On the
Grace of God
May
30, 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.
We might want to,
but we can’t deny that there are verses in the New Testament that support the
notion that God sends the souls of sinners, and maybe their bodies too, into torment
for eternity in a place called hell. The Gospel of Matthew is particularly rich
in such verses. There are several of them in which Matthew has the bad guys
cast either into the outer darkness, or into the furnace of fire, where there
will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.[1]
At verse 10:28 Matthew has Jesus say, “Do not fear those who can kill the body
but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in
hell.” Many Christians I know (and I’m one of them) wish verses like these
weren’t there, but they are. Still, despite these and other verses of the same
ilk, many Christians (and I’m one of them) do not believe that God ever has or
ever will damn anyone to hell. Even Pope Paul VI once said that he believed
that hell exists, but he wasn’t sure there was anyone in it. I and many other
Christians don’t even believe that hell exists at all. Which raises a big
question: How can I cite those verses from Matthew that I just cited and then
say that hell doesn’t exist? I can do that because I believe that God is a God
of grace and salvation, not a God of wrath, judgment, and punishment.
This belief of
mine has a solid biblical foundation. At Ephesians 2:8, for example, we read: “For
by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your doing; it is
the gift of God.” Ephesians isn’t really by Paul though it says it is. In his
authentic writings, especially in Galatians and Romans, Paul too (primarily at
least) preaches justification by grace through faith. Justification (or
salvation—I won’t worry here about what the difference is between them, if any) by
grace through faith is the foundation of Protestant theology. It is the insight
into God’s ways that sparked the Protestant Reformation in the early sixteenth
century CE. Like most Protestant Christians, I’ve heard that phrase for most of
my life, at least most of my adult life.
To be honest, the
phrase has always confused me a bit. It is far from as simple as it may seem or
as so many people try to make it. See, it has three basic and very deep concepts
in it—salvation, grace, and faith. I want here to focus on the latter two of
those concepts. I want to wrestle with the nature of the relationship between
them. To do that we have to start with what is, I’m afraid, a very widespread
misunderstanding or even distortion of our phrase “justification by grace
through faith.” Much of contemporary American Christianity focuses almost
entirely (or actually entirely) on the word faith. largely ignoring the word
grace. That kind of Christianity focuses on verses like Acts 16:31, “Believe on
the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.” These Christians can also use John
3:18: “Those who believe in [Jesus] are not condemned; but those who do not
believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of
the only Son of God.” Yes, our catchphrase here says “faith” not “belief,” but
for Christians who center their Christianity on this notion, believing and
having faith are the same thing. In this way of thinking Christianity comes to
be exclusively about faith understood as having belief in Jesus. There is of
course nothing wrong with having faith and believing in Jesus. Having that
faith and that belief are, after all, what makes a person a Christian. The
problem here is that the concept “grace” gets omitted or at least relegated to
a position behind that of faith. Sadly, the emphasis in much of contemporary American
popular Christianity is on faith understood as belief. Having the right beliefs
becomes the work that one must do to gain salvation.
But see, while
its easy enough to turn having the right faith into a work one must do in order
to be saved, the other concept in the phrase “justification by grace through
faith,” namely, grace, isn’t about any kind of works at all, not even the work
of faith. We see that it isn’t about works in several different Bible verses.
We see it in the passage from Ephesians that I quoted above, “For by grace you
have been saved through faith, and this is not your doing; it is the gift of
God.” (Emphasis added.) We see that grace is God’s free gift and not a
reward for any kind of work. There are other New Testament passages that
establish the same thing. At Romans 8:38-39 Paul says, “For I am convinced that
neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things
to come, nor height, not depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able
to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Notice: In this
authentic saying of his Paul says nothing about any work we must do in order to
stand in the love of God. He makes a similar point at 2 Corinthians 5:16-19 we
read:
From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point
of view, even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know
him no longer in that way. 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 us to himself 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….(Emphasis added.)
Notice that once again Paul says
nothing about any conditions on our relationship with God. We are reconciled
with God not because of anything we have done but because of what God has done.
Grace, here expressed as reconciliation, is God’s free gift. We can’t earn it,
and we don’t have to. God gives grace to us freely not because God somehow owes
us but because grace is God’s very nature. We’re fond of saying God is love. 1
John 4:8. That’s true, and God is also grace. Grace is God’s love given to us
unmerited and unearned. Thanks be to God!
Now, since God’s
grace is a freely given, unmerited, unearned gift, we are faced with three
possibilities for what that means. Either grace is God’s gift to absolutely
everyone, or God gives that gift to no one, or God gives grace to some people
and not to others in a capricious and arbitrary way that has nothing to do with
anyone having earned it. I think it is obvious that neither of the last two of
these possibilities is true. Some of us know that it isn’t true that God gives
grace to no one. We’ve known that grace in our own lives, so we know God doesn’t
withhold it from everyone. We know that a God love simply never will be
arbitrary and capricious. No, neither of the last two of those three
alternatives can possibly be right.
The only
conclusion that makes any sense here is the remaining possibility. Grace is God’s
free gift to everyone. And God doesn’t just extend grace freely, God extends it
universally. I know that that’s a difficult notion for many people to accept.
We can’t imagine God loving and forgiving the monstrous mass murderers of human
history, people like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and, tragically, so many
others. Yet we forget that God is not a human being writ large. God relates to
us in a personal way, but in God’s essence God Is not like us. The book of
Isaiah states this truth clearly. Having God speak the words Godself, Isaiah
says:
For my thoughts
are not your
Thoughts,
Nor are my ways your 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.
We really do need to remember that
we’re not God, and God is not us.
One of the great
traps of religious faith is the temptation to project our human ways onto God. That’s
what we’re doing when we think God judges, convicts, and punishes the same way
we do only on a much larger scale. When we do that we are envisioning and
worshipping something that is not God. We are doing nothing less than
committing adultery. I can’t forgive Hitler or any of the others for the hells
they created on earth, but that doesn’t mean that God can’t. It doesn’t mean
that God doesn’t. Perhaps God has some way dealing with these people in a way
that in some sense punishes them without condemning them to an eternal
damnation in hell. We just don’t know. What we do know is that God is love, and
God’s grace is universal. Afterall, if it isn’t universal, it isn’t grace.
So that’s God’s
grace. But the statement of faith we’re considering here doesn’t end with
grace. It says that we are saved by grace “through faith.” What can that
possibly mean? An awful lot of Christians take it to mean that God’s grace
comes to us only through our faith in Jesus Christ. They draw the conclusion from
that understanding that if you don’t believe in Jesus Christ you are outside
God’s grace. You aren’t saved. In fact you are bound for an eternity of torment
in hell. As widespread as that understanding may be, it is simply theologically
unsound. It contradicts the nature of God’s grace by, as I’ve already said,
making faith in Jesus a work we must perform in order to stand in God’s grace,
usually expressed as in order to be saved. When it does that it makes grace
conditional. Meet the condition of having the right faith, it says, and you’re
saved. Fail to meet the condition of having the right faith, and you are
damned. You are outside of God’s grace. Because we must reject anything that
makes God’s grace conditional, we must reject this understanding of the meaning
of “saved by grace through faith.”
OK, but the
phrase “through faith” is there. I suppose we could handle that phrase the way
the US Supreme Court has handled the Second Amendment’s reference to a well
ordered militia and conclude that it means nothing. That, however, is radically
unsound biblical exegesis (unsound constitutional exegesis too, but that’s not relevant
to our discussion here). The phrase is there, and it must mean something. God’s
grace is universal. Everyone is saved. The problem so many people have isn’t
that they aren’t saved, it’s that they don’t know that they are saved. They don’t
know the healing power of God’s grace. They live in fear of not being
saved, and fear is more than an unpleasant emotion. It stops us in our tracks.
It makes us continually grasp for any hint of a possibility of salvation. It
limits the scope of a person’s concern their own individual fate. People who
fear for the fate of their souls are unlikely to do God’s work of peace and
justice in the world because they don’t see that work as a means of salvation,
which indeed iit isn’t. And of course, concern only for oneself is no basis for
a truly Christian life.
“Though faith”
then doesn’t make God’s grace conditional. If it did it would destroy the very
concept of grace. “Through faith” means that faith is the way we come to know
what we didn’t know before. Faith is how we come to know the grace of God that
is always there for us and for everyone whether we know it or not. Faith is a
means of living into that divine grace. It is how we Christians can come to
know God’s love for us and to know God’s call to us to be messengers of God’s
peace and justice in the world.
God’s grace is
real whether we know it or not. It’s just that it doesn’t do us any good, in
this life anyway, if we aren’t aware of it and don’t fashion our lives in
response to it. Making us aware of God’s grace and guiding us as we respond to
it is the legitimate role of faith. Faith doesn’t save us. God has already done
that. Faith opens us to the wonders of God’s world and of God’s people. It
opens to us to all of the opportunities the world gives us to be agents of God’s
transformation of the world into the realm of universal peace and justice that
Jesus proclaimed to us. Faith matters. It matters a lot, but it creates neither
grace nor salvation, for God has already taken care of those things. Grace and
salvation, the great gifts of God, are already and always there for every
single person—person not just Christian. It is in faith that we know God’s
grace and can give it meaning in our lives and in God’s world. So let’s get on
with it, shall we?
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