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Grace and Personality (1919)

 

CONTENTS AND SUMMARY

PART I
A GRACIOUS PERSONAL RELATION

CHAPTER PAGES
I. THE INFALLIBILITIES 17-23
      The supreme crisis of Christianity was the rejection of infallible authorities on positive moral grounds, because it undermined the old dogmatic method, with faith based on infallible truth, justification on absolute legislation, and regeneration on irresistible succour. A structure which crumbled before scientific and historical investigation cannot be raised again by affirmation.
 
II. THE UNDERLYING PROBLEM 24-27
      Infallible authority presupposes grace as mechanically irresistible, which involves: (1) an a priori assumption; (2) a force not a Father; (3) too restricted or too extended a sphere; (4) conflict with experience. Also, though it may be individual, it cannot be personal.
 
III. ITS MODERN STATEMENT 27-33
      If faith and grace are one problem,, why was the modern mind not concerned with grace? This was true only in appearance, the problem being changed in form, but not in substance. Rationalism, like Pelagianism, was interested in the responsible individual; Romanticism, like Augustinianism, in man's wider environment. But a right inquiry must unite both problems.
 
IV. IRRESISTIBLE GRACE 34-39
      The modern transformation from religious dogma to philosophical theory still leaves the essential question the nature of grace. If grace is the mere might of omnipotence, religious trust must be wholly [9] Augustinian. Yet the inevitable Pelagian reaction is a witness to man's unsatisfied moral needs. Moreover, an argument is too triumphant which leaves God responsible for evil.
 
V. THE CATHOLIC COMPROMISE 39-43
      Catholicism is a compromise--its Church Augustinian, the members thereof Pelagian. On the accepted view of grace it proved useful, yet it fails to provide either religious dependence or moral independence. Why, moreover, should grace, if it is God's only adequate action, be restricted to so special a channel? Protestantism also only considers the sphere of grace, and does not reconsider its nature or expect from it a different result.
 
VI. AUTONOMY 43-47
      God's will being regarded as infinite force and man's as finite force, we must either assert God's will to entire obliteration of human individuality, or man's will to entire isolation from God's succour, or delimit spheres of operation, so that what should be all of God and man is in part of one and in part of the other. The practical result is disastrous, because they all alike ignore the fact that what God's grace succours is a moral person in God's world, whose essential quality is autonomy.
 
VII. MORAL PERSONALITY 47-57
      The first question is the nature not of grace but of the personality it succours. (1) A moral person is self-determined. This is assured (a) by a direct sense of it, (b) by the opposition of our active self to the world, (c) by the difference between moral character and natural disposition. And this every personal relation to us of God or man must recognise. (2) According to its own self-direction. Nothing, not imposed by our own consciences, is truly moral, not even if imposed by God, and freedom of will concerns power to follow this self-direction. (3) In the world of our self-consciousness. Only in that sphere are events personal. Outside of it even God cannot deal with us personally. [10]
 
VIII. DEPENDENCE AND INDEPENDENCE 57-68
      The essential quality of a religious person is to be absolutely dependent, and of a moral person to be absolutely independent. Modern Ethics seeks to free morality from religious authority and motive: modern theology to free religion from being an appendage to morality. Compromise being impossible, isolation is attempted, but with no better success. Spiritual religion requires moral independence and morality becomes external and self-satisfied without religious dependence. Morality requires dependence on the final order of the world as moral. Religion requires independence, else evil is merely God's failure and His action mere arbitrariness. A person is thereby distinguished from a mere individual.
 
IX. IMPERSONAL OPERATIONS 68-74
      Like all created things a moral person must work with forces which are given and act impersonally, but they concern either morality or religion only when used personally. Conversion is not an exception. It is not sub-conscious change of nature, but, however such a change may be the occasion, conversion itself is a conscious discernment of our true relation to God and man.
 
X. A GRACIOUS RELATIONSHIP 75-83
      A salvation with this beginning must be personal on both sides. Like all religious questions this depends on God's real relation to man. He is our Father in the whole range of our experience. Jesus never divides ethic and gospel. Their inseparable unity is best realised in prayer; and the most perfect presentation is the Lord's Prayer which is not partly religious and partly ethical, but the religion is ethic and the ethic religion. The teaching of Jesus is neither moral nor mystical, but the religious presentation of life as all the manifestation of a gracious Father, in which there is no room for the distinction between common and efficacious grace. Augustinianism and Pelagianism alike start wrong by ignoring this personal relation; and most difficulties about Providence spring from the same source. [11]

PART II
THE MODE OF ITS MANIFESTATION

CHAPTER PAGES
I. BLESSEDNESS 84-99
      The issue of God's gracious dealing is blessedness. The Beatitudes are its religious programme. Their basis is acceptance of the discipline God appoints and the duty He demands, in a world which serves His purpose, directed by a conscience which measures righteousness by His love, and sustained by the power of the Kingdom of God as the final reality. It requires us to find God's rule also our own, and a dealing with God also a dealing with man.
 
II. REDEMPTION 99-103
      The dependence of morality on religion is for insight, not directly for motive. Without it morality is a convention, not the ultimate reality. Morality is blessed in the assurance that the world, being God's, is good. Yet the world as our own possession is evil, and there is no true religion which does not seek redemption from it.
 
III. RECONCILIATION 103-111
      Christianity is distinguished from other religions, not by seeking redemption, but by regarding reconciliation to God's purpose in the world as the only redemption from the world. Reconciliation is effected, not by operations of power, but in a personal relation, which overcomes our enmity to God in life by enabling us to accept all life's discipline and duty.
 
IV. LOVE AND FAITH 111-119
      Reconciliation is concerned with God alone, but with a God from whom nothing is isolated. His personal relation appears in reconciling what, mechanically considered, are mere opposites. While God's relation to us is love, if we attempt to reach it directly by love to God, we must attempt to provide what is not in our control; and, if we think we attain it, we become aggrieved with the world, superior to our fellows, and ready to regard God's love as sentiment. Nor is faith, merely as a state of mind, any better, but leads to futile effort and unreality. True faith is what we see [12] to be true, and its value depends on whether the rule of love is fact or fiction.
 
V. FAITH AND UNBELIEF 120-124
      Faith is a gift of God, not directly by implanting, but indirectly by God showing Himself worthy of trust, and we may have a sin of unbelief only by warding off the appeal of truth, and not by lack of effort to believe. But all sin is hypocrisy; and all hypocrisy evades reality.
 
VI. FAITH IN CHRIST 125-126
      Faith depends on revelation. If God's relation to us is gracious, revelation can have no limits. Yet nothing is revealed till we understand, therefore revelation is specially applied to the removal of our ignorance. Its agent is the prophet, and it might equally be called reconciliation. Like all other progress, it has a definite line of advance, which culminates in Jesus as the perfect reconciles. Belief in Him is not the acceptance of facts about His life or theories of His person, as an addition to faith in God, but is seeing in Him the manifestation of our perfect relation to the Father. We may not turn a revelation, summed up in His Cross, into one of mere power and glory. Living in love and for the highest ends, He unites for us the God who rules the world and the God who inspires our souls.
 
VII. REVELATION 126-144
      Revelation is required only because truth must be seen and cannot be imposed. Perplexity about its limits is due to the view of it as authoritative information. The manifestation of God is always and in all things, but, till we are reconciled to His purpose, this cannot be seen. Even Christ is the supreme revelation only as He is the supreme reconciliation. The difficulty is to lay us open to God, so as to enable us to live in moral fellowship with Him, which we approve by living as members of a true moral society.
 
VIII. THE FELLOWSHIP AND MEANS OF GRACE 145-153
      The conception of the Church depends on the conception of grace it embodies. Most Churches combine inconsistent ideas. Catholic and Evangelical alike [13] regard grace mainly as arbitrary acts of omnipotence, which (1) limits the fellowship artificially; (2) causes indifference to moral independence; (3) exposes God to the charge of failure, and (4) has no real use for the secular experience. A fellowship, expressing the relation of a personal God to us as moral persons, on the contrary admits: (1) no frontiers except what it exists to remove; (2) no means of grace except what interprets God's gracious relation in all experience; (3) no special sacred demands, but the right use of the common life; (4) no special sphere, but the use of all experience, past and present.

PART III
THE WAY OF ITS WORKING

CHAPTER PAGES
I. MECHANICAL OPPOSITES 156-162
      Grace as power and will as resolution are irreconcilable mechanical opposites, inconsistent with experience, and introducing conflict into it. Yet the harmony of love, not of absorption, requires that the opposition be overcome only by accepting it; and all doctrines of grace are gracious and personal as they are at once moral and religious, showing how God removes an isolation which it is in our power as persons to maintain.
 
II. PENITENCE 162-169
      Penitence is concerned with moral sincerity, not moral attainment, and is hindered, not by lack of effort, but by conventional moral judgment. That, being superficial and external, exposes to hypocrisy. Penitence and faith must be one act, the possibility of which is supremely manifested through Jesus.
 
III. JUSTIFICATION 169-182
      The vicious circle of sin and hypocrisy cannot be broken directly either morally, or religiously. Moral progress only increases the sense of responsibility, nor can God himself alter imputation. One legal way is Compromise, but it meets the needs neither of the past nor of the future: the other is Composition, but it meets the needs neither of personal responsibility nor of the moral order. The quality [14] of grace is not to be legal; and justification by faith is not a legal condition, but introduction into an order of love, where legal conditions do not obtain. The sacrifice of Christ is the holy of holies of chat world, in which alone atonement is a transforming reality and not an evasion, dealing with sin, and not merely its consequences, and accomplishing forgiveness as restoration to fellowship and not merely condonation of offences.
 
IV. THE CONSEQUENCES OF SIN 182-190
      Yet the consequences of sin may not be ignored or postponed, but must be dealt with in the present, both as they harm others and enslave ourselves. First of all to enable us to accept them is an essential of reconciliation to the God who appoints the life in which they work. Thereafter everything in life works for their undoing. The Cross not only enables us to accept the evil which belongs to ourselves, but to share with God in the whole work of deliverance.
 
V. THE WILL OF GOD 190-208
      Mere moral law is inadequate for righteousness, because: (1) it cannot direct attention from ourselves, and (2) it deals only in prohibitions. Hence it exposes us to self-righteousness. Only through God's gracious personal relation, which makes our moral worth its end, can we turn attention from ourselves to His will of love. Thereby we can at once disregard and care for our moral progress. In God's will we find an infinite positive righteousness, the measurelessness of which is the measure of our salvation, which enables us rightly to know the love of God and gives us true reverence for man. The practical issue is a perfect unity of morality and religion, which makes us at once absolutely dependent on God and absolutely independent in our own souls.
 
VI. THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS 208-218
      To be free is not to be an Ishmaelite, but we are most free as we live in the fellowship of those who have discerned and followed God's will. Yet we may not merely copy their examples, not even Christ's. Copying would not enable us to deal with out situations as He did with His, or have His spirit, or [15] His insight. Nor may we be merely absorbed into their fellowship, or even be in Christ in a merely mystical way, because that is not a truly ethical relation, as love means distinction as well as identity. The Resurrection only confirms the way of the Cross and does not replace its exaltation of personal values by direct power.
 
VII. THE KINGDOM OF GOD 219-239
      The will of God is the Kingdom of Heaven which is the final order of the world, but, though it is an order outside of us, it cannot be imposed from without, because its essence is to be the perfect law of liberty. The prophetic method is to know that it exists without by receiving it from within. This leads through three antagonisms: (1) That the Kingdom of God is small and oppressed, yet universal and triumphant. (2) That it is not even benevolent, yet is love. (3) That it is not even just, yet is atoning. By this conception of a kingdom which alone has dominion, but which, being love, endures restriction, our moral attitude should be determined.
 
VIII. ETERNAL LIFE 240-251
      A life cannot be blessed, if its hope is illusion. Therefore, the question of a future life might seem to have had its place at the beginning. But the first task of religion is to reconcile us to God in this life, not to demonstrate the reality of another. Then, being reconciled, we find ourselves serving a purpose for which this life is too small, and we have the power of an endless life and not a mere expectation of ulterior reward. Only when so won, and not either as a direct gift of God, or as a direct purpose of our own, does the hope provide: (1) an adequate moral subject, (2) an adequate moral sphere, and (3) an adequate moral order.
 
INDEX 252-256

 

[GAP 9-16]

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Grace and Personality (1919)