"Isn't that unfair?"

The title of this post is a question a friend asked me a few months ago after we'd been talking about grace (the same grace I spoke of in my last post). Last week that question came back to my mind, and I spun it around some, to see if I could make grace “fair”.

The first alternative I thought of was the possibility that grace was meant to turn failure into a learning opportunity. One suspects that the captain of the Titanic, had he survived, would have become the world's greatest advocate for lifeboat reform. If someone gets burned in failure, you would think they would develop a very emphatic resistance to that same failure. I don't really believe that though – just as dogs eat their own vomit, humans tend to repeat the actions that hurt them, even with full recognition that it turned out badly for them before.

The next alternative I thought of was that grace was a form of punishment, or perhaps restitution. Again with the Titanic captain (there were others culpable, but I'll stick with this illustration), would he suffer more for his failure in death, or in decades more of life, with hundreds of deaths on his conscience? Another way, is the best manner in which he can repay his victims by becoming one himself, or by ferrying more passengers safely across the Atlantic? The trouble with this though, is that it isn't a just solution either. Somehow I doubt those who lost their entire families in the Titanic tragedy would say that these solutions comprise sufficient punishment and/or restitution. It goes similarly with any other grace.

At the end of tossing this idea around I'm left with one conclusion. Grace, specificically God's grace, is unfair. It doesn't fit into my conception of personal justice, duty, or fairness. However, the act is already done, a gift given out of God's love, and it can't be returned. My choice then, is to complain about the unfairness of grace, reject it on that basis, and let that very expensive gift go to waste, or, to accept it and run with it. I'd rather choose the latter.

Why My God?

In the comments on my first post, I was asked, “If you have to believe in a god, why yours?”. Its an interesting question, and I've had to mull it over some to come up with a possibly acceptable answer (well, actually, I was thinking of something else, and it occured to me that my train of thought answered that question). The claim I will start with is that I should be damned (and I mean that in its literal sense). I won't go into the details for all the Internet to see, though if you know me personally and need this statement backed up, you may ask privately. Now, what, you ask, does that have to do with God? There are two facets to the answer, which rule out, to the best of my knowledge, any god but mine (and I use god in a very loose sense here).

The first facet is that any god who is not willing and able to damn me is no god at all. This sort of god is inneffectual, powerless, a Santa Claus figure. Santa may have his naughty and nice list, but have you ever heard of someone getting coal? He fudges the list so everyone passes – or, from another perspecitve, is regularly fooled by small children. Who wants, needs, or would follow a god that gullible?

On the other hand, any god that cannot save me from damnation is also powerless, and thus no god at all. If I take a materialistic or humanistic perspective, well, I've failed in representing the good of humanity, and am likely to follow that pattern for the rest of this life, absent any external power – damnation on Earth, if you will. If I believe in reincarnatation, then in my next life I am likely to regress, instead of progress. If I believe in an eternal hell, then that should be my final destination. In short, by whatever standard I set up for god (that passes the previous test), I am damned. Any god that will do no more than this has no power over me, as that would be my natural state anyway.

So, on to my God. Christianity is founded on two principles – one is God's justice, the other is his grace. By God's justice, he can, will, and does subject people to eternal damnation. A lot of Christians don't like to talk about that, and end up with Santa Claus in the sky. Other Christians talk of nothing but, and end up with a God that just damns the already damned, doing effectively nothing. The flip side of this, though, is God's redemptive grace. In more detail (and less Christianese), we say that God himself became human (while remaining God – its one of those things that tie your head in knots), and, though he was a completely perfect human, voluntarily suffered the penalty of damnation. In this process, he brought a fundamental change to humanity – he offered people his own payment of the debt of damnation (the grace part), coupled with an exchange of his perfect human nature for our damned human nature (the redemptive part). This is not to say that all Christians (or those who claim to be such) are perfect – the nature of damnation is rather difficult to kill off – but rather that they have a workable path to perfection.

So, why my God? Because the standard that he is demands my damnation, and I could not reconcile a standard that didn't with my sense of justice. On the other hand, a god that merely damned me would really not have any power, while mine also provides payment of my debts and restoration of my being, out of his own blood.

An Unreasonable God

Sometimes God just doesn't make sense. He is, as near as I can tell, irrational. The key there though, is “as near as I can tell”. Really, it is inconceivable why a God who is perfect, right in every moral sense, all-powerful, and able to create an entire universe just by speaking would love me; I, who am far from perfect, often wrong, weak, and just create blog posts when I speak (well, figuratively – I don't have voice recognition software). If I so often fail him and make a hash of his plans, why give me a second chance (and a third, and a seventy-seventh)? Why let me in on what he's continuing to do, instead of just burning me (and, while he's at it, the rest of the world) to cinders and starting over? It is terribly unreasonable of him – definitely not what I would do, were I in his place. Thing is though, God does not answer to my reason. God cannot be contained, understood, analysed, or disected by my reason. He is bigger than that. He is God. I could say he's a bit like infinity, which is mathematically defined to be larger than any given number, in that he's grander than any given model, but of course that statement is logically contradictory (“this model of God states that he does not fit any model”). Isaiah 55:8-9 is often cited as an example of how we can't understand God's mind:

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

Philip Yancey, in his book “What's So Amazing About Grace?”, makes the point that perhaps, rather than just God being a whole lot smarter and more subtle than us, maybe these verses are more about his ununderstandable grace – that he continues to work to connect with us, no matter how difficult we make it. All this leaves me quite grateful (and rather baffled) that I serve an unreasonable God.

(I hope my good friend Ash, who writes an excellent blog on reason and critical thinking does not take this post or this blog as an attack on him or his in any way. For me, this blog is a forum for all the things I can't say on his blog, or similar fora, and this post is why I can't say it. I still hold that reason and critical thinking are very valuable tools, and I hope I'm at least being consistent and reasonable with my unreason, if that makes any sense – I believe that I can understand God truly, yet not completely, in much the same way as Google Maps will give me a true, but incomplete understanding of Fredericton.)