Speculative Grace: Saint Paul

This week, some more speculating. This time about Saint Paul.

Is Paul's conception of grace amenable to a non-theistic port? Though some things will likely be lost along the way, might such a port clarify anything about Paul's own (theistic) conception of grace?

I. Grace, then Sin

For the sake of simplicity, let's focus especially on chapters 1-3 of Paul's epistle to the Romans. As I've argued in detail in the first chapter of Badiou, Marion, and St Paul: Immanent Grace (Continuum, 2008), I think that the key to reading the epistle is the following thesis:

Grace is not a response to sin; rather, sin is a response to grace.

In other words, I take Paul's position to be that grace (always already given, always already immanent) is both logically and temporally prior to sin. Sin is derivative of grace. Grace is not an ad hoc, stop-gap, supplemental band-aid for sin.

Or, again: grace is not a means to some other end (e.g., salvation), grace is salvation. Grace is both the beginning and the end of everything that matters.

For my part, I think that Romans 1-3 prompts us to think that there are good theological (and, even, theistic) reasons for resisting the traditional bifurcation of grace into natural grace (the universally available grace manifest in our having been created, our being sustained in creation, etc.) and supernatural grace (a narrowly granted supplementary grace needed to overcome the gap created by our sinfulness).

To port grace into a nontheistic context, we would have to let go of this distinction, flatten the difference between natural and supernatural grace, and view the latter not as something supplementary but as a re-manifestation of an immanent grace that has always already been given.

II. On Sin as "Suppression"

Paul's description of the essence of sin in Romans 1 is especially helpful. 

In this chapter, Paul describes sin as being a suppression of God's grace. The following verses are of particular importance:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth. 

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. 

So they are without excuse; for though they knew God, they did not honour him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools; and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles. 

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exhanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. 

(NRSV, Romans 1:18-24, emphasis mine)

Leaving much of interest aside, I'll only comment on a few key points. Here, Paul describes wickedness as a suppression of the truth. What truth is in question? A truth that has been manifest from the start: our createdness, our lack of ontological independence or self-sufficiency. In our visible createdness, in our obvious insufficiency, God's invisible grace is manifest. But we despised the insufficiency that this grace made plain, and so we suppressed it and this suppression degraded and disoriented us.

Finding ourselves utterly dependent on God's grace, finite, and incapable of self-satisfaction, we are ashamed (cf. 1:16-17). Out of shame we suppress the truth of our dependence on grace and refuse to acknowledge God as God. Sin is the attempt to fabricate an independence or autonomy that we lack.

In this sense, sin is a direct response to grace. Sin is fundamentally motivated by an unwillingness to accept that we need the grace that we already are. Sin is an active suppression of this need or dependence. Sin is only possible because grace is already given.

III. Displaying Grace

To be saved is to stop suppressing this truth about ourselves and receive, instead, what is actually given as the gift that it is. 

In light of this account of sin, I think that Paul's description in Romans 3 of how Christ's atonement works is very instruction. What follows is my own translation of the crucial verses. God's grace comes

through the deliverance that is in Christ Jesus, whom God publicly displayed [proetheto] as a propitiation by his blood, through faith. He did this to display [eis endeixin] his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; he did it to display [endeixin] in the present, pregnant moment [nun kairoi] his righteousness, and that he is upright [dikaion] and righteousifies [dikaiounta] the one who has faith in Jesus. (3:24-26)

In short, Paul's model of the atonement works like this: Jesus' sacrifice saves because it definitively displays the already given grace that we have (sinfully) been attempting to suppress. God's willingness to sacrifice his own Son displays the gracious unconditionality of his commitment to us (i.e., it displays his "righteousness"): there is nothing he will withhold from us. And, in doing this, God restores the present moment as the locus of givenness and grace.

For lack of a better term, I'll refer to this as a "display" theory of atonement. On this model, the atonement does not accomplish some righteousness previously lacking or supplement the world with a supernatural and salvific addendum. Rather, the atonement "displays" or reveals what we had suppressed and hidden from view: the already given (or immanent) grace that prompted us to sin in the first place. (If it weren't already immanent, sin would itself have been without motivation.) The atonement doesn't set in motion a supernatural grace, but "super"-reveals the immanent grace already and unconditionally in force.

On this model, sin is not at the theological center. Grace is not instrumentalized. And God's unconditional commitment to us is revealed as the unconditional (never withdrawn, never withheld, only willfully suppressed by us) grace that it is.

IV. Final Questions

The question, then, is about how this conception of grace might unfold within a nontheistic model. Is the grace of what is given (i.e., in particular, our createdness and insufficiency) no longer sufficient a grace if we do not, with Paul, infer from it the invisible, supernatural backing of a theistic Creator? Or, again: without a theistic supplement, is the unconditionally given grace of the present moment too poor a thing to receive or save?

Comments

[Blair]

I think there might be some merit to these ideas. Obviously it's a biblical principle that some people were saved before Christ's earthly ministry, and Hebrews makes it clear that they became heirs "of the righteousness that comes by faith" (11:7). Clearly such people were taking hold of God's grace extended to all through Jesus Christ.

I'm not sure I can stomach "display theory" from a biblical or theological standpoint. I think it is a biblical non-negotiable that Christ's work on the cross had atoning significance, not merely a message of love, but some sort of spiritual transaction if you will. "He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world" (1 John 2:2). From God's perspective what Christ did had eternal significance extending backwards and forwards into time (the blood of Christ saves Moses and Billy Graham). Perhaps this won't fit a nontheistic view, but it seems illogical to assert otherwise.

[Adam Miller]

Blair,

Thanks for the comments. You make an interesting point about the potential implications of this approach for the operation of grace in the lives of pre-Christians. I hadn't given any thought to this.

With respect to the issue of the atoning significance of Christ's work, I certainly don't mean to suggest that it is merely the reiteration of a general message of love.

I would view the particulars of his actions to have enacted a very specific sequence of events with very real, specific, and essential consequences for the entire human race.

I'm not very comfortable though (perhaps especially in a theistic context) with describing Christ's atoning work as a kind of "spiritual transaction," especially if the transaction necessitated some kind of divine violence.

For my part, I think it's clear that the event of Christ's resurrection in all its historical particularity is essential, but I would be very hesitant to read either ransom or satisfaction theories of atonement as more than stop-gap metaphors at best. Granted, it is also true that (like you) I don't find the "moral influence" theory of atonement to be very satisfying either.

But I think that what Paul describes, for instance in Romans 3:24-26, doesn't fit well (in a productive way!) with any of the above mentioned theories of atonement.