Grace and Freedom

Peter Leithart's blog post today made me think to write some thoughts on a topic Christians rarely seem to sort out. On the one hand, we acknowledge that God is the source of everything we have, and that we can do nothing on our own. Fundamentally, everyone has to acknowledge this, including atheists: everything that we have to work with is in some sense inherited, whether biologically, culturally, or in some more abstract sense (e.g. all of us are composed of matter that came from stars billions of years ago). On the other hand, we work to earn a living in this world, to create things beautiful and/or useful, to discipline ourselves into moral people, to solve some great problem, or just to satisfy our own desires. Can we really claim credit for any of these accomplishments, given that everything we have to start with is a gift? If not, why do we bother?

This question could quickly become abstract theoretical, leading to a discussion about the famous free will problem in philosophy and theology. What we can't miss, however, is that this is an eminently political question. Many of today's biggest controversies are over the question of how a just society should distribute its resources among its members. In typical partisan terms that most people are familiar with, the "conservative" answer is that people should get to keep what they earn. The "liberal" answer is that the conservative answer is inadequate without some adjustments, because you can't deny that all of your success is built on things you didn't earn; so we should make some attempt to redistribute our wealth to make things a little more equitable.

To make my own position plain from the outset, I think both answers are wrong. I don't find them merely incomplete; I actually don't think either of them have any reasonable foundation on which to build a just society. So where to start?

Milton Friedman was not a Christian, nor was he a religious man at all. Yet I once heard him make a remarkably Christian statement. It was while he was addressing a question which someone asked him to the effect of, "Don't you think women deserve to make as much as men?" His response was, "It's not a question of desert. None of us deserve anything. Thank God we don't get what we deserve!"

Life is a gift: that is my starting point. Everything we have is also a gift. Many people will readily acknowledge this when it is pointed out to them. Where, then, do we get the concept of deserving, and why does it feature so prominently in our moral thinking?

In fact, the idea of deserving comes from situations in which there is a clear hierarchy of people, with one person in charge of deciding who gets what. For instance, if you work for a company and have a boss, you expect to get paid what you deserve--not in some ultimate sense but in the sense that there is some reasonable standard by which you can measure a given employee's performance and give out pay accordingly. In somewhat similar fashion, parents often set up a system of rewards and punishments to shape their children's behavior. Thus the idea of deserving mainly serves to form cooperative groups of people by forming clear behavioral expectations.

The reward/punishment system is very intuitive, and for that reason it is hard not to want it extended to the society at large. However, the system depends on having a leader to distribute rewards and punishments. As a consequence, the reward/punishment destroys both freedom and equality, since someone will have to be placed in authority over us (thus making society unequal) and this authority will have to be used to shape our behavior toward some preconceived ideal (thus destroying freedom).

I suppose any system could work if we had Jesus Christ himself in charge of all economic distribution. But as we read in the gospels, Jesus rejected that responsibility.

A just and free society cannot decide the question of economic distribution based on the concept of deserving. Instead, I suggest that society be built on the concept of grace, which is the radical notion that we  do not get anything from merit, but from the freedom of giving. As Jesus says in the parable of the laborers in the vineyard, "Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?"

For the present I'm going to hedge the question of property rights and how they should be defined. Suffice it to say, without any concept of property (implicit or explicit), members of a society have no way to understand gift. If I cannot own anything, then I cannot give or receive anything. Ownership is not the ultimate value in a society, but it is a necessary feature.

(Note well that I have concentrated on gift and have not even mentioned exchange. Gift is always prior to exchange, since if we had never been given anything (at the very least our own lives) we would have nothing to exchange. About exchange free market economists have many things to say, but perhaps it bears repeating that a free society is based on more than economics!)

Once we accept this principle of grace, there remains a lot of work to be done concerning the nature of property rights and defining the limitations of government. However, my concern is that most people do not seem to accept this principle, because the principle of deserving is so much more intuitive. Surely no one deserves to have "so much money"--a hundred thousand dollars? a million dollars? a billion dollars?--and surely the poor deserve something from those who have more than they need. So might a liberal say. On the other hand, surely people deserve to keep the money they make, and surely lazy people don't deserve anything from those of us who work hard. So might a conservative say. I don't say either one of these things, because I know that none of us--not even the best of us--really deserve anything. I don't say that people shouldn't be praised for their accomplishments; but even this praise is a gift, freely given by those who rightly enjoy seeing good things accomplished in the world.

Yet in spite of our undeserving (or, more properly, in spite of the fact that "deserving" isn't the right category to be applied), we do have an abundance of good things. Should we reject them just because we do not deserve them? On the contrary, the best way to appreciate a good gift is to enjoy it, and to give to others as a response. But when you convince people that everything is a matter of deserving, it is remarkable how stingy they become. Or do you call it generosity when a man gives everything he has at gunpoint? Only a free society can foster true generosity.

On first examination, it looked as if grace and freedom were somehow opposed. It turns out quite the opposite: the one cannot exist without the other.

Self and the Other

I happen to be sitting in on faith and science discussions on a bi-weekly basis this year. It's been an interesting journey, as two representatives of UVA's atheist/agnostic society have been joining us pretty faithfully. Last week I became especially intrigued by some of the fundamental philosophical issues that finally came up as a result of our conversation. One of the atheists in our group was led by a conversation about where we find meaning to say the following (I must paraphrase, since my memory is not exact):

I realize that in my worldview I hold two contradictory beliefs together: one in strict scientific determinism, and the other in the absolute freedom of the individual.

And there it is! Anyone who is a true philosopher, in my opinion, has already come to this conclusion: that the freedom of the individual and the reality of the Other exist in tension with one another, not in harmony. For everyone knows that his own actions are his own responsibility, yet simultaneously he knows that he is the product not of himself, but of that which is other than himself. I think, therefore I am; yet my thoughts are not my own, but they are the product of genetics, environment, culture, all the result of the mere passage of time. One may search endlessly to truly locate his own identity, and never find it. Am I my thoughts? My emotions? My body? Yet none of these things seem really to be me, since my thoughts are often conflicting with myself, as are my emotions, and my body perhaps most often of the three of them.

There is no resolving the tension; it is inescapable. The only question is, what shall we do with the tension? How do we interpret it? I can name two options; there may be others, but I know of two. One option is nihilism, that is, in the words of my friend, the self is nothing. The self is nothing, because it cannot control its own fate, not really; and yet it must control its own fate, because there is no meaning apart from this. The self is ultimately alone; there really is no Other. "Reality" itself is nothing, with the self eternally separated from it, yet always enslaved by it. With a simple act of will, the self can create meaning for himself, but he never really believes in it. This is nihilism.

The second option is love. Love finds its own identity precisely because it doesn't seek its own identity. Love locates the self in the Other, fully acknowledging its own emptiness. Love's epistemological foundation is grace, the sense that reality is given, not constructed. The self becomes one with the Other, without the two ever being confused. It is only because they are one and the same that they can truly be distinct. In this the self finds true freedom, because love knows that freedom is all of grace, and grace is free. It is this givenness, this freedom, that allows us humans to grow in the knowledge of reality; without grace, we are but nothing studying nothing.

True Grit and the grace of God

I highly recommend seeing the Coen brothers' new film, True Grit. Then, after watching it, I highly recommend this review of it in the New York Times. I especially enjoyed this summary paragraph:

The new “True Grit” is that rare thing — a truly religious movie. In the John Wayne version religiosity is just an occasional flourish not to be taken seriously. In this movie it is everything, not despite but because of its refusal to resolve or soften the dilemmas the narrative delivers up.

Just a little piece left to us?

I have nearly finished Beauty for Truth's Sake by Stratford Caldecott, and I intend to review it in the next few days. But since I've been blogging a lot on Calvin, one particular passage has been gnawing at me. It has nothing to do with the main argument of the book, but nevertheless Caldecott takes the trouble to spell it out with some force, so I feel the urge to respond.

He makes the following statement with regard to human effort and divine grace:

As St. Paul says: "Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church" (Col. 1:24, my emphasis [that is, Caldecott's]). This sentence has often been taken by theologians to refer to our cooperation with God in our own salvation and deification.... As the Catholic Catechism puts it: "God grants his creatures not only their existence, but also the dignity of acting on their own, of being causes and principles for each other, and thus of cooperating in the accomplishment of his plan." It is represented in the Catholic Mass by the drop of water with which the priest slightly dilutes the cup of wine that is about to become the blood of Christ. This is the tiny and indispensable human contribution needed if heaven is truly to descend to earth, and earth finally to be integrated with the everlasting Trinity.

This passage, as it contributes nothing to the argument of the book, might as well have been put there entirely to irritate Calvinists. I note, with some irony, that the very next sentence reads, "Speculations like those I have mentioned in this chapter will appear forced to many."

All that aside, I wanted to make a serious point about this line of reasoning, as I find it very common not only in Catholic thinking but in most non-Reformed Christian thought. God's grace plays a huge role, but the contribution of man gets just a drop--that oh so precious drop appears to make all the difference in the world. Why can't the Calvinist just acknowledge that one drop? Why must he strip human beings of every contribution to God's work of grace?

Before I answer the question, why don't we press the question further? Why do Calvinists even get out of bed every morning? For heaven's sake, why did Calvin strain himself to death (literally, I think) working as a clergyman in the newly Reformed Church? If he didn't even believe one drop of contribution was left to man, why did he appear to put in so much effort? Many who consider these questions conclude that the Calvinist must simply be irrational, or strangely obsessed.

But now let me hint at an answer. It is telling that Catholic teaching leaves here only a drop of human contribution. If it were more than that, this would sound like an affront to God's grace, and would violate so many passages of Scripture that seem so clear on God's grace being preeminent. So man, it is thought, must out of humility be content with his little drop for which he can claim credit.

The Calvinist, on the other hand, leaves nothing to himself, but in this way he paradoxically takes on everything. Consider a few quotes from St. Paul:

"But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them--though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me." (1 Cor. 15:10)

"I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me." (Gal. 2:19-20)

"I can do all things through him who strengthens me." (Phil. 4:13)

Paul is not talking about adding his drop of water. No, he can accomplish all things, he can work harder than any of them, even to the point of being crucified with Christ. Yet not one of these things happens apart from God himself. It is only because Paul is united with Christ that he is able to accomplish so much.

So it is by embracing the most profound humility that one actually obtains the greatest empowerment. The Calvinist sees himself as nothing, but therefore gets to see all of the good that he does as nothing less than divine. And this is perhaps the most incredibly presumptuous, most absurdly arrogant thing a man could possibly think about himself--that his actions are actually the works of God--unless that is exactly what God promises to be true.

Union with God cannot be separated from the Calvinist's view of grace. The Christian must be a total paradox--capable of nothing but capable of everything, wretched and human yet sanctified and clothed with divinity. The joy of Calvinism is that one can not only worship God as sovereign and transcendent, but actually participate in his transcendent life. (Otherwise how could he possibly conceive of prayer as so vital?)

No little drops for the Calvinist. One might say it's all or nothing, but that would be a misunderstanding. For the Calvinist, it's all and nothing.