So I haven't blogged in about a month, and now I have two posts about books. Interesting.
I've begun reading Foster's Celebration of Discipline, and on page 7 of the copy I have, Foster says "God has given us the Disciplines of the spiritual life as a means of receiving his grace."
I was hung up on the "means of receiving" bit. As I continued to pick apart the sentence and ponder it all, I came up with a few thoughts ...
1) Foster says the disciplines are "a means" not "the means" by which one receives grace ... this is what I think was initally causing my befuddlement.
2) Foster is talking about two "giving's" ... giving of the disciplines and giving of grace ... which in turn means one needs to think about the process of receiving, being in receipt of, etc.
3) If the disciplines are a means, what are other means by which one would receive grace ... through faith, repentance, other things?
4) The purpose of grace ... justification, redemption, ongoing teaching/instruction (Titus 2:11-12) - "Grow in grace" (2Peter 3:18)
5) What about the Catholic catechism that mentions two kinds of grace, sanctifying and actual?
6) Back to the basic definitions of grace and mercy as explained in Sr High Sunday school by Ken Wiebe (also where prophecies, apologetics, and geneologies become interesting ... read more for details)
__grace - getting what you don't deserve
__mercy - not getting what you do deserve
I was going through the notes I took in Sr High Sunday School (yup, I still have them) and came across the following....
Genesis 5 ... read the meanings of the names as a narrative
Adam - man
Seth - appointed
Enosh - mortal
Kenan - sorrow
Mahalalel - blessing of God
Jared - shall come down
Enoch - teaching
Methuselah - death shall bring, when he dies it's over
Lamech - the desparator, the despairing
Noah - comfort, rest
Jenn,
A thought for you:
I came to this epiphany one day sitting in my Catholic high school Christian Ethics class: Grace and mercy are the same thing, and Catholics (who I previously to this epiphany thought were heretics) just use different words. That sanctifying grace is what we Protestants would call grace -- what you find in Ephesians 2:8. God's perfect work, proceeding from His perfect nature. But just because there is something called grace, what do we experience in actuality? Mercy.
We receive grace through faith. It is this that sanctifies us. But we also receive grace by reaching towards God, through piety, devotion, service -- and God shines grace (mercy) upon us. This is a different kind of grace, but it is still grace. I think this is a point not adequately explored in Catholic doctrine, but the dichotomy presented in Protestant teaching makes too much of semantics.
Well, that's the best this former Ken Weibe Sunday school student could come up with at 11:30pm. Too bad we didn't have this discussion at 2am this past New Year's Day! :-)