Amazing grace, not cheap grace.

April 24, 2009 by Dan Hooper.

In my (frequent) moments of self-doubt, I wonder about whether my stress on grace and unconditional love are swinging the pendulum too far to the other side.  But then, which way should the pendulum swing, anyway? Haven’t we—in both church and society—had too much of pendulum-swinging, of one reformer or strong leader or personality cult person trying to jerk the wheel of the big ship out of the hands of the Holy Spirit and re-chart a course?

Personally I am fed up with pollsters asking their little select sample (subject to error plus or minus 3.0% points) whether this country is going in the right direction or the wrong direction. Why do we have to keep trying to change course when none of us can speak with certainty or authority? And especially in the Christian church, I am put off by such when I think others perceive me as being naive or overly pious when I insist: Jesus Christ has set the course for this church for all time; who are we to think we must constantly wrestle for control or go at each other for taking us “off-course”? If we are following Jesus, how can we get lost?

But I’m also mindful of powerful witnesses like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who cautioned the church about “cheap grace“– pronouncing the love of God and consolation of religion without also calling us to discipleship, without warning believers that there are costs involved in following Jesus. In Bonhoeffer’s case, there was enormous cost—the cost of his life in fighting the greatest evil of the 20^th century.

In my ministry, I am reaching out constantly to people who have not really ever heard grace pronounced at all. Wherever their Christian roots, it seems, all were fertilized with the same burning mixture of fire and brimstone, of dire warnings pointed at them like a shotgun. Where was any “consolation of religion”? They have felt beaten up, criticized, warned, preached at, condemned and completely rejected for failing, or “backsliding, or not measuring up in one way or another, to the high moral standards that some other human being thinks they must reach in order to be loved/saved/accepted/welcomed.

And I have met so many of these people in recent years that maybe I’m overcompensating — confidently announcing the unconditional love of God in Christ for all people.

How can I do that? Didn’t even Jesus put conditions on his own disciples? “If anyone would come after me, let them take up their cross and follow.” How can we pretend to be disciples if we do not take up (carry) a cross just as he did? Even in this Easter season, there is still a cross awaiting all true Christians. And to pretend to belong to Christ otherwise is the ultimate hypocrisy. Right?

The theological problem here is one of directionality. I cannot teach that we must achieve certain prerequisites or conditions before God loves us enough to assure us of our forgiveness. Then discipleship becomes a lifelong qualifying exam, which after all we might fail. But in truth that is more of a description of Islam’s view of the Judgment Day than of the Christian view. The Gospel teaches that

“God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:16–19)

Is that “cheap grace”? Is that liberal pablum? No, it is the Gospel according to the First Letter of John, which is keenly aware of the struggles and conflicts that ride along with discipleship and acceptance of the Lordship of Jesus.

But if we worry or obsess that we can only approach God through our suffering and the personal cost of discipleship before we have any assurance of love and grace, that is backward.

In fact true discipleship results from our assurance that we have already received grace without qualifying for it—with no inherent right to it, no merit, not even a down-payment. It is God who is willing to risk giving us the grace before discipleship rather than as a reward.

Of course, I am most mindful of this when it comes to the struggle of lesbian and gay people—and more recently bisexual, transgender, queer and every other kind of sexual minority as we may define ourselves—to be heard and to be offered a taste of God’s grace, without first promising to and submitting to personal and emotional and psycho-sexual castration in order to somehow please God. Christians who demand this of other Christians have their theology twisted and they themselves need to be born again again.

In the Gospel I know –and the only one I know is written in the Scriptures that all Christians read, and I especially rely on the writings of the Apostle Paul— there are costs of discipleship, but circumcision is not a requirement in advance. We do not need to cut off our true selves, our sexual or gender identity, our orientation, our very being. We do not need to deny ourselves the very thing that makes us human and in fact that Christ calls us to utilize in proclaiming our discipleship: our ability to love.

In the Gay Catechism I will come back to this, and other matters of sexual ethics, because I know that the early church’s conflict over the requirement of circumcision is probably the best analogy we have today with which to evaluate the anti-gay and anti-sexual requirements which some Christians insist must be imposed on us, or we cannot be saved. But Paul says emphatically,

“Listen! I, Paul, am telling you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you. Once again I testify to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obliged to obey the entire law. You who want to be justified by the law have cut yourselves off from Christ; you have fallen away from grace. For through the Spirit, by faith, we eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; the only thing that counts is faith working through love.” (Galatians 5:2–6)

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

Posted in Doctrine, Sex, Gay Catechism, Bible & Interpretation, Fundamentalism, History, Living by Grace, LGBT Christian, Ministry | Print | No Comments »