Common grace is not a part of RC theology

Common grace is not a part of RC theology

I would like to know whether or not righteous behaving and devout people,who are outside of any Christian church, have grace. Is there such a thing as common grace and is it salvific?

There is not unanimity among Reformed Christians regarding whether there is common grace or what common grace is. The disagreement over common grace led to the split in 1924 between the CRC and the PRCA, and a 2003 debate shows that the disagreement remains unresolved.

In Catholic theology, the term ‘grace’ is defined as that by which we are moved or ordered to asupernatural end, beyond our natural end. So in Catholic theology the relevant distinction is between nature and grace. (See “Nature, Grace, and Man’s Supernatural End: Feingold, Kline, and Clark.”) Reformed theology does not draw the distinction between nature and grace, that is, between the natural order and the supernatural order. (This leads to a Pelagian conception of how salvation would have occurred prior to the fall had Adam and Eve not sinned; see “Pelagian Westminster?.”) In Reformed theology, grace is broadly defined as God’s undeserved favor in response to sin, and common grace refers (generally) to the undeserved favor God shows to the whole post-fall world, though it is not soteriological in purpose or effect for the non-elect. Common grace is distinct from the special salvific grace God shows to the elect, by which they are brought to salvation. Reformed theologian Louis Berkhof claims that by common grace the execution of the sentence of judgment is stayed, civil society maintains some understanding of moral and religious truth, unregenerate persons perform [outwardly] good actions, and God bestows all the natural blessings of sunshine, rain, food, health, peace, family, friendship, etc.

In the Reformed system, appealing to common grace is especially necessary to explain how people believed to be unsaved are able to do so many good things, even though they are ‘totally depraved.’ Were it not for common grace, according to this perspective, all unbelievers would be serial murdering, raping, pillaging, rampaging barbarous savages, because that would be the true expression of fallen man’s actual depraved condition. By common grace God generally restrains fallen men from expressing the full measure of their fallen nature. That is the primary way the concept of common grace is utilized in practice; it fills the explanatory gap between the Reformed account of fallen man’s condition and our experience of fallen men who seem not to reflect that account in their behavior.

In the Catholic understanding, the goodness we see in unregenerate persons is not the result of some special grace that keeps them from expressing the full measure of their wickedness. Rather, this goodness we see in unregenerate persons is the goodness of nature, of creation. For the Catholic understanding of the fall and fallen man’s condition, see “Lawrence Feingold on Original Justice and Original Sin.” Of course Catholic theology affirms divine providence, but divine providence is not acting on the hearts of unregenerate men like the wind that held back the walls of water of the Red Sea as the Israelites passed through, preventing it from acting according to its nature. Providence is not acting to hold back or restrain the nature of fallen men, and so make them seem much better than they actually are. Rather, they have free will, and so sometimes choose good, and sometimes choose evil. But if they are not in a state of grace (i.e. do not have sanctifying grace and the supernatural virtue ofagape) then their actions have no soteriological value, because they are not ordered by agape to our supernatural end.

So in Catholic theology there is no ‘common grace’ in the Reformed sense of the term. According to Catholic doctrine, God gives “actual grace” to all men. (See “Lawrence Feingold on Sanctifying Grace and Actual Grace,” and “Lawrence Feingold on God’s Universal Salvific Will“.) But in Catholic doctrine, actual grace is soteriological, and ordered to the supernatural end to which God calls all men. Actual operative grace is the prevenient grace described in the Second Council of Orange. The natural goodness exhibited by unregenerate persons is just that, an expression of the goodness man has by creation. By contrast, in the Reformed system common grace is not soteriological, because it does not lead unregenerate persons to salvation, nor is it intended to do so. From a Catholic point of view, the Reformed doctrine of common grace is something of a stop-gap measure to cover an anthropological error regarding the Reformed position on the post-fall corruption of human nature. The simpler explanation, from the Catholic point of view, is that man is what we see – capable of good and evil. Yet as Second Orange teaches, to move toward faith actual grace must first move man from the limitation of his orientation to his natural end toward the supernatural end of union with God as Father.

comment 13 here: http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2012/09/did-the-council-of-trent-contradict-the-second-council-of-orange/