Cheap Grace
Reactions of some nominal Christians to the message of Pope Benedict XVI are nothing more than liberal-progressive-socialistic “toleration.”
In his April 18th column for the Washington Post, E. J. Dionne, Jr. expresses the misgivings of liberal-progressives who enjoy the ritual of religion, but don’t want to be bothered with following the teachings of Jesus.
Mr. Dionne writes:
The most jarring word that Pope Benedict XVI is using during his visit to the United States is “countercultural.” The American sense of that term is shaped by the 1960s: free love, drugs, hippies, rock music and rebellion. Needless to say, that’s not what Benedict is preaching.
That word is the key to understanding how Benedict’s message runs crosswise to conventional liberalism and conservatism. Benedict came to the United States as a quiet but forceful critic of “an increasingly secular and materialistic culture,” as he put it during yesterday’s Mass. Almost any American who paid attention to his sermon had to be uncomfortable because all of us are shaped by the very forces he was criticizing.
Benedict directly challenged an assumption so many Americans make about religion: that it is a matter of private devotion with few public implications.
The truth is that too many of us like to think of ourselves as saved by God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ. We think that it’s enough to give lip service to the Gospels on Sunday, while keeping our lives in a separate compartment for the remainder of the week.
This is what German pastor Dietrich Bonnhoeffer called cheap grace. Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran minister who openly defied the materialistic, liberal-progressive socialism of Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis) and paid for it with his life.
In The Cost of Discipleship, pastor Bonhoeffer wrote:
Instead of following Christ, let the Christian enjoy the consolations of his grace! That is what we mean by cheap grace, the grace which amounts to the justification of sin without justification of the repentant sinner who departs from sin and from whom sin departs. Cheap grace is not the kind of forgiveness of sin which frees us from the toils of sin. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves.
Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline. Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.
Jesus, two thousand years ago, put his finger on the same phenomenon.
No one was more versed than the pharisees in the texts of the Hebraic Bible and more learned about the requirements of the law emanating from Moses’s original covenant with God. But, Jesus told them, true religion is based on the two greatest of God’s commandments: have no other god than God Himself, and love your neighbor as thyself.
Ritualistically following the law alone was not sufficient. There had to be a softening of the heart that led to obedience to God’s commandments, to genuine concern for serving others and aiding the needy.
So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with ‘unclean’ hands?”
He replied, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: 
” ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.’ You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men.” (Mark 7:5-8)
Unfortunately for nominal Christians and for politicians who seek the cover of church attendance while advocating the materialistic beliefs of the religion of liberal-progressive-socialism, the Pope is right. You can’t be a Christian while defying Jesus in sexual promiscuity and marital infidelity; biological fathers who abandon their children and their family responsibilities can’t counterbalance their dereliction with athletic or business success; people who murder unborn babies cannot claim to love God.
Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.
His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776
http://www.thomasbrewton.com/
Email comments to viewfrom1776@thomasbrewton.com
Thomas E. Brewton, who maintains this blog, had the great good fortune in the middle 1950s at Louisiana State University to study under two of the 20th century's great minds: Eric Voegelin in political science, and Walter Berns in Constitutional law. These two professors opened the door of education to a glimpse of Western civilization and of American political and social thought as they had been before socialism was unconstitutionally established as the official national religion of the United States in 1933. | More from Thomas Brewton
Stumble It!
April 28th, 2008 at 6:07 am
Grace comes directly; uncalled-for, undeserved, and all too often, unwanted. Grace is so hard to have. A gift most want to but cannot return.
These are some of the features of Grace, from the human discomfort perspective. But of course we want the Comfortable life. So we make False graces; erzatz ones that are easier. We define the ones we want and how they are to be.
We are all hypocritical just as we all have toe-nails – but some insist on painting their toe-nails and strutting them down the street.
Hypocricy at a low level is one of the banes of everyday existence in our skins. It is one of those stains on the soul’s clothing that we have to rub and scrub periodically. Expunge with spiritual ‘Cold Power’. But some instead raise it to a tie-dye Art, displaying them as smart-arse slogans on ‘distressed’ jeans.
Some flaunt non-existent ‘Empathy’. Better when they can flaunt it to show up others and equally falsly claim that they have none at all. Some just ‘Love’ so much that it spills over onto the decor of their rooms or a shop window shoe display.
The most difficult of all the real Graces is Unconditional Love. It is rarely inflicted on people by a God who loves us too much to make many bear it. Yet there are those who claim it and confer it upon themselves as though it were something grand to have. Again, the major use of erzatz unconditional love is to deride all those who one percieves as lacking it and make them see just how ‘good’ we must be compared to them.
Most people today find ordinary everyday love to be too hard. They claim it anyway and proclaim it endlessly to banal tunes.
I wonder how many so called Christians, those Sunday seen at church and monday cheat, lie, slander, corrupt, will actually listen to Benedict. How many will actually try Christianity one day.
After, there was Laughter, Music, Whine.
High pitched.
So much fun. …..
No one noticed Love fall to her knees.
Her calls for help were drowned by song.
Trampled to death under dancing feet.
The last to succumb.
The Princess of Lies rides
over barren lands.
April 28th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Nice verse, Amfortas. Where’d yah git it?
So E.J. doesn’t like capitalism, and he hears his heart’s song resonating in the Pope’s message. The word “enlightened” always engenders the pricking of my thumbs; as it’s availability has increased, it’s value has dropped. I’m looking for something a little less expensive, but not as cheap.
April 29th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Jjtaup, I wrote it. Just a small part of a longer lament.