Grace That Exceeds Your Checklists
Todd Brewer and the gospel that refuses to be managed.
There is a never-receding tendency to perceive Christian doctrine as little more than robust incentives for moral living. This is owed to a number of inclinations in the human heart, not the least of which is that we are eager for goodness, or at least versions of it, since we were created by the Creator who alone is good. The issue, of course, is that the sins that lurk so closely and that beset us all mar our perceptions of goodness, such that we end up calling good evil and evil good (Isa. 5:20). We like moral, virtuous living, especially for the very measurable ways we can assess its benefits and progress. We like it so much that we can often lose what the Christian message is all about.
Although it might seem so at times, notions of Christian performancism and the impulse to derive our religion from a checklist are not straw men propped up merely for the sake of theological bombast. I’ve read a number of books over the years, as I’m sure you have as well, that aim to dispel the performative perception of Christianity, mostly due to the resurgence of Reformational retrieval. And while I’m thankful for each one, I wonder if the marketplace isn’t flooded with too many invectives against performance-based faith that well-meaning theologians are to blame for shoving the pendulum in the opposite direction.
True, the more recent and significant American shift has been towards disaffiliation — the so-called “nones” — even still, there’s a hefty dose of anecdotal evidence to suggest that Catholicism or other Orthodox denominations are catechizing migrants from within broader evangelicalism itself. This is likely due to an array of factors that are beyond the purview of this post, let alone the author himself. But among the low-hanging fruit is the mere fact that either Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy offers more attainable or tangible scaffolding of morality. Evangelical Protestants, such as myself, haven’t always done a good job at conveying the transformational effects of the Christian message. But maybe there’s a good reason for that.
As my friend Todd Brewer once said in an essay for Mockingbird, “Christianity’s underdeveloped morality is a feature, not a bug.” This isn’t because moral living isn’t important. Rather, it’s because Christian morality is always derivative, never foundational.
As self-absorbed sinners, we tend to twist moral structures into ladders of self-improvement and conceit, undermining whatever virtue might be derived from them. Paul’s letter to Titus always stands out to me, in this regard, especially since it could be tabbed as Paul’s most “moral” letter, as he encourages another young pastor whose parish is composed of less-than-moral folks. But even within that framework, the apostle never forfeits his grip on the gospel, which says that there’s no ounce of condemnation left since Christ drank it all for us.
In other words, we can’t divorce moral living from its source; doing flows from being. And we are what the Word says that we are: justified and beloved because of Christ. Todd Brewer says it better than I can:
Action always follows from being and never the reverse. When one makes Christianity’s lofty ideals into pragmatic, bite-sized chunks, one fools themselves into believing that moral progress in the Christian life can be achieved without divine aid. Checklists are inherently attainable, largely dependent upon willpower for their completion. It requires far more than mere decision or the magically transformative accrual of quotidian habits to actually be loving, kind, and joyful.
When faced with the high bar of Christian moral ideals, their attainment isn’t found in greater effort. Instead, the inverse is true. The less something feels like work, the more it arises from a fundamental change of character that only comes from the outside. Grace, in other words, feels like freedom. Those who have been moved by grace have no need to be told how to love, but do so without reserve or calculation. Christianity’s underdeveloped morality is a feature, not a bug. There is freedom to do what is necessary and what is not. In place of rigidity, there is flexibility. In place of willpower, there is a boundless grace that always exceeds our checklists.
Forever exceeding and outdoing “checklist religion” is that which Jesus offers — namely, an ongoing relationship with him through the Word and the Spirit. The life God is eager for us to live is not one we can produce or attain. It’s the life Christ lived for us, and it’s the life Christ lives in us, even now, the hope of glory (Col. 1:27; Gal. 2:20). As Martin Luther famously put it in Thesis 26 of the Heidelberg Disputation, “The law says, ‘do this,’ and it is never done. Grace says, ‘believe in this,’ and everything is already done.” We who’ve been redeemed aren’t stunted by checking off the boxes of pious living. Rather, by grace, we find that the boxes were already checked for us, finally freeing us to love as we ought.
Grace and peace.