Misreading Grace

A Debt, A Pardon, and Love

Some translations of holy writ can have enormous, even calamitous impact on the development of religious ideas. A most famous example comes from Paul’s letter to the Romans, in which chapter five refers to the consequences of Adam’s transgression. “So death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned” (Rom. 5:12 KJV). Augustine read the text as referring to Adam “in whom” all sinned. Not expert in Greek, Augustine relied upon a Latin text. As David Bentley Hart explains, the Latin version “contained a mistranslation of the final clause of the verse, one that seemed to suggest that ‘in’ Adam ‘all sinned’. The actual Greek text, however, says nothing of the sort.” The doctrine of original sin, as developed by Augustine, relied upon a mistranslation for its most enduring scriptural support.

In about the same era, Jerome encountered the New Testament term metanoia, and rendered this Greek term (“change your heart/mind”) as “do penance.” That set in motion a growing association with and eventual focus upon acts of self-punishment, emphasizing pain and penalty over transformation and freedom. 

An episode in the gospel of Luke also makes a translation choice that reverses the intended force of one of Jesus’s teachings. Jesus is dining with the Pharisee Simon. A certain woman in the city, apparently a notorious sinner, enters the scene and washes the Savior’s feet with her tears, then anoints them with precious ointment. Her presence and physical interaction with Jesus scandalizes the host, who mentally protests. 

Jesus, perceiving his thoughts, tells a parable of two debtors, one who owes a great debt and one who owes but little. Which debtor will love the creditor more? Jesus asks Simon. “He to whom [the creditor] forgave most,” Simon correctly replies (Luke 7:36-43).

The moral is unambiguous (even if the original Greek grammar is not): we are all debtors in that we all depend upon God’s bounty for our very sustenance as well as mercy. He forgives more than we merit, and those of us who feel the lifting of the greatest burden are likely to respond with the greatest love. In simplest paraphrase, that person who is forgiven the most, loves the most.

Jesus says precisely that to the woman—except in the King James version, the summative moral is rendered exactly backwards: “her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much” (7:47). In other words, she is forgiven because she loved. But that would be to rewrite the parable, which related that the debtor loved because he was forgiven—not the other way around. It’s the difference between saying, “you were kind to me and that is why I am happy” and saying, “you were happy and that is why I am kind to you.” Though both are conceivably possible, there’s a pretty important distinction. In the parable, God’s forgiveness prompts the love we feel. God’s mercy and grace cause us to respond with an outpouring of appreciative devotion. The New Revised Standard Version correctly has the verse, “her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love.”

The parable is in this regard an echo of John’s words: “we love him because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Protestants (John Calvin in particular) get this point. Though the way in which the Protestant doctrine of grace develops (highly selective, effacing free will, imputing righteousness and so forth) is not a path in alignment with Restoration understanding, the primal insight is beautiful and beautifully true: God’s act of creation, their invitation to us to join with them in covenant relationship, Christ’s decision to provide incarnational atonement and universal resurrection, and God’s unstinting commitment to “love us to the end”—all of this abounding grace precedes any effort, work, or even recognition on our part. 

Like children, we awaken gradually with dawning, stupefied awareness of a love that anticipated our worst. Wendell Berry captures the effect: 

I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.

So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, and I erred,
safe found, within your love,

prepared ahead of me, the way home . . .

George MacDonald believed in kindred fashion that our greatest failure is that of underestimating God’s love. “One day,” he wrote, “we will laugh ourselves to scorn that we looked for so little from thee; for thy giving will not be limited by our hoping.”

For some disciples, too much grace sounds dangerously close to cheap grace.

Grace is never cheap because of its infinite and ongoing cost—to the Divinity and to the humans on both sides of what Paul calls the “ministry of reconciliation.” There is nothing in what Jesus taught about love that discounts genuine love’s real rigor. The same George Macdonald quoted above pointed out the obvious when he wrote that “God may be able to move the man to right the wrong, but God himself cannot right it without the man.” God is a consuming fire as well as a loving parent, and the rigor of love requires its own sermons. My point is more preliminary. The love of God precedes the wrong. If we think of discipleship as our response to God’s love rather than its precondition, then we become the woman of his parable. In recognizing the gifts already given, we are freed “to love much” in response. 

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New. To receive each new Terryl Givens column by email, first subscribe and then click here and select "Wrestling with Angels."

Art by Quin Boardman, @quinboardman

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