Grace Universal, Unconditional, and Irrevocable

 

Grace Universal, Unconditional, and Irrevocable

A Personal Confession of Faith

March 23, 2022

 

The Scripture quotations contained here are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and are used with permission. All rights reserved.

 

Here’s a truth we all need to think about. Both major types of western Christianity, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, are grounded in a negative theological and anthropological concept. They both posit that there is something radically wrong with the relationship between God and us human beings. Whether they accept the hoary concept of original sin or not, they both begin with the understanding that there is something radically wrong with us from which we need to be saved. Most Christians believe that there is something we must do in order to be saved, though doing something includes not doing some things. Some think we must obey the dictates of some ecclesial institution. Others think we must believe the right things. Those Christians may not see believing the right things as a work that we must do to be saved, but it is. Christianity starts with the notion that there is something existentially wrong with us humans, and we’d sure better do something about it.

But what if we upend our Christian faith and begin not from a place of need but from a place of grace? I am convinced that God’s universal, unconditional, and irrevocable grace is indeed our starting point as human beings. So much of Christianity grounds its understanding of the relationship between God and humanity in the second creation story in the biblical book of Genesis not with the first one. In that second one the first two humans disobey God and are expelled from a paradise called the Garden of Eden. They are exiled into a life of hard toil and painful childbirth. We say they have “fallen.” They are expelled from the immediate presence of God. Then we say that because of them we’re all “fallen.” We’ve supposedly fallen from God’s grace and must do something to get ourselves back into it.

What does human existence and our relationship with God look like if we start not from the second biblical creation story but from the first one? In that story God creates woman and man together, not separately as in the second story. In the first story God places no restrictions on God’s people (other perhaps than making them vegetarians—see Genesis 1:29-30). There’s nothing in the first story about people being expelled from the immediate presence of God. Instead, God blesses God’s people. Genesis 1:28a. Then God sees everything that God has made, including human beings, and finds that “indeed, it was very good.” Genesis 1:31a. The Bible begins not with sin and alienation but with blessing. God does nothing to God’s humans other than create and bless them; and God finds not that the humans have done something bad and become existentially bad in themselves but that they are very good. So let us begin our analysis here not with sinful people and alienation from God but with very good people blessed by God.

Now, we all know of course that we humans aren’t just good, moral people. We all know that humans bring much evil into God’s good world. We seem to be incorrigibly violent, greedy, and selfish. We cause much avoidable suffering among God’s people. We inflict much avoidable damage on God’s good creation. We all experience pain in our lives. We are all mortal. We are limited, finite creatures. Though God created us, we are neither God nor gods. We are therefore far from perfect.

What does our being far from perfect say about our relationship with God? Our faith mostly says it creates an existential crisis in that relationship. Yet it seems to me that the answer to this question depends on from which side of the God-human relationship we are looking at that relationship. From our human side of the relationship with God we have to be honest. We damage our relationship with God all the time. As Paul says, we all sin and fall short of the glory of God. Romans 3:23. Our sin essentially boils down to the myriad ways we push God away. We find it difficult if not impossible consistently to live the way we know God wants us to live.

We don’t like living with difficult or impossible things. So we relieve our discomfort over those things in various ways. Some of us relieve it by doing, or attempting to do, the things that some variety of Christianity tells them they have to do to get right with God. Some relieve it by convincing themselves that God doesn’t care how they live. Some relieve the pain by ignoring a God they may reluctantly concede is real but they more or less wish wasn’t. Others do it by denying the reality of God altogether. Many people of course don’t relieve the discomfort at all. They just live with the comfort of knowing that they are not perfect, though just living with the discomfort is neither psychologically nor spiritually healthy, which doesn’t stop a lot of people from doing it. I want here to suggest a way of dealing with our knowledge that we sin and fall short of the glory of God that I am convinced is more psychologically, spiritually, and theologically sound and healthy than any of these other ways of dealing with our existential pain around our relationship with God.

That way is to do the best we can to look at the relationship between God and us humans not from our human side of the relationship but from God’s side. Of course, God ultimately remains unknowable mystery, but we humans, or at least some of us, are driven to understand God anyway. There are, I believe, two closely related ways in which we can do it. One is to look at some of the passages from scripture, especially from the writings of St. Paul, that assure us we really are in right relationship with God despite the ways in which we always fall short of God’s will for us. The other is to stop projecting our human ways onto God. I’ll start with scripture.

In 2 Corinthians Paul deals with many different issues that he has heard are causing trouble among the Christians in Corinth. Whether this was an issue in Corinth or not, in chapter 5 of 2 Corinthians Paul directly addresses the question of our relationship with God in a very helpful way. These verses are foundational for my own faith and shed a great deal of light on the issue we are addressing here. We read:

 

So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled himself to us through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. That is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. 2 Corinthians 5:17-19.

 

In these wonderful verses Paul tells us that God does not count our trespasses, that is, our sin, against us. Therefore, as far as God is concerned, we are already reconciled with God. It’s done. For all of us. Our problem is not that God is angry with us and is going to punish us. Our problem is that we do not know that God isn’t angry with us and is not going to punish us.

Then there’s this passage from Romans. It’s even more foundational for my faith and theology than are those great lines from 2 Corinthians that we just read. In chapter 8 of Romans Paul writes:

 

Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who is raised, who is the right hand of God, who intervenes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? .... No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 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 separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8:34-39, with verse 36 omitted.

 

I have said many times that the last two verses here, the ones that begin “For I am convinced,” are the gospel of Jesus Christ in a nutshell. Paul’s questions—who will bring a charge against God’s elect, and who is to condemn—are clearly rhetorical.[1] The answer is, “no one.” Consider for a moment these amazing words: “nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” There’s God’s truth for all of us. Nothing does, ever has, or ever will separate us from the love of God. That’s what the God-human relationship looks like from God’s side.

Why is that divine truth so hard for people to understand? I believe that it is because we are forever projecting our human ways onto God. We get angry at evildoers. We project that human emotion onto God and assume that God gets powerfully angry with evildoers. We want evildoers punished. We project that human desire onto God and think that God will punish evildoers in a way far more punishing than anything we could ever do to them. We judge other people all the time, usually negatively. We project our judgmental nature onto God and believe that God will judge us and everybody else the way we would if we could. We fear that God’s judgment and punishment will be directed against us. At some level of our consciousness, we agree with Psalm 51 when it says, “Against you, you alone, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are justified in your sentence and blameless when you pass judgment.” Psalm 51:4. That fear arises from our projecting our ways onto God.

Here’s the thing though. God’s ways are not human ways that we have projected onto God. Scripture tells us as much:

 

For my thoughts are not your

thoughts,

     nor are your ways my ways, says

the Lord.

For as the heavens are higher than

the earth,

     so are my ways higher than your

ways,

     and my thoughts than your

thoughts. Isaiah 55:8-9.

 

These verses point us to one of the best ways we have of discerning God’s ways and thoughts. It is to consider if something we’re attributing to God is merely something human writ large. If it is, it’s not God’s. Jesus turned his whole world upside down to tell us that God’s ways are not the world’s ways. This is true even of the good things we attribute to God. For example, we say that God is love, a characterization of God that we also find in scripture. See 1 John 4:8. Yet God’s love is not merely human love on a larger scale. God’s love is so much more vast than human love is or ever could be that it becomes something different from human love not merely in scope but n its very essence.

Now, you may say that that means that God’s anger and judgment are so much more vast than human anger and judgment that they become something different from human anger and judgment not merely in scope but in their very essence. Yet we know that that isn’t correct because we know Jesus Christ. We know that he condemned anger and judgment and lifted up love. We know that he demonstrated God’s love for the least and the lost. He demonstrated God’s love for everyone else too. God’s anger and judgment are different from human anger and judgment in essence because they simply aren’t real!

No, God is not angry with us. God does not judge us. God is not going to condemn and punish us. God has never judged or condemned anyone. God never will. Pope Paul VI once said that he believes that there is such a place as hell, but he’s not sure anyone is in it. That statement is true as far as it goes, but God’s love of humanity is so vast, so radical, that we must say not only is no one in hell but that hell doesn’t even exist. There is no physical place of fire and brimstone where sinners suffer agony for eternity. We create hell on earth for others and sometimes even for ourselves, but that’s our doing not God’s.

No, God is not anger and judgment. God is love in action, that is, God is grace. Unconditional, universal, irrevocable grace. Christians are forever making God’s grace conditional. We say whether or not we stand in God’s grace depends on whether we do what is necessary for us to earn it, as we noted above. Some Christians have said that it depends on who God has preordained to receive it. All of our attempts to limit God’s grace suffer from the same fault. They all make God too small, too human. We humans can’t imagine ourselves forgiving everyone unconditionally. We can’t imagine accepting everyone unconditionally. We can’t imagine loving everyone unconditionally. We can’t imagine God doing those things either.

But let me say it once again. God is not human. God is not humanity writ large. The only limitations on God are limitations God places on Godself. God has imposed on Godself a decision to be love not hate, grace not wrath and punishment. God transcends humanity absolutely. God transcends human limitations absolutely. We cannot imagine universal, conditional, irrevocable love. But God is universal, unconditional, irrevocable love. We cannot imagine universal, unconditional, irrevocable forgiveness. But God is universal, unconditional, irrevocable forgiveness. We will never reach the greatest understanding of God of which we humans are capable as long as we keep projecting our human limitations onto God.

There are more things we can’t imagine for ourselves. We cannot imagine ever dispensing universal, unconditional, irrevocable grace for anyone. We all acknowledge, I think, that what we call the grace of God is real, but we as we do with every other attribute of God, we make God’s grace particular and conditional. We say not everyone receives it. We say not everyone deserves it. We say that those who have it may lose it. We can’t imagine God bestowing universal, unconditional, irrevocable grace on all of God’s creation. Perhaps we can’t imagine it because at some deep level of our psyches we don’t believe that we ourselves deserve it. We can’t believe it also because we can’t imagine God other than as a bigger, more powerful, human being. Yet God is not a bigger, more powerful human being. God does not have human limitations.

Perhaps answering this question will help. What is grace? The online dictionary mirriam-webster.com gives as this as the primary meaning of grace in the sense in which we are using the word here: “unmerited divine assistance given to humans for their regeneration or sanctification.” The key word here is “unmerited.” In our earthly lives we understand that something positive received as a result of something we have done is a payment. Except perhaps rarely in extraordinary circumstances, no employer pays an employee wages the employee has not earned through her labor. That which we earn is a wage. It is not grace. Wages are particular and conditional. An employee earns only his own wages. His work is a condition of his receiving wages. We don’t earn grace as a payment or reward. If we’ve done something to earn it, it’s payment not grace.

A few other truths follow from the fact that grace is given as a gift not as a reward. The first is that grace is utterly unconditional. There is no if-then logic to grace. We may think we can’t possibly earn grace, but the far more important truth is that we don’t have to. Or we may think that we have earned it. The truth, however, is that God’s grace was already there all along. It was there before we did anything to earn it. It’s there when we do nothing to earn it. It’s there when we think we don’t deserve it or someone else doesn’t. For grace to be grace and not a reward it absolutely must be the free, unconditional gift of God.

It also follows from the nature of grace as unmerited that grace is and must be universal. For grace truly to be grace it must be there for everyone without condition. If it isn’t there for everyone there must be some distinction between those who have it and those who don’t. But introducing a distinction between people in the equation of grace necessarily introduces a condition for grace. Once we’ve done that, as we have already seen, what we have is not longer grace. It is a payment or reward.

And it follows that for grace truly to be grace it must be irrevocable. Different Christian traditions have taken different positions on whether once a person has been “saved” that person can later on lose that salvation. The truth is that no one anywhere, at any time, loses grace. For grace to be revocable there would have to be conditions on grace. A person who had it would have to have violated some condition of keeping it. Once again, introducing that condition into the equation of grace makes it a payment not grace.

The unmerited universality and irrevocability of grace rules out Christian exclusivism. For nearly two millennia now most Christians have insisted that only Christians are saved. They have said that God’s grace extends only to those who accept the Christian faith. It is obvious that that belief makes being a Christian a condition of grace. Now I’ll say it again because it can’t be stressed too much. If there’s a condition on it, it isn’t grace. Moreover, given the enormous diversity of God’s people across time and space, it makes no sense to say that God created only one way to be right with God, and it just happens to be our way. A God who is love simply would never do that. The nature of grace shows that God hasn’t done that and never will, for in that scenario being Christian is a condition of grace. Christianity can be a powerful tradition within which to live one’s spiritual life. Christians however have no monopoly on God’s grace. We never have had such a monopoly, and we never will. People of other faith traditions, and people of no faith at all, stand as much in God’s grace as we Christians do.

Sadly, Christians have for millennia excluded some people from their churches not because of something about the excluded person’s faith but because of something about that person’s life or that person’s personhood. The churches to which most Christians belong still condemn homosexuality as a sin and exclude God’s LGBTQ+ people from the church. At the very least, they will not ordain those people as clergy. Many churches exclude people who have been divorced. They exclude people who have been convicted of a crime against a child rather than make arrangements for that person to be in church without being a threat to the church’s children. The truth is that churches, being human institutions not divine ones, can exclude people from the church, sinful as their doing so may be. What they cannot do is exclude anyone from God’s grace. If they could, then not being whatever a particular church condemns would be a condition of grace. So let’s repeat our mantra here: If there’s a condition on it, it’s not grace.

There is another issue about grace that we must address. It is the question of whether God’s grace was a reality for all people before the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. Christianity has said from its beginning that Jesus Christ brought a forgiveness of sin and a salvation that was not there before those things had happened. Christians confess Jesus as their savior. Most of them mean by that confession that there is no salvation without Christ. To these Christians something new came into human life with and through Jesus that wasn’t there before. That something is God’s grace expressed as eternal salvation.

In their contention that Jesus Christ created a divine grace expressed as salvation that wasn’t there before, Christians are just wrong. Consider what that contention means. It means that at a particular point in time, for reasons known only to God, God decided to do for God’s people something God had never done for them before. God decided around the time we call 1 CE to save people God had never saved before. This scenario simply makes no sense. Why would God do that? Did God one day become a different God? Did God change from a God who didn’t save people into one who did?  Did God somehow morph into a God of love and grace when God had never been that before?

No, God never did any such thing. Process theologians disagree with this contention, but God is immutable. God has always been perfect. God has always been the source and ground of morality. Our human understanding of morality changes and develops over time. God’s morality doesn’t. Does it make any sense to you that God suddenly decided to save people from a particular time forward when God had not saved the people who came before that time? It sure doesn’t make any sense to me.

Some of the earliest Christians were aware of this problem that arises from the confession of Jesus Christ as savior. Some of them tried to solve the problem by saying that in the short time between Christ’s death on the cross and his resurrection he descended into hell and brough out of hell all the souls who deserved to be saved but hadn’t been because Jesus hadn’t come yet when they were alive. That notion is unbiblical. More importantly, it doesn’t really solve the problem. Those souls had supposedly been suffering in hell since the day of their person’s physical death. Some of them would have been in hell for tens or even a few hundred thousands years. This theory, sometimes called the harrowing of hell, gets us nowhere in dealing with the problem of the existence of grace or salvation before Jesus came. The only way around this problem is to confess that Jesus don’t create grace. He didn’t create divine forgiveness of sin. He didn’t make a salvation possible that hadn’t been possible before. God has always been a God of grace. God has always saved all people. God didn’t send Jesus to bring salvation because God didn’t need to. God’s grace and salvation have always been there.

Does that mean that Jesus is unimportant and we should forget about him? By no means! Jesus didn’t change God’s relationship with humanity. What he did was bring and reveal a new way for people to understand and enter into God’s grace. A new way, not the only way. When we confess Jesus to be the Word of God Incarnate, we see a new revelation of an eternal truth. We see God in the person of Jesus entering fully into human life. We see God in the person of Jesus entering into and suffering the worst that human sin can do to human beings. We see revealed anew the truth that God doesn’t prevent bad things from happening. Rather, God enters with us into whatever happens in our lives. We see that our God of love and grace never abandons us. In Jesus’ cry of dereliction from the cross — “My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?” — we seen paradox that God is present with us even when we are sure that God is not present with us. So, for us Christians Jesus is immensely important. His importance just isn’t that he created something that hadn’t existed before.

I have preached and taught God’s unconditional, universal, irrevocable grace for quite some time now. I have heard the objections to that theology that Christian people raise. One common objection is that it just can’t be that everyone is saved. This objection is often stated as, “Do you mean to tell me that Adolf Hitler is saved?” There is of course no question that Hitler committed enormous crimes and sins against humanity. I have lived in Germany. I find those gut-wrenching, heart breaking pictures of what Hitler and his agents did to God’s people, especially to God’s Jewish people, almost too painful to look at. I first saw them when I was living in Berlin when I was eleven years old. My family had a landlady whose late husband had been a member of the Nazi party. I was closer to what Hitler had done than most Americans ever have been. I get it about the Holocaust. It is simply impossible for us to believe that Adolf Hitler doesn’t deserve the most severe punishment for what he did.

It should be possible, however, for us not to project that human judgment onto God. No, it isn’t easy to do. But if grace is grace, we need to do it hard or not. Jesus told us not to judge. See Matthew 7:1 and Luke 6:37. He placed no limits on that directive. He didn’t say don’t judge unless the person you’re judging has done something monstrously bad. Any judgment that there is belongs to God not to us, not that I mean here to retract my claim that God doesn’t judge. One thing we can know is that however badly God may feel about Adolf Hitler and his crimes, however angry at Hitler God may have the right to be, nothing removes even Hitler or any other human monsters from God’s grace. Nothing can, for is something can, grace is not grace.

Another common objection to the theology of God’s universal, unconditional, irrevocable grace is that it takes away people’s incentive to be good. After all, this objection says, if God doesn’t punish bad behavior, why should I be good? Being bad can often be a lot of fun. As Billy Joel sings, “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints,” not of course that saints never laugh. Being bad can be beneficial for us, though of course it is always beneficial for us at someone else’s expense. That’s why it’s bad. Yet if I steal money, I have more money. If I commit adultery, I have more sex. If I can get away with these things here on earth, and if God isn’t ever going to punish me for doing them, why shouldn’t I be as bad as I want?

The answer to this objection is actually quite simple. People raised the same objection to St. Paul’s theology of justification through grace not through the law. He replied: “What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it?” Romans 6:1-2. The point is this. When we truly know that, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians, God doesn’t hold our trespasses against us, when we really get the nature and extent of God’s grace, of God’s love, we know that we are compelled to respond to love with love. We cannot do otherwise. Truly moral behavior Is not behavior done to avoid punishment. That, after all, is selfish behavior. Truly moral behavior is doing good simply because it is good and not doing bad simply because it is bad. It is being good because we know how irrevocably good God is to us. We strive to live moral lives not to gain grace but in response to it.

Does the universal, unconditional, irrevocable nature of God’s grace mean that God doesn’t care how we behave? By no means! There is no doubt that human sin hurts God. The Bible, especially the Old Testament, is full of stories about God getting angry and hurting God’s people for their misdeeds. I think of these ancient stories not as literal truth but as mythic expressions of the way human sin hunts God. God wants us to live according to God’s ways of love, justice, nonviolence, and care for the poor ant the marginalized. It hurts God when we don’t. God’s not going to lash out against us because we have failed and hurt God. Lashing out in pain is a human phenomenon not a divine one. Of course, God knows that we are fallible creatures not perfect gods. God knows that none of us will live the way God wants us to perfectly. God’s response to that existential human reality isn’t violent punishment. It is to keep calling us every minute of every day to do better. To come closer to God’s ways and away from the world’s ways. God cares. That just doesn’t mean that God punishes.

Finally, please understand this truth. That God’s grace, that is, God’s love for us in action, is universal, unconditional, and irrevocable is the best, most glorious, most joyful news there is or ever could be. Christianity has convinced people for two millennia that they are sinners whom God has every right to punish for all eternity. The leaders and institutions of our faith have convinced people that their relationship with God is broken and that they had better do what those leaders and institutions tell them to do to repair it. If they don’t, they say, a wrathful, vengeful God will make them pay a terrible price. Folks, it just isn’t true. It never has been true. Our faith has lived with a gross cognitive dissonance for most of its history. It says God is love, then it says that God is out to get us if we don’t shape up. If we don’t toe the line. We cannot continue to live with the conflict between these two assertions, and we know which one of them more truly characterizes God. We humans get angry, judgmental, and violent. Because those are human ways, we know that they are not God’s ways. Yes, significant numbers of us humans also love and care for others. But human love and care are always compromised by the way so many of us hate rather than love, condemn rather than care. God’s love is not and cannot be compromised by human failings the way ours is.

God’s grace is not compromised. It extends to and covers every person who lived in the past, every person alive today, and every person who will be alive in the future. God’s grace is unconditional. We cannot earn it. More importantly, we don’t have to. God’s grace is irrevocable. It’s there as a given throughout our lives, and nothing we ever do will cause God to take it from us. We can live in peace, knowing that God, who is universal truth, the ground of our being, and the power behind everything that is, loves us in a way so great that we can’t really comprehend it. What we can do is know that God’s love, God’s grace, is always there with us no matter what. We can be grateful to God with every fiber of our being. We can live free from fear, for we know God is with us always. We can rejoice that God, who is infinite and unconditional, is with and for us finite, conditional beings every moment of our lives. And that truth is the best news there is or ever could be. Thanks be to God!

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[1] There are a couple of theological difficulties in these verses that I won’t go into here. One is Paul’s use of term “God’s elect.” I believe that all people are God’s people, and I think the rest of the passage supports that understanding of the phrase.