04.12 | Perverted Grace
Jude
‘For certain individuals whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. They are ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord.’
Jude 1:4
In 1937, German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer published a book that was to become a staple of Christian apprenticeship for generations.
Bonhoeffer was writing into a moment in his nation when two things were simultaneously happening.
On the one hand, the Nazi regime was active and growing, their right wing ideology and antisemitism ripping through the heart of German society. On the other, the German institutional church—with Germany in many ways then the hub of the academic theological world—had increasingly secularised, reducing and reducing the potency of the New Testament to fit with the views of rational atheism and Nazi sympathisers. Interpretation of the Scriptures, rather than leading the transformation of a prophetic and pilgrim people, had been twisted and perverted to accommodate ideas that are anathema to its contents.
Bonhoeffer’s response was this book. He called it Nachfolge, expanded and translated as The Cost of Discipleship. And the book contains one particular idea that has stood out to disciples of Jesus ever since. It is an idea that he caught in two words:
Cheap grace.
It is the way of grace, he said, to offer us the radical love of God, free of charge to us, for Jesus has accomplished all things.
And yet, he said, it is the way of Christians—in a secularising world—to use that very grace as an excuse to continue to live as they choose. It was grace without transformation, grace without repentance, grace without confrontation, grace without cost. It was cheap grace.
Bonhoeffer, who was later to be executed by the Nazi state that he opposed, called the true Church of Jesus back to the radicality of obedience. Obedience that confronts injustice. Obedience that stands distinct from the culture. Obedience that relegates every worldview and every practice and every desire beneath the greater call for the follower of Jesus to align themselves with His will and His way.
Jude’s letter today finds us on similar themes. As the last epistle of the New Testament, and the second written by a biological brother of Jesus,1 Jude picks up Bonhoeffer themes that reverberate through the New Testament. Bonhoeffer called it cheap grace. Jude calls it perverted grace. It is grace malformed, grace manipulated, grace remoulded to fit in with the desires of a very broken world. It is a flimsy Christianity constructed to support my existing comfort and ideologies. Nearly the entire letter of Jude focuses on these individuals who track the ways of perverted grace.
What do we do with this?
We need to let these words come uncomfortably close, for the truths within them get to work in a place that can be precarious.
It is where Christianity gradually becomes comfortable. It is where we begin to put some parts of Christian practice or ideology gradually to one side, explaining them away as antiquated or alarmist or fanatical, in favour of selective inclusion of those words and practices that we find to fit more readily with the culture in which we walk. It is where we begin to become critics of the Scriptures, rather than letting the Scripture be critics of us. It is where we begin to compromise and justify and dilute and distort, letting the broken desires that keep us small begin to dictate the parameters of our lives, more greatly than the words and vision of God as found in these very Scriptures.
Take heart, my friends, for every challenge is an invitation. He is able to keep you from stumbling. His is the upward invitation. For the widest life, the most adventurous life, the most radical and true and purposeful and joyful life, is that which endlessly casts aside the shackles of mediocrity in favour of total surrender to the way and person of Jesus.
For the opposite of cheap grace is the grace that is most precious. The grace that costs all and demands all, and yet invites us into all the ways and life of the God we love, and that, in losing our lives, finds that we most truly find them.
Reflect:
Are there ways that I can see that I have cheapened God’s grace to me?
What would it look like to come back to greater surrender to His words and His ways?
Pray:
Father in heaven,
Guard me from the smaller life—
Where grace becomes entitlement
And love becomes a transaction
And obedience becomes a burden.
For, Father,
In such thoughts,
I stray from the pathways of freedom and life.
And so, Father,
I invite Your
Interruption,
Conviction,
Ignition,
And transformation,
That all that I am may become pure, and new, and alive,
In the abandoned liberties
Of costly grace.
In Jesus’ Name,
Amen
Old Testament:
For those also reading the Old Testament this year, your additional readings are here:
Hosea 4:1-7:7 | Psalm 139:1-12
The other being James