When I think about my experience of what is uniquely special to me about my Christian faith, the one thing I'd like to incarnate more and see multiplied around me, I think it might be best described as grace. That's not to say that I think that grace might trump love, but I do also happen to agree with some skeptics who consider love to run the risk of being so broad, multidimensional and cultural that it can and does leave the communicative task profoundly unfinished. Grace less so. It too might well need some clarification, but not so much as to sideline the 100 or so competing ideas of what "love" might mean in a given context.
The best definition I can come up with is that it's like goodness on steroids! A window of hopeful confidence on a future potential good despite an unsure or even absurd human context.
The next morning I had time to read something for guidance in my reflection and installed the 2019 Bonne Semance app. 6 March was a simple testimony resting on Romans 10:9 if you believe God raised Jesus back to life and acknowledge him (Jesus) as Lord, then you'll be saved.
At first I was like, how can I fit this into my new progressive grid? Then it dawned on me. Jesus is the symbol of this raw Goodness of God, not because God is a savage endorsing child sacrifice, but because there is an historic exemplar of the group-imagined kindness of God to us. "Paying the price for us" is thus super powerful if understood through the lens of Grace. Any human can look at the great act of grace to us as humanity's new option for goodness that is not content to mete out justice and rights alone. Someone believes in me, my goodness, my inherent value, my own potential not just to live better but to love and restore as I was "designed" to do. The Christian story of Jesus gives us a powerful narrative to hang all this on and a loving gaze through which to view this exciting new twist of Goodness-perception in our species' history.
This reads like closed loop "I've got it" reasoning detached from whole scripture reasoning. Submitting oneself to the teaching of Jesus as remembered to us by the apostles and "apostolic" authors of the New Testament gives a broad critique of any attempt to define grace by our own definitions.
ReplyDeleteThanks Richard - I am sorry this post did not resonate for you. It was a more personal share about how despite some serious questions I have how and why I wish to pursue my allegiance to Christianity and the Church, who has been there for me in my hour of need. The silly story of footprints on the beach is bunkham. A much more encouraging image would be that when times got hard, there were a myriad of footprints as the community moved in to support the weak member. God bless you, Richard, JB
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