"What's so Amazing about Grace?" (I)

I first heard about Philip Yancey's book in bible college. Our theology professor, a man who read 3-4 books a week and who had been doing so for decades, told us that What's So Amazing About Grace? was the most influential book he'd ever read. I found that odd, coming from him, since Yancey tends to write books for the masses rather than for theologians. I started reading this book Monday and finished it Tuesday, and I can see now why my professor extolled it. Yancey blends stories and meditations on Jesus' parables to cut through the bullshit of religion to catch a glimpse of the heart of God.

Yancey defines grace: "Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more--no amount of spiritual calisthenics and renunciations, no amoung of knowledge gained from seminaries and divinity schools, no amount of crusading on behalf of righteous causes. And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less--no amount of racism or pride or pornography or adultery or even murder. Grace means that God already loves us as much as an infinite God can possibly love." He continues, "I cannot moderate my definition of grace, because the Bible forces me to make it as sweeping as possible. God is 'the God of all grace,' in the apostle Peter's words. And grace means there is nothing I can do to make God love me more, and nothing I can do to make God love me less. It means that I, even I who deserve the opposite, am invited to take my place at a table in God's family." (page 70)

In three posts I'm going to convey some of my favorite quotes. The book is basically split into three parts: God's grace towards us, our grace towards others, and the church's role of dispensing grace to the world. The last several chapters are a damning rebuke on evangelical Christianity's politically-bent motivations that always fail to miss the heart of the gospel: "We're a bunch of bastards, but God loves us anyways."

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"Many years ago I was driven to the conclusion that the two major causes of most emotional problems among evangelical Christians are these: the failure to understand, receive, and live out God's unconditional grace and forgiveness; and the failure to give out that unconditional love, forgiveness, and grace to other people... We read, we hear, we believe a good theology about grace. But that's not the way we live. The good news of the Gospel of grace has not penetrated the level of our emotions." (15, quoting David Seamands)

"Catholics, Mennonites, Churches of Christ, Lutherans, and Southern Baptists all have their own custom agenda of legalism. You gain the church's, and presumably God's, approval by following the prescribed pattern." (30)

"Eugene Peterson draws a contrast between Augustine and Pelagius, two fourth-century theological opponents. Pelagius was urbane, courteous, convincing, and liked by everyone. Augustine squandered away his youth in immorality, had a strange relationship with his mother, and made many enemies. Yet Augustine started from God's grace and got it right, whereas Pelagius started from human effort and got it wrong. Augustine passionately pursued God; Pelagius methodically worked to please God. Peterson goes on to say that Christians tend to be Augustinian in theory but Pelagian in practice. They work obsessively to please other people and even God." (70)

"By tradition, one wears faith with the solemnity of a mourner, the gravity of a mask of tragedy, and the dedication of a Rotary badge." (31, quoting Erma Bombeck)

"The church... communicates ungrace through its lack of unity. Mark Twain used to say he put a dog and cat in a cage together as an experiment, to see if they could get along. They did, so he put in a bird, pig, and goat. They, too, got along fine after a few adjustments. Then he put in a Baptist, Presbyterian, and Catholic; soon there was not a living thing left." (33)

"I have been picking on Christians because I am one, and see no reason to pretend we are better than we are." (33)

"Guilt was not my problem as I felt it. What I felt most was a glob of unworthiness that I could not tie down to any concrete sins I was guilty of. What I needed more than pardon was a sense that God accepted me, owned me, held me, affirmed me, and would never let go of men even if he was not too much impressed with what he had on his hands." (36, quoting Lewis Smedes)

"The disease anorexia is a direct product of ungrace: hold up the ideal of beautiful, skinny models, and teenage girls will starve themselves to death in an attempt to reach that ideal. A peculiar offshoot of modern Western civilization, anorexia has no known history and rarely occurs in places like modern Africa (where plumpness, not thinness, is admired)." (37)

"The notion of God's love coming to us free of charge, no strings attached, seems to go against every instinct of humanity. The Buddhist eight-fold path, the Hindu doctrine of karma, the Jewish covenant, and Muslim code of law--each of these offers a way to earn approval. Only Christianity dares to make God's love unconditional." (45)

"How different [are Jesus' parables] from my own childhood notions about God: a God who forgives, yes, but reluctantly, after making the penitent squirm. I imagined God as a distant thundering figure who prefers fear and respect to love. Jesus tells instead [in the parable of the Prodigal Son] of a father publicly humiliating himself by rushing out to embrace a son who has squandered half the family fortune. There is no solemn lecture, 'I hope you've learned your lesson!' Instead, Jesus tells of the father's exhilaration--'This my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found'--and then adds the buoyant phrase, 'they began to make merry.'" (51)

"What blocks forgiveness is not God's reticence... but ours. God's arms are always extended; we are the ones who turn away." (51-52)

"The gospel is not at all what we would come up with on our own. I, for one, would expect to honor the virtuous over the profligate. I would expect to have to clean up my act before even applying for an audience with a Holy God. But Jesus told of God ignoring a fancy religious teacher and turning instead to an ordinary sinner who pleads, 'God, have mercy.' Throughout the Bible, in fact, God shows a marked preference for "real" people over "good" people. In Jesus' own words, 'There will be more rejoincing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.'" (54)

"Ask people what they must do to get to heaven and most reply, 'Be good.' Jesus' stories contradict that answer. All we must do is cry, 'Help!' God welcomes home anyone who will have him and, in fact, has made the first move already." (54)

"[Jesus' parables] were not merely pleasant stories to hold listeners' attention or literary vessels to hold theological truths. They were, in fact, the template of Jesus' life on earth. He was the sepherd who left the safety of the fold for the dark and dangerous night outside. To his banquets he welcomed tax collectors and reprobates and whores. He came for the sick and not the well, for the unrighteous and not the righteous. And to those who betrayed him--especially the disciples, who forsook him at his time of greatest need--he responded like a lovesick father." (55)

"At the center of Jesus' parables of grace stands a God who takes the initiative towards us: a lovesick father who runs to meet the prodigal, a king who cancels a debt too large for any servant to reimburse, an employer who pays eleventh-hour workers the same as the first-hour crew, a banquet-giver who goes out to the highways and byways in search of undeserving guests." (91)

"God dispenses gifts, not wages. None of us gets paid according to merit, for none of us comes close to satisfying God's requirements for a perfect life. If we paid on the basis of fairness, we would all end up in hell." (62)

"[If] I care to listen, I hear a loud whisper from the gospel that I did not get what I deserved. I deserved punishment and got forgiveness. I deserved wrath and got love. I deserved debtor's prison and got instead a clean credit history. I deserved stern lectures and crawl-on-your-knees-repentance; I got a banquet... spread for me." (64)

"'But where sin increased, grace increased all the more.' Paul knew better than anyone who has ever lived that grace comes undeserved, at God's initiative and not our own. Knocked flat on the ground on the way to Damascus, he never recovered from the impact of grace: the word appears no later than the second sentence in every one of his letters... Paul--the "chief of sinners" he once called himself--knew beyond doubt that God loves people because of who God is, not because of who we are." (66)

"[Grace] costs nothing for the recipients but everything for the giver. God's grace is not a grandfatherly display of 'niceness,' for it cost the exorbitant price of Calvary. 'There is only one real law--the law of the universe,' said Dorothy Sayers. 'It may be fulfilled either by way of judgment or by the way of grace, but it must be fulfilled.' By accepting the judgment in his own body, Jesus fulfilled that law, and God found a way to forgive." (66)

"Weighed down by repeated failures, lost hope, a sense of unworthiness, we pull around ourselves a shell that makes us almost impervious to grace. Like foster children who choose again and again to return to abusive families, we turn stubbornly away from grace." (68)

"At a seminar, [Brennan Manning] referred to Jesus' closest friend on earth, the disciple named John, identified in the Gospels as 'the one Jesus loved.' Manning said, 'If John were to be asked, "What is your primary identity in life?" he would not reply, "I am a disciple, an apostle, an evangelist, an author of one of the four Gospels," but rather, "I am the one Jesus loves.'" What would it mean, I ask myself, if I too came to the place where I saw my identity in life as 'the one Jesus loves'? How differently would I view myself at the end of a day?" (68)

"God exists outside of time, the theologians tell us. God created time as an artist chooses a medium to work with, and is unbound by it. He sees the future and the past in a kind of eternal present. If right about this property of God, the theologians have helped explain how God can possibly call "beloved" a person as inconsistent, fickle, and temperamental as I am. When God looks upon my life graph, he sees not jagged swerves toward good and bad but rather a steady line of good: the goodness of God's Son captured in a moment of time and applied for all eternity." (69)

"There is a simple cure for people who doubt God's love and question God's grace: to turn to the Bible and examine the kind of people God loves. Jacob, who dared take God on in a wrestling match and ever after bore a wound from that struggle, became the eponym for God's people, the "children of Israel." The Bible tells of a murderer and adulterer who gained a reputation as the greatest king of the Old Testament, a "man after God's own heart." And of a church being led by a disciple who cursed and swore that he had never known Jesus. And of a missionary being recruited from the ranks of the Christian-torturers. I get mailings from Amnesty International, and as I look at their photos of men and women who have been beaten and cattle-prodded and jabbed and spit on and electrocuted, I ask myself, "What kind of human being could do that to another human being?" Then I read the book of Acts and meet the kind of person who could do such a thing--now an apostle of grace, a servant of Jesus Christ, the greatest missionary the world has ever known. If God can love that kind of person, maybe, just maybe, he can love the likes of me." (70)