David Quinn
An inauthentic Church peddles ‘cheap grace’, writes David Quinn
In any given society and cultural moment, Christianity faces certain temptations. In part of Eastern Europe, for example, Christianity is coming to be identified again with national identity. This happened in the run-up to World War I and World War II, with disastrous consequences.
In Germany, a group of pastors set up something called ‘The Confessing Church’ to resist the Nazification of the Protestant Churches there.
In Ireland after independence, we wanted a Catholic State, and we got it. The Church should have resisted, but it didn’t. It was glad to accept power and influence. That is understandable to some extent. Christianity has its own ideas about the just ordering of society and it would be irresponsible not to seek to shape society, but the form Catholic Ireland took was too authoritarian.
In parts of Africa, South America, North America and elsewhere, a form of Christianity is preached that is loosely called ‘prosperity theology’ which basically teaches that when you believe in God and follow him, all sorts of good things will come your way including material prosperity. But this school of thought (if can even be dignified with this term) leaves almost no place for suffering. God does not guarantee a life without suffering because spiritual growth is often impossible without it.
Culture
In each of the above examples, and many more can be given, Christianity is seeking to accommodate itself to the surrounding culture and so make itself more popular, influential and acceptable. But the dangers should be obvious: you end up compromising the Gospel itself. By all means, Christianity must seek to translate itself into an idiom that will be understood by the people of a particular time and place, but not at the cost of its identity.
In our present cultural moment here in Ireland, the huge temptation is to accommodate ourselves to the radical moral individualism and relativism that are characteristic of our time.
The temptation is to offer an extremely undemanding, unchallenging form of Christianity that imposes few obligations on believers.
The German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (killed by the Nazis in 1945), said that this type of Christianity offers what he called “cheap grace”.
Cheap grace, he wrote, “is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
Unpack what that means. Authentic Christianity does not pretend we can be forgiven without first repenting, and we can’t and won’t repent unless we first believe we have sinned.
Baptism without church discipline applies strongly to our present situation. When we are baptised we become members of the Church, but membership of the Church brings certain obligations. We are not members on our own terms, but on God’s terms and on the terms of the historical Christian community. If we insist on membership on our own terms that can and must mean the possibility of being cast outside of the Christian community until the person repents.
Communion without confession means we can partake in Communion anytime without the need to confess our sins. This practice is now absolutely commonplace in the Church. People detest being told they should be in a state of grace in order to receive Communion because they think they are in a permanent state of grace, and that is the very essence of cheap grace.
Absolution without personal confession is similar. We think we can be absolved of our sins without the need to personally confess them because, once again, we find such a notion offensive. This is why there was a lot of anger when Bishops Kevin Doran and Phonsie Cullinan said Catholics who knowingly and with full understanding voted for abortion must attend Confession before receiving Communion again.
Bonhoeffer then describes “cheap grace” as “grace without discipleship, grace without the Cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate”.
For Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran, discipleship is costly and cannot be anything else. Being married is costly and being a parent is costly because both will involve personal sacrifice and a great deal of dying to self. Following Christ is even more demanding.
Bonhoeffer reminds us that Christ died for our sins. That is why we have the Cross.
“Costly grace,” says Bonhoeffer, “is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy [for] which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble; it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him.”
The sort of Christianity that is now often preached in Ireland is deliberately inoffensive. Preachers are scared to offend their congregations or the wider culture. And so they preach a Gospel that essentially says to Christians that if they are doing their best, then that is good enough. Sin is mentioned in whispers. The inevitability of suffering is avoided. The Cross is veiled. There appears to be nothing you can do that casts you outside the Christian community because you are there on your own terms.
Being there on your own terms means you decide what is moral for you, what is true to you, and this fits in well with a highly individualistic, relativistic age. It is a temper and a mood that the Church succumbs to unless it actively resists.
Consumerism
What we see at work in Ireland is the ‘cheap grace’ that Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned us about decades ago, a grace that is being “sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares”.
It is, ultimately, a consumerist version of Christianity.
Has the Church the courage to preach costly grace, or will it continue to sell cheap grace for the sake of a facile popularity which it will ultimately fail to achieve because it is so inauthentic and so shallow?