Kindle Notes & Highlights
SIX PERFECTIONS OF GRACE
These are the ways people to to think of “pure grace” and why there has been so much disagreement. What do we mean by a perfect gift of grace.
These six ideas I believe will be what he spends the rest of the book unpacking. It’s also a great summary of the book
Here attention shifts from the gift to the giver, and by “singularity” I mean that benevolence or goodness is the giver’s sole or exclusive mode of operation.
he/she would never do anything in a contrary mode, such as harm, punish, or judge. The lavishness of the gift is not here at issue: what matters is the singular devotion of this giver to do nothing other than what is beneficial.
Christian theologians have spoken of the “prevenience” of grace and of prior election by grace as “predestination.” Whatever its particular nuance, priority suggests the freedom or sovereignty of God in determining the operation of grace.
Incongruity concerns the relationship between the giver and the recipient, and maximizes the mismatch between the gift and the worth or merit of its recipient.
Gifts that achieve something, that change things for the better, might be regarded as better than gifts with limited positive effect.
In antiquity, philosophers insisted that God/the gods need nothing in return for their gifts: they are not salesmen, trading their benefits for a monetary return.
In the modern era, as we have seen, there has been a persistent tendency to perfect gifts as noncircular and nonreciprocal: if they are truly “altruistic” and “disinterested,” they should not be “tainted” by elements of return.
We can now see how people can mean different things by “pure grace,” and have taken grace to be “free” in more than one sense. “Pure grace” may mean its singularity (God is nothing but benevolent) or its noncircularity (God’s grace seeks no return). Grace may be “free” in being given irrespective of the recipient’s worth (incongruous), or in being given without subsequent expectations (noncircular), or in both senses at once.
Even the word “unconditional” can be confusing: Does this mean without prior conditions (incongruous), or without resulting obligations (noncircular), or both?
Disagreements may arise, not because one side emphasizes grace more than the other, but because they perfect the term in different ways.
Pelagius did not believe in grace less than Augustine; he simply believed in it differently.
Marcion perfected the singularity of grace, in a way that was easily understood and highly attractive in the ancient world.
Augustine had always been impressed by Paul’s stress on the incongruity of grace: God justifies not the righteous but the ungodly (Rom 4:5).
He now began to explore its efficacy, so that even our response to God’s grace is not truly “up to us.”
If God’s grace is effective in the human will, how could a true believer turn away from God? Must we not thus affirm “the perseverance of the saints”? Even more controversially, if God has already selected those who will believe, and none of God’s intentions are fruitless, did Christ die only for the elect, and not for all? Centuries later, John Calvin (1509–1564) revived many of Augustine’s arguments, such that the cluster of Augustinian perfections of grace has become a hallmark of the Reformed tradition.
It is clear that God’s grace is initially incongruous: Christ came to call not the righteous but sinners (Mark 2:17).
For Luther it became essential to emphasize that the incongruity of grace—the mismatch between God’s gift and the worth of the believer—is foundational not just at the start of the believer’s life but as the permanent hallmark of the life of faith.
The important point is that, in themselves, believers remain deeply flawed: in their inmost souls there lurks a deep rebellion or resistance to God. But God looks on believers as if they are “glued” to Christ (and he to them), and in Christ he sees only righteousness, holiness, and goodness. There thus remains a lifelong incongruity in grace, such that Luther could coin the expression simul justus et peccator (“at the same time justified and a sinner”).23
Luther thus radicalized the incongruity of grace and combined it with a presumption toward noncircularity: God’s grace does not necessitate or demand a return. This is a powerful combination of perfections, which has long influenced Protestant thought. Lutheran polemics have insisted that this is the only proper meaning of grace, and of salvation “by grace alone.” But as this brief survey has shown, it is not the only way one can think about grace.
Luther’s view was very impactful on the west
1976). On that mainstream interpretation, grace was at the heart of Paul’s theology: salvation is not attained by human capacity or achievement but is given by the sheer, unmerited grace of God in Christ.
On this reading, God’s election of Israel was by grace, and the covenant was established prior to any requirement of Torah-observance.
Thus, whatever requirements were made regarding obedience and works, these were already founded on, and framed by, the grace of God.
sequence: first one “gets in” to the community of the saved, and then one “stays in,” and the difference between the two must be carefully preserved.
As far as ancient Judaism was concerned, Sanders argued, “getting in” was always and only by grace, in the election of the patriarchs and in the gift of the covenant. Torah-observance was necessary for “staying in” the covenant but was not the means of “getting in.” At most it was a condition for final salvation but not its cause.
To capture this pattern of religion, Sanders coined the phrase “covenantal nomism,” whose ingredie...
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Sanders wished to give proper weight to the demand for Torah-obedience in Jewish texts; nevertheless, he insisted that this “maintains one’s position in the covenant, but it does not earn God’s grace as such. It simply keeps an individual in the group which is the recipient of God’s grace.”4
In our terms, the element of grace that Sanders here highlights is priority: God’s grace comes before human obedience.
scholarship. It is no longer intellectually defensible to represent ancient Judaism as a religion of “legalism” or “works-righteousness,” as if Jews sought to “earn” salvation by doing good works. That caricature must count as one of the many anti-Jewish tropes that have circulated in Christian-influenced scholarship but must now be strongly repudiated.
This is a good summary of Sanders and the start of the NPP
What does this mean for the interpretation of Paul? The traditional reading of Paul, associating Paul with grace and Judaism with works, was no longer tenable in the wake of Sanders’s work. Sanders traced a difference in Paul’s “pattern of religion,” but not at this point. Paul’s soteriology, he argued, was based on participation in Christ, rather than covenantal nomism, but there was no difference with regard to grace and works: “On the point on which many have found the decisive contrast between Paul and Judaism—grace and works—Paul is in agreement with Palestinian Judaism … salvation is by
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very important shift in understanding Paul and Judaism
1979. My teachers, N. T. Wright and Morna Hooker,
Dunn pioneered an interpretation of Paul’s phrase “works of the Law” that stressed that these were not works in general but works of the Mosaic Law, and in particular, he argued, the “boundary markers,” such as circumcision, Sabbath regulations, and food laws, by which Jews were distinguished from gentiles. On Dunn’s reading, Paul was not criticizing “salvation by works” but an overly “narrow” or “restricted” view of God’s purposes, by which gentiles were being excluded or required to adopt ethnically specific, Jewish markers of identity.10
Because Sanders analyzed the pattern of religion in terms of sequence, he emphasized the priority of grace: God gives the covenant first, and Torah-obedience is a secondary phenomenon.
Perhaps there is diversity in the Jewish texts, and perhaps Paul’s voice on this matter is neither simply “different” from, nor simply “the same” as, that of his fellow Jews but has its own tone and tenor within a complex Jewish debate. We cannot decide this in advance, only by careful reconsideration of the texts.
God is shown to exercise extreme patience, giving plenty of time for the ungodly to repent. But at the end of the day God has to punish those deserving of death (12:20), not as a limitation of God’s goodness but as its ultimate proof.
God is the Cause of all good things.
It is proper that God should give the best gifts to worthy or fitting recipients.
In one notable passage (Allegorical Interpretation 3.65–106), he examines scriptural examples where God’s giving seems to defy rationality or justice. This includes God’s choice of Jacob over Esau even before they were born. How could that be fair? God must have known, says Philo, what their characters would be (he foresaw it in their names); on that basis, he chose the one who was worthy of his blessing.
yikes
This is probably the most negative picture of the human condition in Jewish literature of this time, making divine mercy all the more remarkable and praiseworthy. Of our six perfections of grace, here we find most clearly the perfection of incongruity, one not evidenced in the other two authors surveyed above.
which reflects the pain and soul-searching that followed the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE.
The text poses a significant question: If grace is given to the undeserving, does that undercut the justice of the cosmos? This was clearly a live issue in the first century CE, and Paul was not the only Jew to reflect theologically upon it.
Describing Judaism as a “religion of grace” helpfully counters some still-common caricatures, but the label is of little analytical value.
Sanders’s “covenantal nomism” is helpful in clarifying the sequence from election to obedience (the priority of grace), but it is conceptually incapable of grasping the differences we have noted, including the difference between congruous and incongruous grace.
What might seem a small dispute over circumcision determined, in fact, whether and in what ways the Jesus-movement would be able to adapt culturally as it crossed ethnic boundaries.
His question is what God has done in Christ, and what its implications are.
It is striking how often Paul interprets this matter in the language of gift.
But this gift-language is underlined by the fact that Christ “gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age” (1:4).
This language of gift or grace seems too prominent and too frequent to ignore. The question is: What does it mean, and how does it shape the rest of the letter?
Interpreters of the letter to the Galatians take their bearings from one or more of its striking polarities: slavery or freedom (2:4–5; 4:21–5:1); works of the Law or faith in Christ (2:16; 3:2, 5); humanity or God (1:1, 10–12); flesh or Spirit (3:3; 5:13–6:10).
incongruous gift,
