What You Probably Don't Know About Grace and Faith
Church Words Revisited: Part 4
[Series Note: This piece is the fourth installment of an ongoing, semi-irregular series I’m doing called “Church Words Revisited.” The series is aimed to take a look at oft-used phrases or words in the Christian vocabulary and, when necessary, set the record strait. You can find the first three installments, one on “Spiritual and Physical,” another on “Family,” and another on “Lust” here.]
There are quite possible no two words more frequently used in the Christian vocabulary than “grace” and “faith.” We use them in everyday conversation, we read those words in our Bibles, and we sing about and preach about them in our worship gatherings.
But what if I told you that you are probably using these words wrong?
When we think of the Biblical relationship between grace and faith the Scripture that most often comes to mind is Paul’s words to the church in Ephesus:
8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast. (Ephesians 2:8-9, NIV).
While this Scripture is, indeed, an excellent working explanation of the relationship between grace and faith, the definitions of these words that we read into the text when we come to it are what is flawed.
Our Functional Definitions
We tend to think of grace as “long-suffering” or “super forgiving.” Grace is, the “unmerited favor” God has toward us that gives him the patience to put up with our shenanigans.
We tend to think of faith as a sort of “wishful thinking.” It is “believing is seeing” that little Charlie uses to explain to his step-dad Neil why Scott Calvin is the Santa Claus.
We typically get this twisted because of our misreading of yet another Scripture, Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (KJV). In our culture “hope” is used to express a wishfulness… “I hope I win the lottery.” “I hope the Detroit Tigers win the World Series” and so on.
…So…
Grace = God’s patient forgiveness,
Faith = believing in God (and the right doctrines about him)
Hope = the blind, wishful thinking that drives my belief in God
When we come to Ephesians 2 with these definitions we have a sort of “by God’s super forgiving patience you’re saved…because you have a disembodied belief in the existence of God…and so there’s nothing that you have to do because God’s really forgiving.”
Now, admittedly, few would actually say it that explicitly. But this is a functional definition we carry out from the text, giving us a sort of permission to have a disembodied affirmation of a belief system because of God’s patience toward us. This is the very groundwork upon which our present discipleship crisis in the church is formed…a faith that is devoid of action and rests in wishful thinking, much to the shagrin of St. James.
But this is not how the Ephesians, nor any other of the early Christians would have thought about grace and faith (or hope, for that matter). This comes, not from the Bible, but from the Reformation, where Luther sought to address some of the excesses of his day (N.T. Wright fleshes this out a bit in his book The Day the Revolution Began).
Biblical Definitions
Defining Hope
Before we get to grace and faith, let’s first correct our understanding of “hope.” When the first Christians spoke of “hope” it wasn’t a wishful thinking, like hoping you will one day have the body of a professional athlete while making no adjustments to diet or exercise.
For early Christians, hope was a “certain expectation.” It was the unwavering assurance they staked their future in and around which they oriented their lives. Specifically, Christian hope is rooted in the expectation that Christ will return and renew the world and defeat death at the final resurrection of the dead. So when the author/ess of Hebrews says, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” he or she is not saying that faith is rooted in a blind wishful thinking."
Instead, Heb. 11:1 can be better paraphrased as, “Now faith is the overflow of the certain hope we have oriented ourselves around, even though we don’t see its fulfillment yet.” Much different, right? So our better definition of hope is a certain expectation. We’ll return to why this is important in order to understand grace and faith in a moment.
Grace and Faith
Now, to understand grace and faith we need to understand a crucial point…so crucial I’m going to highlight it as a pull quote:
Before grace and faith were religious words, they were socio-economic words.
That’s right. When Paul is talking to the Ephesians, he’s not making up new words to add to the Christian vocabulary. He’s using words with which they would have been deeply familiar: charis (grace) and pistis (faith). The Ephesians understood these terms because it is how their social economy as well as their work economy (which were much more intertwined than ours is) were structured.
You see, the Ephesians and other first Christians lived in what was called a “patron-client” system. The best way to explain it is like this:
If you were a blacksmith who had recently moved your family to Ephesus, you could not get established professionally by applying for a small business loan or making a pitch on Shark Tank. Instead, you would seek out the generosity of a wealthy patron—someone who could bankroll your operation (they would often find a patron through what was called a “mediator”…but that’s a sermon for another day).
A patron would indeed bankroll the client’s operation, often providing for new equipment, a place in the trade guild, and (as Lloyd Christmas would say) plug you into the social pipeline.
This tremendous generosity…a generosity of a magnitude that you as a poor blacksmith could never repay on your own…that was called charis in Greek…gratia in Latin…grace in English.
But extending such grace was not done out of a purely philanthropic heart. Much like the social expectation in our culture that if you give a wedding gift at a wedding you expect a thank you note in return, the client (the blacksmith for our purposes) had expectations for how to steward that grace given to them. So, set within its proper context, the definition of grace as unmerited favor actually works quite well. But it was more about a all-encompassing patronage than it was just patient forgiveness.
The client could never repay the patron and repayment wasn’t generally expected. What was expected was pistis…what we call “faithfulness” or “faith.” Proper stewardship of your patron’s generosity meant that you would sing his or her praises in public, lavishing honor upon them (an important aspect of ancient society), you would lend your services to your patron whenever called upon, and you would be fiercely faithful/loyal to your patron. This sort of loyalty, however, was not to be begrudging, it was one that was connected to the concept of honor…an “ exuberant loyalty” if you will—they way a soldier would be loyal to a commander he or she has developed deep admiration for.
To forego this social norm was known as ingratitude, and was among the very worst of character flaws in the ancient world.
…So, biblically speaking…
Hope is a certain expectation
Grace is unmerited favor
Faith is exuberant loyalty
Returning to Scripture
When we return to our texts in question with these working definitions, we find a subtle, but wildly different insight from the texts.
In the Hebrews texts, we end up with something like this (again, I paraphrase):
“Now our abiding loyalty to Christ overflows from the certain hope that he will do as he has promised, even though we don’t see its fulfillment yet.”
The writer spends the rest of the chapter fleshing out that concept, appealing to God’s past faithfulness to those who have been faithful to him.
Now Ephesians. Paul is actually using the patron-client metaphor to explain our relationship to God here. But in order to see that, we need to broaden our perspective and look at verses 4-10. Again, I paraphrase, but you can look at the language as translated in the NIV here.
4Through the vast riches God possesses, riches in love and mercy toward us, 5 he made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—this is the unmerited favor and generosity through which you have been reconciled to God.
6 And through Christ, God has given us a seat of honor in his court, 7so that in the age to come we might bear witness to his never-ending favor toward us—the fruit of which we see in Jesus the Messiah.
8 For it is by this bottomless reservoir of God’s rich favor and generosity grace that you’ve been brought into God’s patronage, maintained through your ongoing loyalty to him. You didn’t do anything to earn this seat of honor—it’s God’s gift to give. 9 You could have never bought your way into this situation, so don’t even think about taking the honor for yourself.
10 We are God’s created beauty, made new in the Messiah in order to demonstrate our loyalty to God through the good deeds we do to others.
A heavy paraphrase, to be sure. But when we begin to view Paul’s words in their intended context, which this paraphrase conveys, we do not see a “hey, God’s super forgiving so all you gotta do is believe like you believe in Santa and don’t worry about good works because your saved by grace alone #SolaGratia.”
Instead, we see a call to:
Recognize that, in Jesus, God has elevated us to a place of honor and looks upon us, his people, with generosity and favor. God longs to give good gifts to his children (cf. Matt 7:11).
See that. our place of honor now is a foretaste of what is to come in new creation, where God will continue to show himself generous as a testimony to his glorious name.
Respond to God’s generosity with a demonstrated loyalty…a loyalty that honors God through ongoing work of reconciliation, justice, mercy, and compassion in the world as a testimony to the greatness of our Divine Patron and a demonstration of our allegiance to him.
Recognize that failing to respond to God’s generosity with loyalty…embracing other loves and loyalties, showing ingratitude, dishonoring God’s reputation…is a serious offense. We would do well to guard what we pledge our loyalty to.
So What?
This matters deeply for us as Christians. Often our loyalties, whether to a political system, a particular ideology, an idolatrous affection—whatever—take us off focus of precisely what Paul is calling for in Ephesians (ironically using the same passage, wrongly, to justify it). Paul’s use of grace and faith are not a call to sit on our hands while we “lean on the everlasting arms” but instead a call to work diligently in light of our loyalty to Christ, knowing that God is generous and favors his daughters and sons.