Transforming Power of Grace Thomas Oden

 The Transforming Power of Grace: Oden, Wesley, and the Life of the Spirit

From Month Four, Day 2 of my book of prayers, Daily Conversations with God, I offer this prayer:

Lord, you are a merciful God.

I confess that holiness is far easier to say than it is to do. 

·      My words are pious, but often mask attitudes of intolerance and judgment. 

·      My concern for others is too often shallow, swallowed up by my own self-interest. 

·      I too often resort to platitudes of compassion and care rather than modify my behavior to embrace those who are different or unlovely. 

This is not holiness. I confess my failure to you. I confess that I need your grace to see me truly and the games I play. I need your power to change my attitudes and actions. Ignite within me the passion and audacity to be a holy disciple of Jesus Christ amid a world of sound bites and rhetoric. 

Amen.

 

I want to take the opportunity of reading Thomas Oden on the transforming power of grace (1993) to discuss sanctification. Here is my guiding question: what does it mean for God to transform a human being without the person ceasing to be a human being?

            I moved from the Wesleyan Church, where my experience was in some fine educational institutions that tried to maintain the “distinctive” of entire sanctification or perfection in love, to the United Methodist Church in 1978. Part of the reason was my struggle with this teaching. I had some very good professors explore this teaching with me, but I could not make the connection of the teaching with my experience. I saw the value of Wesleyan-Arminian theology, especially as compared to the Reformed and Baptist traditions, but I wrestled with this teaching as interpreted in the Holiness movement. 

In this essay, I am struggling for a way to modify my understanding of sanctification without abandoning the Wesleyan doctrine of sanctification. Grace changes the fundamental orientation of the person, but that new orientation gradually works its way through the various dimensions of an already-developed human personality. Sincere Christians can experience genuine transformation while still having anger, fear, compulsions, prejudices, emotional reactions, bad habits, blind spots, and psychological complexity.

Christian sanctification cannot finally be understood as human flourishing detached from God. This leads to misjudgments as to what salvation and sanctification mean. What Oden wants to do is allow the consensual teaching on the holy life to be stated in its own terms. In that sense, the evangelical tradition represented by Wesley and the Catholic tradition are closer than either tradition is ready to acknowledge. Much of the Wesleyan view has its source in patristic writings. 

I will offer one response early, in a brief reflection on habit formation, and give the fuller answer toward the end, because I also want to move through Oden's book.

Thomas Oden's The Transforming Power of Grace begins with a question that is easy to overlook: Can grace actually be studied? At first this may seem like an odd question. Christians have been talking about grace for centuries. We know the familiar language: grace is God's unmerited favor; we are saved by grace; grace is God's gift. Yet Oden's question points toward something deeper. If grace is merely a doctrine we affirm, then we can understand it intellectually without allowing it to change us. But if grace is the active presence of God in human life, then grace ought to have consequences for how we understand freedom, responsibility, holiness, and the actual shape of Christian existence.

That is where Oden's book becomes especially interesting. He offers a theology of transformation. The underlying argument is this: Grace does not replace human activity. Grace makes transformed human activity possible.

            Bonaventure (The Soul’s Journey Into God, 1259) provides a medieval mystical picture of the movement from God's traces in creation, through God's image within the human person, toward union with God. The new birth is the human response to the unmerited grace of God. The fullness of sanctifying grace grows through an extended developmental process. 

We can see the consensual approach to the holy life in the way some ancient authors, such as Gregory the Great, Gregory Nazianzus, and Basil paved the way for human maturity providing an analogy for spiritual maturity.

Growth in human life occurs in stages. We move through stages of infancy, childhood, adolescence, and various phases of adulthood as we mature in life. In the Christian devotional tradition, people have attempted various images for this growth in spiritual life. The mystical tradition favored the movement from the active life to the contemplative life. Some thought of growth as movement from a servant to a child of God. Others think of all persons as made in the image of God, but taking a lifetime of God shaping us into the likeness of God. Still others think in terms of movement from the immaturity of children in spiritual life to the maturity of adulthood, often explained as perfection in love. However, I suggest that a parallel with the stages of growth from infancy through stages of adult life can be a helpful image for our spiritual growth. Just as with the stages of a human life, we can define spiritual growth stages by the types of problems we face. Of course, some people exhibit signs of being unaware when it comes to spiritual matters.

  God must love growth. If science is describing the creative work of God, the growth of the universe becomes a metaphor, for even the universe did not simply appear full and complete. It grew from an initial "bang" that grew to become the universe we now experience. The same is true of life on this planet. Life has emerged with increasing complexity of organization. God is more like a gardener, nurturing life to its fullness and completeness, than like a watchmaker who makes it, winds it up, and lets it run. Becoming like Christ is a process. It does not occur overnight. Each of us is a work in progress. Our transformation will take the rest of our lives. Eternity will complete the process.  

Here is one way I respond to the question at the beginning of this essay. I want to take the risk of pointing toward a Christian psychology of habit formation. I do so to make the point that transformation of the person is not instantaneous because human beings are complex systems whose various dimensions don't change simultaneously. 

I might illustrate the problem with fundamental changes in a human life in this way. I want to use a metaphor that I hope is helpful. We have various modules or compartments of stored memory and experiences that exist in us. They open to each other and influence each other in various and unpredictable ways. Thus, we may decide to change our eating and exercise habits. Yet, some parts of our mind and body will not get the message, and a craving develops. Even a fundamental commitment to Christ may change dramatically one area of one’s life but will take years to change another area of our lives. What God is after is to change our form of life or view of the world. Again, Paul has some powerful ways of expressing this change when he writes of our renewal in the spirit of our minds (Ephesians 4:23), to allow the same mind to be in us that was in Christ Jesus (Philippians 2:5), to refuse to be children in our thinking but rather to be adults in our thinking (I Corinthians 14:20), to set our minds on the things of the Spirit (Romans 8:5), and put an end to childish ways by becoming an adult in the way we speak, think, and reason (I Corinthians 13:11). 

 All of this means that we need to change the way we think, feel, and act. The Bible calls this repentance, cleansing, becoming a new person in Christ, putting off the old and putting on the new, sanctification, and holiness. Sometimes, we will need to work hard on the way we think about certain areas of our lives. Sometimes, we will need to work hard to change the way we behave, expecting that changes in feeling and thinking will soon come. In either case, feeling is often an indicator of thought. If we feel repulsed, but are not immediately conscious of why, a thought is present, and we need to explore until we discover with greater clarity the thought that gave rise to that feeling. If we feel fear, a thought is often present. If we feel joy and attraction to a person, community, or thought, a thought is present. If feeling is a thought struggling to find expression, then we need to bring that thought to greater clarity through focused and prayerful reflection and meditation. Note how thinking, feeling, and acting work together. They open themselves to each other. They are not necessarily on the same page at the same time. Therefore, to suggest that if we change the way we think, we will change the way we feel and act suggests a rigid logic to human experience that I have not found to be true in my life.

            With that in view, that brings a consensual approach to transforming grace directly into conversation with Wesleyan sanctification, of course, given the theological commitments of Oden, but also with the older mystical tradition, with Paul, and even with some of the themes I have encountered in Paul Tillich and process theology.

Oden provides the theological structure for that claim. Wesley gives it the name sanctification. The mystical tradition gives us pictures of what transformation can look like from within. Tillich helps us think about the Spirit's encounter with human existence. And Paul (Philippians 2:12-13) gives us perhaps the most concise expression of the paradox: "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling," precisely because "it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure."

Oden's book can be read as an extended exploration of that paradox.

Grace and the Possibility of Transformation

In his first chapter, "The Nurture of Gracious Ability," Oden begins with an important corrective to the idea that grace simply excuses us. Grace is not merely God's willingness to overlook our failures. It is God's active gift of an ability that we do not possess adequately on our own. The human being does not begin the Christian journey by independently deciding to seek God. Something has already happened. Grace precedes us.

The Christian journey begins before we make an intentional commitment. Grace is already operative in the first desire to please God, the first awareness that we have failed to become the person we want to be, and the first recognition that we need healing and liberation. God is at the beginning of the journey before we were aware that we were on a journey. That is prevenient grace.

The importance of this is that Christianity does not begin with human achievement. Even our ability to respond to God is itself enabled by grace. Yet that does not mean that our response is unreal. The person who responds actually responds. The decision matters. The commitment matters. The life that follows matters.

In my book, Prayer as Conversation with God, I have an introduction in which I wrote:

 

One could intellectually affirm all this and stop. If one does so, one has left the Christian life as an abstract and lifeless belief. Grace has opened our eyes to our condition and to the pardon God has offered. We can have confidence and joy as we live in this grace. The beginning of the Christian spiritual journey requires a conscious choice and commitment, a decisive turning point.  It has to do with taking a stand regarding our ultimate life values, that is, declaring a commitment to what we believe about life and the world and living our lives accordingly.  This is the crux of psychological and spiritual maturity.  The conversion process is an ongoing process of a letting go of self, a self-emptying.  Indeed, every call of God that we may receive in the various life stages involves a letting go, a self-emptying.

 

This is the tension Oden refuses to resolve by eliminating either side.

Chapter 2, "Preparing and Cooperating Grace," makes the point more explicit. Grace prepares us, but grace also calls forth cooperation. The word "cooperation" can make some Protestants nervous because it can sound as though we are adding something to God's work. But Oden's point is almost the opposite. We cooperate because grace has made cooperation possible.

This is where Philippians 2:12–13 becomes such a useful lens for reading Oden: We work precisely because God is working in us. The "fear and trembling" of Paul's language need not mean neurotic anxiety. I think "earnestness" or "moral seriousness" gets closer to the point. The Christian life matters. What we do with grace matters. The fact that God is working within us does not make our response less significant; it makes it more significant.

The Reach of Grace

Oden then turns to "The Extent of Common Grace" in Chapter 3. This expands the horizon. God's grace is not confined to the moment of conversion or to those who consciously identify themselves as Christians. 

The Spirit is not simply an alien power occasionally invading human existence. The world itself is open to divine influence. In a process-oriented understanding of the action of  God, God works through persuasion, influence, patience, and invitation rather than coercion. Creation itself becomes a long history of response to divine persuasion. What begins as creaturely spontaneity gradually becomes life, consciousness, self-consciousness, and finally human freedom.

I would not equate this directly with Oden. There is an important theological difference.

Oden is concerned primarily with the Christian doctrine of grace: God's initiative, the human will, sin, freedom, salvation, and transformation. The process tradition raises a somewhat different question: What kind of divine power is consistent with genuine creaturely freedom?

For process thought, coercion is problematic because it violates the integrity of the creature. Divine persuasion respects creaturely spontaneity. God is imagined as the gardener, companion, and friend who nurtures creation toward its possibilities.

The work of the Holy Spirit is the work of sanctification, and therefore of forming us into the image of Christ. Some Christian circles think of the Holy Spirit as miraculous demonstrations and intense emotions. However, the Holy Spirit works in quiet, unassuming ways, often in ways of which we are aware only later. The Spirit often works with a gentle whisper. We allow Christ to work through us. Our focus outward toward Christ and others means that the Christian life is not simply the result of our effort and struggle to do or be something. We allow Christ and our relationship with others to change us into what God wants. We allow Christ to influence the choices we make in life. This requires cooperation with the Holy Spirit. This is why images like that of seeds, building, growing, and maturing, are so important in the New Testament. Seeds need planting and cultivation, buildings need to be built, and children need exercise and growth.

I want to use a metaphor that might help us move from theological description of grace to experiential intimacy with God. We might dare think of this intimacy in terms of the kiss. In the Gospel story, some persons kissed the feet of Jesus, doing so as a penitent. One kisses the hand, a kiss that cleanses the stains of the heart and lifts one up for service in the world. The kiss of the lips is the kiss of the Holy Spirit, who unites us to Christ. Such intimacy takes us beyond the false knowledge due to our curiosity about matters, and for the false knowledge that comes from pride. Knowledge of God and self leads us to humility and builds one’s character. Love of God and neighbor leads to genuine knowledge of self.[1]   

Oden does not need process theology to make his point about grace-enabled freedom. But I find that process thought sharpens a question already present in Oden: What does it mean for God to work in us without simply replacing us?

The answer begins to emerge in Chapter 4, "The Intent of Sufficient Grace."

Grace is sufficient because God does not abandon human beings to themselves. But grace does not turn human beings into puppets. God's purpose is not merely to produce compliant behavior. Grace aims at restored freedom.

That is an important distinction. If God simply coerced us into goodness, there would be no genuine transformation of the person. There would only be externally controlled behavior. Christian holiness requires something deeper: the person must increasingly want the good.

And that takes us directly to Oden's most important chapter.

Grace-Enabled Freedom

Chapter 5, "How Grace Works in the Will: Grace-enabled Freedom," may be the theological center of the book.

Here Oden is dealing with a perennial Christian problem. If grace is truly God's initiative, how can human beings be genuinely free? But if human beings are genuinely free, how can salvation be genuinely the work of grace?

Oden's answer is neither to deny grace nor to deny freedom. Grace makes freedom possible.

This is one place where the Christian mystical tradition can help us understand what Oden means experientially. The human interior life is restless, wandering, and difficult to discipline. Prayer becomes an exercise of love and a path toward self-knowledge. Stillness, examination of conscience, discernment, and spiritual discipline are ways of learning to attend to what is happening within us.

The point is not that spiritual exercises manufacture grace. Rather, they cultivate attentiveness to grace. That distinction matters.

A person can be surrounded by grace and remain inattentive to it. We can be like the wild horses described in the mystical tradition—continually moving, following one impulse after another, never finding rest. The spiritual disciplines help us become capable of noticing what is happening within us.

This is also where Tillich becomes interesting. Tillich's discussion of the human spirit emphasizes self-transcendence: human beings are not closed systems. We reach beyond ourselves toward meaning, truth, love, and ultimately toward that which concerns us unconditionally. The Spiritual Presence encounters the human spirit within this movement toward transcendence.

I would not make Tillich say exactly what Oden says. Tillich can sometimes sound as though the human capacity for transcendence itself provides the point of contact with God. Oden is more insistent that grace is God's initiative and that human nature is distorted by sin.

But there is a useful convergence. Tillich helps me understand the depth at which divine presence can encounter us. Oden helps me understand why that encounter is called grace. Grace does not merely give us information from outside ourselves. Grace works upon the will.

And when grace works upon the will, transformation becomes possible.

The Danger of Pelagianism—and the Opposite Danger

Chapter 6, "The Perennial Battle with Pelagianism," identifies one of the dangers Oden wants to avoid. Pelagianism effectively makes human moral achievement too independent of grace.

But there is an opposite danger that deserves equal attention: if grace is emphasized so strongly that human response becomes irrelevant, Christianity can become passive.

We need to hold those two dangers together. There is a temptation toward moralism and self-righteousness when we become preoccupied with our own spiritual progress. But there is another danger in being satisfied with a Christianity that rests permanently in forgiveness while never asking what grace is doing in us.

The answer is not to choose between morality and grace. It is to understand morality itself as the fruit of grace. That is why sanctification becomes such an important Wesleyan category. Sanctification is not a second chance to accomplish by human effort what justification accomplished by grace. It is the continuing work of grace in the person. Grace forgives, but grace also empowers. Grace changes not merely our legal standing before God but our desires, habits, relationships, and character.

I increasingly think of sanctification as the gradual reorganization of the self around love.

That definition brings together much of what Oden, Wesley, Paul, and the mystical tradition are saying.

Election and the Mystery of Grace

Chapters 7 and 8 turn to "The Mystery of Foreknowing and Electing Grace" and "Election Made Sure Through Faith."

These chapters take us into territory where human explanation eventually reaches its limits. How God's foreknowledge, election, grace, and human freedom fit together completely remains a mystery.

I am less interested in resolving that mystery than in noticing what Oden refuses to do with it. He does not allow election to erase faith, nor does he allow human faith to become an independent achievement that makes grace unnecessary. The same pattern persists. Grace initiates. Human beings respond. Grace continues. That pattern may actually be more important than our ability to construct a perfectly logical system explaining predestination.

There is a temptation in theology to solve the mystery by moving everything to one side. Either God determines everything and human freedom becomes difficult to explain, or human freedom becomes so autonomous that God's grace becomes little more than an offer waiting for our decision. Oden's theological project is an attempt to remain in the tension.

That is also where my process-oriented reflections become useful, though again they should not simply be substituted for Oden. The process account emphasizes that a world genuinely created as other than God must possess some genuine spontaneity. Otherwise, God would simply have created echoes of God.

Christian theology does not have to adopt process metaphysics to appreciate the question. What kind of relationship would God want with creatures if what God desires is love?

Love cannot be coerced without ceasing to be love.

Grace in History

Chapters 9, 10, and 11—"The Covenant History of Grace," "The Fullness of Grace Received," and "The Call to Salvation"—bring Oden's argument into the history of God's relationship with humanity. Here the doctrine becomes narrative.

Grace is not merely a principle operating in individual souls. It is the story of God with a people, culminating for Christians in Christ. Creation, covenant, Christ, and the continuing work of the Spirit belong together.

Creation and eschatology should not be artificially separated. If creation is God's continuing work of bringing something into being, then the destiny of creation is related to its origin. Christ provides the decisive appearance of what creation is intended to become.

Oden would frame this within the classical Christian story of grace rather than the evolutionary metaphysics of process theology. Yet there is a point of contact: grace is not simply God's response to human failure. Grace belongs to the purpose of creation itself. God is not waiting around until human beings finally become bad enough to need salvation. God's grace is already at work.

That takes us back to the beginning of the Christian journey.

From Forgiveness to Transformation

Oden distinguishes between grace as something God has done for us and grace as something God is doing in us. That distinction is central to the Wesleyan understanding of sanctification. Moving from what God has done for us in Christ, we move to what God does in us by the power of the Spirit. Sanctifying grace is not reserved for extraordinary religious experiences. It belongs to everyday Christian life. It is God's continuing work of conforming us to the image of God.

We might think of this as the process of holiness. The delightful thing about the doctrine of holiness in the mystical tradition, as well as from John Wesley, the holiness tradition, and higher life movements, is the emphasis upon the perfection of love.  However, the question is whether the emphasis is upon the relational dimensions of love or upon an internalized or interior life.  If we specify relation, then we clearly emphasize others; but if the interior life dominates, then preoccupation with self is the prime activity.  Too much preoccupation with the self may bring the activity of the Holy Spirit to a screeching halt, as the yogic posturing of gazing at one’s navel provides evidence. We do not need a spirituality that makes us obsessive about us. We need a spirituality that helps us focus on others.[2]

Holiness is an uncommon word.  More than that, it triggers unpleasant images of persons who claimed the concept but whose lives were anything but holy.  We can tolerate anything more easily than a "holier than thou" attitude.  Many would consider the concept of holiness of heart as being too otherworldly or too far removed from the activist lifestyle that most of us live.  

The temptations and opportunities to be less than God intends surround us daily.  However, the grace to be more than we are is even closer. Just as salvation is out of reach without the grace of God, so is a life of holiness. Moving from what God has done for us in Christ, we move to what God does in us by the power of the Spirit. This work is for everyday life of the Christian. Such sanctifying grace is for all as we seek daily conforming to the image of God we were meant to be. This grace coupled with our disciplined life, leads to a life of peace, assurance, faithfulness, and usefulness.[3]

While many Christians may rest content with a lower form of Christian life, the path to a flourishing human life as understood in Christianity is the path of holiness.[4] Mark 12:28-34 summarizes the whole of the law as love to God and humanity.  In John 13:34-35 Jesus offers a commandment to the disciples to love each other.  In I Corinthians 8:1-3 Paul shows that we should desire love more than knowledge.  Why should love be the highest virtue?  Luke 7:36-47 shows that those whom God forgives lead to a life of love.  I John 4:19-21 shows that God loved us first, and therefore we ought to love others. What is love?  I John 3:10-24 defines love as laying down one's life for others.  I Corinthians 13:4-8 compresses a lifetime agenda of developing the qualities of love.  Galatians 5:22-24 describes the fruit of the spirit. 

This is where the title of Oden's book becomes particularly important. The transforming power of grace.

Not merely the forgiving power.

Not merely the accepting power.

Not merely the comforting power.

The transforming power.

What is being transformed? The will. The desires. The habits. The imagination. The relationships. The way we see ourselves, other people, and the world. The mystical tradition gives us some remarkable language for this transformation. John of the Cross speaks of purification. Bernard of Clairvaux speaks of love. Teresa of Avila describes movement toward deeper union with God. Meister Eckhart points toward discovering God within and seeing the world differently as our relationship with God deepens.

I like the image of the smudged window. The inner life is like a window through which we see the world. The window is dirty, so our vision is distorted. Spiritual growth involves cleansing the window so that the light can enter more clearly.

But perhaps the metaphor needs one qualification.

The light is not waiting outside for us to become sufficiently clean.

The light is already shining.

Grace is already at work.

Our spiritual disciplines, our prayer, our examination of conscience, our acts of charity, and our willingness to let go of destructive attachments are ways of cooperating with that work.

That is Oden's point in practice.

The Test of Transformation

There is, however, a danger here. Spirituality can become another form of self-absorption. We do not need a spirituality that makes us obsessive about us. We need a spirituality that helps us focus on others. This may be one of the most important safeguards against misunderstanding sanctification. If I spend all my time examining whether I am becoming holy, I can become less holy. If I become preoccupied with whether I have reached the right spiritual state, whether I have experienced the right filling of the Spirit, whether I have conquered the right sins, whether I have achieved the right interior serenity, I can turn Christianity into an elaborate project of self-improvement.

But the goal of holiness is love. Jesus summarizes the law as love of God and neighbor. Paul places love above knowledge. Galatians describes the fruit of the Spirit. First Corinthians 13 gives us not a mystical experience but a description of how love behaves.

This means the ultimate evidence of transforming grace is not how intensely spiritual I feel. It is what kind of person I am becoming. I offer a set of self-examination questions. They are better asked in community. Others often see our growth before we do.

·      Am I becoming more patient?

·      More forgiving?

·      Less dominated by anger?

·      Less driven by ambition?

·      Less controlled by greed, lust, envy, or resentment?

·      More capable of kindness?

·      More able to love people who do not love me?

·      More able to see other people as persons rather than obstacles?

·      More able to serve?

This is where the Wesleyan emphasis on holiness becomes especially powerful. Holiness is not escape from the world. It is learning to love the world as God loves it.

The mystical tradition therefore reaches its proper conclusion when prayer leads back into life. Prayer should make us more capable of loving our neighbor. Union with God should make us more available to other people.

The deeper our friendship with God becomes, the more authentically we should be able to inhabit the world rather than flee from it.

 

A Grace That Takes Human Imperfection Seriously

There is another part of the Wesleyan reflection that I think enriches Oden's emphasis on transformation. Transformation does not mean psychological perfection. We remain complicated human beings. Subconscious complexes, phobias, prejudices, physical limitations, mental infirmities, impulsive reactions, and poor judgments can remain even as our fundamental orientation toward God and neighbor changes. This is important because holiness can become destructive if it is confused with relentless self-condemnation. Not every unwanted thought is a sin. Not every impulsive reaction is a moral failure. Not every weakness needs to become an occasion for giving ourselves "forty lashes."

Yet neither should we use grace as an excuse to stop taking moral responsibility. Here again we return to Philippians. "Work out your own salvation." Take your life seriously. Pay attention. Examine yourself. Make amends. Practice love. But do so because "God is at work in you." Grace forgives us when we fail. Grace also empowers us to try again.

Grace does not remove responsibility. It makes responsible action possible.

What Tillich Adds

Tillich helps me see one additional dimension of Oden's argument. 

If Oden tells us that grace transforms, Tillich helps us think about where that transformation occurs. It occurs within human existence itself—in the human spirit, in our relationships, our culture, our moral decisions, our communities, and our search for meaning.

Tillich's idea of Spiritual Presence suggests that divine presence does not necessarily appear by destroying the structures of human existence. The Spirit enters them, disrupts them, transforms them, and gives them new possibilities.

This helps me understand why I am drawn to the thought that the church does not simply lay something alien upon human beings. The church participates in a work God is already doing.

But Oden provides an important correction to Tillich. I would not want to say simply that God is already present within us and therefore we only need to discover ourselves. That could become a theology of self-discovery rather than grace. The stronger Christian formulation is: God has already been at work within us before we knew what God was doing. That preserves divine initiative. It also preserves the Wesleyan insight that grace precedes conscious faith. The Christian does not discover that he or she has been secretly divine all along. The Christian discovers that God has been pursuing, awakening, inviting, healing, and transforming all along.

Grace as a Way of Life

I find myself thinking less about grace as a theological proposition and more about grace as a way of life. Oden's great concern is that grace be understood neither as human achievement nor as divine activity that makes human response irrelevant.

Grace comes first.

Grace enables.

Grace calls.

Grace heals.

Grace transforms.

And then, because grace is already at work, we respond. This is why sanctification is not an optional addition to the Christian life. It is what transforming grace looks like when it takes hold of an actual human being. The process may be slow. It may be uneven. There may be periods of dryness, confusion, failure, and even what the mystical tradition calls the dark night. There may be times when we discover that the heart is much less civilized than the behavior we have managed to produce. There may be things within us that we cannot simply will away.

Yet the direction matters. The question is not whether I have become perfect. The question is whether grace is increasingly having its way with me. Am I becoming a person whose desires are being reordered? Is love becoming more natural? Are selfish impulses losing some of their authority? Is forgiveness becoming easier? Is my capacity to serve increasing? Is my vision of neighbor expanding? Can I increasingly see God's creation not merely as something to use but as something to receive with gratitude?

The Franciscan vision of creation offers a beautiful culmination of this movement. Sun, moon, wind, water, fire, earth, animals, human beings—all become part of a creation that gives praise to its Creator. That may sound far removed from Oden's careful theological discussion of grace. I don't think it is. If grace truly transforms the human person, eventually it should transform the way the person sees.

Grace and the Long Journey

Oden does not offer a formula for solving the relationship between divine sovereignty and human freedom. It is a way of understanding the Christian journey. We do not begin with ourselves. Grace is already there. We do not save ourselves. Grace is God's initiative.

But neither are we passive objects of God's activity. Grace awakens the will. Grace enables response. Grace calls forth cooperation. Grace transforms the person who responds. And the transformation has a recognizable direction. Toward love.

That is why the several traditions I have been reading begin to converge for me. 

·      Oden gives me the theology of transforming grace. 

·      Wesley gives me the language of sanctification. 

·      The mystical tradition gives me a picture of the interior work by which desire, attention, and perception are gradually purified. 

·      Tillich gives me a philosophical account of how the Spiritual Presence can encounter human existence without simply imposing something foreign upon it. 

·      Process theology gives me a way of thinking about divine activity as persuasion that respects creaturely freedom and integrity.

·      And Paul gives me the paradox that holds the whole thing together.

Work out your salvation because God is working in you.

Perhaps that is the transforming power of grace.

·      Grace does not make us less human. It makes possible a fuller humanity.

·      Grace does not eliminate the will. It heals and strengthens the will.

·      Grace does not eliminate effort. It gives effort a new source and a new direction.

·      Grace does not make spiritual disciplines unnecessary. It makes them ways of cooperating with what God is already doing.

·      Grace does not make holiness a human accomplishment. It makes holiness possible.

·      And holiness, finally, is not primarily about how I feel about myself. It is about how I love.

That is where Oden's argument ultimately leads. The grace that saves is the grace that transforms, and the transformation that matters most is the transformation of a human life into a life increasingly shaped by love.

I began by saying that I left the Wesleyan Church in part because I could not connect the teaching on entire sanctification with my own experience. Having spent this time with Oden, I no longer think the difficulty was Wesley's vision of holiness so much as a particular way of hearing it. If holiness means a state in which anger, fear, compulsion, and blind spots have been removed, then honest experience will keep contradicting the teaching, and the honest person will be tempted either to pretend or to despair. But if holiness means a fundamental reorientation toward love that works its way gradually through an already-formed and complicated personality, then my experience and the teaching are no longer at odds. The professors who patiently explored this doctrine with me were right to hold up perfect love as the goal. What I needed was a way to hold that goal without asking grace to erase the very person it is healing. Perfect love, then, is less a threshold I have or have not crossed than the direction in which grace is steadily moving me, and it is a direction I can report honestly, even from within a life that remains unfinished.

We work because God is working in us.

And perhaps the deepest mystery is that, as we learn to cooperate with that grace, we discover that the work we thought was ours alone was never ours alone at all.

Part of what transforming grace teaches us is to see what love has cost the people who gave it to us, and what it cost God.

I conclude with a prayer from my book of prayers, Daily Conversations with God, Month One, Day 22

Your grace, Lord, and the grace of those who love me, often seem to flow so easily and freely I overlook how much the giving may have cost the giver.  Those who have sent the gifts of love into my life have rarely called attention to their own generosity; they printed the return address on the packages in very small type.

            I want to remember today that grace is hardly ever cheap.  Repeatedly the work of grace weaves the threads of sacrifice.  My life began with a woman's pain in a hospital birthing room.  She said nothing about that pain; my birth was a gift freely given, but it came at the price of pain.  Through the years of childhood and youth, people did things for me so cheerfully and generously I seldom thought of them as representing sacrifice.  Moreover, the generosity that was in my parents has continued to come my way from family and friends, with the cost to the givers so hidden by their love I often did not notice the cost was there.

            I want to remember today the forgiveness that brings comfort back into a strained relationship. It offers the new beginnings I so frequently need. Such forgiveness is not as effortless as it appears to be.  The people I care most about, because they care about me, tend to be so quick with their forgiveness I do not see the pain that surrounds it. Often, they are forgiving wounds inflicted by my thoughtlessness, my indifference, my selfishness -- and wounds hurt.

            As it is with them, so too, Lord, with you.  Turn me around whenever I start to turn your grace into cheap grace, whenever I forget that to a God who cares deeply about righteousness, the forgiveness of unrighteousness can never be easy.  When the prodigal son came home, he must have seen in the face of his father the lines etched by pain, grief, and loneliness (Luke 15:11-24).  When the church has thought about forgiveness, it has thought about a cross.

            The grace that sustains and forgives is not cost-free.  Today and every day, help me to remember. 

Amen.

 

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[1] Bernard of Clairvaux, sermons on the Song of Solomon 1:2.

[2] Duane Thompson, of blessed memory, an early mentor of mine at what is now Indiana Wesleyan, Marion, Indiana.

[3] John Wesley, Journal, vol. 1, p. 225. Sermon 69, The Imperfection of Human Knowledge.”

[4] John Wesley, Sermon 89, "The More Excellent Way." Sermon 2, “The Almost Christian.” Sermon 4, “Scriptural Christianity.” A Plain Account of Christian Perfection.