Amazing Grace

Grace, as identified in the Christian tradition, is monstrously unjust, says Dunedin Catholic writer, Mike Riddell. This article complements his piece on human evil in the July issue. The bad news is we are a sin-sodden lot; the good news – the ‘gospel’ – is God still loves us and forgives us.

‘God walked into heaven and discovered that everyone was there. This didn’t seem fair, as some of those gathered had done terrible things in life. So everyone was summoned before God, where an angel read the Ten Commandments. When the first commandment was read, God said, “Everyone who has broken this commandment will have to leave.” The same happened with each of the other commandments. By the time the angel had finished reading the 7th, there was hardly anyone left.
God looked up, and saw a small group of thin-lipped and self-righteous ascetics remaining in heaven. They seemed rather pleased with themselves and their lifelong fastidious obedience. For a few moments, God considered the prospect of spending eternity in the company of these puritans. Then he raised his voice and shouted to the ends of the universe, “Alright everyone, come back!” The crowds returned with great happiness, but the religious minority were furious, saying, ‘We’ve wasted our lives.’

As James K. Baxter once said, such jokes and fables provide a dramatised theology which cuts right to the bone. The preceding story seems innocent enough, but it entirely subverts what many regard as the natural moral and religious order. It points up the dangerous aspect of what is sometimes regarded as an innocuous notion: the idea of grace. Just as sin has been diluted to insipid levels, the popular contemporary understanding of grace is no longer anything worthy of crucifixion. Familiarity has misled us into thinking of it as something with the consistency of candy floss: sweet but insubstantial. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Grace is easily enough defined. It is simply love overcoming judgement. Another story might provide some insight. It seems that every soul is connected to God by an invisible string. Whenever someone turns their back on their Maker and commits a sin, that string is broken. The only thing to be done is for God to repair the connection by tying a knot in the string. Unfortunately this makes it a little bit shorter. Some people sin a great deal, and God is always having to tie knots in their cord. That’s why great sinners end up a lot closer to God.

That small story, is I think, both beautiful and perceptive. It is also slightly scandalous to people who have lived their lives trying to do what is right, many of whom are good church folk. They quite rightly feel that this view of life undervalues discipline and virtue, and promotes both indolence and loose living. What, after all, is the point in doing what is good, when those who live wantonly seem to be rewarded equally? Why strive for righteousness if the profligate masses can do as they please and find favour with an indiscriminate God?

Grace is monstrously unjust, in that it severs the inevitable connection between deed and consequence, which is the foundation of both morality and law. Furthermore, as the contemporaries of Jesus understood only too well, it destroys the religious impulse which posits a connection between earthly conduct and eternal reward. The story of the Prodigal Son, as an example, incites not just intimacy but anarchy. The much maligned elder brother is the one who has the clearest perspective on this, and is justifiably angry. He represents all of us who have a stakeholding in the ecclesiastical status quo.

When love overcomes judgment, those who have built their house upon jurisprudence find themselves homeless. The choices open to them are stark: they can welcome the grace which promises freedom, or they can resist it for the sake of preserving their special status as the ‘good’ people. The foundational events of Christian faith, which culminated in Golgotha, demonstrate the lengths to which we all might go in order to guard the gates of salvation. It is helpful to remember this whenever we might be tempted to regard grace as something akin to polite liberalism.

If, as I have argued previously, sin is a given in the human condition rather than the individual indiscretions of a reprobate minority, then any suggested division between the enlightened faithful and ignorant barbarians is not only arbitrary but ill-founded. The apostle Paul understood precisely the implications of Jesus’ teaching, declaring that we are all in the same boat when it comes to sin. None of us is in a good position to petition God for justice to be given us rather than love. We all need grace. Unfortunately some of us are tempted, dangerously, to think we’ve outgrown it.

Paradoxically, it may be those who consider themselves ‘saved’ who are most resistant to grace, while those who know themselves to be ‘sinners’ are thirsty for it. Why? Because people who do well in life like to think that they ‘deserve’ their success, while those whose lives are chaotic and fractured prefer to see their tragedies as unearned. There is a clash of theologies at work in our society, which is not limited to the people who know what theology is. Like sin, grace is a quality which touches all human life, and not just the people who can name it.

The contrasting theologies have been expressed quite clearly in New Zealand society through recent advertising campaigns. One, which we might describe as the theology of grace, is illustrated in the highly entertaining ‘Bugger!’ commercials. In these, life for humans and animals alike is shown to be something beset with unintended disasters. In short, things go wrong for people in all sorts of unexpected ways. This doesn’t mean that they are bad people. There is a very loose connection between goodness and outcome.
In the face of this, the appropriate theological response is ‘Bugger!’ It’s a rough declaration of the graced life – one in which there is space for things to turn bad without it necessarily being anyone’s fault. The causal link between the way we live and the consequences has been cut. As an approach to life, many might find this overly casual and haphazard. But it does allow the category of the unmerited; creating space not only for tragedy, but for good things to drop on us with all the excitement of a tree stump demolishing a dunny.

The contrary perspective was spelled out in a series of banking commercials which advanced the proposition that ‘Luck has nothing to do with it’. This is the theology of power, or what Walter Brueggemann has termed ‘the royal consciousness’. It maintains a very tight connection between what people do and what happens to them. If people are poor, it is their own fault – and, naturally, if they are wealthy it is due to their own moral superiority. This pervasive philosophy is a kind of secular Pharisaism which regards human effort as capable of twisting the arm of fate.

Alain de Botton, in his masterpiece Status Anxiety, has revealed the sentiment as the undergirding ideology of a meritocracy which has become orthodox in Western society. It stems from the meditation of the rich. Why are they in positions of privilege and power? Because they deserve them. Why do they deserve them? Because they are better people than their social inferiors. Those who have done well in life have no wish to regard their rewards as arbitrary rather than earned.

Despite New Zealand’s vibrant counter-ideology of black-singleted subversive humour, the theology of power holds sway in our market economy. Under the iron rule of meritocracy, we all of us are only as good as we can prove ourselves to be. Little wonder then that people are working longer hours and enduring greater pressures in the unrelenting struggle to demonstrate their value. We have created a perverse form of social Darwinism in which only the winners win, and all others are losers of one form or another.
In a previous era people wrestled with the question of their salvation, seeking to know what they could do to secure it. Our culture has people desperate simply to be noticed, and willing to sacrifice whatever is necessary to achieve this. Both religious and secular forms of self-improvement end up in life-denying futility, attempting that which is unattainable. Neither salvation nor self-worth can be manufactured through our own agency. Ironically, that which people bruise their souls to achieve is available freely if they will only open themselves to it.

Knowledge of sin, and the humility to admit it, is not something which should cause us to break our teeth in despair. It is simply the corridor which leads us to the door of grace. To that place where we are prepared to give up on manipulations and performances intended to win favour, recognising our good deeds to be as inadequate as our bad in the quest for acceptance. It is only then and there that we are able to understand that there is nothing to be won; that we are already accepted and loved, and nothing will change that.

Grace is applied love; love which has become more than an abstract concept; love which is received and known. With this knowledge comes the freedom to be human. The paradox of our existence is that the more we strive for acceptance, the further it retreats from us. Only when we know ourselves to be already cherished, simply by virtue of our existence, do we have the space in which to grow into the life which is ours alone to live. It is grace which is the kernel of the gospel, and the gift which holds me in the faith through all those experiences which seem to deny it.

Christianity has never been a set of moral principles. It is inevitably distorted when presented as such, and we must judge the experiment of Christendom to have been a failure from which we are all still recovering. It is, in many ways, the end of morality – if we understand morality as a human striving to do what is right. Any goodness which ensues from those who have given themselves to Christ is a by-product of the love which sustains them. Augustine understood this perfectly when he gave the ethical advice to ‘love God and do as you please’.

The institution of the church has great difficulty in upholding the tenets of grace. This is nowhere more lucidly expounded than in Dostoevsky’s parable of The Grand Inquisitor in The Brotheres Karamazov. This describes the return of Jesus to Seville in Spain during the Inquisition of the 16th century. The Grand Inquisitor sees him in the street, recognises him, and locks him in prison before he can do any harm. As a wily old theologian, the Inquisitor knows the danger which Jesus presents to his religion.

Later he visits his Saviour in prison, and chastises him for the impossible mess that he left behind – one which the church has been forced to tidy up. He accuses Jesus in these terms: Instead of seizing men’s freedom, You gave them even more of it! Have You forgotten that peace, and even death, is more attractive to man than the freedom of choice that derives from the knowledge of good and evil?... You wanted to gain man’s love so that he would follow You of his own free will, fascinated and captivated by You. In place of the clear and rigid ancient law, You made man decide about good and evil for himself, with no other guidance than Your example... think now, was that the best that You could offer them?

Our brave new world, of course, has replaced religious law with the equally rigorous demands of performance evaluation. It is not so much those who trespass, but those who fail to measure up who are punished in our culture. The Grand Inquisitor has been internalised, and now directs his programme of torture in the halls of our self-esteem. If grace is love overcoming judgment, then often it is self-loathing which provides the fiercest resistance.

Puritanism dies hard. We are constantly tempted back to carping and moralising and trying harder, unaware of the existential tangle we are creating for ourselves. Like serial dieters, we are trapped in cycles of excess and restraint. While we might be inclined to relinquish our bad intentions, we feel less inclined to surrender even the good as a way of becoming free. But the path of grace asks that we come to an end of our striving, and cast ourselves on the mercy of God. Only then may true goodness burst unexpectedly within us like a spring bulb cracking winter’s crust.

People who stumble across the sublime gift of God’s grace do not stop sinning. But they do become free from sin. They break the iron shackles of consequence, and are able to live fully without fear. To be human, as created in the image of God, is a marvellous and beautiful thing. That possibility has already been given to each of us to possess, through the eternal and limitless grace of God.

Mike Riddell is a novelist and religious author living in Dunedin