If you have ever sown your wild oats as a young person, you can understand Augustine. His mother Monica was a Christian who tried to teach her boy about the Lord, but his Pagan father seemed to have a greater influence on him. You know how it goes – “Son, wouldn’t you rather go fishing than sit through a boring sermon?” It wasn’t long before his mother lost the battle and the young man Augustine began sowing those wild oats with abandon.
However, he soon discovered, as the book of Ecclesiastes reminds us, that such a life is meaningless. So he began searching for something more. He gravitated to the religion of Manichaeism, but this didn’t quite fill the void. He then ventured into the philosophical thought of Plato and Cicero, but this too he found dissatisfying.
In his struggle to find something to fill the hole in his soul, he returned to the church of his youth. It was in the scriptures of the Christian faith that he found consolation. It happened one day as he was sitting in a park. In the midst of his weeping about his life, Augustine heard the voice of a child say, “Pick it up. Read it.” In response he returned to the bench where he had been sitting with the scriptures and read the first passage he came upon. It was this – “Let us behave decently, as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy. Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the sinful nature” (Rom. 13:13-14).
What most moved Augustine was the grace of God. He had found sin was a force too powerful to overcome by his own will. And yet he HAD overcome his hedonism. He had done so through the grace of God. This experience moved Augustine to speak and write on the power of God’s grace. So strong were his convictions that Augustine essentially removed the will of any individual from his or her own conversion.
Many of us have had experiences similar to that of Augustine. We may have been raised in a Church environment that put such an emphasis of choosing the right, that we have been overwhelmed when we have failed and have felt destined to condemnation. Others have experienced Augustine’s route of trying to be good, but continuing to fall short. Those who have had these experiences can relate to Augustine’s emphasis on the gift of salvation as a work of God.
However, others have had quite different experiences. One of those was a man named Pelagius who saw Christians using the grace of God as a license to live however they wanted to live. Instead of Augustine’s notion of “You are saved by God and you CANNOT do anything to merit it”, many had seemed to substitute “I am saved by the grace of God and therefore I don’t HAVE to do anything.”
The latter position was what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “Cheap grace”. “Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. Grace alone does everything they say, and so everything can remain as it was before. ‘All for sin could not atone.’ Well, then, let the Christian live like the rest of the world, let him model himself on the world’s standards in every sphere of life, and not presumptuously aspire to live a different life under grace from his old life under sin” (The Cost of Discipleship).
It sounds as if Bonhoeffer had been reading the Barna Report before it was ever published. On numerous occasions George Barna has done research that demonstrates that the lives of Christians don’t look much different than those of non-Christians. If this is the case, a non-Christian would have to wonder why they would ever want to give up their Sunday mornings.
The tension of grace and human responsibility has been the subject of debate in the western church for hundreds of years. Good arguments can be made on both sides. The voice of each side should be heard, but maybe the voice that should be heard most is the voice that goes against the prevailing winds.
It seems to me that the prevailing winds these days tend to blow in the direction of cheap grace. It also seems to me that the problem is related to our understanding of salvation. Grace is often understood as that which gets us off the hook so that we can go to heaven when we die. If this is the assumption of grace, then formation into the image of Christ is not necessary.
But what if grace is meant to be transformative? This will be the subject of my next post.
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