RePost: The Heresy of Unconditional Grace (in some contexts)

“Of course God will forgive me; that’s His job.”

I have found more than one possible source for that quotation. I originally ran into it in a Christian writing that dealt with the utterly destructive lie that there is salvation to be found with God outside of Jesus Christ. But on the web one can find this quotation offered as an inspirational aphorism.

The fact that people believe this lie so widely makes our calling as Christians rather difficult. We have to tell people some really bad news for them to be willing to accept the good news. Even humble people who acknowledge that they are evil and who trust a good creator God to forgive their sin are in fact under God’s wrath and curse. Why? Because they are not Christians. Only those who entrust themselves to Jesus, who belong to him and thus are covered by his atonement, are the recipients of forgiveness. While there are all sorts of real problems found in nonchristian religions and positions, their ultimate problem is that they are not Christianity. God has sent His Son to us and he demands that all people everywhere entrust themselves to him. Outside of Christ there is no grace of forgiveness and final glory.

But while our God-given job is made difficult by this fact, we make it much more difficult when we refuse to deal with people as they are. I remember reading in some primary sources from Medieval Byzantium. They would write about this or that people they were dealing with and there would be an endnote in my Penguin edition telling me that, in fact, the tribal name the author was using was centuries out of date. That nation was long dead and another tribe now lived in the region. But the Byzantines simply couldn’t acknowledge change–at least not the Byzantine ruling class. They kept using labels they got from their ancient books.

Since that point, I have always considered the habit of seeing present people as nothing more than reiterations of a past age to be the reflex of a dying culture. Thus, it really bothers me when we obstruct our evangelistic efforts with the illusion that everyone, in their hearts, is a medieval monk trying to do enough righteous works to win God’s favor. That is not the only possible form of unbelief, and I doubt it is the prominant one. There are plenty of people who trust God is willing to overlook their sins and bless them out of pure mercy.

We are called and commissioned to preach the Gospel to every creature. We are not told to pay special attention to all the people whose mindsets come nearest to that of Luther before his tower experience. When confronted directly with the issue, every Evangelical Christian knows that the problem of a God who forgives everyone and loves everyone salvifically is a huge widespread form of unbelief. Yet all too ofen, the key to the Gospel as opposed to the world is made out to be grace versus earning standing by one’s moral behavior. Why is this?

I have no experience in the primary sources for Bultmann, so take this with a grain of salt. But my understanding is his entire explanation for the Christianity was to make it an abstract system of “authenticity”–something pretty close to faith and grace in his own mind. The point was to make Christianity worth “following” without any need to believe in a real person who was both God and man and who rose again from the grave. All of that could be overlooked, “dymythologized,” because a principle was all that mattered.

Thus, Bultmann heavily favored some of the most charicatured (and, it turns out, completely inaccurate) stereotypes of first-century Judaism as a religion devoid of any real belief in God’s grace. The Jewish ethic was built entirely upon gaining credit by obeying enough and thus winning by their own efforts a place with God.

In other words, for Bultmann, making out Judaism into a form of earning or meriting standing was essential to his strategy of rationalizing his unbelief. The person and work of Jesus could be dispensed with and a residual philosophy of authenticity (that Jesus allegedly taught or practiced at some level) could be retained as the essence of modern faith.

Of course, modern unbelief isn’t some sort of monolith. Bultmann’s portrayal eventually provoked a reaction, the most prominant of which was E. P. Sanders Paul & Palestinian Judaism. While many may have received the impression that this book was set against a “traditional Lutheran” interpretation of first-century Judaism, it actually barely mentions Luther and devotes a great deal of attention to Bultmann. Since Sanders is no more a believer than Bultmann was, no Evangelical can subscribe to his thought. Still, it is helpful to meditate on Sander’s contention that Paul’s problem with Judaism was that Judaism was not Christianity. While Sanders requires correction and refutation, his point against Bultmann and others like him is quite valuable.

For some great Evangelical responses to Sanders, see Frank Thielman’s From Plight to Solution and the works of N. T. Wright.

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