. To counter the response of "they are getting better at videogames", this is not a virtuous thing to become better in. It is not unvirtuous nor virtuous, but non-virtuous. Similarly, to morality, something can be amoral because it is neither moral nor immoral. However, something that is non-virtuous, or amoral, can become unvirtuous leading to vice, but more on this later. 

    God's grace is a freely given gift that can help us turn from sin, or be strengthened in a state of sanctifying grace, or justification. But God's grace, as powerful as it is, can be resisted by us in actions of our will. This is shown in our voluntary actions towards, or against God. We can choose to do as He wants us to do or choose to sin. This is what is entailed by our free will. As St. Aquinas puts it in his Summa Theologica: first part of the second part, 

            "An act deliberately proceeding from the will of man. To be sure, only those actions are properly called human. A man is the master of those things; but a man acts through reason and the will. Therefore, ... proceeding from the deliberate will." - (S.T. I-II, Q. 1, Art. 1)

    For the sake of clarification, we need to define a couple of terms stated here in St. Aquinas' work. They are:

• Deliberation: This is a simple enough term, a s defined by the Webster's dictionary as carefully thinking and or acting upon something, but deliberation has a particular definition in Philosophical terms. As stated by Aristotle in the Nichomachean Ethics Chapter 3 "Now no one deliberates about eternal things - about the universe for example ... We deliberate about what is up to us, i.e., about the actions that we can do ... we deliberate not about ends, but about what promotes the ends." (N.E. 1112a20,30-33; 1112b12). This distinction is important, particularly for St. Aquinas, as the action of deliberation requires the knowing end for which you strive (N.E. 1112b9-10), but the method of getting there is not known. So, it is not just about the action of carefully thinking through something, but it is thinking through an action where you already know the end result, but not how to obtain it. 
• Human: This term is straight to the point of saying that actions done by a human, is a human action. But this is important because not all actions are human actions, some are Divine, or demonic. The humanness of an action points to three things: imperfect knowledge or reason, imperfect will, and deliberation. Our imperfect knowledge requires deliberation, and our imperfect will allow for us to not will only the good, but also the evil. This is why St. Aquinas says, "man acts through reason and will."
• The supernatural has perfect knowledge, and in a perfect will (S.T. I, Q.106, Art.1, Ad. Contra.) in that God and the Angel need not to deliberate on something, as their actions always point back to God, the perfection of all. And the demonic, being fallen angels themselves have a perfectly imperfect knowledge (Ibid.) and a perfectly imperfect will (a perfect will is oriented towards God, who is all perfect) as the demonic are removed from God they do not benefit from the cleansing closeness to God; therefore they are imperfect (S.T. I, Q.109, Art. 3). 
• Deliberate will: This pertains to the humanness of actions as our imperfect will can act upon our deliberation to either the good (towards God), or the bad (toward sin). An action of which you are consciously aware.

    As we live our life, we do deliberate our various choices. The deliberation may not be a lengthy deliberation, sometimes an unconscious deliberation such as what or where to eat. The unconsciousness of those choices is predominantly biologically driven, such as your body is lacking certain nutrients and electrolytes, and tells you to eat, but your brain subconsciously knows where to go to satisfy the dietary requirements, which interestingly always points me to either pizza or tacos, no complaints here. But the type of deliberation that matters the most is the deliberation of moral choices. 

 

    Moral deliberation is how we can make the moral choices necessary for following God. We can take the preponderance of amoral activities, and make them properly moral, or we can devolve them into immorality. We can take amoral activities of reading, or playing videogames, and make them moral or immoral. We can read things that bring us closer to God, such as the Bible or writings of the Saints; this is an amoral activity made moral. This is not to say that non-biblical or non-theological texts are inherently immoral, it is the content of the activity that matters. For example, I like the Warhammer 40k universe, and reading the books are an enjoyable pastime where the struggles of humanity against various things in the far future yields entertaining and imaginative stories. However, if I took the contents of the Warhammer 40k books to be a pseudo-truth or contents to live by, or some other misapplication of fiction to life, then it becomes an immoral activity. 

    

    Playing videogames can be an amoral activity wherein one spends time slaying dragons in the forever fun game of Skyrim. But you can partake of immoral activities relating to any game, where you choose to play the game instead of going to work, school, or taking care of your various responsibilities. This is a slothful approach to an amoral activity, that leads to immorality. The choices we make, at times may be a conscious deliberate act or an unconscious one, can lead us from being moral to immoral very easily, but less easily from immorality to morality. This is due to our fallen nature, we often fall into immorality and stay there easily even though we are aware of the harm they cause, but we need help to become moral and stay moral. 

 

    Our deliberate choices put us into immorality and make us less likely to adhere to the right and good of the laws of God. This is why God gives us the "Holy Nudges" in the form of His actual grace, to help us get out of our immoral "funk." His actual grace drives us to want to pray, go to church, or to go to confession and confess our sins to seek absolution. His actual grace, as many of us can attest, can be refused. We can have that thought to pray but choose to not pray or choose to pray later ultimately to not pray later at all. The actual grace is to pull us out of immorality into morality, and we can refuse to take God's hand as He tries to pull us there. 

 

    God will allow us to stay in immorality, not because He is okay with immorality (this is antithetical to His very nature, so He cannot allow immorality to exist in His eternal presence), but because He loves us enough to allow us to choose Him vs what we have already chosen. He wants us to deliberately will Him into our life, and to deliberately choose Him in our actions. He wants to save us, but He will not force His salvation upon us if we do not choose Him. As we see in the Council of Trent, in response to the Reformers (canons 4 and 5 on the Canons of Justification (Denzinger § 814-815)) in response to the graces of justification, initial or not, can be refused, because otherwise our choice in God was not a choice at all. The Reformers, Calvin more so than Luther I believe, taught that God's grace is irresistible, that when God gives us grace, we cannot refuse His grace no matter what, this removes our choice in choosing Him. There are other issues to their doctrine of irresistible grace, but that will have to wait for another article. 

 

    In conclusion, we can refuse His grace, because He lets us do so since He made us to have freedom of will. He loves us enough to let us choose Him, but more often than not, our choices have made it to where we do not choose Him but other things in this life. It is foolish of us to not choose Him, and we can only choose Him and continue to choose Him when we cooperate with His grace and make our deliberate choices in our life reflect our choice in choosing Him.