IT is also importance to notice that grace is experienced as something that is entirely gratuitous and always come firstly from God’s initiative. It is granted to human beings not because of their merits or goodness but simply because God is gratuitous love for all. This experience prompts human beings to give thanks to God in return.
Human beings would get experience when they go out of themselves, meet others, face reality, endure dangers, try to solve difficulties, confront inner and outer realities, and find the way to get through.
Then they might get knowledge and conscience. They earn these with their own sweat and blood. Grace appears in this process, liberating human beings from decadent human situation for fuller and divinized one. Put in another way, only by immersing themselves in the reality around them can human beings experience its aspects of gratuitousness and grace. Accordingly, Boff insists that grace can be grace (God’s free love and his liberating presence in the world) for us today only if it emerges from within the world in which ourselves are immersed.
Boff confronts the notions that see grace as something apart from human life and experience. He argues that we should see grace as something expressed in terms of relationship, encounter, covenant (concrete experiences) as the bible and early Christians did.
Boff suspects that the erroneous view of grace, which separate grace from human experience, was emerged because alien categories (Greek philosophy) were used. Boff is well aware that such erroneous view has been so prevalent in the Christian thought since the council of Trent. This view puts grace in the context of supernatural and natural.
