Taking St. Raphael's Advice

Tobit and Cooperation with Grace

“Bless God and give him thanks before all the living for the good things he has done for you, by blessing and extolling his name in song. Proclaim before all with due honor the deeds of God, and do not be slack in thanking him. A king’s secret should be kept secret, but one must declare the works of God and give thanks with due honor. Do good, and evil will not overtake you.

Prayer with fasting is good; almsgiving with righteousness is better than wealth with wickedness. It is better to give alms than to store up gold, for almsgiving saves from death, and purges all sin. Those who give alms will enjoy a full life, but those who commit sin and do evil are their own worst enemies. (Tobit 12.6-10)

As a reformed Christian, I was to take confidence and trust in the mystery of God’s all-encompassing Providence, as He had ordained all things from the foundation of the world. Ironically, I would say the same as a Thomist. However, I identified more with Paul’s words in Romans 7 about sin seizing the opportunity to destroy me by perverting the Law, as well as Isaiah’s observation that all my “righteousness was as filthy rags.”

Sin not only perverted the doctrine of Providence as I understood it, but Calvin’s intense application of the Sovereignty of God in all things led me to neglect my prayers, my good works, my study of Scripture, the kind of things a Puritan would have called “proof of regeneration.” I would not neglect them if God in His Providence desired me to do them. By neglecting the “spiritual disciplines,” a perverted view of Providence would have me take comfort in God’s ordaining it from the foundation of the world.

It was a constant struggle of naval-gazing. I was not to seek such things as sources of justification, and rightly so, for that is the heresy of Pelagianism; but that threat always hangs over the head of the Calvinist. The emphasis is sanctification; these good works were to be understood as the product of a life truly born-again, wherein one is trusting solus Christus for one’s salvation. The good deeds are the proof in the pudding so to speak. But what does one do when one believes in sovereign predestination as it applies existentially to the individual and there is no evidence demonstrating the reality? Is it a matter of self-deception? Was I never “saved?” I had always said if Calvinism had 10 points, I would have believed and preached 11.

Therein is the dilemma: both Luther and Calvin separated justification and sanctification where Scripture nor the Church Fathers do not. Justification in Paul (unlike in Calvin) begins in New Covenant Baptism (CCC 1992) and is lived out as sanctification provided by the deifying work of the Holy Spirit in the life of grace given in the sacraments. However, the reality of breaching the new covenant by mortal sins (1 John 5) is a real existential threat in the daily life of the Christian, whose Christian experience began in baptism, in which my sins were initially “washed away” (cf.Acts 22).

Hence, the necessity of the gift of the Sacrament of Penance, which restores the grace lost by mortal sin (cf. John 20.21ff), i.e. “Whoever’s sins you forgive, they are forgiven …” What was lost by an act of the will in “submitting my members to unrighteousness” (cf. Romans 6), is restored by God’s grace in the Confessional, in which I leave absolved, justified and back on the path of sanctification.

Enter the wisdom of St. Raphael. It was a turning point in my spiritual formation. St. Raphael tells young Tobit and his wife

“… Prayer with fasting is good; almsgiving with righteousness is better than wealth with wickedness. It is better to give alms than to store up gold, for almsgiving saves from death, and purges all sin. Those who give alms will enjoy a full life, but those who commit sin and do evil are their own worst enemies.”

WHAT??? If I have the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ, secured sola fide, so that I am simul iustus et peccator, as Luther proclaimed to Erasmus, how can I save myself from death by almsgiving? How can I add to the “finished work of Jesus?” And here’s the beauty of the Catholic perennial teaching. The grace infused in me in my baptism is something I must use and consciously pursue.

As a Thomist, I would quickly point out that the decision to “not submit my members to unrighteousness” would itself not be possible without prevenient grace, as the means by which I am enabled to cooperate with sanctifying grace. Because of the merits of Jesus Christ in His life, death and resurrection, I am free by my baptism and the consequent strength of confession to pursue good works on the path of Holiness and increase in that deifying grace everyday that I live.

St. Raphael’s wisdom would not have been possible had I been reading my Protestant Bible, for this Catholic understanding that runs contrary to Luther’s new Gospel is precisely one reason why he removed it from his German translation. It changed my prayer life, my understanding of holiness and the pursuit of being a Saint. Sancte Raphael, ora pro nobis.