![[assets/covers/grace.jpg]] Grace is the theological concept of unmerited favour extended freely, without regard to worthiness or achievement. It is not merely a doctrine about salvation but a posture toward people: one that reaches precisely where human systems of merit and respectability do not. ## For the ones the world has discarded Richard J. Foster, introducing *The Divine Conspiracy*, brackets a passage in which Willard names his audience: 'The flunk-outs and drop-outs and burned-outs. The broke and the broken. The drug heads and the divorced. The HIV positive and the herpes-ridden. The brain-damaged and the incurably ill. The barren and the pregnant too many times or at the wrong time. The overemployed, the underemployed, the unemployed. The unemployable. The swindled, the shoved-aside, the replaced. The lonely, the incompetent, the stupid.'[^dc-pxi] The list is deliberately uncomfortable. It does not stop at the sympathetic cases. It keeps going until it has named everyone the world tends to regard as having brought their situation on themselves. Grace, in Willard's framing, does not distinguish. This is not a soft universalism; it is a specific claim about who Jesus's teaching was addressed to and what it is actually capable of doing. A theology that produces [[Legalism]] cannot reach these people. A theology of grace can. ## An invitation into life, not a benefit to be collected Grace drew its first recipients not by threat but by recognition. The people who initially encountered Jesus's message generally concluded they would be fools to disregard it; that recognition, freely arrived at, was the basis of their conversion. This is a very different account of how grace works from the coercive model that [[Legalism]] produces.[^dc-pxiv] The harlot at Simon's dinner is the sharpest illustration. She had overheard [[Jesus]] teaching, had seen his care for people, and was moved to believe she too was loved by him and by the heavenly Father. She arrived at his dinner uninvited, weeping, drying his feet with her hair, unable to do anything other than express gratitude. Simon the Pharisee observed all the correct proprieties and understood nothing. Jesus's verdict: '''Loved me much!' Simply that, and not the customary proprieties, was now the key of entry into the rule of God.' Love (genuine, overflowing, outward-directed love) is the mode of entry. Propriety can coexist with a closed door.[^dc-p19] Willard draws the contrast plainly: living now as an apprentice in kingdom living, not just as a consumer of his merits. Both postures are possible responses to grace, but only one is what grace is actually for. The consumer receives what is offered and remains essentially unchanged; the apprentice enters what is offered and is formed by it. [[Discipleship]] is the shape of that formation. The [[Kingdom of God]] is genuinely open: 'We do have an invitation to be a part of it, but if we refuse we only hurt ourselves.' Grace, as invitation, imposes no cost on the one who extends it; only the one who declines bears any consequence.[^dc-p25] ## Cheap grace and the bumper sticker ==The [[Gospel of Sin Management]] represents grace at its most diluted.== =='There is a lot of room between being perfect and being "just forgiven" as that is nowadays understood.'== ==The bumper sticker ('Christians aren't perfect, just forgiven') is not wrong — forgiveness does not depend on being perfect.== ==But what it communicates, Willard argues, is something more: that 'forgiveness alone is what Christianity is all about, what is genuinely essential to it.'== ==Grace has been reduced to a transaction that gets you to heaven, severed from the transformation of character and life that grace is meant to initiate.==[^dc-p36] ==The cheap-grace account insists that 'it says that you can have a faith in Christ that brings forgiveness, while in every other respect your life is no different from that of others who have no faith in Christ at all.'== ==This is grace without formation, pardon without presence, entry without life.== ==The invitation is real; what has been lost is what the invitation is an invitation to.== ## Selected passages > 'The people initially impacted by that message generally concluded that they would be fools to disregard it. That was the basis of their conversion.' > > *The Divine Conspiracy*, p. xiv > 'living now as his apprentice in kingdom living, not just as a consumer of his merits.' > > *The Divine Conspiracy*, p. xvii ## Appearances - *The Divine Conspiracy*, [[Dallas Willard]] (1997), Foreword (R.J. Foster), pp. x–xi - *The Divine Conspiracy*, [[Dallas Willard]] (1997), Introduction, pp. xiv–xvii - *The Divine Conspiracy*, [[Dallas Willard]] (1997), Ch. 1 'Entering the Eternal Kind of Life Now', pp. 19, 25 - *The Divine Conspiracy*, [[Dallas Willard]] (1997), Ch. 2 'Gospels of Sin Management', pp. 36–37 ## Related [[Discipleship]] · [[Gospel of Sin Management]] · [[Legalism]] · [[Kingdom of God]] · [[Jesus]] · [[Dallas Willard]] [^dc-pxi]: [[The Divine Conspiracy (1997)]], p. xi · *'I would place The Divine Conspiracy in rare company indeed: alongside the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and John Wesley, John Calvin and Martin Luther, Teresa of Avila and Hildegard of Bingen, and perhaps even Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo.'* · [[The Divine Conspiracy - 10.jpg|↗]] [^dc-pxiv]: [[The Divine Conspiracy (1997)]], p. xiv · *'The people initially impacted by that message generally concluded that they would be fools to disregard it. That was the basis of their conversion.'* · [[The Divine Conspiracy - 13.jpg|↗]] [^dc-p19]: [[The Divine Conspiracy (1997)]], p. 19 · *'"Loved me much!" Simply that, and not the customary proprieties, was now the key of entry into the rule of God.'* · [[The Divine Conspiracy - 38.jpg|↗]] [^dc-p25]: [[The Divine Conspiracy (1997)]], p. 25 · *'It is not something that human beings produce or, ultimately, can hinder. We do have an invitation to be a part of it, but if we refuse we only hurt ourselves.'* · [[The Divine Conspiracy - 44.jpg|↗]] [^dc-p36]: [[The Divine Conspiracy (1997)]], p. 36 · *'But there is a lot of room between being perfect and being "just forgiven" as that is nowadays understood.'* · [[The Divine Conspiracy - 55.jpg|↗]]