On Anglo-Catholic Salvation

I think it would be helpful to stress a distinction regarding salvation so that the non-Sacramental Protestant is clear that there is an agreement on a most essential point. This distinction is merely that of the Biblical paradox: "work out your salvation...for it is the Lord working in you." St. Bernard has beautifully expanded upon this, "grace is necessary to salvation, free will equally so -- but grace in order to give salvation, free will in order to receive it. Therefore we should not attribute part of the good to grace and part to free will; it is performed in its entirety by the common and inseparable action of both; entirely by grace, entirely by free will, but springing from the first in the second."

The official position of any Christian church of the Sacramental Tradition -- Catholic, Anglican, Episcopalian, Orthodox, etc. -- is that without grace, that is, without Christ's life, death, and resurrection, there would be no access to Heaven -- there would be no "first springing in the second." To put it another way, the door to the Father would be forever closed, the gulf forever impassible, if not for Christ -- this all churches hold as necessary to believe. This means, therefore, that no church preaches that "works" merit us Heavenly access -- only Christ won access for us. We are not, however, automatons -- we are not robots into whom God programs "grace". Indeed, God grants us the dignity of choosing, of participating in the grace He offers to us. There are, therefore, things given to us to do in order to appropriate this gift of grace, in order to make it effective in our lives. To put it plainly, we are to obey, and obedience requires faith -- faith is implicit, it's presupposed in any act of obedience: a faith without works is dead. Thus faith and obedience are inseparable.

Given the context of Sacramental Christianity, a faith which leads to works means that to trust that Christ has instituted Baptism to erase Original Sin, and that good works (found, primarily, in the Sermon on the Mount) and the other Sacraments are how His grace operates in us -- how we enter the door only Christ could open -- is not to say we get to Heaven by our own effort on our own merit. Obeying Christ in this way is merely to be consistent with the preservation of both sides of the Biblical paradox mentioned earlier. To ignore one side in favor of the other is to end in a disastrous conclusion -- either way. The Sacramental Tradition is thus both Biblical and reasonable, it just professes that Christ’s grace works, though in essence through faith and obedience – never the less through a faith and obedience which are manifested in a different way than that of the Protestant.

Despite theological disagreements, it is my hope that we can all agree that Christ's life, death, and resurrection unite us as common believers; that this essential belief unites us as brothers and sisters in Christ.