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One of the most peculiar elements of Christian culture is the doctrine of grace. Jesus followers can’t stop themselves from bringing up this implicit moral ledger of debts and credits even as they endlessly reiterate that, no really, God’s love truly is a free gift. While denying that God’s love for us is in any way transactional, there’s this lingering rhetorical shadow of indebtedness as they keep bringing up the prospect by using words like unearned, undeserved, unmerited, unwarranted, and unconditional. Riiiiiiiiight. It’s all because of a core misrepresentation of grace.
Imagine there’s a 13-year-old son who steals his dad’s car to go joyriding. He takes a corner way too fast and flips the car. Dad gets a call saying the paramedics are rushing his son to the hospital. He’s paralyzed from the waist down but they’re trying to save his life. Dad arrives right as his son is being wheeled into the operating room. He’s scared and says, “Dad, I’m so sorry about the car!” It would be a complete dick move to reply, “It’s OK. I forgive you.” No, the gracious response is, “Forget about the car! I don’t care! All that matters is you! I love you, son.” See the difference?
The theologians can’t seem to fathom grace doesn’t mean “God loves you despite your sins.” That keeps raising the specter of the moral ledger over it all. True biblical grace is more beautiful and simple. It ends that sentence after three words: “God loves you.” Full stop. That is grace. Christian culture has a fixation with redemption, so it anthropo-centrically projects onto God by redefining grace in terms of our own forgiveness and reconciliation. It’s an epic distortion of God’s character that recasts the Lord as a perfectionistic stickler who continually reminds us of our shortcomings.
In the original Greek, charis means loving-kindness, goodwill, sweetness, delight, and joy. Grace is about the divine dance of perfect, eternal fellowship within the Trinity giving off an abiding and radiating presence of warm affection toward all of Creation. God’s holistic disposition of love toward His beloved children existed since the moment of our creation, so grace existed long before the fall. Justification and reconciliation occur by mean’s of God’s grace, but this radiating affection has never been focused on our corruption and restoration. That’s us projecting.
The original beatniks tended to be rather self-preoccupied. They cared about the broken and marginalized, but their writings contain little emphasis upon self-sacrificial service to others. Their focus was on their own lives and they knowingly interpreted the world through the prism of their own experiences. I love many things about the Beat Generation, but often times feel the urge to say, “Oh, get over yourselves already! It’s not about you.” Not gonna lie, though. Christian culture has the same problem. That’s why we’ve systematically made God’s grace about ourselves.
