Outside St Paul and the Acts the term charis—whence our ‘grace’—is rather rare in the New Testament, but the idea, as Dr Ryder Smith has said, ‘is everywhere.’ Common alike in secular Greek and the Septuagint, charis was a wonderfully apt term for Christian uses. In the Septuagint it renders the Hebrew chen, meaning favour or goodwill freely bestowed and presupposing the idea of love and of a love active and generous. Again charis, as derived from chairein, ‘to be glad,’ carried a sense of joy—-joy on both sides for the gift bestowed, both in the giver and in the receiver, or more precisely in the relation arising between the two as a result of the gift. Thus it could denote a state of being in communion or fellowship, and in the New Testament (especially in St Paul, but cf. John i, 14-16) it became the chief term signifying the specifically Christian situation of being loved by God, in Christ, and of returning this love, in Christ—or simply of being ‘in Christ.’ Certainly the Church was fortunate in having to hand a word so flexible and beautiful.

Around charis gathered the other Christian words, faith, love, peace, etc., as well as, in St Paul particularly, the contrast-term ‘law’ and the term for grace’s antagonist, ‘sin’. In time these words came to be defined more precisely, and as each one became more precise all the rest were affected too. The Church could not understand ‘love’ or ‘faith’ except in the context of grace, and in particular, and more quickly, she found she could not understand grace except in relation to sin and vice versa.