Untangling Cliché: "Grace"

I've made a few comments recently critical of the idea of "Jesus-shaped spirituality." 

A few emails have asked me to clarify my intentions.

I've been putting that off, but this post at The Internet Monk put my mind on a few of the themes that run through my mind as I think about "Jesus-shaped spirituality."

In the first place I want to quote a couple of things from the article.

In our first post, we examined the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1-12), concluding that the way of being shaped by Jesus involves:

• Living in and by Jesus’ grace alone.
• Joining Jesus in living among and ministering to the poor.
• Living now in the light of the new creation Jesus is making

THe second two items in that list strike me as being worth pursuing. Ministering to the poor is pragmatic, and that last item is breathtakingly romantic.

As for the first: I'm always troubled by rhetoric like this.

To talk about "living in and by Jesus' grace alone" strikes me as being as close to meaningless language as a person can get.  It's pious, in a Reformed sort of way.  But what does it even mean?  What is a Christian struggling to be faithful, rational and sane make of such language?

If I labor for money and spend that money on bread, is that "Jesus' grace" or the natural order of things for a human creature in social relationships?  If somebody in my church gives me rent money, was that grace or just human generosity (because the pagans do these things too).

The Internet Monk's Chaplain Mike explains this "grace" this way:

The Beatitudes are pronouncements of grace. They announce that:

• those who have little or no hope,
• those who appear to have little to offer to the world,
• those who are on the fringes of society (and religious society in particular),
• those who live in ways that the world considers weak, unproductive, and unsuccessful
• those who are considered the “losers”—

—all are welcome to share in the Kingdom blessings that Jesus brings. There is no human situation that excludes one from being blessed in Jesus. The world and its evaluation of who wins and who loses will not have the final say. In Jesus, God has the last word: The last shall be first.

So…

• Even if you are spiritually bankrupt (poor in spirit),
• Even if you are overwhelmed by the sadness of life in this world (those who mourn),
• Even if you are the kind of person who doesn’t stand up for yourself or assert your rights (meek),
• Even if you are fed up with and broken by injustice (those who hunger and thirst for righteousness),
• Even if your heart is soft, you are always giving to others, and easily taken advantage of by needy people (merciful),
• Even if you are so concerned with having a clear conscience that others think you a prude (pure in heart),
• Even if you are always trying to pacify others and care more about diffusing conflict than any other objective (peacemakers),
• Even if your convictions and actions get you in constant trouble with those who set the rules (persecuted),

God’s blessings are yours in Jesus!

The longhand response therefore is pretty specific.  To "live in Jesus' grace" is to live believing that you are blessed for being marginalized for your goodness.  And those weaknesses you have no power over will have no power over you.  (When?)  It's the anti-Darwinism, the Un-Survivor.  It's the survival and dominance of the least fit.

As it's being used here it strikes me that the "grace of Jesus" is a ghostly thing.  Everything in the longhand explanation of "grace" there can be said of other faiths, right up until that last zinger, "God's blessings are yours in Jesus!" 

Which blessings?  What makes them "in Jesus"?

These words set up a sort of cloud of language in which Jesus is double-plus-good, but what the specific content of all this is, or how it is peculiar to Jesus, is left a little shadowy.

Maybe some people have received happiness for their poverty of spirit.  But I'm not sure how precisely one measures these things or qualifies that they are intrinsic only to the Kingdom of God (or what that particular phrase means to any given person).   Speaking as somebody who deals with clinical depression, I can say that happiness often follows darkness, and often a bad bout of depression sharpens the joy (or relief) that follows.

But I expect that the good Chaplain Mike has more in mind than mood swings.

He has in mind the status of people in the "kingdom," whatever that means.

If he means that in the Christian churches, people who are suffering and stupid and meek and bankrupt and righteous are counted as the greatest, sign me up.  But that can't be what he means... it isn't so.  (More precisely, it's the case that people who lead devastated lives might get to reconstruct those lives with a new way of remembering the past.  Is that what is meant?  Is that not true of any faith that offers a post-conversion second chance as well as Twelve Step programs?  Or is the Chaplain offering to extend the definition of "grace in Jesus" to all these things that decline to name the name of Jesus?)

What then?  You get to be infused with some gift from God... and I think that is so.  I think everybody is, some more than others.

I suspect that you have to look elsewhere for the answer to this riddle of what is meant by "grace."

To understand the Protestant notion of grace (and the Catholic one, I think) you have to engage in a delicate mental exercise.

I say it's delicate: it asks you to engage in a rather refined form of self-hatred in which you do not admit that you are engaging in self-hatred but rather sober judgment of yourself as a creature devoid of worth until infused with this ghostly grace.

I might as well come out and say, I don't think that's what you are.

I think it's worth hating the things you do that are stupid.  But don't do them anymore.  That's a choice you can make: nobody makes you do the things you hate.  It might not be easy to break lifelong habits, but get on that.

But I think the Protestant conscience so constitutes itself that "grace" means the erasure of this intrinsic badness in God's eyes.

Grace means "a gift," and doubtless the gifts of nature, the Universe, god, and our culture are all generous and bountiful.

They are also random, often inexplicable.

The unrighteous have graces as well as the righteous.  Perhaps over time the scoffer, unbeliever, the evil, the adulterous, the murderer, the usurer all lose their graces.  I don't know.

But I don't want to leave this concept on a negative note.

I think that Christians who do perceive goodness in their relationships, in their subjective experiences with their god, who find easement for their material and emotional aches, are entitled to call the means "grace."   But I think they need to know what they mean.

A diffuse thing, is grace.  Like "blessing," grace refers to those specific boons that human creatures are given.  Self-hatred is not a necessary part of it.  If Life returns you good for good: that's a gift.  Be grateful.  If a thought or imagination or experience of god eases you or those you love in some way, call it good.

The cliché isn't meaningless.  It attempts to grasp at a goodness that moves in a particular way, a goodness that asserts itself aggressively in peoples' lives. It's real, and it's kind of spooky.  I've no reason to think it's exclusive to Christianity, but it can be awfully strong there.... I wish that the Christians who are given an opportunity to participate in and shape that gift would do so more in line with the vision of Chaplain Mike, and see to it that "the last are first."  But that's no way to run a corporation.

I hope you find it wherever you stake your faith.

I hope I do too.

If Jesus is shapeless, then so is the grace.  If you are not so mired in self-hatred that you cannot see yourself as being a son or daughter of God, then you can make real the kingdom.  That would be a great grace to others, perhaps.