The story of Christmas is too big for us to wrap our hearts around. Yet as we reach the day we celebrate as the birthday of Jesus we should at least press our noses against the window of divine revelation and look once again at the greatest of all gifts.

Where does the story begin? In eternity past. There it was that the Father, who has always loved the Son, determined to find him a bride. And where would this bride be found? Within the creation, a newly conceived realm that was made to host both the bride and the groom. So it was that God made this, our world, to be populated with Man—the male-and-female Man—who are created in God’s own triune image as two who, by one Spirit, are united as truly one.

That a God who is pure Spirit and who existed in the unending past apart from any material composition would both create a tangible world and then enter into that world himself for our sake is a metaphysical event that dazzles us if we pause to think about it.

But I am getting ahead of the story. Before God the Son entered the world he first spoke the world into being out of nothing. In that step he created us to be both physical and immaterial: both flesh and spirit. As tangible beings in the new creation we could be both “not yet” beings, with no prior existence before our birthing; and also those who can now inhabit eternity by the life of God’s own Spirit—God’s Life forming our lives and his Spirit giving life to our spirits. In material terms we are incommensurate to God; in relational terms we have a commensurability initiated with the God who forms relations.

This was the means by which the distance between Creator and created could be bridged. In the physical realm we are finite—localized in space and time with bodies susceptible to death. Yet in the spiritual realm we are immaterial centers of relationality. I am, for instance, the son of Ernie and Hazel; the brother of Bill, Dave, and Susan; a friend of many other people, including Bill, Mark, Jeff, Rick, Steve, & Matt; and a child of God in Christ Jesus as well as a member in Christ’s Body, the church. My point is that the physical side of us—of what I weigh, where I’m located as I write this piece, and how I’m dressed—represents the lesser reality (Paul’s “jars of clay” in 2 Corinthians 4) and the relational reality is the greater aspect of my being.

And, as I noted a moment ago, our physical being is our mortal side. But why, we ask, did God come up with such an arrangement? Why not make us into purely spiritual-and-relational beings and ignore the option of a material universe?

No certain answers are available to such questions but whatever we might think ourselves we find that God refuses to disparage the material world.  In fact, in his work of creation he labeled that work as “good”, “good”, and “very good”. And, even more, his Son has now entered into this realm forevermore. Yet we’re amazed at this, which is why I used the imagery of pressing our noses against the glass of revelation. We get some insights but there are plenty of mysteries that remain!

That’s not to say we can’t make some guesses—some of which are at least partially informed. One is that God allowed for us to exist as people who can be both dead and alive in the same moment: dead spiritually but alive physically. That potential for a paradoxical double status was the point God made to Adam in Genesis when he warned “you shall surely die” if they ate of the forbidden fruit; and what Jesus told Nicodemus in John 3 when he said “you must be born again”; and what Paul said in Ephesians 2 about our being “dead in our trespasses and sins”.

Our bodies, after all, are physical nests for our souls—whether spiritually dead or living souls—and it is in our status of spiritual death that God resurrects us by the coming of the Spirit of Life. By having, after Adam’s fall, a physical body cursed with a progression of decay that leads to physical death we discover God’s “egg timer” so that our pending mortality forces us to weigh our eternal status: one of either death or life—”it is appointed for a man to die once, and after that comes judgment” (Hebrews 9:27).

Let us return to the love story at this point. My best guess is that God arranged all this—the duality of flesh and spirit—in order for a true love to form between the Son and his Bride. God knows that love can never be imposed on us: it is a function of desire and delight—the devotion of a heart. God, then, created humanity to respond to his Son in love. But the love must be a free response, and such a free response can be tested by other competing loves.

So it was that God created Adam and Eve as lovers who were free to love or not to love him. God, we can be sure, knew with absolute certainty that Adam’s free heart would taste other loves. Not the least of these was self love. It was this new devotion that displaced God’s primacy in all our hearts, a devotion that has since unfolded into more focused forms of love: for power, glory, money, sensuality and more.

This was, for God’s tender heart, a betrayal beyond measure. He was grieved as Adam coveted the Father’s status and rejected his word. At that moment the Spirit left Adam to his own devices. Adam, no longer united to God’s life, was spiritually dead although still alive: the material world continued to sustain Adam physically, as one made from the earth.

God, however, also placed the earth—and Adam’s body with that—under the curse of a slowly progressing material decay. It was in this duality that God set up both space and time in which to woo and recapture the heart of the Son’s intended bride. This pursuit is the guiding drama that unfolds in the Bible; and it still shapes world events today.

Now let us return to the importance of Christmas. In Adam all of humanity had been consumed by death. Yet the Father and the Son, with the Spirit, determined to send the Son to share in the material, physical world of Adam, as a “new” man. That is, he was born as a new human yet as a child who did not share in Adam’s death—the Spirit had departed from Adam and the Spirit was now the seed of the new Adam, Christ.

But to woo, capture, and cleanse his immoral and disaffected Bride God conceived of an incredible rescue: to have his Son enter into death on the basis of the Bride’s sins, and to give the Bride his own righteousness. Why enter into death? In order to break its power. Adam, after all, had given himself over to Satan’s scheme of independence. This realm needed to be conquered by one who could enter into death but never be ruled by it.

And the pathway to that outcome was the birth of Jesus in a manger in Bethlehem. He came to die for us, but first he needed to be born with us—to become human. This was the plan of love offered by the Father, a love for both the Son and for us. As the Father sent his Son into the lair of death he knew that it was only this that could break its power for all those who look to the Son in response to that love—a response called faith.  And all who respond in faith are, collectively, his Bride.

So it is that as we celebrate the coming of Jesus into the world and press our noses against the window of divine revelation we discover that Jesus has become the greatest of all gifts by coming to “our side” of the window—by becoming a man in order that we can join him in eternity.

Have a wonderful Christmas—and be sure to embrace the Son!

I welcome Mark Nicklas back as a guest contributor for this Christmas entry. His reflection on God’s gift to us in Christ plays on some of the paradoxical realities of God’s gracious entry into our realm. I hope, on Christmas day itself, to offer my own voice of celebration and reflection in a separate entry that echoes many of Mark’s themes. In the meantime, read, reflect, and rejoice!

The story of Christmas brings us to a baby in a manger: Jesus Christ, born of a virgin in the town of Bethlehem.  It is a historical fact that changed the World forever—the Incarnation of our God. 

Brother Linus Van Pelt appealed to the beauty of the nativity when he uttered those unforgettable words, “Sure, Charlie Brown, I can tell you what Christmas is all about..”                 

Mary shared the birth story with Dr. Luke and the Apostle Matthew in order provide us with an important detail of the advent of Jesus Christ—the miraculous events that surrounded His birth.  It is a glorious story where God bestowed royalty on common people, in common circumstance, in common place. And in so doing, he consecrated his Creation. 

Prior to the coming of Christ, God was approached tentatively and circumspectly in the Holy of Holies and through the Law.  The veil separating God from man was a visible reminder of the great gulf that existed between the God of Holiness and fallen creation.  The veil was as much a protection from the power of the darkness-shattering holiness of God—if exposed to its pure “volume,” our spiritual “Bose speakers” would have been blown from the wattage of God’s presence.  Moses had to wear a veil to speak to people after being in God’s presence, the glow was so powerful.   And yet, in the story of Jesus, God came to be with us: “and the word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).

This Christmas season I look with awe at how it unfolded.   It helps to have an understanding of the first century anticipation of a Redeemer King in Israel.  The Book of Hebrews looks back at the advent of the Lord in this way: 

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.  (Hebrews 1:1-2)

The writer of Hebrews draws attention to the expectation—long ago in many times and in many ways—God had spoken of the coming Redeemer King through the prophets.  As we read God’s story from Genesis to Revelation we see again and again the expectations that were set. 

Even at the fall in the Garden, God told Satan that the seed of a woman would crush His head.  He promised to Abraham one of his own descendants would bless the whole world.  Moses promised the children of Israel that One would be raised up from among their own brothers to whom they should listen.  God promised to David that a Son of his own body who would reign forever.  Isaiah said a Son would be given, called Wonderful, Counselor, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.  His light would shine out of Galilee.  A righteous Branch of David would rise up and rescue His people.  One was coming who Isaiah said would swallow up death forever. There would be a Light to all the nations, a Bringer of a New Covenant, who would write His law on our hearts.  Daniel told of One like the Son of Man, to whom is given dominion and glory and a kingdom who all peoples, nations and tongues would worship. 

And all of this all pointed to Jesus Christ, born of the virgin Mary in Bethlehem, to God with us.

First century Israel was alive with expectation that God would begin the emancipation of Israel from Roman rule, but they could not possibly have fathomed how God’s plan would work.  The long awaited Messiah would arrive without trumpets, and would gain victory by His own death.  The kings of our day, the presidents and prime ministers and premiers, always arrive with pomp and circumstance.  Their arrivals are carefully planned and orchestrated and accompanied by public handshakes and banquets.  They needn’t open any doors—doors are always opened for them. 

By comparison this King’s arrival was a mundane event.  He was born in obscurity and to humble circumstance.  Perhaps God considers mundane things to be of royal proportion.  Maybe that is why it is hard for some people to see God in the world in which we live—the miraculous is so often clothed in the ordinary.

Mary seemed ordinary.  Still, she was uniquely qualified to be the God-bearer.  She was a direct descendant of David.  She was also a direct descendant of Aaron (through her mother).  But even given her unique bloodline, her greatest qualification was that God chose her, to which she responded in faith, “Let it be done to me according to Your word.”   And after that confession of trust, at the moment of conception, the eternal Word left His glory with the Father and the Spirit and became flesh, to be the God-man forever and ever.  It was the greatest moment in Heaven and Earth since Creation!

Frankly, when I was set in motion it was initiated in the flesh.  Two humans, my mom and dad, came together and the miracle of life was set in motion.  There is no mystery in that.  But when Jesus Christ’s humanity was set in motion, God was the initiator.  The Incarnation shows that salvation can never come through human effort; it must be by the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit.   And on Christmas day, finally, the King arrived.   

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.  (Gal 4:4-5)

This very thought leaves me in awe.  2000 years ago, in a manger in Bethlehem, lay the One promised long ago and in many ways… here was the King.  I’ve held 5 of our own babies right after they were born.  I have looked with marvel at these little creations and was in awe of the life God had given to my wife and me.  No doubt, some of those same emotions were encountered at the manger by Joseph and Mary… but this Child is the One who spoke and the universe leapt unto existence, the One by whom all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.  

This Child is before all things and in Him all things hold together and in Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. 

This Child is the image of the invisible God who humbled Himself in the form of a servant, the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature. 

This Child upholds the universe by the word of his power.  He would wage a war with Satan and crush Satan’s head  and swallow up death in victory. 

This is the Child in whom all the world would be blessed.

This Child is the light of the nations.

This Child would reconcile to himself all things making peace by the blood of the cross. 

This Child is Jesus Christ, born of the virgin Mary, Immanuel, God with us. 

And in coming to Earth God made the irrevocable declaration that He is all in!  That’s what love does.  Love commits.  Jesus is a part of His creation, and He’s all in.  Love came down in the flesh.  And His flesh became the new veil.  The body of Jesus contained all the fullness of God and in His total connection with His Creation, Jesus is fully God and fully man. 

The earliest witnesses of the church, at peace with His Divinity, affirmed his humanity.  Some people think that the story of the virgin birth developed out of a need to claim that Jesus was the Son of God.  But that was never in doubt to the church—people already knew Him to be God—they understood that in the way they had come to love and worship Him, something that is evident in the very earliest writings of the church. 

Jesus Himself did not turn to His own virgin birth as a witness to His divinity when the Pharisees sought proof.  It is actually the other way around, against the cries of those who said Jesus was not fully human that this part of the story of Jesus is so important for us.  Ignatius of Antioch in the 2^nd century declared in another creed of the early Christian church that Jesus was “truly born, truly lived, truly died.”  Jesus is the God-Man—a miracle of conception.  The Word became flesh—even as an embryo He was fully God and fully man.  The King had arrived and was here to inaugurate His kingdom. 

Getting back to
Brother Linus, it is worth remembering the story he told so beautifully,

“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, ‘Fear not: for behold, I bring unto you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the City of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.’ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God, and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.‘” (Luke 2:8-14)

Taking up his blanket and walking off the stage to Charlie Brown he said, “That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”

The Nativity remains an irenic, beautiful picture of the way the King entered His Creation.  Of course, that manger rested under the shadow of the cross.  This same Jesus, in who the fullness of God dwelt, would conquer sin and swallow up death forever.  He would make a way so that the Holy Spirit would come and inhabit the hearts of every believer who calls upon His name.  The Incarnation of Jesus Christ led to yet another Incarnation—the Holy Spirit in the midst of His Church.  The King has established His kingdom, and His kingdom will have no end. 

And He invites us to come.

J. B. Phillips, a British minister in the last century, wrote a book, Your God Is Too Small. I read it years ago and recall being impressed by it, though I don’t remember the particulars in it today. Rather it was the title that caught me. Whatever our view of God, he is vastly too small!

Indeed, as I travel around the Christian world I find miniscule versions of God being promoted. What kinds of tiny Christian Gods, you might ask? Let me suggest a few.

There is the fire insurance God. His greatest concern is to find as many policy holders as possible. His premiums vary, depending on the Christian community that sells his policies, but the payments are usually behavioral: mainly church attendance, a monthly tithe, and a midweek Christian book discussion or prayer group are the cash he requires. This is a pragmatic God, with pragmatic followers. For policy holders the real ambition is to avoid the fires of hell—a negative goal—rather than to know and enjoy God above all else. What God gets out of this arrangement isn’t clear but he seems to be a bit needy, looking for as large a following as possible. Lower premiums are always possible if an additional follower or two can be coaxed into the community that way.

Another much rarer version of God is the brainiac deity. His greatest capacity is intelligence so that his ideas and doctrines are great, complex puzzles. He invites chess champions, debaters, and logicians to compose and compare doctrinal statements about him. He is altogether different to the fire insurance version of God in that he is more interested in compelling ideas than in numbers of followers. His audiences are small but impressive, even if most of what they do is talk and write. Access to this God comes through Christian versions of the Mensa Society—churches, parachurch groups, and theological centers that elevate intellect over practice; a knowledge about God over a love for God and people.

Still another small version of God is the self-absorbed deity. He can think only of himself and wants everyone else to think only of him. The biggest fear for this God is what philosophers call “contingency”—that he is not fully in charge of everything but in some manner has a real involvement with his creation. If, for instance, he actually loves his creatures in a way that causes him to respond to them, he has somehow lost his mojo and is less than truly God. Instead he wants glory at any cost. Access to this God is virtually impossible because we are products of his will and live downstream from his first decrees and plans—a bit like dominoes that are now being tipped over by other dominoes, all started before the creation. He looks on with some sort of pleasure because everything is under his glorious control and control is his greatest ambition.

One additional, and final, version of a miniscule God is what we might call a stubborn Genie. He has a bag of tricks and powers to tease us—offering promises to heal us, to make us wealthy, to make us wise, to make us more powerful—but we first have to learn how to rub him right. What kind of rub is needed? At a minimum he looks for effort from his followers, real effort! Disciplines, devotions, tasks, duties, and best-efforts are needed. Accountability is the name of his game: the harder we work, the more likely it is that we can finally coax a benefit or two out of him. Some seem to get more out him than others, so he is not a very fair God, but ours is not to question him but to keep rubbing the jar of his being and to hope for the best.

Now let me make a confession: I have these false versions of God myself, and even other distortions. Faith for me tends to be an oscillation between bad habit versions of God and the true God I see portrayed in the Bible! So this is not an exercise of finger-pointing but of invitation. The invitation is for us all to open our hearts to let God be truly God to us—in the terms that he reveals to us in his Word. Let us pray to have the eyes of our hearts opened by the Spirit so that the character of the triune God is magnified—made much larger—in our spiritual vision.

This need was reawakened in me as I was reading Matthew and Mark this past week. What jumped off the pages is that Jesus was regularly stretching the boundaries about himself—of who he is as the Son of God—again and again by all that he said and did. The apostles were clueless again and again as Jesus worked to enlarge their vision of him and his Father. He startled them by healing the lame, the blind, the deaf, the speech-deprived, and the demonized. He showed his power over the weather, over the sea, over demons, and over death. He forgave sins and he confronted sinners. Yet again and again his disciples misjudged his purposes and capacities—always seeing him as someone less than he really was . . . and is.

So how do we come to see God in his real size? The answer is, by keeping the eyes of our hearts open!

One way to do this is to thank God in every experience of life for being our God. Thank him no matter what happens to us! The point is this: he really does run the universe! Even Satan is on his leash so that even evil is God’s resource for accomplishing good in the lives of those who love him (see Genesis 50:19-29; Job 1; & Romans 8:28).

Another way is to seek him above every other ambition in life. God is the source of all that is, and there is no other proper priority in “all that is” than to know him. That is, we must never descend into the worship of the creation, but are to find our joy in the Creator. Given that he invites us to love him with all that we are and have, then that ambition is appropriate to the way God made us. Even at a human level it is only when we love someone that we begin to see their beauty and delightful qualities with open eyes. The same is true of knowing and loving God: he gets bigger and better by the moment once we start to gaze in his direction!

A final suggestion for having our vision of God stretched is to listen carefully while we gaze at him. My reading in this past week took me back to the parable of the soils. What was sown, Jesus told his disciples, was “the word” and that word had a variety of responses. Sometimes it was taken away by the enemy. Sometimes it failed to take root. Sometimes it was choked out. And sometimes it bore fruit. The reality of our present age is that God’s word is readily available to us. To get a proper view of God we need to read, to respond, and to worship.

So, given that God is infinite and we are finite, Phillips’ book title will always be true for us: our God is too small! But some of us will acknowledge that as a problem we want to address. So even if many around us are busy with the world and are having that word choked out or lost, let’s go forward with an ever-greater and more compelling God. I know he’ll be pleased and will show us more of himself than ever before!

God’s grace is amazing—he offers it freely to the poor, the broken, the sinful. It is the basis for salvation as Paul wrote in Ephesians 2:8, “For by grace you have been saved through faith.”

The only problem we have with grace is knowing what it is. Is grace, for instance, the quality of goodness offered to us by God—as well as by any departed saints who have a surplus—as something of a commodity that we engage through sacraments? Or is it an energy source—as in an “enabling grace” or “infused grace”—that helps us to start being more godly just as a battery helps to start a car? Or is grace relational—a summative expression for God’s care towards us? Or is it something else?

This is not an arcane question. Differing answers produce very different forms of faith, some of which Christ himself would never believe in. And fights among Christians over the meaning of grace have been never-ending. Yet you may be thinking, “Huh? When and where have there ever been fights over grace?”

Actually, the fights have been about salvation: over what constitutes salvation. But the underlying issue in any salvation debate is a disagreement over how grace is defined. Salvation is, after all, the product of grace. It’s just that the link between grace and faith is not always kept in focus.

So the product of grace—salvation—is what usually captures our attention. And by not keeping the full sequence of sin-grace-faith-and-salvation in view some participants among the competing versions of Christianity then fail to spot the deepest tensions. Indeed, when many people think about salvation their own understanding of grace is assumed to be true and reliable—not something that calls for real reflection. They are wrong.

Even when grace is noticed in some salvation debates the definitions used are not always carefully developed. For instance, the debate of some years ago between John MacArthur and Zane Hodges was, at one level, about grace. But it was ultimately about who is saved and who isn’t—of what it means to have Christ as lord and savior. Yet neither faction was careful in tracing the different definitions of grace used by the church through her history. Some historical awareness would have illuminated for them ways in which their separate readings of key Bible texts had been shaped by assumptions from earlier debates over sin, grace and salvation.

Let me suggest that one big problem is that the definition of grace has migrated through the centuries with the result that competing definitions are now available—with some that are Biblical and some not. So a person’s particular view depends on what definition and what era of history he or she applies.

With that as a warning let me offer a snapshot tour of history.

The early church—in the New Testament era—understood grace to be God’s goodness. Grace was, in effect, a matter of “who” and not “what”. And from the God who is full of grace came graces: in his charis he produced charismata. Salvation was by his grace and that grace was then extended through gifts given to one and all—extended in order to allow each of us to care for others in wonderful and unique ways. We receive grace and, in responding to his grace, we offer our own graces to those around us.

In Romans 5, for instance, the milieu of faith and grace are unpacked by Paul. He starts with faith—the basis for our righteousness before God—as the great benefit we have in Christ. He even wrote of how faith is the entry point “into this grace in which we stand” (v. 2) so that it sounds as if faith precedes grace. Yet it’s clear that the context is that we are justified in Christ—the meaning of “this grace”—and that the prior event that accounts for this justification is our relationship with Christ. And the source of that relationship comes into view only in verse 5: “because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”

Paul, that is, understood what Jesus had told Nicodemus (John 3:6): “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” It is only in the coming of the Spirit that we are “born again”—and that is God’s grace! It is expressed in the great act of Christ on the cross of restoring what Adam discarded: a love relationship with God.

For the young church the wonderful celebration of God’s grace was memorialized in the shared meal each Sunday—the day of the resurrection—as a response to the sacrificial love of Christ and his power over death in the resurrection. This, the “Lord’s supper”, was the proper focal point of church life. Yet it soon took on a hypostatic quality—with a tangible reading of John 6 in view. Hypostasis—the Greek term for “being”—was the label given to the manner in which Christ became incarnate: the Word who became flesh and lived among us. His existence is now acknowledged to be one of “hypostatic union”—of being fully God and fully man while being fully one in that union.

The church began, then, to extend the union of the unseen God to the seen expression of God in the bread and wine of the weekly remembrance. That is, the elements of the meal came to be seen as objects of God’s grace: of Christ’s body and blood hypostatically present. And with that began to grow a notion that grace is “something”—the elements—that we consume and rely on to have more and more grace. And with that there grew the notion of sacramental grace—that all the acts of obedience we find in faith are carriers or instruments of grace.

But that was not all. The question of what is meant by grace became even sharper late in the 4^th century through a debate between Augustine of Hippo and a Brit named Pelagius. In a nutshell the Brit was scandalized by the low moral standards he found among believers in Italy. True faith, he believed, is demonstrated by real godliness and it was time for every so-called believer to clean up his or her act. He even quoted Augustine’s teachings on the human will as offering a way to be godly: start using your god-given free will to make godly choices!

Augustine, however, didn’t buy the Pelagian line even though Pelagius had quoted him accurately. The problem for Augustine was that both his own conversion and his deeper beliefs about sin and salvation didn’t line up with what had once written about the moral power of the human will. So he corrected himself. Sin and grace were, Augustine began to teach, matters of love. Sin is self-love: “concupiscence”. Grace is God’s love that, alone, can overcome self-love.

So while both men held that salvation is by grace through faith alone, Pelagius viewed grace as external: as God’s teachings about right and wrong in Scripture that people are then able to affirm or to ignore. Augustine held that to be nonsense because, biblically, the heart is said to be distorted by sin and will never choose the good. Instead grace is God’s love that draws us out of false love. So God alone gets credit for salvation!

Augustine’s views were affirmed by the church as trustworthy and Pelagius was dismissed. But soon after that debate another teacher, John Cassian, insisted that grace is present in each soul—as a capacity for goodness—that God then matches once it is used. In effect it was a premise that God helps those who help themselves.

Later on, in the 13^th century, Thomas Aquinas dismissed that idea by insisting that grace is a spiritual energy for good that God infuses in the souls of some but not all. This gave room for a continuation of the hypostatic view of grace—of grace as “something”—and it also supported a sacramental theology. In some respects it was similar to Cassian’s view in that it elevated human responsibility for offering God faith in order to be saved. But Aquinas held that only some were given this grace and that, once given, it is certain to be effective. So God “creates” and controls such grace but only certain humans have it and are then obliged to use it.

It was this objective view of grace and its corollary of human-initiated faith that Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and others utterly rejected at the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Once again they returned to the New Testament premise that grace is ultimately a “who”—the triune God, revealed to us in Christ—and not a “what” that we control. Yet within a few decades a new version of Protestant faith—”federal theology”—reverted to the model Thomas Aquinas had used and grace was again defined by many as a newly created capacity: the enablement of our wills to do good.

So it is that today we happily sing about God’s amazing grace but, amazingly, we have very different views of what we mean by it!

Let me suggest that we all return to the New Testament conviction that grace is God’s love for us, as in Romans 5:8-9—”but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.” And then in 5:20—”Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more . . .”

Faith, then, is our response to the one who loves us and who sets us free from our sin.  His gracious love is, indeed, truly amazing!