Kindle Notes & Highlights
More accurately, they are full of references to God’s favor, gift, or benefaction, using a variety of Greek terms including the word charis, which we normally translate “grace.”
Paul sums up the effect of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as “the grace (charis) of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Cor 8:9); “where sin abounded, grace (charis) super-abounded” (Rom 5:20).1
What did Paul mean by this word charis, and how is it related to other terms for gift (and the verb, “to give”), which are common throughout his letters? Charis is an ordinary term in the Greek of Paul’s day, not loaded with any special theological meaning.
Short book, charis isn’t special!
As we shall see, most gifts and benefits in the ancient world were distributed discriminately to fitting or worthy recipients.
That is how we normally hear the term “grace” now: it depicts a benefit or gift given to an unfitting or helpless recipient—in Newton’s terms, a “wretch.” Is that what is meant by Paul? Did he endue ordinary words for gift with this special meaning? If so, how did charis and other gift-terms acquire the sense of an undeserved gift? And what difference did that make?
How did we go from it meaning gift to a worthy person to a gift to an unworthy Pierson?
One might understand “pure grace” to mean that God’s relation to the world consists only of love, benevolence, and kindness, excluding any notions of wrath or judgment, any sense that God might punish evil or condemn evildoers.
without reservation and without limit.
“Free grace” is “free,” on this interpretation, when it is noncircular, that is, rid of any hint of return or exchange: it just gives (and gives again).
If grace is “free,” should it not be unilateral, unconditional, outside the normal cycles of reciprocity and return that inhibit or burden human gifts?
Grace may, in fact, be said to be free in two senses. It might be free of prior conditions, without regard to worth or desert, “free” in the sense of undeserved. Or (and this is not the same) it might be considered “free” of subsequent obligation, debt, or demand, given, as we might say, “with no strings attached.”
Good summary
On this reading, grace is not only unconditioned—given without regard to prior desert—but also unconditional—given without expectation of a necessary response.
“Grace,” it seems, is not a simple concept but is capable of many possible meanings. Grace without obligation, sacrifice, or demand was the object of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous critique of “cheap grace”—a form of comfortable, undemanding Christianity that he considered the besetting sin of German Lutherans in the 1930s.2 No one preached grace more passionately than Bonhoeffer, but Bonhoeffer’s understanding of grace did not carry the sense “with no strings attached.”
Some contemporary versions of “pure grace” have been dubbed by their critics “hyper-grace,” judging the grace that they preach to be, in some sense, excessive.
This topic provides, in fact, a good example of how people may talk past one other: they appear to disagree violently on the same issue, but in fact they mean different things, even when they use the same vocabulary.
His mission to the gentiles was highly controversial since he did not require his gentile converts to observe the Jewish law in the way that other Jewish believers thought essential.
Paul, we shall see, had an unusual, creative, and socially radical understanding of the grace of God, arising from the Gift: Christ.
Whereas good gifts were (and still are) normally thought to be distributed best to fitting or worthy recipients, Paul took the Christ-gift, the ultimate gift of God to the world, to be given without regard to worth, and in the absence of worth—an unconditioned or incongruous gift that did not match the worth of its recipients but created it.
As we have already noted, the Greek term we normally translate as “grace” (charis) is a normal, nonspecialized word for benefit, favor, or gift, which Paul mixes with other ordinary gift-terms.
The word charis has, in fact, three main classes of meaning that reflect the circular structure of gift-giving in antiquity.
Thus, in Paul’s letters, charis can describe gifts (e.g., 1 Cor 16:3: “your charis to Jerusalem”) or the favor or generosity of God (“charis and peace be with you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,” Rom 1:7).
Thirdly, charis (like the related term, eucharistia) can mean the return of gratitude or thanksgiving (e.g., 2 Cor 9:15: “charis [thanks] be to God for his inexpressible gift”).
These three meanings of charis represent the circular movement of gifts: a gift given to a favored person creates gratitude in return. The Greeks played on these interrelated me...
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To study Paul’s theology of grace is not the same as doing a word-study on charis.
In English, a monetary gift could be styled simply a gift, but it might be what we call a tip, a donation, an honorarium, a present, a benefit, or a bribe. Each of these terms has a slightly different nuance, reflecting the purposes, contexts, and effects of the gift. Indeed, what one person considers a donation, another might denounce as a bribe. This alerts us to the fact that gifts are complex and multifaceted phenomena.
Gifts are complex
By “gift” I mean the sphere of voluntary, personal relations characterized by goodwill in the giving of a benefit or favor, which generally elicits some form of reciprocal return that is necessary for the continuation of the relationship.
Payment for goods and services is generally the end of a transaction, but a gift is not the end of a relationship, and neither is the return. One gives or gives back (typically at a later time and in some nonidentical form) in order to continue a relationship that is in principle open-ended.
A gift implies the desire for an on going relationship
If you have travelled to another continent, or have come to know people from another culture, you will know that gifts operate under different rules in different cultures.
Mauss was particularly interested in what creates the obligation to return a gift, an obligation that still leaves the return, however, voluntary and free.
The best answer may lie in the fact that gifts are a means of creating or sustaining relationships.
Failure to return a gift weakens the invited relationship and may bring it to an end.
we are conscious that family relations and friendships are maintained by a continuous circle of favors and benefits.
Mauss and his successors showed that in most cultures standard Western polarities simply do not apply. We contrast “free” gifts with notions of obligation, but at many times in history and in many (perhaps most) cultures today, gifts can be both obligatory and free.
Material gifts are often returned not in kind, but by according honor or prestige to the giver, especially in unequal relationships.
even if the return takes place in indirect forms.
We should be open to the possibility that gifts can be both “voluntary” and “obliged,” both “disinterested” and “interested,” both “generous” and “constrained.”
A fundamental principle of Greek social life was the norm of reciprocity in giving, receiving, and returning gifts.
Generosity to others was the best form of insurance, and those known for being stingy or uncooperative were liable to find themselves without help when illness, accident, or bereavement brought financial disaster.
Recipients of favors would commonly describe themselves as being “in debt” since it was taken for granted that gifts carry obligations.
Like the Wookiee life debt
something was expected to come back to the giver, even if only gratitude or honor.
If gifts, both human and divine, were given within a cycle of reciprocal exchange, it was important to give wisely and discriminately. This is partly a matter of practical prudence: one would be wary of giving to someone unlikely or unwilling to reciprocate.
Who you gave to mattered
Gifts tied persons and groups together: the giving and receiving of a gift constituted a social bond. For that reason, one might refuse a gift, wary of association with a disreputable giver, and, as a donor, one would be careful to give gifts only to those recognized to be in some sense “worthy” of them.
This system of “euergetism” (the giving of public benefits) was the means by which the rich attempted to legitimate vast inequalities in wealth.14 By paying for public buildings, feasts, competitions, and civic amenities, the wealthy benefitted their cities, which reciprocated with public honors, proclamations, privileges, statues, and inscriptions.
One common assumption is that gifts go around in circles: for Seneca, gift-giving is like a continuous ball game where one person throws a ball to another in such a way that it can be easily caught and thrown back (On Benefits 2.17.3–5).
it is enough for recipients to be grateful—although, where possible, they should give some counter-gift.
Were Jewish gifting practices in Paul’s day any different in this regard? In brief: mostly no, but in one respect, yes. Jews gave to each other, and to God, with the normal expectation of a return.
But there is one important exception (echoed also in biblical laws, such as Exod 22:25–27): one should give to the poor, even though they cannot reciprocate (e.g., Prov 19:17).
because they had nothing they could offer in return: that was the experience of the prodigal son, to whom “no one gave anything” (Luke 15:16).
The Jewish ethic is unusual in the emphasis it places on giving to the vulnerable and poor, even though they had nothing to give back.
Didn’t know this
The more we prize individual autonomy, the more we disown the ties and social obligations traditionally created by gifts, and the more we idealize gifts given without thought or expectation of return.
Since Paul’s discussion of (what we call) “grace” falls within the domain of gift, we should not rush to assume that we know what he meant.
