Does grace do everything, leaving the will passive, or does man genuinely cooperate with a grace that comes first? Whom God chooses, and whether election is unconditional, is treated in the Predestination topic; this hub asks whether the will cooperates with grace, whether grace can be resisted, and whether anything good can be done without it.
28 verses are cited on this page. Each one links to its chapter in the Greek text.
...for without me you can do nothing.John 15:5
Christ's own statement, absolute and unqualified. Nothing supernatural is possible apart from him.
For by grace you are saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, for it is the gift of God; not of works, that no man may glory.Ephesians 2:8-9
Salvation is a gift, not an achievement, and boasting is excluded.
For who distinguisheth thee? Or what hast thou that thou hast not received?1 Corinthians 4:7
Everything we have, including whatever distinguishes us from another, was received.
For it is God who worketh in you, both to will and to accomplish, according to his good will.Philippians 2:13
God works even the willing, so the very first stirring toward good is his gift.
No man can come to me, except the Father, who hath sent me, draw him.John 6:44
The strongest text for the priority of grace, and Catholic teaching agrees with it: no one moves toward God unaided. What the verse leaves open is whether the drawing can be refused.
And you, when you were dead in your offences and sins.Ephesians 2:1
The anchor of the Reformed anthropology: a corpse does not cooperate. The Church teaches the same helplessness and denies the inference, because the same passage says God quickened us, and a man quickened can then act.
Not that we are sufficient to think any thing of ourselves, as of ourselves: but our sufficiency is from God.2 Corinthians 3:5
Not even the thought is ours to begin. The Catholic position agrees entirely and locates freedom in what a man does with a sufficiency he did not supply.
And we know that to them that love God all things work together unto good, to such as, according to his purpose, are called to be saints.Romans 8:28
Synergei, work together, the root behind synergism. God's purpose and a man's love of God stand in one sentence without embarrassment.
And there are diversities of operations, but the same God, who worketh all in all.1 Corinthians 12:6
God works all in all, and the same chapter says each is given the manifestation of the Spirit to profit by. Divine causality does not empty the creature's act. It is what makes the act possible.
And of his fulness we all have received, and grace for grace.John 1:16
Grace upon grace, one gift succeeding another. The Catholic account of merit rests here: what is crowned at the end was itself given at the beginning.
...how often would I have gathered thy children... and thou wouldest not.Matthew 23:37
Christ's will and their refusal stand directly opposed, in his own words.
Behold, I stand at the gate, and knock. If any man shall hear my voice, and open to me the door, I will come in to him.Revelation 3:20
The knocking is his; the opening is asked of us.
You stiffnecked... you always resist the Holy Ghost.Acts 7:51
A continuing resistance to the Spirit, charged as culpable.
...with fear and trembling work out your salvation.Philippians 2:12
A command to act, which presupposes the capacity to act.
...I have laboured more abundantly than all they: yet not I, but the grace of God with me.1 Corinthians 15:10
Paul's own formula, holding both together without dividing them.
Why doth he then find fault? for who resisteth his will? O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Hath not the potter power over the clay?Romans 9:19-21
Paul does not answer the objection by softening it. He refuses the standing of the creature to arraign the creator, which is a rebuke rather than a doctrine of the will, and the chapter is arguing about Israel and the Gentiles as peoples.
And we helping do exhort you, that you receive not the grace of God in vain.2 Corinthians 6:1
Grace can be received in vain, which is meaningless if the response is not ours.
Looking diligently, lest any man be wanting to the grace of God.Hebrews 12:15
A warning to believers that they may fall short of grace.
...you are fallen from grace.Galatians 5:4
One can fall from what one had.
Today if you shall hear his voice, harden not your hearts.Hebrews 3:7-8
A command not to harden, addressed to those who might.
Grace comes first, always, and no one can take a single step toward God without it; the Church defined this against the semi-Pelagians at the Second Council of Orange in 529, a thousand years before Calvin, and Trent repeated it. Without Christ we can do nothing (John 15:5), and God works in us even the willing (Philippians 2:13). But Scripture is equally plain that this grace can be resisted, received in vain, and fallen from (Acts 7:51; 2 Corinthians 6:1; Galatians 5:4), and that Christ's own will was refused by those he would have gathered (Matthew 23:37). The Catholic answer is not to split the work between God and man, as though each supplied a part. It is that God's causality operates on a different level from ours, so that he can be the total cause of an act that is also totally free. Paul says it in a single breath: "yet not I, but the grace of God with me" (1 Corinthians 15:10). The Council of Trent (Session 6) taught that man can reject grace and that his cooperation is real, while condemning any notion that he can merit the first grace. How exactly grace moves a free will without coercing it, the Church has never defined; the Thomist and Molinist schools debate it still, and both are permitted. What is not permitted is to save God's sovereignty by denying that our yes is ours, or to save our freedom by pretending it is not his gift.