Do we earn our salvation? Definitely no. In Romans 6. 23:"The wages of sin
[what we earn] is death, the free gift of God [what we do not earn] is
eternal life." And several times in St. Paul, e.g., in 1 Cor 6. 10 we see
that we "inherit" the kingdom. Now when we inherit from our parents we do
not say we earned the inheritance, though , on the other hand, by being bad
enough long enough we could have earned to lose it. So, as a student put
it, as to salvation,"you can't earn it, but you can blow it."
So we get justification, being right with God, without any merit at all.
But, when we have that, it makes us sons of the Father, and brothers of
Christ - as such we have a claim to inherit. We did not earn that claim,
but we could earn to lose it. So in 1 Cor 6:9-10 St. Paul gives a list of
the chief great sins and sinners, adds that they "will not inherit the
kingdom."
We are not saved as individuals, or by our own power, but we are saved
inasmuch as we are members of Christ. That means we must be like Him. Hence
in Gal 5:13-26 Paul gives two lists: the fruits of the Spirit, and the
works of the flesh. If we follow the flesh, we will die. We will not
inherit. But we must follow the Spirit. Romans 8:9:"If anyone does not have
the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him." - that Spirit leads us to
do as Christ did, which means to avoid sin. We cannot say: If we have taken
Christ as our Savior we can sin as much as we want. For faith includes
obedience - cf. Romans1:5. We cannot say if we have faith we can disobey,
for faith includes obedience.
This is really the syn Christo theme of St. Paul: We must suffer with Him,
die with Him, be buried with Him, rise with Him, ascend with Him (cf.
Romans 8. 17; 6:3-8; Col. 3:1-4; Eph. 2:5-6; Rom 8:13.
We should notice too the fact that there are two stages, sometimes called
objective redemption and subjective redemption. The objective redemtion is
the work of earning a claim to all forgiveness and grace -- we do not
contribute to that at all, Christ did it for us. The subjective redemption
is the process of giving out that forgiveness and grace thoughout all
subsequent ages, even today. It is in that that we need to be like Christ
to share in the claim He generated.
Our part in the subjective redemption is had by being like Christ in
suffering and other things. God likes this as part of His love of good
order. Summa I.19.5.c., paraphrased (literal is very crude) says: God in
His love of good order likes to have one thing in place to serve as a
reason or title for giving the second thing, even though that thing does
not really move Him. Hence, in the objective redemption, He was pleased to
use the Blessed Mother (whose ability to do anything came from her Son). In
the subjective redemption, He uses her, the Saints, and us.
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