Defeating Grace Through Memory Work

Exploring Faith, Pursuing Grace 1.1

Here is the first section of the first chapter Exploring Faith, Pursuing Grace. Again, this post is specifically for paid subscribers as a gift to them. All of my other posts are free: Monday Lectionary, Textual Tuesday, and Topical Thursday.

“Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone” (James 2:17, KJV).

For so many years, I simply didn’t talk about grace. The ministers at my church didn’t preach on it. Visiting preachers didn’t mention it positively in their sermons, if they preached on grace at all. And we spent way more time explaining away passages like Ephesians 2:8-9 than we ever did using them during an invitation, called an altar call in other traditions. .

Ephesians 2, for instance, says,

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast. (Ephesians 2:8–9, NRSV)

While other churches might use this passage to teach that one is saved by grace through faith, I was trained to quickly move to James 2 if words like grace or faith ever got thrown around; grace, after all, is a slippery slope.

So, my pursuit of grace started off like a linebacker trying to tackle the running back. It was my responsibility to defeat it at all costs. Through debate, using certain passages to my advantage (while strategically avoiding others), and using clever arguments passed down to me by other contenders for the faith once delivered, I was equipped to defeat grace at every turn.

If someone dare bring up Romans 4 or Acts 10:43, which says that someone who believes in Jesus receives forgiveness of sins, I was ready with James 2:17 and Acts 2:38 to show that there was something we must do as well.

Faith alone, I believed, was a false teaching.

And we all know what happens to those guys.

To defeat grace, I couldn’t deal with each passage within its context; I had to run from passage to passage to prove my anti-grace position.

To defeat grace, I had to misrepresent my religious opponents. This misrepresentation was generally unintentional, but it was sloppy because it came from a lack of genuinely listening to what other people had to say; instead, I would hear what my people had to say about what their people believed.