Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message
“Preventing” Grace
Nov. 4, 2105
“Open my lips, O Lord,
and my mouth shall proclaim your
praise.”
Psalm 51:15
One
of the core ideas in Christian faith is that all good comes from God. And so we pray that God will stir our hearts
and inspire our minds that we can better worship, praise, pray, and behave. This is not seen as a choice or preference
on our part, something to be chalked up to our wisdom or basic goodness, but
rather the effect of God already at work in us:
prevenient grace, the grace
from God that stems from God’s desire that all be saved (God’s “universal
salvific will”) and goes before the grace of God experienced as salvation.
One
of the traditional collects in the Prayer Book reads:
“Prevent us, O Lord,
in all our doings, with thy most gracious favor, and further us with thy
continual help; that in all our works begun, continued, and ended in thee, we
may glorify thy holy Name, and finally by thy mercy obtain everlasting life;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
“Prevent”
here carries the original meaning of the Latin “prevenire” “to go before” and does not have any hint of impediment
or hindrance.
“Prevenient”
or “preventing” grace is one of the hallmarks of the Anglican theological
heritage. We share the idea with Roman
Catholics, Orthodox, Methodists, and most Baptists; Calvinists have
traditionally rejected the idea and labeled it at “Arminian” (from Jacob
Arminius, a Dutch reformed theologian who rejected Calvin’s idea of a double
predestination, one to heaven and one to hell.)
The idea of prevenient grace is expressed in the hymn
“Amazing Grace” this way: “’twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace
my fear relieved.”
This was a new idea for me when I became an
Episcopalian. I was raised in a
tradition that emphasized human free will and choice, and understood “grace” as
a result of one’s works. The idea that
God was working in us even in our first stirrings toward faith was strange to
me. Now I see it all about us in our prayers and liturgy, again and again.
The idea is not that we are unworthy or so depraved that we
cannot do or conceive of any good.
Rather, it is a reflection on God’s overwhelming goodness and beauty,
and the fact that God lies behind and beneath all that is.
The basic structure of the collect prayer form reveals the
doctrine of prevenient grace: One of God’s names is named, followed by an
attribute or act of God, and only then comes the petition.
J. Philip Newell wrote the following prayer in the Celtic style,
expressing the idea in somewhat more accessible terms:
As I utter these prayers from my
mouth O God
In my soul may I feel your
presence.
The knee that is stiff O healer
make pliant.
The heart that is hard make warm
beneath your wing.
The wound that is giving me pain,
O best of healers, make whole
And may my hopes and my fears
Find a listening place with
you.
Grace and peace,
Fr. Tony+
No comments:
Post a Comment