Often, in the West, particularly because of Thomas Aquinas’s lasting influence, mediated as it is through the structures of Post Reformed orthodoxy, making its way into evangelical theologies, we think of God’s grace as a quality or thing that comes alongside of ‘nature’ and perfects it; as if nature, after the Fall, was simply plunged into a deficiency only needing to be restored or healed to
where it once was. But this is not the biblical concept of grace. The biblical concept of grace is captured much better in the construal we see in Karl Barth’s theology. The biblical concept of grace is ‘disruptive;’ it recreates rather than restores; it is discontinuous from the old to the new in such a way that one might think of it as an apocalyptic reality. George Hunsinger wonderfully and succinctly describes it this way as he works his way into a treatment of a doctrine of grace in the theology of Karl Barth. He writes:

Grace that is not disruptive is not grace — a point that Flannery O’Connor well grasped alongside Karl Barth, strictly speaking, does not mean continuity but radical discontinuity, not reform but revolution, not violence but non-violence, not the perfecting of virtues but the forgiveness of sins, not improvement but resurrection from the dead. It means repentance, judgment, and death as the portal to life. It means negation and the negation of the negation. The grace of God really comes to lost sinners, but in coming it disrupts them to the core. It slays to make alive and sets the captive free. Grace may of course work silently and secretly like a germinating seed as well as like a bolt from the blue. It is always wholly as incalculable as it is reliable, unmerited, and full of blessing. Yet it is necessarily as unsettling as it is comforting. It does not finally teach of its own sufficiency without appointing a thorn in the flesh. Grace is disruptive because God does not compromise with sin, nor ignore it, nor call it good. On the contrary, God removes it by submitting to the cross to show that love is stronger than death. Those whom God loves may be drawn to God through their suffering and be privileged to share in his sufferings in the world, because grace in its radical disruption surpasses all that we imagine or think.[1]

I am not really sure most Christians think of grace in such radical ways. And if people think of it in technical or “academic” ways it is usually as I suggested in the preface of this post. But what Hunsinger describes, in my reading of Scripture, and then thinking through the inner-logic that supplies Scripture with its theo-logic as it terminates in its reality, Jesus Christ, is one of the best accounts and succinct descriptions of God’s grace in Christ I have probably ever encountered.

If we can’t get a hold of the radical nature of what God’s grace in Christ entails then I fear that we will never really or fully live into the Christian life that we have in God in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. Grace is just as much a foreign reality to this world system, just as disruptive, as is the Incarnation of God in Christ is in itself. There are no analogies available for it in the world; how could there be? It so disrupts and re-pivots the axis of the created order that it’s nothing short of recreation in the resurrection of God in the humanity of Christ.

We Christians are considered fools not because we are idiosyncratic social weirdoes, although some of us may be; we are considered fools because we bear witness to a reality that is not of this world, and yet has broken into the inner structure of this world in such a way that indeed it is this world’s actual reality. But this sounds like rubbish to a world who still tries to live from the rot of their own self-possessed (or so they think) lives.

The Grace and Peace of Christ be with you.

[1] George Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000), 16-7.