dead in sins

from http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2009/10/a-reply-from-a-romery-person/http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2009/10/a-reply-from-a-romery-person/

The Catholic understanding is that to be “dead in sins” is to be without the life of God, i.e without sanctifying grace. That is what it means to be unregenerate. Since the fall of Adam, all human beings are born into the world without the life of God, i.e. without sanctifying grace and without agape. We call this privation of the life of God, “original sin.” Without sanctifying grace we still have a functioning intellect and a will. But we cannot love God with supernatural love (i.e. agape) because agape is present in us only if we have sanctifying grace, i.e. a participation in the divine life. So, without sanctifying grace we can know God as Creator simply by the things He has made, and we can have natural virtues. But we cannot know God as Father, and have faith, hope, andagape. Without agape, we cannot have friendship with God as Father. So without sanctifying grace, we cannot enter into heaven. According to Catholic doctrine, the unregenerate man cannot do things ordered to a supernatural end (i.e. heaven) because he is not a participant in the divine nature. Since he only has human nature, which is natural, he can only achieve a natural end. But heaven is a supernatural end. Hence, without sanctifying grace he cannot attain to a supernatural end.

According to the Catholic position, for those in the unregenerate condition, God must act first without us, in giving us grace, before we can freely move toward Him. (Otherwise we’d be semi-Pelagian, if we believed that we, without His grace, acted first toward Him as our supernatural end.) But our privation of the life of God does not require that we must be “regenerated” before we freely move toward Him. Catholic doctrine makes a distinction here between two forms of grace. One form, called ‘actual grace,’ is the grace by which God moves our hearts and minds. The other form, called ‘sanctifying grace,’ is that participation in the divine nature by which we are sanctified in our very soul and made sons of God. In Catholic theology regeneration means receiving sanctifying grace. A person who is moved by actual grace, but has not yet received sanctifying grace, is not yet regenerated. And in Catholic theology sanctifying grace comes through the sacrament of baptism, though it can (while still coming through the sacrament of baptism) precede the reception of that sacrament. But, in Catholic theology actual grace comes to us before regeneration, and actual grace first acts as operative grace (in which God moves us without us), and then by our participation actual grace acts as cooperative grace (God moving us with us), leading us to faith and baptism by which we receive sanctifying grace, and are thereby justified.

Lutheran and Reformed theology generally do not make the distinction between actual grace and sanctifying grace. They tend to maintain that a person cannot do anything until he is alive. And therefore regeneration is required in order for a person to cooperate. Hence, what Catholic theology refers to as ‘actual grace’ drops out of Reformed and Lutheran theology as something that precedes regeneration. Since Catholic theology understands ‘dead in sins’ as meaning the absence of divine life, but not the loss of intellect and will, therefore, Catholic theology does not need to maintain that regeneration must precede cooperation, because a person without sanctifying grace (i.e. without the life of God) may still by his intellect and will cooperate with actual grace.

JDK then quotes Canon 5:

Canon 5: “If anyone says that after the sin of Adam man’s free will was lost and destroyed. . . let him be anathema.”

This canon has to do with what happened to man at the Fall. In Lutheran theology man’s very nature was damaged, and his intellect and will were radically corrupted. In Catholic theology, at the Fall man lost sanctifying grace, lost agape, lost the four preternatural gifts, and suffered the four wounds of nature. Among those wounds of nature were ignorance in the intellect, and malice in the will. Each of man’s powers was wounded, though not destroyed, but man’s nature was not destroyed. We were human before the Fall, and we remain human after the Fall. (I have discussed this in more detail here.) But this canon need not separate Catholics and Protestants. Both Protestants and Catholics can agree that man after the Fall is incapable of turning to God, unless God first acts in us without us. We all agree that semi-Pelagianism is a heresy, so the objection to semi-Pelagianism need not be a point of contention between us