Counterfeit grace, fear, and learning to stop pretending
To listen to the whole unabridged class: Paste Jewelry and a New Law
Beyond Sunday School: The Ragamuffin Gospel, chapters 7 and 8
Chapter 7 of The Ragamuffin Gospel gave me a picture of cheap grace I had not quite considered before.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer gave us the phrase “cheap grace.” Brennan Manning gives us paste jewelry and sawdust hot dogs. It is grace that looks like the real thing from a distance. It is faith we can put on for public display. It fills a plate, but it does not nourish anybody.
At the center of the chapter is a sentence that fairly punched me in the face. Manning has just quoted a long passage from the letter of James when he writes:
At Sunday worship, as in every dimension of our existence, many of us pretend to believe we are sinners. Consequently, all we can do is pretend to believe we have been forgiven. As a result, our whole spiritual life is pseudo repentance and pseudo bliss.
Pretend to believe we are sinners.
Pretend to believe we have been forgiven.
Pseudo repentance. Pseudo bliss.
That is counterfeit grace.
It happens when we learn the language and the behaviors. We know how to look sufficiently broken without actually bringing our brokenness into the light. We know how to talk about grace without becoming honest enough to need it. And if we do this whole Christian thing long enough, a quiet self deception can settle in. We begin to believe that we somehow deserve grace. We begin to think that what Jesus has done for us is a reasonable reward for people who have believed the right things, joined the right church, and kept most of the right rules.
Once we lose sight of our own mortality and brokenness, we distance ourselves from grace very quickly.
Jesus or Caiaphas?
Manning makes the danger sharper with a choice most of us would rather avoid:
The choice usually presented to Christians is not between Jesus and Barabbas. No one wants to appear an obvious murderer. The choice to be careful about is between Jesus and Caiaphas, and Caiaphas can fool us. He is a very religious man.
That sounds like far too much of the American evangelical church to me.
Nobody in the room wants to identify with Barabbas. Barabbas is obviously violent. Barabbas is obviously guilty. Caiaphas is respectable. Caiaphas knows the Scriptures, protects the institution, and speaks the language of faithfulness. Caiaphas can convince himself that opposing Jesus is an act of devotion.
That is where the danger lives.
Manning tells an old story about Satan lamenting that hell was being emptied out. God tells him not to weep. He will send all the holy people, who will become self complacent and fill it right back up.
Then Manning asks a series of questions that do not let us move on too quickly:
How long will it be before we discover we cannot dazzle God with our accomplishments?
When will we acknowledge that we need not and cannot buy God’s favor?
When will we acknowledge that we do not have it altogether and happily accept the gift of grace?
When will we grasp the thrilling truth of Paul, that what makes a person righteous is not obedience to the law but faith in Jesus Christ?
Authentic faith changes the way we see people. It leads us to treat others with unconditional seriousness and with a loving reverence for the mystery of the human personality. Grace is never only a private transaction between God and me. If I have truly received grace, it will change the way I look at the person in front of me.
The right thing for the wrong reason
One person in our room brought in a line attributed to T. S. Eliot: the greatest sin is to do the right thing for the wrong reason.
There are people who go to church to be seen. Some find it good for business. Some want the reputation that comes with religious respectability. Another voice in the room added a line from early in Manning’s chapter: impostors in the spirit always prefer appearances to reality.
Rationalization begins with a look in the mirror.
And biblically, there may be nothing more detestable than a self righteous disciple. C. S. Lewis put it more bluntly. Bad people are bad, but there is nothing more evil than a religious bad person.
This is where Manning’s discussion of the pro life movement becomes uncomfortable. He is not taking issue with proclaiming that each life is precious to God. He is asking whether our reverence for life remains consistent when the life belongs to an enemy.
He writes that when we laud life with one breath and call for more violence against an enemy with the next, our credibility as Christians is questionable. We proclaim the love and anguish, the pain and joy that go into fashioning a single child. We proclaim how precious each life is to God. But when an enemy shrieks under fire, we do not always weep. We are not always ashamed. Sometimes we call for more.
I remember having these conversations years ago. Are we pro birth, or are we truly pro life? To be pro life has to be bigger than the moment of birth. It includes how we care for children, the poor, and the elderly. It includes every person in between.
I once debated a man at the first church I served as pastor. He was passionate about the pro life cause. Marches, projects, all of it. I asked whether he also supported the death penalty.
“Absolutely,” he said. “Kill them all.” One participant in our room added, “And live stream it.”
I told him that he had berated us about needing to be pro life, unless a person was in prison. Then the answer was capital punishment. That seemed somewhat at odds.
He left the church shortly thereafter. I was not always good for building crowds.
The point is not that every hard moral question resolves itself with a slogan. The point is that looking into our own hearts exposes our inconsistencies. We create enemies. We separate certain people from grace. We do it most easily when we have lost a full grip on the depth of grace that we ourselves need.
Yes, we go to church. We show up for Sunday school on Tuesday afternoons. We read our Bibles. We pray. We are pretty good people. That is precisely the temptation.
We do not need to walk around staring at our belly buttons and beating ourselves up. That is another performance. But we ought to be people overwhelmed with gratitude and freshly aware of our own need for grace. Otherwise, grace becomes paste jewelry and sawdust hot dogs, something we talk about but do not really believe.
The truest test is an ordinary day
Another line from the chapter was read aloud in our room, and the person reading it said she had to go back and read it two or three more times. Each time, it landed harder.
The way we are with each other is the truest test of our faith. How I treat a brother or sister from day to day, how I react to the sin scarred wino on the street, how I respond to interruptions from people I dislike, how I deal with normal people in their normal confusion on a normal day may be a better indication of my reverence for life than the anti abortion sticker on the bumper of my car.
That will preach, but it will not preach comfortably.
It moves faith from the bumper sticker to the interruption. From the position statement to the person I dislike. From the cause I support in public to the way I treat normal people in their normal confusion on a normal day.
Someone else talked about war and how it separates people. How many of us have mourned a Japanese or German person killed in war? We usually think of them only as the enemy. Once we dehumanize an enemy, there is not much room left for grace or love.
Powers at war work very hard at dehumanization. Nazi propaganda cast Jews as rats and animals. We rightly call that awful. But American propaganda also dehumanized its enemies, and Japanese Americans who had lived peacefully in our communities were forced into internment camps. We dehumanize people, and then we can treat them as though they are vermin.
Our room remembered Corrie ten Boom. After the war, she was speaking about forgiveness when a man came forward afterward. He had been one of the guards who treated the prisoners worst. He asked for her forgiveness and reached out to shake her hand.
She did not feel able to do it. She did not feel forgiveness. But she reached out her hand, and as she did, God worked in her heart and the feelings followed.
Sometimes we do not feel like doing the faithful thing. Sometimes we act first and discover later that God has been at work in us through the act itself. I do not know if I could have done what Corrie did. I can hold a grudge over far smaller things.
What if church looked like an AA meeting?
Near the end of chapter 7, Manning writes:
To the extent that I reject my ragamuffin identity, I turn away from God, the community, and myself. I become a man obsessed by illusion, a man of false power in fearful weakness, unable to think, act, or love.
I thought about my brother, who is an alcoholic. He once invited me to an open meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous so I could see what it was like.
When I walked out, I thought, This is what the church ought to be.
People were transparent. They were honest. Someone had fallen off the wagon and had come back. Nobody pretended to have all their crap together. Everyone knew they needed help, and they knew everyone else in the room was in the same condition. Because of that honesty, they were able to love one another and be present with one another.
How refreshing would that be in church?
Instead of putting on happy faces and trying to look good on the outside so we can be respectable Christians, what if we gathered on Sunday with this attitude: “Man, I really screwed up this week. Let me tell you.”
That is not exhibitionism. It is reality. When we embrace the reality of who we are and how much we need grace, it draws us closer together. Even people who do not know one another well can be drawn together by that kind of honesty.
Give me a new law
Chapter 8, “Freedom from Fear,” begins with the Grand Inquisitor from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. In the tale, Jesus returns, and the Grand Inquisitor asks, “Why have you come to disturb us?”
A few paragraphs later, Manning says the question had changed. It was no longer, “What does Jesus say?” It had become, “What does the church say?”
That question is still being asked today.
Manning adds a sad and painfully accurate observation: some Christians want to be slaves. It is easier to let others make decisions. It is easier to rely on the letter of the law.
As soon as I read that, I wrote a song title in the margin: “New Law” by Derek Webb. Webb, who was the lead singer of Caedmon’s Call before his solo work, captures the desire perfectly. Do not teach me about poetry and prose. Do not teach me about beauty and truth. Just tell me what to believe. Do not teach me about right and wrong. Just tell me who to vote for. Just tell me what music Christians should hear and what movies Christians should watch.
Just give me a new law.
If we are Christians, perhaps we should watch only movies from the Christian movie company. Perhaps the only television show we should watch is The Chosen. Back in the day, the list was endless. You could not watch this. You could not play cards. You could not dance, drink, or chew, or go with girls who do.
I remember my father in law growing up in a small Christian church in Griffin, Indiana. One Sunday the preacher railed about the evils of playing cards and drinking. My future father in law sat there as a teenager thinking that those were the two things he liked to do. This was not going to be much fun.
We joke because we recognize it.
Manning argues that we want a new law because we are afraid. We are afraid we will let God down. We are afraid we will disappoint him. We are afraid that, when everything is sorted out, we will find ourselves outside heaven looking in.
So we ask, “Just tell me what to do. What is the Christian thing to do?”
I think it was C. S. Lewis who said that “Christian” is a great noun and a terrible adjective. Christian music, Christian literature, and Christian painting can all become ways of sorting the approved from the unapproved. Ancient Christian art did not usually market itself that way. Artists simply made beautiful art. Much of it included naked people, and it hung in churches. Imagine walking into one of our churches today and finding Michelangelo everywhere. We would have a meeting.
The rules feel safer than freedom. A list can tell us whether we are in or out. Grace asks us to trust a Person.
Assured of your salvation
One of the loveliest lines in the chapter comes from Brother Roger, the prior of the Protestant monks of Taizé in France:
Assured of your salvation by the unique grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Manning goes on to say that we accept grace in theory but deny it in practice.
That brought to mind another quote I read recently. I did not look it up, so this may be apocryphal. Somebody may have made it up. It sounds legitimate, though, and that is my disclaimer.
Karl Barth was a German theologian of enormous influence. Someone supposedly asked him, “When were you saved?”
Barth thought for a moment and said, “A.D. 33.”
That is grace.
If I asked most of us when we were saved, we would point to a prayer we prayed, a decision we made, or an age when we began to follow Jesus. Those moments matter. But Barth’s answer moves the center of gravity. We were saved when Jesus said, “It is finished.”
None of us had been born. None of us had committed a single sin. And yet the sins we would commit were dealt with on the cross in A.D. 33. Our salvation is God’s free gift, given because of his love for us. It is a remarkable thing to think about.
Then what do we do in response? We say, “Great. Now tell me how to be good. Give me the new rules.”
There is an old story about Martin Luther. Some older women in his church supposedly told him that they enjoyed his sermons, but he preached the same message every week. He always preached the gospel. They were ready to move beyond the milk to the meat.
Luther answered, in effect, “As soon as you come in here looking like you actually believe the gospel, I will preach something else. Right now, none of you looks like you believe it.”
It is funny because it is true. We lose the concept of grace quickly, all of us. Manning says we take out a second mortgage on the house of fear.
There is no free lunch
Grace goes against our natural instinct. We feel that we have to do something. There has to be some responsibility on our part. We cannot just receive this.
We have heard it all our lives. There is nothing free in life. There is no free lunch. Be responsible. Achieve something.
One person in our room remembered a pastor’s response after Manning preached about grace for an hour. As people were leaving, the pastor essentially complained that Manning had said nothing about what we have to do.
Well, yes. That was rather the point of the hour.
I remember sitting with a college student at Illinois State University and trying to explain grace. He tracked with me when we talked about believing in God. He tracked with me when we talked about believing in Jesus. Then he said that I lost him on grace. There was no way God worked like that. There was no way God just loved us and forgave us because he loves us. It did not make sense.
It does not make sense inside the human box.
We think God works the way we work. We limit him to our perspective. If somebody treated me the way I often treat God, I would establish a healthy boundary and end the relationship. God remains faithful. He keeps coming back. “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” Jonah complained that God is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love.
His ways are higher than our ways. That is grace right there. We do not understand it.
And because it frightens us, we demand a new law. We demand a manageable way to prove that we are safely inside.
Jesus is our home
One of the passages our room lingered over begins with Jesus saying, “Remain in me, as I remain in you.” Manning writes that home is not a heavenly mansion in the afterlife. Home is a safe place right in the middle of our anxious wounds.
Then comes a line so tender that I want to sit with it for a while:
A little child cannot do a bad coloring, nor can a child of God do a bad prayer.
To those of us in flight, afraid to turn around lest we run into ourselves, Jesus says, “You have a home. I am your home.”
We often see other people not as they are, but as we are. Psychologists call it projection. There is an old observation that what we dislike in another person often reveals what we dislike in ourselves.
Someone told the story of a woman who was placed on a tranquilizer because she was so anxious. When the doctor later asked how she was doing, she said, “I do not notice any change, but everybody around me seems to be calm.”
We laughed because we recognized ourselves.
Manning writes that grace inspires a growing consciousness that “I am what I am in the sight of Jesus.” That awareness changes the voice in our heads. We do not have to perform a self for God. We can come home.
Give up trying to sound like a saint
Manning’s spiritual director once told him, “Brennan, give up trying to look and sound like a saint. It will be a lot easier on everybody.”
That is a particular danger for people in church leadership. There is an expectation that a pastor will act and speak a certain way, perhaps with a permanently gentler voice and a permanently composed face. I am not built that way. I can be gentle, but even my gentleness sometimes does not sound all that gentle.
Early in my life and ministry, I struggled to fit into a box labeled “person in full time ministry.” I wish someone had given me Manning’s line when I was in my twenties. It would have made life much easier. Sometime in my forties, I finally gave up trying to look and sound like a saint. The freedom that comes with that is one more gift of grace.
It also shapes the way we love other people.
Jesus says we are to love others as we love ourselves. For a long time, I heard that as though self love were automatic. Then I realized that many of us do not love ourselves very well at all. Our ability to love another person is often limited by our inability to receive love for ourselves.
Manning gets to the heart of it on the far side of a discussion about moderation in love. Faith will not tolerate a merely moderate love between God and humanity, or between one person and another. Then he writes:
Once again, gentleness towards ourselves constitutes the core of our gentleness with others. When the compassion of Christ is interiorized and appropriated to self, “the bruised reed he will not crush, and the smoldering wick he will not quench.” The breakthrough into a compassionate stance towards others occurs.
This matters in a moment when some corners of the church have begun to speak of toxic empathy and even the sin of empathy. Have we missed the interior work of receiving the compassionate love of Christ for our own lives? If we truly grasp that God has not crushed us, that he has not quenched our smoldering wick, we will become more compassionate and empathetic toward others.
Gentleness with ourselves is not self indulgence. It is where gentleness with others begins.
The freedom is real
Chapters 7 and 8 belong together because fear is one of the forces that keeps counterfeit grace alive.
We pretend because we are afraid of being seen.
We ask for a new law because we are afraid grace might not be enough.
We polish the paste jewelry because we are afraid the real person underneath is unacceptable.
We call other people enemies because fear makes compassion feel dangerous.
But the gospel tells another story. We have a home. We are assured of salvation by the unique grace of Jesus Christ. We do not need to dazzle God with our accomplishments. We do not need to buy his favor. We do not need to keep up a pseudo repentance that can only produce pseudo bliss.
We can tell the truth. We can receive forgiveness. We can stop trying to look and sound like saints. We can become gentle with ourselves and, at last, gentle with one another.
That is freedom from fear.