Wesley’s childish destructive grace

Bishop Robert Schnase‘s Five Practices for Fruitful Living was handed out to everyone at annual conference a couple years ago when he was guest preacher. I have picked it up a few times, but never given it sustained attention.

What strikes me every time I grab it is the opening chapter’s praise of Paul Tillich’s sermon “You are Accepted.” Schnase describes reading that sermon as something of a conversion experience. I’d never read the sermon. Then I recently heard another person praise that sermon for its eye-opening power, so I finally dug it up on the Internet and gave it a read.

The opening move of the sermon is an effort to find new words for “sin” and “grace.” Tillich says finding new words in impossible, but then he does just that by suggesting “separation” and “reunion” as the best ways to understand what we mean when we say “sin” and “grace.”

All this calls to my mind the way John Wesley uses these same terms. For Wesley, of course, the words were not meaningless or hopelessly out of touch with the lived experience of people. They were not words in search of a connection to “human experience” but rather words that described the deepest truths about spiritual experience.

Tillich, if I read him properly, finds the way Wesley speaks of sin wrongheaded.

Do they, and do we, still realize that sin does not mean an immoral act, that “sin” should never be used in the plural, and that not our sins, but rather our sin is the great, all-pervading problem of our life?

Wesley certainly would not argue against the notion that capital-S Sin is our all-pervading problem, but he actually does use the word “sins” in the plural quite often and does speak of immoral acts as sins. Indeed, for Wesley the definition of sin is an intentional violation of a known command of God.

And for that sin, we need, Wesley argues, exactly the kind of grace Tillich rules out.

Grace is just as difficult to describe as sin. For some people, grace is the willingness of a divine king and father to forgive over and again the foolishness and weakness of his subjects and children. We must reject such a concept of grace; for it is a merely childish destruction of a human dignity.

Wesley’s threefold understanding of grace calls the grace that Tillich here calls “childish destruction” the justifying grace of God. The idea of God’s pardon and forgiveness does not exhaust Wesley’s understanding of grace, but it certainly stands right in the middle of it.

But perhaps the most interesting contrast to Wesley is the central proclamation of the sermon: You are accepted.

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I know it is not the same thing as saying, “God loves you. God loves you so much that he came in the form of Jesus Christ, lived, died, and rose again for us.”

I am sure the two, Tillich and Wesley, can be brought more closely together than I am doing. My reading of Tillich in some ways is looking for gaps and shoving them open. But I do not see how to hold Wesley and Tillich together. More subtle and perceptive thinkers than me probably can.