RESTORATION AND THE GRACE OF GOD

Where sin was thus multiplied, grace immeasurably exceeded it. — Rom. 5:20

Insofar as the Restoration Movement in this country is concerned, the Campbell-Stone aspect of the movement, it has come up short in reference to preaching the gospel of the grace of God. It is not so much that we have taught a cheap grace, a charge often leveled against some sects, but that we have hardly taught grace at all. What we have taught has had its negative ring, designed to show that salvation is not “wholly by grace” or by “faith only,” but that there is something for man to do, some work for him to perform, as a kind of partner in God’s plan.

In a survey of our literature back through the years it is difficult to find anything written in a positive way about the grace of God in the salvation of the soul. A favorite topic through the years has been something like “Things That Save,” in which grace and mercy are listed along with works and baptism. While admitting that man is not saved by his own works, we have somehow woven a doctrine of works into the fabric and have left the impression that there is more required than mere grace. Elder Ben Franklin’s sermon on “Men Must Do Something to Be Saved,” published by Daniel Sommer back in 1896, certainly has much truth, and it is typical of “Campbellite preaching,” and yet in the light of what the Bible teaches about grace it is a dangerous emphasis. This sermon, like so many others through the years, emphasizes a human side to salvation as well as a divine side. Brother Franklin, after recounting what God has done for our salvation, speaks of “the small amount he requires of man.”

H. G. Harward, an Austrian evangelist, in his Evangelistic Sermons, first published in 1905, has a sermon on “The Chain of Salvation,” which makes much of this human and divine side of salvation. The “chain” that saves has ten divine links and eight human links, including we save ourselves and baptism. And yet on the divine side he has grace listed, the proof text being Eph. 2:8, which not only says that we are saved “by grace through faith,” but also insists that salvation is not of ourselves!

Twelve books of sermons by our pioneers that I have in my library total 249 addresses. There is not even one of the 249 that has the word grace in the title. That certainly does not mean that there is no grace of God preached in those messages, but when one sees the scores of sermons on baptism, conversion, the plan of salvation, and the church there is reason to conclude that however “Paul oriented” our movement has been, we have not caught the excitement that Paul had over the grace of God.

If one were to take the more recent sermons, all the way from Hardeman’s Tabernacle Sermons to the ACC Lectures, he would find the same emphasis. One notices the same dearth of treatment given to the Holy Spirit, who, like the subject of grace, is given mostly negative consideration. We have hardly been “long on grace,” as one of our premillennial brothers has been dubbed. The premillennial wing of discipledom is, by the way, one area of our movement where the grace of God has really been proclaimed. One of our young princes, something of a maverick, was introduced to a Dallas area congregation by an orthodox brother as “a fanatic on grace.” Perhaps one could be a fanatic on that subject as well as any, but one thing is sure, we have not had many such fanatics.

Human frailty being what it is. we are not without reasons as to why this graceless thing happened to us. Part of it was surely the Lockean empiricism of Alexander Campbell in his struggle to negate the influence of an extreme Calvinism on the American frontier. Man is more than a corpse awaiting the influence of the Spirit and effectual grace to arouse him, Campbell rightly urged. The pioneers rejected “faith only” because this was made to mean that there is no meaning at all to one’s response to the gospel. They probably could have agreed that salvation is most certainly by faith alone, once they saw alike the biblical concept of faith.

That our Movement has been influenced by the pragmatic philosophy of American culture is probably another reason why we have not really seen the grace of God. We have always been a do-it-yourself people, bequeathed to us by the rugged individualism of the colonial fathers and the raw-boned independence of the western frontier. What is more consistent for red-blooded Americans than to have a do-it-yourself religion? The reformed churches, both Lutheran and Calvinistic, could have saved us from our self-assertiveness, for they had European ties that helped them to keep the cross of Jesus in proper perspective. But we cut ourselves off from such influences, or were cut off by them, due to the exclusiveness that soon came to characterize us. To be sure, we had some things to teach “the sects,” but we were so busy skinning them that we overlooked the fact that they also had a lot to teach us.

But as important as any reason for our being short on grace is the human proclivity to do it for oneself, which is why all churches fall short of giving proper place to the grace of God. Because of our self-will it is most difficult for us not to suppose that God needs some help in this matter of saving us. From childhood we have asserted ourselves with a “let me do it myself’ to the point that we are hardly ready to turn our souls (completely over to God’s grace. We give lip service to salvation by grace, and we boldly quote “Our righteousness is as filthy rags,” but it is something else for us to really believe that salvation is by pure grace, apart from anything that we might do to merit it.

A noble exception to the dearth on grace in our Movement, especially in Churches of Christ, is the writings of K. C. Moser, who authored The Gist of Romans and The Way of Salvation, both of which stand in bold contrast to what is usually taught about grace and salvation (and even baptism) among us. Back in 1933 G. C. Brewer, one of the greats of the past generation, wrote the introduction for The Way of Salvation, in which he admits that Moser’s views are not “the accepted view” or “the brotherhood idea,” and that he might even be criticized for being Baptistic. After agreeing with what Moser says, including the point that repentance precedes faith, he goes on to say:

In showing that man can and must obey God in order to be saved, some of us have run to the extreme of making salvation depend on works. Some have been wont to show that there is a human side and a divine side to salvation, and in doing so they have made the human coordinate with the divine. Worse, in the minds of some the divine has been completely ruled out and salvation made a matter of human achievement — except that the “plan” was divinely given. The gospel was made a system of divine laws for human beings to obey and thus save themselves sans grace, sans mercy, sans everything spiritual and divine — except that the “plan” was in mercy given! Mercy to expect man of his own unaided strength to save himself by meeting the demands of a system of perfect divine laws!

Brother Brewer also praises Moser’s chapter on “The Gift of the Holy Spirit,” acknowledging that it is likely to be criticized. The treatment certainly departs from the old bromides that “the Spirit is the Bible” or “the Spirit operates only through the Word,” for it sets forth what the Spirit actually does in the life of the saint. This emphasis on the Spirit, one will find, goes with an emphasis upon grace. Where one is lacking, so is the other. When Christians come to see the place of grace, they come also to see the role of the Spirit in their lives.

The words of Rom. 5:20 shows where the apostle placed grace: “Where sin was thus multiplied, grace immeasurably exceeded it.” Or as some versions have it: “Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” The first rendering brings out what the second does not, that there are two different Greek words for abound, making it mean something like Where sin overflowed, grace flooded in. Or maybe Where sin was finite, grace was infinite. It means that grace overflows for us all, regardless of the measure of our sin. God does not give more grace to one and less to another, depending on the degree of his sin. God never says, “This is an average man, with an ordinary amount of sin, so I will give him an average amount of grace.” God’s grace overflows, saving us even when sin is abundant in our lives, and it is abundant in us all.

Grace does not merely supply our deficiencies, taking up wherever we may leave off in the struggle for wholeness. Grace creates a new life within us, providing us with resources that would never be ours otherwise. It does not come to us because we are good or for anything we have done, but because of his infinite love for us. It is not given as a part payment for some good work on our part, for there is no sense in which we can either buy it or deserve it. “If it be by grace, then it does not rest on deeds done, or grace would cease to be grace” (Rom. 11:6). It is the proclivity of man’s ego to cling to something he has done, however minute, as a cooperative act or as part payment for salvation, thus making void the grace of God. Man is inclined to usurp the crown that belongs to’ grace alone, thus enthroning his own self-will as the ruler of his heart. Notice Rom. 5:21: “As sin established its reign by way of death, so God’s grace might establish its reign in righteousness, and insure in eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Paul here speaks of two queens that rule in men’s lives. True, sin once had such an upper hand that it looked as if the whole drama of creation would be swept away by it, beginning with Adam’s transgression. But God in His love would not allow that all be lost. His grace made possible another ruler in the human heart. Sin will rule or grace will rule. The choice becomes ours. But the choice is based only upon our faith, which is trust in Jesus as Saviour. “It is by grace you are saved, through trusting him; it is not your own doing. It is God’s gift, not a reward for work done.” (Eph. 2:8)

So eager is man to have some part in saving himself that it is an easy thing to pervert the doctrine of grace. Lest we forget that it was a perversion of the teaching on grace that led Paul to say in Gal. 1:8: “If anyone, if we ourselves or an angel from heaven, should preach a gospel at variance with the gospel we, preached to you, he shall be held outcast.” He insisted that they had been “called by grace,” and that any reliance upon law or self-assertion meant to “fallout of the domain of God’s grace” (Gal. 5:4). The modern church needs to ask itself that arresting question: Are we really preaching the gospel? It is something less than the gospel when we suggest that man himself has something to do, at least a little something to do, with his salvation. Man’s pride hardly prepares him to accept God’s grace, pure and simple.

Our illustrations betray us. We say that God shows His grace toward us and thus saves us like a governor issues a pardon to a convict and thus frees him. This is hardly pure grace, for a governor pardons in view of the punishment the convict has already suffered or because the penalty was too severe or because the man wasn’t guilty to start with. We are guilty before God, and it is only because of what Christ has done for us that God shows His grace. Indeed, Jesus is that grace. “The grace of God has dawned upon the world with healing for all mankind,” says Tit. 2:11 in a reference to Jesus.

If one should go to the governor and take upon himself all the penalty due the convict, along with the guilt of the convict, and paying it all by going to prison himself, that would be pure grace. No one could say that in accepting such love and thus walking out of the prison a free man, the convict in some sense merited his freedom, and yet this can be the only sense that the scriptures would employ such language as “Save yourselves.” Man responds to the grace, of course, if it is to be effectual, but this makes him no co-worker with God in some kind of “plan of salvation.”

In reference to illustrations, one that comes from the Restoration literature referred to above seems to have the right ring in reference to grace. James A. Harding was in a debate with John H. Nichols back in 1888. The proposition was justification by faith only, which of course brother Harding was denying. In his first reply to his opponent he says, “Mr. Nichols seems to have a great horror of buying his salvation. He seems to think that one cannot do anything at all in order to justification without thereby paying for it. He seems to think that if one must, in addition to exercising internally a loving, trusting faith, also express that faith by some external action, he thereby pays for his justification.” He goes on to point out that should a neighbor say to him “Come to my house tomorrow and bring a bridle with you, I have a horse I want to give you,” he surely would not suppose that in bringing a bridle he would be paying for the horse. According to Nichols’ notion of faith, he would have to fall on his knees and beg the man for a bridle, lest in bringing a bridle he pay for the horse. Nor could he even go to the pasture and catch the horse, lest in catching him he’d be paying for him!

There may be some question as to how well such illustrations, taken from human experience, fit the divine economy, but I am impressed with the validity of Harding’s point. It well shows that “the free gift of God” does call for response on man’s part, and that the responding is not itself a work. I especially like the way brother Harding spoke of “trusting faith expressing itself in some external action,” which is where he places baptism. Baptism is the response of faith, indeed an act of faith rather than something apart from it. So that when Paul says, “By grace you are saved through faith,” he speaks of a faith that expresses itself in obedience.

We have erred through the years, I think, in leaving the impression that baptism is something we do after we believe, as if it were the next step in some program that leads to salvation. It wrongly implies that one completes one step, and once it is attended to, he moves on to the next. As in the case of the man offered the free horse, there was no awareness of steps, for it was all a matter of trusting faith on his part. He believed the man would really give him a horse, so he took his bridle and went after it. This is why brother Harding was right, as a reading of the debate reveals, in dealing with the kind of faith that the scriptures talk about. There is no biblical faith except an obeying, trusting faith. So it is true that for one to be saved he must have sufficient faith to do what the Lord expects of him.

This is why we can say with Luther and Protestant thought in general that man is saved by faith only. He is not saved by faith plus works, nor by faith plus anything. It is only by faith, remembering that all that the Lord command us is an expression of that faith. I have no quarrel with the Good News for Modern Man when it translates Rom. 1:17 “faith alone.” I would only insist that faith be seen as that simple trusting response on man’s part to what the Lord has commanded him. This is the faith that Paul equates with grace. “By his grace you are saved, through trusting him; it is not your own doing. It is God’s gift, not a reward for work done.” — the Editor