The Un-Godding of God

Why Grace Can’t Be Tidied-Up

Grace, to be grace, cannot be religiously defined. It is, by definition, a defiance of religion: a refusal to accept a world limited by predictions and rules. Grace is not against rules — it is not an antinomian or anarchistic force — but it refuses to flow along the channels created by religious intent. Just when you think you’ve understood the world, grace defies you. Just when you’ve tidied your office and put all your loose papers into the right folders, every letter in its proper pigeonhole, grace blows open the window, bursts into the room and sets up a windstorm. Grace is bigger than us; beyond us; wider than our categories and catalogues.

Why, then, is grace so central to our faith? Does God want to mess up our plans and projects? Is he being deliberately obtuse, a hyperactive deity who just won’t sit still? The truth is much simpler than this, and arises from the two conditions that define God’s nature, and ours: God is by definition bigger than us, and we are by definition pattern-makers.

God is our maker, not our pet. The only ontological distinction that finally matters in our world is that between creator and created. He is our maker. We are made. This distinction, on which the very nature of the universe depends, means that God will always be beyond us. He has made us logical but will defy our logic. He gives us laws but resists our legalism. God is not a system or a service-provider but a sentient being, free and endowed with infinite creativity. We know all this, ironically, precisely because we are made, and because we ourselves are free. It is one of the great tragedies of human religious history that those who have most benefitted from the freedom God has given them have tended, in return, to limit his.

That we are pattern-makers is self-evident from our history, but is also God’s gift to us. The creator and law-giver has made us to be lawmakers. From the moment our maker first asked us to suggest animal names, we have looked for order and meaning in the created world. Where we find patterns, we rejoice. Where we find none, we improvise our own. Every human culture — from family to village to city — has set out to discover and master the patterns of its environment. But we go further. Excited by the power that pattern-making gives us, we go beyond finding the order inherent in our world to imposing an order of our own. An apple falls on our head and we declare the unbreakable rule of gravity. And we forget to add the all-important words as far as we can tell.

Just as science has imposed on every generation rules that those who follow have no choice but to break, so religion tends towards the concretisation of law. This is not all that religion does, and it would be entirely wrong to characterise religion as an essentially negative force. But this is the danger religion dances with: the trap we are so prone to falling into. When we make absolute that which God has not declared absolute, we fall into the error of concretising the provisional. Hence Peter, on the roof of his house, sees a vision of crawling, writhing creatures and hears God telling him to do what God has told him not to do: to kill and eat. This is not a mere opinion of Peter’s that God is challenging, it is the established law and practice of Judaism over centuries. Whatever God is doing here, it is not conforming.

God is by nature bigger than us and by choice the breaker of our patterns and paradigms.

So of course grace will challenge our assumptions. Of course God will love people we don’t and forgive people we haven’t and accept what we reject. He does it because his logic is not ours; because his love outstretches ours; because his desire for intimacy with men and women overwhelms and subsumes every other force in the universe. ‘I want you to know how big God’s love is’, Paul tells his friends in Ephesus, ‘even though it is too big to know’. You’ll never know how long and wide and high and deep the love of God’s is, but don’t let that stop you from trying to climb it!

Grace is always beyond us because God is always bigger than us, and every time we run from this reality, we make him small. The purpose of religion is to honour God as God. The danger of religion is to un-God God. When you reduce God to a manageable scale and create a movement or a process or a church you can control, you have removed him from the role of God. And guess who you’ll find, before long, sitting on that vacant throne?