Grace (footnoted)

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to seperate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8:38-39

The Christian faith is rooted in the understanding that we belong to a God of Grace. This is the first affirmation of the believer and yet is goes beyond our immediate experience of justification, encompassing all of life and all of creation. Christian theology is the footnotes to that profound grace. And yet, grace still goes beyond our ability to describe, so that after two thousand years, we are still not able to truly capture the centrality of grace.

Everything that gets posted on this blog will ultimately come back to grace, grace more profound than even Theologyman's words can ever capture. So, here at the beginning, a few general things to remember about grace are in order.

Grace precedes creation: The real question in a debate over creation is not about how things were created, but why would God bother to create anything at all. Creation itself (no matter how it got here) is the first fruit of grace. This means that grace is about more than simply us as a human species, but grace embraces all of the created order. When grace is reduced to a means for human salvation in the afterlife, it neglects fact that a gracious God creates and is redeeming the entire cosmos.

Grace without merit: Those of us who are blessed enough to be awake to the grace in which we live and move and have our being are well aware that we did not earn any of it. The idea that we have received this grace as a function of our own gifts or talents, our own charm or wit, our own righteousness or faithfulness (though we may be any of these, and likely see ourselves as all of them) is the birth place of much of the idolatry we see in the contemporary church. The scandalous corollary to the unmerited grace that I have received means that I cannot deny that grace to another. I should live in the world with the same grace that I received (grace and gratitude as the basis for the Christian life will be another post, or likely several). Having received God's grace without merit, any honest humility will preclude me from denying God's grace to others based on their merits.

Grace precedes faith: One gift of grace is faith in Jesus Chrsit. If faith is the gift of a gracious God, that grace must precede faith. Faith itself is not foremost an act of will or a decision of the mind, but a gift of the Holy Spirit. Without that gift, we are incapable of having a meaningful faith. This is what led the Reformers to double predestination (those who receive the gift of faith will be saved, those who do not will be damned). Others would instead seek to make faith a human response to grace, our reception of the divine gift (thus making faith an act of human will). Still others conclude that faith is a gift that not all receive, yet all ultimately receive grace (universal salvation). Now, I've known many people who claimed to have faith in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, but who choose a hell of their own making to living in the light of grace. I've also known many people who do not have an explicitly Christian faith (Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and others) whose lives are overflowing with I only know to call grace. This much I know, that I belong to a God of grace, and that if I could add anything to Paul's litany at the end of Romans 8 it would go something like "...nothing can seperate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, not even ourselves."

Grace is not solely, or even primarily, about what happens when we die: The exact details about what happens after death are a mystery. The Christian confession in this regard is not about harps and halos, but that even in death we belong to God. But grace is not simply about after our deaths, but the blessedness of our lives here and now. It is both infinite gift and a demand for responsibility. Having awakened to grace, our lives are being transformed and we become (and are becoming) new creations, and that transformation demands a response.

...and yet sin: With all this talk of grace, many of you not from a progressive viewpoint on theology have likely been thinking to yourselves, "Great, another liberal who talks all about grace, but doesn't take sin seriously." This is a fair characture of many liberal theological voices. Sin remains a radical, universal reality in our world and in ourselves. It is both personal and communal, and touches everything that is touched by humanity. A serious liberal theology, I would argue, actually has a more realistic and often pessimistic view of human sin than do most neo-evangelical theologies. Theologyman is all about total depravity. And that's what makes grace all the more amazing, because even as we are yet fallen and sinful, we belong to a God of Grace.