I am so excited to have Justin guest posting for me today. Part of this is that he’s one of the few online friends that I’ve met in person. Let me tell you, Justin is a great guy, and he thinks deeply about some of the same stuff I do. Naturally, that’s why today’s post is a good fit—it’s a subject close to my own heart. I’ll stop playing fangirl (can you fangirl for your own friends?) and let Justin’s words speak for themselves.
The Cost of Grace and Justice
“What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it?” Romans 6:1-2
I’ve been pondering grace lately; it’s a concept I often wonder about. I take a less strict view of the nature of man— in fact, it’s less about our nature than it is about community, social development of ethical morals that engender healthiness and safety in the community of humans, etc. But what about grace?
We seem to have a twisted understanding of this, a grace which denies justice. Or justice that denies grace. For humans, we often fall on one end or the other. I’d like to take this blog post and explore some ways in which we deny one or the other with some practical examples as well as repercussions, or “cost” if you will, of doing so.
The first example that comes to mind is the culture of forgiveness based reconciliation which permeates both evangelical and mainline church culture. For instance, we have ministries like Sovereign Grace seeking to cover up the sexual abuse of a pastor, which sought forgiveness but not consequence. Or Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill, where a reportedly arrogant, abusive pastor was allowed to apologize many times while continuing his verbal abuse. There is even among the peace- and justice-loving Mennonites a kind of cognitive dissonance in their continual use of the nonviolent teachings of John Howard Yoder, a man reportedly accused of sexual abuse, although he apologized but received no consequence, yet was allowed to continue ministering. Or take for instance another reported abuser, Bill Gothard, who apologized and was allowed to continue ministering.
Are we sensing a pattern here?
As soon as forgiveness is sought, reconciliation immediately is forced upon the community that was abused. But that’s not all: any cynicism, any desire for consequence or push to not allow reinstatement is treated as unforgiveness. Grace has a cost here, sticking communities in an endless cycle of abuse-repent-forgive-abuse-repent-forgive-abuse instead of truly seeking a safe reality for the community as well as rehabilitation for the abuser that will mean facing actual consequences and changing actual praxis.
But let’s look at the other side of the coin, justice without grace.
Recently a United Methodist pastor named Frank Schaefer sought to be loving to his gay son by holding a same sex wedding for his son and his son’s fiancé. This caused him to be defrocked as church discipline, and he is still seeking to be reinstated. Another example happened even more recently to a Quaker pastor, C. Wess Daniels, who was a teacher at George Fox University. Because he stood up for a transgender student, he was more or less fired from his job. Or to be more in comparison with the examples in paragraphs above, take the many churchgoers who attended Mars Hill but were ostracized or kicked out altogether by church discipline for many different reasons, such as premarital living together or gossip against the leadership (which usually was and is merited).
It seems we have a lopsided view of justice here. Justice means that if you break church policy you must be punished, even if your offense is something as small as gossip or loving your gay son by giving him the wedding he asks for. In fact, ethical love of community, including the example of Daniels, is treated as unforgiveable. You are immediately defrocked or asked to leave your church. If you write a book about how Love Wins you’ll find yourself farewelled on Twitter by John Piper, but if you show a pattern of sexual abuse, as long as you ask for forgiveness, and often even if you don’t, you will have your pattern covered up and your name untarnished by Piper and others. You won’t be farewelled for sexually abusing your congregation, but you will be for loving your community if doing so means you cross some line of orthodoxy.
I’m pretty sure this makes no cognitive sense, but for some reason it’s how grace and justice is handled in the church. We have created heinous sins out of acts of love (and I’m not saying we even necessarily have to doctrinally agree with those acts, but we can understand and affirm the loving intentions and realize grace need be more important than justice in those cases) while covering over abusive patterns with a grace that is unbiblical, such as the verse mentioned above. Many a pastor has sought grace while continuing in sin because the church has provided him a system that he can easily abuse, while actually good pastors who simply do not fall in doctrinal lines are treated as heretics and worse.
And that, my friends, is the cost of grace and justice. I would submit that we need to change this somehow, and I’d like to see people begin to discuss how we should. I think that if the church is to ethically evolve and survive in a human community that is often far beyond it ethically, at least in these cases, it needs to change. And that begins with leadership changing how it offers grace, and justice.
Justin is a librarian-to-be living in the Pacific Northwest, he blogs about faith, life and writes stories at The Peregrinatio http://theperegrinatio.wordpress.com/
I like Justin’s blog. I think it shows deep thought and heartfelt sincerity. Both justice and grace are essential elements of our faith. The examples he lists are accurate and fair criticisms of inconsistences of leaders who have stood on what seemed to be one side of this equation that should have yielded a more powerful balance when considering the other important reality.
I think that in response I would encourage the use of the word accountability rather than justice. Justice yields too much of a forensic and final assessment for this worthwhile discussion. I think Justin hits the nail on the head of how forgiveness and reconciliation are not the same thing. Forgiveness is always a free gift. Reconciliation, on the other hand, requires not only confession but also repentance. Repentance assumes a change in life that is being demonstrated over time. I think that our tendency to cheapen grace by ignoring repentance creates the culture of easy confession without consequence.
The example he uses of the Methodist Pastor could be an illustration of a lack of balance. But as someone who is both orthodox (I don’t like evangelical because of the problems with this word today) in his theology and sympathetic in his experiences with some of the abuses of more evangelical churches I would still probably have to say that I think that it does not serves his purpose of giving examples of a lack of balance. If a person is part of a more orthodox group, then any departure from that group’s agreed upon practices and beliefs should be met with a willingness to not be counted as a victim of abuse, but as a person whose personal conscience causes them to take a different stand.
If we believe in both grace and accountability; in confession and consequence; in forgiveness and repentance then we should not agree with any decision that cancels out one part for the sole adherence to the other. On the other hand, no matter what our theological orientation, any of us can build a straw man for our position that makes us feel better but rarely engenders meaningful dialogue with those whom take a different stand. Thanks for sharing Justin.