Grace and the Practical Christian Life

Grace is the essence of sacra doctrina, for God of His love and goodness imparts His divine grace to us in the Church and sacraments, via the Incarnation, to make human beings participant in the divine life. Because sacra doctrina is itself the gift of God's grace used and mediated by the faith, reason, and intelligence of man, we can assert faithfully that sacra doctrina is a unique endeavour in the life of grace and in the experience of the Christian life. To a certain degree, the full living Christian experience is an adventure in sacra doctrina.

Fully to appreciate and apply the Christian verity, the Christian person must be completely alive to the divine gift by appropriating it in heart, mind, soul, will, and intelligence. The process by which the divinely-revealed Faith is transmitted, received, digested, and applied is sacra doctrina. Christianity must be a lived-out reality in the believer, in which the divine grace is extended to man and corresponded with by faith and response. Christianity first starts-off, begins with Revelation from God. It is deposited in us and in creation. God makes creation, and makes it capable of receiving His own personal revelation message. So we can say there is a first revelation, the act of creation itself, and a secondary revelation, the imparting of God's own Tri-Personal Being through personal communication and speech. The whole Christian life is made possible because of this twofold revelation, and most especially, because of God's personal revelation - God communicates Himself to mankind through divine grace, God's life itself, which in turn allows human beings to accept the revelation and appropriate the truth humanly.

The practical Christian life is the life of faith, and faith is the response of the human intellect to God's revelation given to man by grace. Only by grace does God give His revelation of Himself - and by this grace man is empowered to respond in faith, with the assent and the searching love of the intellect and the mind. Sacra Doctrina, then, is simply theology, theology at its highest level, the intellectual and rational exploration and reflection of and in the truth of God's revelation. Faith, with the exercise of the intellect and mind, is the basis of sacra doctrina at its heart. The Word of God, divine speaking or speech, is received, united to faith, appropriated by grace to nature, thus raising nature to the divine life.

The whole reality of the gift of God's grace, that grace perfects and builds-upon nature, is fulfilled through sacra doctrina. Nature, deified by grace, shares in the life of God. The theosis of man incorporates the work of sacra doctrina, in which the human person is liberated into the truth by the free gift of God and the corresponding free-will of man and his response. The divine labour of sacra doctrina is to be found in the concept of synergy, God and man working together so that they may forever enjoy a mutual indwelling, a perichoresis of life, love, and grace - the life of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost participated in and shared by redeemed humanity.