Grace: Escape or Empowerment?

Rethinking the central biblical perspectives on law and grace

Saturday, Oct. 31, 2009 Posted: 9:29:24PM HKT

Even if I sin, God will forgive me. So I don't have to be afraid of committing sin. In fact, I think I will carry on sinning, because that will give God the opportunity to reveal His grace.

This was one of the major issues in the day of the Apostle Paul: namely, that of law and grace.

A certain group taught a law-deficient grace. To put it simply, they taught a form of grace that did away with human effort and obedience.

Faith is relying completely on God, they said, and to lift even a finger to pursue the path of righteousness would be a useless form of law-keeping.

And so they did nothing in terms of righteousness. They did not attempt to live righteous lives (that would be living by works rather than faith). Indeed, they let themselves spiral into immorality, thinking that their filthiness glorified God.

Where is the error of these moral libertarians?

Like certain famous theologians, they had confused reality with truth in their reading of Scripture.

The Bible seems to suggest in many places such as Jeremiah that human beings are ‘totally’ depraved and completely incapable of any form of righteousness. The Protestant Reformers like Luther and Calvin were of such a view.

While these men made significant contributions to the spiritual life of the Church, particularly in the way of restoring the truth of God’s free gift to mankind of justification revealed through the atoning death of Jesus Christ on Calvary, there is room to reexamine the teaching of total depravity.

Now when the prophets proclaimed in the Bible that there was no one righteous, not even one, was it an axiom or simply a statement of fact?

Taken as an axiom, a few logical difficulties follow. First of all, if human beings since the event in which Adam and Eve disobeyed God lost all religious and moral capacity, it is hard to see how God could be justified in lamenting their disobedience.

It would be as irrational for God to mourn the disobedience of totally depraved human beings as for an able person to regret that a wheelchair-bound person is unable to join him for a marathon.

A second dilemma such an understanding presents is that it diminishes the importance of the law, which becomes nothing more than a ‘mirror’ through which the unrighteousness of human beings is proven.

This perspective makes little sense in the light of the common experience of the godly of Israel, who seemed to delight in the fact that they had received the law. They also appeared to believe that they were capable of keeping it.

It may be more reasonable to think of the scriptural statements on total depravity as those of observation and fact rather than as axiomatic statements.

Consider a major implication of thinking of human beings as totally depraved in the axiomatic sense. It makes God an accomplice in that depravity and its horrendous results, since it becomes God’s prerogative alone to reawaken righteousness in the hearts of individuals.

But if human beings, though having the capacity to live righteous lives, failed to do that out of their own disobedience, and the prophets in the Bible were simply giving a statement of fact with hearts full of lamentation, then such a difficulty is avoided.

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