Continuing the Conversation about Grace: A Response to Paul Foster and Beverly Gaventa

I am extremely grateful to Paul Foster ¹ and Beverly Gaventa for the care with which they have read Paul and the Gift, and for the generosity with which they have spoken about it. Foster has given a fine summary of central elements of the book, including its anthropological tools, its taxonomy of ‘perfections’, and its engagement with Second Temple Judaism, while Gaventa has focused on its Pauline dimensions. The combination gives the reader a good sense of what the book is about, and the tone they have set provides the conditions for fruitful discussion. I am privileged both to receive this careful assessment of my work and to be given this opportunity to respond. I will focus on Gaventa’s probing questions concerning my reading of Paul, grateful for this challenging, friendly, and open-ended dialogue.

Whence did Paul derive his reading of the Christ-event as gift? Did Paul’s participation in the Jewish dialogue on divine beneficence generate this interpretation of Christ, asks Gaventa, ‘or is it the Christ-event that generates Paul’s participation in the dialogue’? We need not press for an either/or decision. As Romans 9–11 suggests, Paul could draw on a pool of biblical texts which point to the mercy and benevolence of God, and as a theologian working within this biblical/Jewish tradition, the question of where and how God’s mercy is displayed was always live and serious. But the peculiar, incongruous, character of God’s mercy (as Paul reads it)—its disregard of the worth of its recipients—is not a necessary or inevitable construal of the biblical tradition (as the contemporary Wisdom of Solomon shows), and I suggest in my reading of Romans 9–11 that this has a special Christological character (Paul and the Gift, pp. 556–61). We cannot tell, of course, how Paul would have read these texts otherwise, but I do not think that a proper emphasis on the Christ-event as the catalyst of all his theological reasoning needs to be played off against the fact that he is frequently dealing with topics also discussed and disputed among his fellow Jews. The second part of Paul and the Gift, with its detailed studies of Jewish texts, demonstrates that there was such discussion and dispute concerning the mercy or grace of God. But it also serves to illumine Paul’s texts at numerous points, through complex mixtures of similarity and difference, and it is surely unlikely that Paul began to think about God’s mercy/grace only when he was encountered by Christ. In other words, I think we can understand Paul better by situating his theology alongside other participants in this Jewish discussion, but I certainly agree that we cannot understand him at all unless we see the impact of the Christ-event, and of his calling and mission to the Gentiles, on the way he figured what ‘grace’ meant.

As Gaventa rightly notes, the category of gift is not the only dimension of Paul’s soteriology, and there are other themes and many passages that I have not been able to address. In fact, I think gift is not so much one among the many Pauline metaphors for salvation as the structure or ‘grammar’ of it all: it indicates the mode in which God defeats Sin and Death, releases slaves, reconciles enemies, justifies the ungodly, and adopts children. ² All of these things happen by means of the unconditioned Christ-gift, so that what is being discussed in this book is the ‘deep structure’ of salvation, not merely one of its many elements. Gaventa is right that I might have said more about the pervasive metaphors of conflict and the ‘larger-than-human’ powers contested by Christ and ultimately overcome by the love of God in Christ (Romans 8). Romans 5, in fact, figures ‘Grace’ as a power whose reign surpasses and replaces the reign of Sin (Rom 5:20–21), so that here also the grace/gift language is used to shape the narrative and the meaning of the cosmic conflict. Here especially one realises that ‘grace’ is not a thing, a material or even a ‘spiritual’ gift that is passed from God to us, but is God himself in gracious power, stepping into the world to govern and transform it. To quote a theologian whom we both admire, ‘The gift which is being bestowed here is never at any time separable from its Giver. It partakes of the character of power, in so far as God himself enters the arena and remains in the arena with it.’ ³ There is a danger that the language of ‘gift’ might give the impression that what God gives us in Christ is something separable from God’s self, a thing (an alienable thing) that is somehow conveyed from God to us—especially since we (particularly Westerners) think of gifts as passing from the possession of the giver into the possession of the recipient. If Paul uses the language of ‘gift’ it is to convey the mode in which God confronts the ‘present evil age’ (Gal 1:4) and unites us to God’s self (or to the Spirit, or to the life of Christ). The specific Pauline understanding of that transformative intervention is that it is granted without regard to worth, not as reward or in recognition of (even partial) human success but in the midst of cosmic and human catastrophe.

As Gaventa points out, dangers may also lurk in the language of ‘reciprocity’ (our giving in return to God). Might that suggest that we (as ‘independent agents’: I hope I have never said that!) are inspired or enhanced by something that we receive, such that our ameliorated selves now give something back to God? That, to be sure, is the normal pattern of human reciprocity. Someone gives us something, which (at its best) inspires or enables us to give something back: in both moments of this transaction we are fundamentally the same, however much we may be supplemented or even reformed by the gift. That is emphatically not what Paul has in mind. As Gaventa indicates, Paul uses the language of ‘new creation’ (Gal 6.15; 2 Cor 5.17) and ‘newness of life’ (Rom 6.4-5) to describe the status of believers, and in the latter case it is crystal clear that this is the life of the risen Christ from which believers now draw (cf. Gal 2.19–20). As I tried to say in this connection, but might have said more fully (or with greater effort to spell this out in contemporary terms), ‘everything that may be said about the believers’ new mode of existence—their new allegiances, dispositions, emotions, and actions—is attributable to the miraculous life of Christ himself’ (Paul and the Gift, 501). Thus whatever we give back to God (gratitude, praise, service, the obedience of faith) we do not give as our old selves, but as newly created agents in Christ, and we do not give from our own resources but from what we have been made in Christ. Nonetheless, just as God gave God’s self (or God’s Son) to us, so we give (as newly minted agents) our (new) selves to God – as Paul says on more than one occasion (e.g., Rom 12.1–2; 2 Cor 8.5). Since the terminology of gift is used on both sides, and since the believers’ giving is secondary to, and dependent on, the giving of God, the language of reciprocity does not seem inappropriate, provided that it is hedged about in the ways described here.

If a good way of describing salvation is that God gives God’s self to us, and that we (the new ‘we’) give ourselves to God (and thereby to others), it is clear that what lies at the heart of salvation is relationship or ‘participation’, and not conformity to an externally imposed order of things. Gaventa is understandably anxious that by using the language of ‘moral order’ or ‘fit’ (e.g., that ‘on the eschatological horizon of the gift of Christ there is the fitting outcome of a life of “good work”,’ Paul and the Gift, 492), I may be attributing to Paul some notion of a pre-ordained universal order, exterior to God, ‘to which God is compelled to answer.’ In fact, I fully agree with her that any order is properly defined by God’s own actions, and not by anything external to God, but I am grateful for her insistence on this point. Paul does show some concern to defend the notion that God will justly judge the world (Rom 2:1–11, and especially the questions in Rom 3:5–7), and to show that God is ‘righteous’ (Rom 3:26); and it is possible that one meaning of ‘the dikaiosunē of God’ (Rom 3:21 etc.) is that God is faithful and non-arbitrary. Even in relation to the Law, Paul makes it clear that those who walk in the Spirit ‘fulfil the just requirement (dikaiōma) of the Law’ (Rom 8:4). But it is important that the ‘fit’ Paul wants is a ‘fit’ with God, not a fit with something ‘natural’, ‘cosmic’, or other than God. It is interesting to observe how the language of justification bleeds into talk of participation in Christ (Gal 2:15–21) or of reconciliation with God (Rom 5:1–11). I take that as a sign that what matters is not that believers are correctly aligned with some rule (some cosmic norm) but that they are correctly aligned with God. Even if Augustine read the genitive wrongly, he was right to see that when Paul says that ‘the love of God is poured into our hearts’ (Rom 5:5) this is because salvation is first and foremost about creating a relationship of love between God and us. ⁴ It is that relationship that determines the ‘fit’. ‘What fellowship is there between light and darkness? What agreement does Christ have with Beliar?’, and thus ‘what partnership is there between righteousness and lawlessness?’ (2 Cor 6:14–15). The unfitting gift is designed to create a fitting result, in the form of transformed creatures who delight in God, and thus delight in what delights God (Rom 12:1–2). As Luther put it, in one of his most memorable theses, ‘the love of God does not find but creates that which is pleasing to Him’ (Heidelberg Disputation, Thesis 28). God creates it and does not find it ready-made, but it is created to have a deep and ‘pleasing’ fellowship with God. This is not about ‘an ancient sense of moral order’, but it is does imply an order or ‘fit’ with the character and purposes of God.

In exegetical terms, Gaventa’s discomfort with my language reflects our different readings of Romans 2, a passage that has always troubled Protestant exegetes (like us), and continues to puzzle and divide them to this day. My reading finds reference here to the eschatological vindication of Jewish and Gentile believers, whose good works are the evidence of their heart-transformation (Paul and the Gift, pp. 461–74). This certainly challenges the common reading of the architecture of Romans 1:18–3.20 as a single-focused indictment of human sin, with every part building to the climax of 3:9–20. Gaventa appeals to this ‘larger argumentative arc’ as ruling out my reading, but I believe that Paul’s rhetorical purposes within Romans 1–3 are much more varied that she suggests, and include a proleptic vision of the eschatological judgement with reference to those who are circumcised in the heart (2:29, to my mind, a reference to believers; cf. 7:6). No-one has a smooth ride here, but in return I would love to know how Gaventa reads the references to those who ‘do the good’ and receive eschatological honour (2:10), or who have the ‘work of the law’ written on their hearts (2:15). To treat these as hypothetical cases (as many exegetes do) seems to me ultimately a weaker reading than the one I have offered, though I recognise that no-one can claim to have uttered the final word on this text.

If, as I understand it, this passage does look forward to the ultimate rectification of the cosmos, it can help us to keep together both Paul’s references to the faithfulness of God, of which Gaventa reminds us (Rom 14.4; 1 Thess 5:23–4), and those appeals to faithfulness and obedience to which Paul calls believers. The work of the Spirit in ‘the circumcision of the heart’ (Rom 2:29) is God’s ‘seal’ (2 Cor 1:21–2) and will not be revoked by God. But it may be denied or destroyed either by believers themselves or by other believers; hence the warnings against denying God who gives the Spirit (1 Thess 4:7–8) and destroying ‘the work of God’ (Rom 14:20; 1 Cor 3:17; 8:11). The olive-tree analogy enables Paul to say this in another way: he reminds his Gentile readers of the kindness and the severity of God, the former ‘if you remain in the kindness, otherwise you also will be cut off’ (Rom 11:22). What is called for here is not achievement, the maintenance of a record of human righteousness, but remaining in the kindness or mercy of God (the richness-supplying root of the tree, 11:17). At the same time, the warning implies that it is possible not to remain in it, that is, to lose one’s connection to the grace of God, notably here by denying or forgetting that it is only by grace that anyone stands. ⁵ Thus whatever positive is said about those who stand at the Parousia ‘with blameless hearts’ (1 Thess 3.11-14) must be attributed to the new selves that they have become in Christ and the love that the Lord has made to abound among them (1 Thess 3:12); but that only makes more urgent Paul’s appeal to make that love abound (1 Thess 4:1–2, 9–10). I think that there is enough in Romans 2 (especially Rom 2:14–16, 28–9) to indicate that its account of human accountability is predicated on an account of the divine remaking of the self. At least, when we find those hints filled out elsewhere, we discover nothing that would make one think that Romans 2 is incompatible with the many descriptions of the Parousia and judgement that we find elsewhere.

At a number of points, Gaventa suggests that, had I looked harder, I might have found more evidence of the ‘efficacy’ of grace in the being and action of the newly created believer. I am certainly aware that this ‘perfection’ of grace, in particular, might have been given greater clarification. One might distinguish, for instance, between three senses of the efficacy of grace: (i) that God creates newly formed agents who (as I put it) live an ‘eccentric’ existence, dependent on the life of the resurrected Christ; (ii) that the agency of God (or the agency of the Spirit) replaces the agency of the human; or (iii) that God guarantees that his grace is not ‘in vain’ in securing the salvation of believers, even each individual believer. I have resisted (iii) at least in regard to individual believers (the Augustinian doctrine of ‘the perseverance of the saints’), since it seems to me a logical ‘perfection’ of grace that simply goes beyond the evidence of the texts (Gal 5:4; 6:8; etc.). I have also resisted (ii) which implies a zero-sum calculation of agency (the more God, the less us, and vice versa) and prefer to use a model of ‘energism’ for the non-contrastive agency of God in the agency of the believer, rather than postulating a divine ‘monergism’. ⁶ To be sure, Paul can speak of grace or the Spirit as an ongoing agent in the life of the believer (1 Cor 15:9–10; Gal 5:22–3), but I find that he just as often (in fact more often) speaks of the agency of the (newly created) believer and puts considerable weight on this agency as the necessary outcome of incongruous grace. We may certainly speak of ‘efficacy’ in sense (i) above, but (in reaction to Martyn) I have allowed myself to emphasise that, once we have that point clear, it is not necessary (and not true to Paul) to keep glossing what Paul says about believer-agency as really, or more truly, the agency of God, as if one excludes the other.

I am trying to give proper weight to the fact that Paul is constantly calling believers, as newly constituted agents, to action, not to grow weary in doing good (Gal 6:9–10), to test their own work (Gal 6:4), to walk in the Spirit (Gal 5:25), and to present their bodies as living sacrifices (Rom 12:1–2). It matters greatly to Paul whether believers sow to the flesh or sow to the Spirit (Gal 6:8), and he challenges others, as he challenges himself, with the question whether they remain authentically in Christ (1 Cor 9.24–7; 2 Cor 13:5–6). As long as we recall that the source of this active life is Christ, I would stand by the claim that ‘that new life cannot be said to be active within believers unless it is demonstrably acted out by them’ (Paul and the Gift, p. 503).

How can we guard against the equal and opposite dangers of (i) a strong assurance that subtly leads towards ‘cheap grace’ or an empty faith that professes ‘Jesus is Lord’ only to serve other ‘lords’ in the personal and social affairs of life; and (ii) an urgency of Christian obedience that subtly descends into self-propelled activism, turning the narrative of grace into a merely moral campaign? Perhaps no amount of theological balancing and reformulation will aid us here so much as a basic habit of the Christian life. Every time that we receive the body and blood of the Lord (and for me, as an Anglican, the regularity of this moment is highly important), we remember who we most truly are—the products of a grace so complete and undeserved that we live entirely out of the gift of Christ. And every time that, having received this gift anew, we ‘go in peace to love and serve the Lord’, we commit ourselves to put this gift into active service in the world. To go in peace to love and serve ourselves, or another lord, would be to deny who we are; but we can neither love nor serve unless we are loved. In other words, and I imagine Gaventa might agree with me here, perhaps the rhythm of the Eucharist is precisely what we need in order to read Paul aright.

John M. G. BarclayUniversity of Durham