Frank is a well-dressed, polished, suave and very successful insurance executive. He is also a man of deep faith, a Christian who believes he has committed the unpardonable sin of blaspheming the Holy Spirit. Stifle your yawn long enough to realize that this young man in his mid-thirties is quite serious. He could not name his sin, but he was certain it was tantamount to blaspheming the Holy Spirit and knowing such a sin could not be forgiven, he was therefore destined for hell.

If this young fellow’s perceptions are accurate, then Paul in his letters, had the naïve notion that no sin existed that is greater than God’s ubiquitous grace. There is no sin so great that it was not covered by and absorbed by God’s grace.

That’s why we sing the song, “Grace that is greater than all our sin” – is it not?

It is helpful to observe that the grace extended to us was not cheap. If one can envision the bleeding form of Jesus on the cross, one can see the incalculable cost of grace. Grace was paid for at great price – but it was paid for. There is no need, it seems, to attempt to earn it by conducting ourselves in a proscribed paradigm of religious behavior.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

In his exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, Nachfolge, (The Cost of Discipleship), (1937) Dietrich Bonhoeffer mints the seminal idea of “Cheap Grace.” Bonhoffer defines cheap grace as,

“The preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”

We should remember that when Bonhoeffer wrote this, he was attacking the easy forgiveness, dispensed by the State Church, for those cooperating with the evil of the Nazi movement. Bonhoeffer believed, cit., Gemeinsames Leben (Life Together) (1939), that Christ meant the Church to be a community that prayed, confessed, learned and suffered together as an instrument of Divine grace in our troubled world. A noble notion, perhaps, but one whose roots in the Gospel record may be a bit shallow.

It is of interest to observe that Mr. Bonhoeffer taught that Christians should not be involved in politics, yet he may have himself been a spy for the resistance against Hitler’s Reich. Mr. Bonhoeffer lived a life of Christian character, but he died a resistance soldier.

With all due respect to the memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man admired deeply by any who appreciate his work with the resistance and his personal sacrifice, what the notion of “cheap grace” provokes, as is it preached today, is a kind of sober integration of legalism and theological casuistry.

Since Adam preferred the knowledge of good and evil, exempli gratia, of right and wrong, people of faith have struggled with an ancestral indisposition toward anything spiritually affirming, opting instead to trim the extravagances of our wicked bent by assorted levels of contritions and penance. Such contritions give us the soul-cleansing power of absolution. Or so it is thought.

Those whose order for the day it is to cry “Cheap Grace,” are also those who rant on and on about how a believer should “deny himself and take up his cross daily.”

The anterior lobe of this discourse purposes to suggest that Grace is largely misunderstood, further, that Jesus is yet in today’s Christianity, misunderstood. A quote from my own book, The Carpenter, may be of some relevance here . . .

“If anyone wants to follow me," said Jesus to Peter, to us all. Calmer now, he still had furrows of anger mixed with compassionate concern on his face. He said it as a climax to his terrible rebuke to Peter. He said it quietly but with rectitude, "If any of you wants to follow me, you must first deny yourself — put yourself aside — and take up your cross each day and come after me.” The sky was clear, the day bright and much too beautiful for this intrusion of painful words. A cross is an instrument of death, of torturous execution. I wondered if he meant that following him would mean a life of deprivation, of mental and spiritual torture. “Each day” we must deny ourselves, he said. Each day we must put ourselves aside and crucify ourselves? Surely he could not have meant “crucifixion” because he said that we must take up our cross, meaning that in some way we must carry about this horrible, bloody metaphor each day we live. What an incongruent consequence! Up till now, our times with him had been happy. I think you could say, "happy." We had experienced so much together and except for our sometimes irritating carping, there was never a harsh word. Is Jesus changing? What is all this talk about dying and carrying crosses? Lugging about such an unpleasant burden could not be a happy thing.

This depressing dilemma was interrupted as he continued. It seemed as if he knew what I was thinking. “For whoever wants to save his life.” he said, “will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the faith I teach, will save it. Is it good for a man to gain the whole world yet forfeit his soul? What is his soul worth? What can a man give in exchange for his soul? Do you think that I cheat you out of this life because I ask you to take up your cross, to forfeit your life now for an eternal life with me? On the contrary, living with that cross on your back gives vitality to every breath you breathe.”

“To hold on to this life with its consumptive and self-absorbed focus is to separate yourself from me. It is as if you were ashamed of me. If you are ashamed of me now, you can be sure that I will be ashamed of you when I come in my Father’s glory with the holy angels. You cannot love me and at the same time be ashamed of me.

“I know the meaning of a Roman cross. I know it better than any of you realize. I know it means death, and I want you to know that while you bear this cross, it will never bear you. Those of you who believe will never taste death. Your bodies may perish but you will not. You will be raised to see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom. Your cross is more of a mark than a burden. It is a sign that you belong to me. It is reflected in how much you give of yourselves, in how you love and care for others, in how you bring healing and comfort to those who need it. It is a sign that there is life in you — eternal life, my life.”

What could grace mean if it were granted only to some sinners and not to others according to an arbitrary decree that is totally contrary to the nature (Love) of our God? If grace is granted according to the greater or lesser number of sins, it is no longer grace-it is just the opposite because of this accountancy. Paul is the very one who reminds us that the enormity of the sin is no obstacle to grace: "Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more (Rom. 5:20). This is the key statement. The greater the sin, the more God's love reveals itself to be far beyond any judgment or evaluation of ours. This grace covers all things. I do not think that in regard to this grace we can make the scholastic distinctions between prevenient grace, expectant grace, conditional grace, etc. Such adjectives weaken the thrust of the free grace of the Absolute Sovereign, and they result only from our great difficulty in believing that God has done everything. But this means that nothing in his creation is excluded or lost. --Jaques Ellul

Jaques Ellul was a French philosopher, socioligist and lay theologian who speaks forcibly to the power of grace. His thoughts are controversial owing to his arguments in support of universal salvation. However one evaluates that, his view of grace cannot be dismissed.

I understand completely the fury of those who glibly and superficially speak of “cheap grace.” It is the lubricious edict of both liberals and conservatives on each other. It is the label of “grace did it all for me so I do not need to change my lifestyle” accusation of judgmental evangelicals toward those who eat meat.

Many years ago – many years ago when I was a much younger man – I sat in the office of a pastor friend. He was indeed a friend, or so I thought. We attended the same church when we were younger. His father was one of my closest mentors. He was the "best man" at my wedding. We attended college and seminary together. At the time I happened to be struggling with a problem. I forget what it was. I shared my struggle with him, not so much as to get help or advice, but I thought sharing these issues with a friend might help, somehow.

I shall always remember his response. He looked at me from his high-back executive chair, and making a small steeple with his fingers he asked, “Paul, is there any sin in your life?” I was dismayed. Incredulous. Thank God I had the presence of mind to say onerously, “Yes, unfortunately (his name), there is.” A moment’s pause. Our eyes met. And then, “. . . almost, perhaps, as much as there is in yours.” Oddly, our friendship was never quite the same after that.

I said above that I understand the fury of those who speak of “cheap grace.” I understand that such dispositions come from a base of rage and jealously. Jealous because those they judge can eat meat while they, usually for reasons politic, cannot. Rage because they are failing to enforce their spiritualized dictatorial control over others. These are among the genre of Jim Jones spiritual leaders who become unglued when the rest of us do not drink their poison.

And you can be certified that poison it is. It is the poison of legalism and hypocrisy for which Jesus reserved his most virulent invective. But those who have been freed from such religious jingoism, may drink deeply of the reassurance that grace extends beyond small minds, beyond niggardly margins.

None of this would matter if we didn't need to forgive and be forgiven. But we do. Pardon me for putting it this way, but guilt is a kind of existential constant. (We have a word for people who don't feel guilt: sociopath.) Most of us have the sense that we have sinned, even if we don't call it that. I'm not talking about the kind of guilt that is the staple of "Jewish mother" and "growing up Catholic" jokes. I mean the knowledge that there's a great deal wrong with the world and that some of it is our doing—the kind of knowledge that intrudes upon us when we are honest with ourselves or too tired to engage in sophistry. (In other words, not every postmodern is a libertine. Many are depressed, guilt-ridden nihilists.) – Roberto Rivera

A fundamental function of the Holy Spirit is that he works in us both to will and to act according to his good purpose (Phil. 2:13). If you and I are to become better people, if we are to be sanctified, if we become more and more like Jesus, if we are to pull away from consumptive living, relativism and secularism, it will be owing to the work of the Spirit in us -- not rigidity and pseudo probity. That doesn't work. Never has. Never will. The whole purpose of law, whether Old Covenant or New, is to teach us that we will fail to keep it and that the only -- the only -- hope for resolution is connectedness to Jesus Christ.

It seems believers would be far better off to relax (not to be confused with indifference) with and trust this reality than to pursue a hair shirt.

-- Paul Morris