infusion

from http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/07/st-augustine-on-law-and-grace/#conclusion

What St. Augustine says here about the relation of grace and law could not be preached today in PCA or OPC congregations; they would consider it heretical for allegedly confusing law and gospel. But St. Augustine’s account of the relation of grace and law is fully compatible if not organically identical with what we find in the Catholic Catechism. Consider again the difference between the Catholic and Reformed positions, as I summarized them at the beginning of this post. According to Reformed theology, justification is by God’s extra nos imputation of the obedience of Christ. By contrast, for St. Augustine, justification is by the infusion of grace and the theological virtues of faith, hope, and particularly agape. In Reformed theology, because of its notion of justification by imputed righteousness, being under grace means that our justification (or condemnation) does not depend on our law-keeping. Even though we grievously sin against all God’s commands and never keep any of them, God imputes to our account the obedience of Christ in our place, so that before Him we are as though we had never sinned. All we have to do is accept this gift with a believing heart.⁴ According to this position, our good works, even under grace, are “imperfect and stained with sin.”⁵ Even under grace “there is no sin so small, but it deserves damnation,”⁶ and even the most holy among us sin daily in thought, word, and deed. But God demands an entirely perfect righteousness, which only Christ has. Therefore, we can be saved only by the extra nos imputation of Christ’s righteousness. The Belgic Confession reads:

Therefore to say that Christ is not enough but that something else is needed as well is a most enormous blasphemy against God — for it would then follow that Jesus Christ is only half a Savior. And therefore we justly say with Paul that we are justified by faith alone or by faith apart from works.

That conclusion does not follow, because the Confession goes on to acknowledge that faith is necessary. And conceding the need for faith does not constitute a blasphemy against God. So the question concerns the means by which the grace of Christ  is communicated to us, what are the senses in which we attain Christ (both in this life and the next) and how we are to attain Christ. But the quotation indicates the reasoning underlying the Reformed notion that our justification is by faith alone, and through the extra nos imputation of Christ’s obedience.

By contrast, for St. Augustine (and the Catholic Church), being under grace does not mean that our justification (or condemnation) does not depend on our law-keeping. Rather, being under grace means having received grace from God into our hearts, and the infused virtues of faith, hope, and agape such that with this divine help we are enabled to keep the law, it being written on our hearts. This is what it means to walk in the newness of the Spirit. For St. Augustine, by the gift of infused grace and agape, the law is fulfilled in us, because agape fulfills the law. By grace we are enabled to love the law, and not be hearers only, but doers of the law. Grace does not take away our obligation to fulfill the law; it does not mean that Christ fulfills the law so that we do not have to do so. Rather, grace enables to us to keep the law, and so truly fulfill the law, not by extra nos imputation nor, like Pelagius, by ourselves without grace, but through grace by God working in us to will and to do what is pleasing in His sight, i.e. living in accordance with His royal law. The Reformed conception of grace is in this respect a weaker conception of grace, because such grace is unable to make us capable of fulfilling the law. But St. Augustine’s (and the Catholic Church’s) doctrine of grace is a more powerful or higher view of grace, because for St. Augustin grace is the power of God in us enabling us to keep the law and so be truly well-pleasing in His sight.

This overview of St. Augustine’s soteriology indicates that Benjamin Warfield was mistaken when he claimed that the Reformation was the triumph of Augustine’s soteriology over his ecclesiology. The early Protestants not only departed from St. Augustine’s ecclesiology, but also from his soteriology.

1. There are objections to this Reformed doctrine of imputation. I cannot address them in this post, but roughly they go like this. If at the moment of imputation nothing is actually transferred from Christ to me, and from me to Christ, but rather, God merely no longer sees things as they actually are, i.e. He stops seeing Christ as righteous and me as guilty, and starts seeing Christ as guilty and me as righteous (even though in actuality nothing in Christ or me has changed), then there is no difference between ‘real imputation’ and imputation as legal fiction. In other words, if extra nosimputation were simply a legal fiction, there would be nothing different about it. Another objection goes like this. My account before God is an account of my heart. Because God is omniscient and Truth, He cannot lie or be deceived. Whatever He speaks is true. So if my heart is evil, then my account before God must be that my heart is evil. God cannot call what is evil good, without changing it from evil to good, lest He be a liar. Likewise, if Christ’s heart is good, then His account before God must be that His heart is good. God cannot without lying say that Christ’s account is evil, when Christ’s heart is good, without making Christ’s heart evil. So if at the moment of extra nos imputation nothing changes in me, and nothing changes in Christ, then when God changes my account from evil to good, but without changing my heart from evil to good, this entails that God is lying about me. Likewise, when God changes Christ’s account from good to evil, without changing Christ’s heart from good to evil, this entails that God is lying about Christ. But God cannot lie. Therefore extra nos imputation is impossible. [↩]

see also http://nannykim-catholicconsiderations.blogspot.com/2011/09/imputation-or-

infusion.html

and found here  http://pontifications.wordpress.com/justification/  found in the Sept 13 section

 “The grace of Christ,” the Catholic Catechism tells us, “is the gratuitous gift that God makes to us of his own life, infused by the Holy Spirit into our soul to heal it of sin and to sanctify it. It is thesanctifying or deifying grace received in Baptism. It is in us the source of the work of sanctification.” At no point, according to the Catholic Church, can justification be understood as sinful man pulling himself up by his bootstraps; nor can it be understood as man earning his way into heaven by his good works; nor can it even be understood as a team effort, with God doing his part (perhaps a big part) and man doing his part (perhaps just a little bitty part). The work of justification is God’s work. God justifies man by graciously incorporating him through Baptism into his Trinitarian life and making him a new creation by the Holy Spirit.

A quote from St. Augustine found here at comment
131 http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2014/05/the-witness-of-the-lost-christianities/

...the Tractate on John, Augustine explains that the grace of God makes us just by pouring the love of God into our hearts, not by imputation:

What is this, God’s righteousness and man’s righteousness? God’s righteousness here means, not that wherein God is righteous, but that which God bestows on man, that man may be righteous through God. But again, what was the righteousness of those Jews? A righteousness wrought of their own strength on which they presumed, and so declared themselves as if they were fulfillers of the law by their own virtue. But no man fulfills the law but he whom grace assists, that is, whom the bread that comes down from heaven assists. For the fulfilling of the law, as the apostle says in brief, is charity. Romans 13:10 Charity, that is, love, not of money, but of God; love, not of earth nor of heaven, but of Him who made Heaven and earth. Whence can man have that love? Let us hear the same: The love of God, says he, is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given unto us. Romans 5:5

and
Furthermore, in his Sermon to Catechumens on the Creed, Augustine explains the article “On the remission of sins” completely in light of the Church’s sacramental and liturgical tradition:

You have [this article of] the Creed perfectly in you when you receive Baptism . . . When you have been baptized, hold fast a good life in the commandments of God, that you may guard your Baptism even unto the end. . . For the sake of all sins was Baptism provided; for the sake of light sins, without which we cannot be, was prayer provided. . . Only, do not commit those things for which you must needs be separated from Christ’s body: which be far from you! For those whom you have seen doing penance, have committed heinous things, either adulteries or some enormous crimes: for these they do penance. Because if theirs had been light sins, to blot out these daily prayer would suffice. In three ways then are sins remitted in the Church; by Baptism, by prayer, by the greater humility of penance.

When Augustine does expound the meaning of justification, he does so in a way fully consistent with this tradition. He insists that faith alone does not save, and that those in the church who commit gross sins must “wash it away in penitence,” or “redeem it by almsgiving.”

See his work, de fide et operibus.

and from comment 132
De spiritu et littera, 15: “It is by God’s gift, through the help of the Spirit, that a man is justified . . . It is not, therefore, by the law, nor is it by their own will, that they are justified; but they are justified freely by His grace — not that it is wrought without our will; but our will is by the law shown to be weak, that grace may heal its infirmity; and that our healed will may fulfill the law.”
(De spiritu et lit, 45): “For what else does the phrase being justified signify than being made righteous—by Him, of course, who justifies the ungodly man, that he may become a godly one instead?

from comment 450 here http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2012/08/imputation-and-paradigms-a-reply-to-nicholas-batzig  --

 Extra nos means outside of us; “infused” means poured into us. Extra nos is not about the source or origin of the righteous, but about where it is in relation to us. Extra nos imputation means that the righteousness is outside of us, and not within us. That’s how it differs from the Catholic conception of imputation, which is not extra nos. (See comment #140 above, where I explain the Catholic conception of imputation, which is not extra nos.)