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                                                                                                        On the Meaning of "Grace"

1. By the "grace" of God one properly means the divine event of God's love for us as the gift and demand of authentic existence, i.e., obedient faith (oboedientia) in the sense of both unreserved trust (fiducia) in God's love and unqualified loyalty (fidelitas) to God's cause.

2. But any human event experienced as asserting the possibility of such authentic existence as our possibility could only be a re-presentation of the divine event of God's grace, and so itself, mediately and indirectly, that event. For "the explicit self-awareness of grace in the Church is itself a grace" (Karl Rahner, The Christian of the Future: 85).

1980; rev. 22 August 2003; 30 June 2008