This has been a week of early meetings and distractions. On Tuesday, I told my wife that my day just did not go anything like I planned. She replied that I have so many of these days, that I should just accept it as normal. She is right!
Today, I offer a brief post on the nature of grace. I have been re-reading devotionally a book my Paul Zahl called Grace in Practice: A Theology of Everyday Life. As a book, I find it to be overly detailed and fairly repetitive. I also find it something I keep coming back to for more thought! It is one of those books that after reading it (and struggling through it), I have found it remained attractive because there were so many ideas in the book that I need to think through in deeper and more sustained ways.
I do not know if this is a ringing endorsement, but I do give it an endorsement. In particular, I like Zahl's idea and definition of grace as one-way love. I believe he is quite correct that such love runs counter to the normal human condition. It also runs counter to what our flesh, in its fallen state, would judge as "fair" and right.
What does one-way love mean and look like in the real world? This is the primary point of Zahl's book. After defining grace, he then works through how grace is played out in the real world. The following is a quote from a section detailing how grace works in society. Zahl argues that grace is almost incomprehensible in society. As he states,
Grace is one-way love. Society demands two-way love. Society requires quantity and value and "evidence" of the pound of flesh. In human society grace has a bad day every day. This was first expressed conceptually when the philosopher Aristotle composed his Nicomachean Ethics in the fourth century B.C. Aristotle aught that a man is defined by his deeds: a good man is good because he does good deeds. This is the only way to gauge moral worth. Measurement becomes everything. Progress becomes everything. Amelioration becomes the law of life. I would say that Aristotle is the safe harbor of absolute worldliness in the world of thought.
Grace is the opposite of Aristotle. Grace takes a different approach to criminal justice. Grace takes a different line on what forms human identity. Grace rewrites the meaning of achievement and career. Grace is not utopian: in fact, it is dystopian. What I mean is that utopian ideas of society call on hard work and human dedication to create a new society of fairness and equity- the same old story. Grace, on the other hand, recognizes the wholly dystopian and hellish character of life in the world under the law and posits an alternative view of reality.
Zahl, Grace in Practice, 70.
Do you agree with me? What I mean is this is tough stuff to grasp! Personally, I just do not talk or think in the manner of Zahl. He is much smarter than I am. Yet, as I think through his point I agree with it. Grace does not work well in society.
Why does grace does not work well in society? I believe the answer to this corporate problem is the same as the answer to our individual problem: the fall has shaken and decimated the created good where Law worked. We long to have the Law change people and keep them in line. We long for utopia because that is where and how we were created to live.
The problem is sin had infected every dimension of this universe so we as individuals desire Law for others and society, but grace for ourselves. Actually, some of us like the Law for ourselves too!
Well, enough for today. Enjoying thinking through these difficult ideas!
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