My Conundrum with Grace

I was recently confronted with a problem.  The problem was fundamentally a simple one.  I had an imperfect understanding of Grace.  And to be more specific I had only a theoretical understanding of the subject.  I could explain the theory of grace adequately enough, but had little if any real understanding of it.  I could explain it as a mechanical process from Biblical texts, but couldn’t exposit it in the most useful form application.

This is in part due to several factors.  The most prominent of which being the faith tradition I was fetched up in had little use for grace.  This fundamentalist wing of the Church of Christ was more about a ‘turn or burn’, ‘repent or be sent’, ‘I am a worm-like’ expression of Christianity.  The subject of Grace was all too Baptist for this group.  And as such was glossed over in order to make was for the more meaty parts of their theology.  I don’t say this as some sort of condemnation of them.

I got a very good grounding in my faith from them.  I just wish that they had made more room for Grace is all.  I wish they would have been less a rules based form of Christianity.  I also wish that it had been a more organic form that held Grace in higher regard.  I wish the focus would have given me a better grounding in application of this subject.

Some of my lacking in this area comes from a disconnect that I just recently discovered.  Grace is not a human concept at all.  It is an entirely divine one that the fallen human state of carnality neither has room for or the ability to grasp hold of in any meaningful fashion.  This disconnect leads us away from grace and into places inhabited by things the finite mortal condition more easily and readily assimilates.  The nature of this fundamental disconnect does lead us away from the majestic and amazing side of our creator though.  And we tend to gravitate toward a rules and works based form of faith instead.

Grace at its basic and generic form is unmerited favor.  And in looking at this subject, I had to accept that this is the basal definition, (which any Christian can cite verbatim), but it felt too ambiguous and overly broad.  It felt at first to be so much so that it was functionally meaningless.  Under that definition any act of God could be construed as an act of Grace.

I hit upon a solution to my definitional dilemma not long ago.  I was reading up on a computer programming concept when I had a personal eureka moment.  In reading about polymorphism I discovered something amazing.  This concept in computer science is a fundamental one.  In polymorphism an instance of an object derives the baseline properties, functions, and methods from its parent object.  An example of this is a car.  It is a member of the vehicle class from which it inherits all of its basic principles.

The ‘a-ha’ part happened when I realized that the definition wasn’t too broad at all.  Grace is a super-type from which everything else is derived.  Nearly every act of God flows from the Grace super-type into the appropriate polymorphic sub-type.  A good example of this would be God’s grace flowing through the forgiveness sub-type into the individual instance.  In this fashion it obviates sin and reconciles the individual to God.

In real terms, this means that it is all about Grace.  The Bible from Genesis to maps is about Grace.  The polymorphic sub-types change, but the purpose, focus, and definition remains Grace.  That realization sent me spinning for awhile.  It means that provision is a form of Grace.  It means that forgiveness is a form of Grace.  It means revelation is a form of Grace.  In truth, I had to accept that there wasn’t an aspect of God in the spectrum that an individual interfaces with directly or otherwise, that doesn’t bear the imprint of the Grace super-type.

Sorting through this it began to dawn on me, that Grace was the central theme of a life of faith.  How we interact with it, how we deal with it, what we do with it, defines the full measure of the Christian walk.  If we accept grace as just the sales hook that God is obligated to provide as a method of providing entrance into Christianity and have no other functional use for it after that, then we have failed to grasp the most crucial element of the life of faith.  Then we have failed to take hold of the item provided by God to sustain us in our earthly journey.

The Perspective Problem

A problem that I faced and many Christians face on the grace question relates directly to perspective.  The modern framework that man has imposed upon all aspects of Christianity has a particularly negative imprint on our understanding of Grace.  This framework includes a mechanistic mindset that tries to reduce everything it encounters to a dry recitation of principles and concepts.  The application of this framework upon the subject of Grace has a particularly pernicious outcome.

The mechanistic modern perspective is the equivalent of food preservation through dehydration.  This helpful if you are talking about peaches or apricots, but if you are talking about Grace not so much.  You see this mindset removes everything that isn’t vital to the equation in order to preserve it or make it palatable for mass consumption.  With Grace the whole thing is essential and no reduction is realistically possible.  Largely as grace is a divine concept and any reduction conceptually is a process that removes God.  Did this stop the modern reductionists?  Of course not, they carried out their modern reduction on grace and left humanity in a sad shape.

The process left us with an unconnected and disjointed understanding of Grace.  It removed the polymorphic nature of Grace.  Essentially all that was left was an overly broad definition.  The definition only then becomes useful in attempting to convert people into Christianity as its broader implications, import, and conceptualizations are lost.  The rich tapestry woven throughout the Bible that is grace is lost, and concepts that are fundamentally an aspect of grace, become independent structures.

Forgiveness, providence, revelation all appear to be individual components of God’s character when in reality they are plants that grow from the fertile soil of grace.  They each produce a different type of fruit when their work comes to fruition.  In reality, without their connection to grace and subsequently to the heart of God, they simply wouldn’t exist.

Another problem with the mechanistic perspective occurs when we read Biblical examples of grace.  This framework attempts to in outline form graph the equation of grace.  And that only works for the elements of the equation that are observable from the text.  These events in narration end up capturing the who, what, when, and where effectively.  Rarely are these graphs able to explain the why.  Rarely if ever are they able to capture the divine side of the equation.  This leads to a place that I found myself in where I could describe the event in vivid detail, but couldn’t make an adequate application of it.

This feeds out incomplete understanding of Grace.  This conundrum forces us into the rules and works perspective that I discussed earlier.  It robs us of the beauty, the majesty, and the pageantry of God working upon the creation through the tool of grace.  To some degree, it becomes necessary to embrace the mystery of God to embrace an organic perspective of Grace.  This is because so much of the equation is shrouded from view in the heart, mind, and body of God.

An outsider looking upon this sees a fickle and capricious child.  God moves and acts where he chooses, and when he chooses.  In some cases mercy and love are abundant and in others it is totally absent.  This whimsy of action by God leads many to be left with a gnawingly fearful response to God.  Will God act in the manner I need in the circumstance in question is a difficult question for anyone to answer.

Rather than probe this whimsy, rather than embrace, (or be embraced by) the mystery of God, the reductionists have reduced grace to a sub-one sentence sound byte.  The sound byte is devoid of problem areas.  It has no thorny edges to it.  There are no advanced theological concepts in it.  It is soft pabulum for a soft society.

In doing so Grace fundamentally loses its meaning.  If Grace isn’t tied to the mystery of God, if we make no effort to explain what looks to the outsider as capricious whimsy topped off with a petty vengeful streak, then we as a community of faith have failed.  If grace remains a sound byte for us, then it will never become real.  If grace remains a concept that is only applicable to use as a sales pitch at conversion, then we have fundamentally missed the nature of grace.

The real conundrum for me has been in unpacking grace.  It has been in moving beyond the sound byte understanding of it.  It has been in laying hold of Grace as a central tenet / theme of the Bible.  And it revolved around a single question which has nagged me for sometime.  It is a question that an arbitrator or mediator might pose.  It is:

More Questions

“If Grace is more than unmerited favor, if it is more than reductionist pabulum, if it is the central mechanism by which God interfaces with his creation, then how do I make it real?”

Many questions flowed out of this one.  Ultimately though this question is what pre-occupied my consciousness.  What does a grace like this look like, act like, smell like, taste like?  How does it feel?  What is its impact?  Is the import of this grace the same as the reductionist view only that it is properly categorized?

I was left with a single answer to all my questioning; experience.  God calls us to come and taste and see that the fruit of his vineyard is good.  It boiled down to putting myself in a position to experience his Grace.  In doing so I have found that all of the other questions were answered.  I experienced the present reality of a living God.  This happened through a plethora of ways, forms, and manners.

The primary linkage to all of these forms was found in understanding two things.

1. It isn’t about me.
2. It is about God.

I was forced to accept that God’s grace while packaged for individualized application isn’t necessarily about the individual. By that I mean that God’s grace was tailored to my needs at the moment of experience.  It was however not about me per say.  It was about God being God.  It was about God being true to his nature.  It was about the divine creator being omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent.  I probably could spend the rest of my life unpacking the last sentence.  Let me say that God’s grace is always sufficient.  It is always on time.  And it always takes the form needed at the moment it’s applied.  God being God knows what is needed, when it is needed most, and what form it will need to take on in application.

Therein lays the most root problem.  It is God’s tool, it is God’s vehicle, and it is God’s mechanism.  This side of heaven we know so little of God, the merest fraction of the creator really.  Our lack of knowledge and understanding hampers our ability to functionally grasp grace.  This lacking doesn’t mean that we don’t need to, and it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try.  It means that as humans we can only use what little faith we have been given to trust in our creator’s ability to be the creator, and to have hope that grace will show up when we need it.  We just have to be looking for it.

I stand now at what seems to be a conclusion of a process of self-discovery.  More accurately put, it is the conclusion of the beginning phase of this process.  I am forced to admit that there is still much that I don’t understand.  There is still much that remains mysterious to me.  I find myself at a place of grasping the following statement:

God is always about the business of interacting with his creation through the vehicle of Grace.  And it is always about Grace!