Salvation As Stewardship

What must I do to be saved? It is the most important question anyone can ask. Unfortunately, the answer is not always easy to grasp. Since the Reformation, there have been many different answers to this question, and while the Catholic position has been the same since the beginning, it has not always been well articulated. The goal of this article is to help change that. 

The first thing we must do is examine salvation’s source: divine grace. Saint Paul writes, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— not the result of works, so that no one may boast (Eph 2:8-9).” The word grace is the Greek word for gift. For Saint Paul, the grace of God is the gift of God. But what does it mean to be on the receiving end of a gift from God? Like with any other passage of Scripture, we must seek to understand the text in the same way the original audience would have understood it. John Barclay, an Anglican New Testament scholar, has done some amazing scholarship in this area by analyzing the way Paul’s teaching about grace relates to gift-giving in the ancient world. He writes the following: 

"Ancient gift-giving involved a complex system of etiquette. Those who received gifts understood that they were under a special obligation to reciprocate, that is, to make a return gift. The ancient Roman author Seneca compares gift-giving to a game of catch, which requires a continuous back-and-forth exchange. The goal of gift-giving was to keep the ball (the gift) continually circulating back and forth."(1)

This necessity of reciprocity is on full display in the parable of the talents found in the 13th chapter of Matthew’s gospel. In this particular parable, a certain master gives his servants a certain number of talents (money) while he goes to a distant country for a time. Two of the servants invest the master’s gifts wisely and turn a profit, while the other buries his in the ground. When the master returned, he rewarded the two servants who used their gifts to increase the master's wealth, and he punished the servant who did nothing with it. In the parable, gifts were given with the expectation that those gifts would be used to reciprocate the gift giver. Those who used the gifts to multiply the master's wealth were rewarded, while the servant who did not was punished. Pope Francis summarized this teaching succinctly when he said, “The Church has repeatedly taught that we are justified not by our own works or efforts, but by the grace of the Lord, who always takes the initiative.”(2) God must take the initiative to enable us to perform good works, just as the master must first give his servants talents for them to invest them wisely. God must act first, for without Christ we can do nothing (John 15:5), or as St. Augustine put it, “For he hath no fruit, who hath not Christ.” But, once God has given us the ability to produce spiritual fruit, there is an expectation that we do so rather than bury his gift in the ground.

I began this article by referring to Ephesians 2:8-9. If we read those two verses alongside verse 10, we will see that Paul has in mind this same understanding of gift-giving as his contemporaries. The three verses read together are as follows: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”(3) In Paul’s letters, there are three ways in which the word saved is used:

1. Justification: We have been saved (1 Cor 6:11)

2. Sanctification: We are being saved (2 Cor 2:15)

3. Glorification: We will be saved (Rom 5:9-10)

Salvation in the past tense refers to the reception of the gift, which only requires faith. This is something that occurs at a specific moment in time. The effect of salvation in the past tense consists of forgiveness of all our past sins and freedom from slavery to sinful desires. But the entire reason God gives us that gift is so that we may use it to live a holy life. This is salvation according to the present tense (sanctification). In the economy of salvation, one does not automatically go to heaven just because one has the potential to produce spiritual fruit. Like the third servant in the parable of the talents, they must do what they have been empowered to do. They must go from having the potential for holiness to actually being holy. The stage of salvation that Paul describes in Ephesians 2:8-9 is the first stage, which is why he concludes in verse 10 by saying this salvation is for the sake of good works. As St. John Chrysostom writes, “If we are to attain the kingdom of Heaven, it is not enough to abandon wickedness, but there must be abundant practice of that which is good also.”(4)

If we choose not to be faithful stewards of God’s grace, then there will be consequences. The third-century theologian, Origen of Alexandria, says, “If anyone acts unjustly after justification, it is scarcely to be doubted that he has rejected the grace of justification. Those who remain in Christ in name but are found unfruitful in works and deeds will be cut off and cast into the fire.”(5) Likewise, the Catechism of the Catholic Church states that the faith that remains in the absence of hope and love does not fully unite the believer to Christ or bestow living membership in Christ’s body.(6) As Saint Paul says in his epistle to the Galatians, we are saved by the kind of faith that works through love (Gal 5:6). We cannot be saved by works without faith. But neither can we be saved by faith without works. We are saved by faith, not by works, but our faith must work in order to be the kind of faith that saves.(7) If faith is genuine, love will accompany it, and it is love that fulfills the law of the spirit (Rom 13:9). But, once our faith stops working in love, it ceases to be true faith, for true faith is never inoperative.

The Catholic view of salvation can best be described using the word stewardship. God gives us a gift (grace), with the expectation that we will reciprocate by producing good works. The German theologian Matthias Scheeben says, “God himself has laid the foundation of this spiritual house through his grace. But he demands that we cooperate in the construction of our own building. For we are not only God’s building but also his cooperators.”(8) There is no set amount of spiritual fruit one must produce to be saved,  just as the man with four talents does not need to equal the man with ten. But there is still an obligation to produce spiritual fruit. God has given us all that we need to fulfill his will for our lives which is to be holy (1 Thess 4:3). If we choose to bury those gifts in the ground and not use them to bear any fruit, then we will be cut down and thrown into the fire (Matt 7:19).

1. John Barclay, Paul and the Gift, pg. 46.

2. Pope Francis, Gaudete et Exsultate, 52.

3. St. Augustine of Hippo, Sermons on Selected Lessons of the New-Testament 39.1.

4. St. John Chrysostom, Homily XVI on Ephesians, pg. 125.

5. Origen of Alexandria, Commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: Books 1-5, 227.

6. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1814.

7. St. Gregory of Nazianzus, On Holy Baptism XLV.

8. Matthias Scheeben, The Glories of Divine Grace, pg. 391.