Like most clichés, “salvation by grace alone” isn’t wrong. Complicated ideas are often distilled into shorthand phrases to make them easier to access. Over time, however, such shorthand phrases can come to mean something much different from what their authors meant when they crafted them.
The following is what we consider the contemporary understanding of “salvation by grace alone.”
Salvation. A person is saved from their sins. Their sins are forgiven, and as a result, they gain admission to heaven. Salvation is thus a singular event focused exclusively on forgiveness of sin, partitioned off from any requirement for behavioral change.
By grace. Grace is a derivative of God’s mercy, and the greatest portion of it comes to us at our “point of salvation.” This often is called the moment you were “saved” or received new life, forgiveness, new birth—the big moment when you became a child of God. Grace is something you cannot seek or earn; you only receive it. The human’s relationship to grace is a passive one: God is the one who distributes it as he wills.
Alone. Alone contrasts grace with human effort. Life in Christ is separate from human action: There is nothing you can do to earn it, there is nothing you can do to lose it, and there is nothing you can do to supplement it. There is something powerful and right about each of these elements. They are profoundly true: All people need to be saved, salvation can only come about by God’s grace, and we are completely unable to achieve salvation on our own.
The following is what we consider the contemporary understanding of “salvation by grace alone.”
Salvation. A person is saved from their sins. Their sins are forgiven, and as a result, they gain admission to heaven. Salvation is thus a singular event focused exclusively on forgiveness of sin, partitioned off from any requirement for behavioral change.
By grace. Grace is a derivative of God’s mercy, and the greatest portion of it comes to us at our “point of salvation.” This often is called the moment you were “saved” or received new life, forgiveness, new birth—the big moment when you became a child of God. Grace is something you cannot seek or earn; you only receive it. The human’s relationship to grace is a passive one: God is the one who distributes it as he wills.
Alone. Alone contrasts grace with human effort. Life in Christ is separate from human action: There is nothing you can do to earn it, there is nothing you can do to lose it, and there is nothing you can do to supplement it. There is something powerful and right about each of these elements. They are profoundly true: All people need to be saved, salvation can only come about by God’s grace, and we are completely unable to achieve salvation on our own.
- Bill Hull & Brandon Cook,
The Cost of Cheap Grace: Reclaiming the Value of Discipleship, 2020.
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