The Grace of Queen Z

Prior to my family's switch from the Southern Baptist Church to the United Methodist Church, I had never give the idea of grace much thought. I knew that grace was a central part of my faith. We sang songs about how amazing was God's saving grace. But, in my Baptist upbringing, grace served at best as an adjunct to God's righteous judgment. Grace was God's withholding of our just deserts, i.e., hell. Being sinners, we deserve eternal hell. God, without having to, intervenes, offering us the chance to turn to Christ. That's grace for Baptists as I understood it.

The problem is that grace, in this configuration, gets mired in the same problems I've long had with hell-based evangelism (and hell-based faith) in general. Grace, in the Baptist view, works within a larger context of a God willing--even eager, depending upon the verses you choose to look at--to punish those who reject God. We are sinners in the hands of an angry God. God's forbearance is the grace for which we are to praise God.

Here's what rubs me wrong about this: suppose that you lived in an autocracy, under absolute dictatorial rule of an absolutely powerful ruler. Suppose that this ruler (Queen Z, let's call her) promulgates an endlessly complicated, intimate, and impossible-to-keep-perfectly set of rules for her subjects. It is illegal, for instance, not merely to make speeches against Queen Z in public but also to say anything subversive in private--or even to think about saying something against her. Ultimately, everyone in the society will at some point or another transgress this body of rules. The problem? Queen Z has established that, as much as she loves her subjects, she cannot be expected to tolerate fifth columnists. Anyone found guilty of breaking any of her laws, therefore, is condemned to painful death.

Obviously, this is a fantasy. But scholars and survivors of totalitarian regimes point out that his is how authoritarian governments in general operate. They create a set of laws so invasive and all-encompassing that everyone in the society is guaranteed to break them eventually. Everyone in the society is therefore guilty--and everyone knows it. Such societies also tend to encourage formal or informal systems of tattling, watching neighbors for transgressions and reporting those transgressions to the authority. For Christians, of course, the watchfulness of neighbors is moot since God (like Santa Claus) sees all and knows all. (Of course, this hasn't stopped Christian societies throughout history from adopting ideologies of informing-against, such as Puritan New England during the witchcraft trials or Spain during the Spanish Inquisition).

Back to the fantasy, though: Suppose Queen Z or her minions catch someone expressing some mild degree of impatience at, say, how inefficiently the trains are running nowadays. The person has transgressed the law and been found guilty. Just as the person, the convicted dissenter, the secret rebel against Queen Z--just as this person is about to face the tortuous execution, word comes down from Her Majesty: the sentence is remitted. The person can go free to sin no more.

Word spreads about how grace-filled Queen Z is. Rallies are organized to celebrate Queen Z's mercy and love for her people. And laws get added to the effect that questioning Queen Z's grace is itself evidence of capital-punishment-worthy treason. Grace thus functions as, yes, a kind of unearned mercy from the figure who is both offended and empowered to redress that offense. But grace also serves to occlude the fact that the figure's authority is unjust, that the offense should not have been an offense (or at least not a capital offense) in the first place. Grace ideologically short-circuits the question begged by the entire system: why is Queen Z worthy of honor in the first place?

It's difficult for me not to see the Baptist version of grace as operating similarly. God asserts a standard--perfection--that no human can possibly meet, and God specifies that the penalty for imperfection is an eternity in Hell. To call grace God's merciful snatching-away of his elect from that fate begs the question: what kind of just God would make any human transgression into grounds for an eternity--an eternity, mind--of unending, mind-blowing torment? Certainly, in such a grisly system, it's happier to focus on grace; it narrows one's focus to a less pathological feature of God's personality. But it's unsatisfying to a growing number of unchurched (or dechurched) people. And it's unsatisfying to me.

I was not, as a Baptist, as aware or articulate about my problems with evangelical soteriology as I am now. But I do remember that I tolerated grace as a part of faith rather than celebrating it. To focus on grace as a point of worship seemed to me on some level too much like praising the schoolyard bully for not spiting on me or tripping me as I walked by. "How merciful and graceful Biff is. I deserved tripping, certainly, but in Biff's wisdom Biff extended me the Grace of Passage." Distasteful.

One of the most surprising things about becoming Methodist, then, was learning a whole different way of seeing grace--a definition defined not by God's inaction (which, again, could be due to boredom or indifference as easily as it could be due to love--evangelical salvation does not require that God love humans, merely that God save them from divine judgment). Rather, the Methodist tradition sees grace as God's love-filled action, God's ceaseless efforts to make us one with God.

More tomorrow,

JF