“Prevenient grace”: Already there, without limit.

PREVENE pri'vin verb . Arrive first, come before, pre-exist. [Prevenient pri'vin.jənt adjective , prevenience pri'vin.jəns noun .] Time for an old-timey word, prevenient . One you’ll really only find theologians use anymore. But I gotta inflict it on you—sorry—because so many Christians use it to describe how God’s grace works. Y’might already know humans are selfish, and this self-interest distorts everything we do. Including everything good we try to do: There’s gotta be something in it for us . Even if it looks and feels like there’s nothing in it for us—if it’s an absolute act of sacrifice, one which harms us instead of benefits us, one which makes us feel awful instead of noble—there’s still something way deep down, embedded in the core of our being, which gets some satisfaction from it. Otherwise we we’d never voluntarily do it. That’s just how messed up we are. “Totally depraved,” as the theologians put it. But people usually pretend this messed-up