As a Latter-day Saint, I’m deeply interested in the kinds of questions Christians have traditionally asked about the nature of God’s grace and the importance of good works. But even more than this, as a philosopher, I’m especially interested in why we are asking the kinds of questions we ask about grace.
Why, for instance, are grace and works commonly treated as mutually exclusive approaches to our salvation and justification? And similarly, why is grace (i.e., giving what good is needed, even when that good is not deserved) often treated as an exception to what divine law requires or even as something forbidden by the demands of justice? Why is grace often assumed to be “unlawful?” What unspoken assumptions frame this way of talking? What unspoken assumptions about the nature and purpose of divine justice shape both how we ask and how we answer these questions? And might Christians in general, and Latter-day Saints in particular, have good reason to question these inherited assumptions?
My recent book, Original Grace: An Experiment in Restoration Thinking, is wholly focused on exactly these questions about God’s grace. The book is equal parts popular theology and personal narrative, particularly grounded in my own late father’s personal writings and history. In the article that follows here, I want to briefly introduce these same questions about grace and justice from a slightly different angle. The experiment is essentially the same—both the book and this article converge toward the same solution; however, the raw materials and process are slightly different.
I ask: what if some of the basic assumptions about divine justice that have long framed Christianity’s familiar “grace vs. works” debates are, ultimately, incompatible with the deepest truths our scriptures have revealed about God? And, if so, how might this change our thinking about the necessity of grace, the importance of works, and the reality of divine justice?
What if grace, rather than being barred by justice, is demanded by justice?
What if grace, rather than being a backup plan, is God’s original plan?
The Classic Debate
To start, then, I want to pull on the following thread: are we saved by grace or works?
This question—grace or works?—has long been used as a blunt wedge for separating Protestants from Catholics. This same wedge has been used to, even more emphatically, differentiate Protestants from Latter-day Saints, with Protestants positioned as defenders of grace and Latter-day Saints as defenders of works.
Now, a lot of careful and interesting work has already been done—by Protestants, Catholics, and Latter-day Saints alike—to question this popular but too-rough heuristic. I’m quite sympathetic to this work and welcome it. However, as useful as this theological work has been, I want to take a different approach to this question.
Traditionally, the “grace vs. works” debate is a debate about how, in light of our sinfulness, two apparently competing needs can be reconciled: (1) the need for sinners to be forgiven and redeemed and (2) the need for the demands of justice to be respected and fulfilled. Christ and His atoning grace are then positioned in some way as essential to the reconciliation of these competing needs.
For my purposes, the crucial thing to recognize about this debate is how the nature of Christ’s atoning work—and, thus, the whole debate about grace—turns on a set of assumptions about what justice is and what justice demands. In other words, the whole debate is framed by our assumptions about the nature and logic of God’s law.
It is fair to say, I think, that the central dramatic conflict of Jesus’s own ministry also turns on this same question: what is the nature and logic of God’s law? Or, more simply, what does justice demand?
For example, in the opening verses of Mark chapter three, we get a representative story about Jesus healing a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath. As a group of Pharisees look on, Jesus asks the following question: “Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath days, or to do evil? to save life, or to kill?” The Pharisees, though, don’t answer. Instead, “they held their peace.”
I want to take this question as a key to understanding what may be questionable about our usual approach to the “grace vs. works” debate. Jesus bluntly and directly asks the Pharisees a decisive question: “Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath?” And when it comes to thinking about the nature of justice, I believe this is, quite precisely, the essential question: Is it lawful to do good?
For Jesus, the answer appears to be unequivocal and unconditional: it is always lawful (or just) to do good. In short, the law commands what is good. Justice demands what is good. And this exclusively. Jesus isn’t carving out an exception to the law.
Sometimes, justice requires that we do what is good. But sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes, justice requires us to passively withhold what is good—or, even, sometimes, justice may require us to actively do what is evil.
How does this work? What underlying logic determines when justice requires what is good or, instead, evil? Far from being arbitrary, the conditional logic that informs our shared, common assumptions about the nature of justice is both rigorous and familiar. The assumed logic of justice is this: good for good and evil for evil.
If you’ve done good, then the law judges you to be deserving of what’s good. But if you’ve done evil, then the law judges you to be deserving of evil. This is only fair. This is the law. This is justice. It is only lawful to do good when what’s good is deserved. Otherwise, if good is not deserved, it is not lawful to do good. And, in fact, if evil has been done, justice itself will require that evil be done to those who are evil. Based on this understanding, moral law is essentially a mechanism for apportioning deserved rewards or punishments.
We might underline the character of this conditional logic just by repeating Jesus’s original question, but with a twist: Is it lawful to do evil? And as before, the answer we seem to take for granted is: sometimes—because we assume that justice does sometimes require that evil be returned to those who deserve evil. And it seems to me that this logic, quite explicitly, is the unquestioned frame within which all our “grace vs. works” debates have traditionally taken place.
Atonement as a Workaround
How so? Recall that the “grace vs. works” debate is itself an argument about how two competing needs can be reconciled: (1) the need for evil sinners to be redeemed, and (2) the need for the demands of justice to be respected and fulfilled. Here, the debate itself is structured by the assumption that these two needs are, in some fundamental sense, at odds and incompatible. And, then, in light of this frame, the role of Christ’s atoning grace is to accomplish—often through a kind of vast, vicarious cosmic work-around—a way of reconciling them.
From this it follows that our ideas about grace will themselves be defined in relation to this common notion of justice. If justice only sanctions giving what’s good as a deserved reward for being good, then “grace” becomes a name for still doing what is good even when that good is not deserved, even when the law, instead, would justly require that we be given the evil we deserve.
Structurally, this logic positions grace as an exception to the law. Grace is defined as an extra-judicial loophole. Christ’s death and suffering then create this exception and authorize, with some conditions, the opening of this legal loophole and, in turn, the possible salvation of sinners who, otherwise, would justly deserve evil.
As best I can tell, both sides of our traditional “grace vs. works” debates buy this basic setup without comment or disagreement. Both sides buy both this notion of justice and this notion of grace. Then, the debate itself unfolds only as a debate about the precise conditions for accessing this loophole.
The only real question at stake in the traditional debate is this: how big is this loophole? How hard is it to qualify for this gracious exception?
Taking this question as our guide, it’s not hard to plot the different positions assigned in the debate. Traditionally, Protestants are seen as arguing that access to this exception is readily available via faith alone. Latter-day Saints, on the other hand, are traditionally seen as arguing that access to this exception is narrowly restricted to those who not only have faith but also participate in the required rituals and demonstrate the requisite works.
If these positions—accurate or not—represent something like poles on opposite ends of the “grace-as-special-exception-to-the-law” spectrum, then we could also plot any number of intermediate positions between them on a sliding scale that adjusts the appropriate balance of faith and works, increasing or decreasing the accessibility of the loophole that is grace.
This, at least, is my reading of the debate’s basic structure.
An Alternative Approach
How might this reading of the debate be helpful? It may help clarify our theological options in relation to how the debate plays out.
The first option is familiar: we get disagreement and hostility within the debate’s received frame. Each side of the debate simply accepts this framing of justice and grace, together with the positions assigned to them within this frame. Then it’s just a matter of arguing, through some mix of reason and scripture, who is right and who is wrong.
The second option aims, instead, to work for reconciliation within the frame. Here, rather than disagreeing, one or more of the participants may try to show how the perceived differences between their assigned positions are really only very slight (or even non-existent). They might do this by relocating one or both of the traditions on the sliding scale of faith/works or perhaps by defining more subtly and carefully exactly what is meant in any given instance by deeply interdependent terms like “faith” and “works.”
But the possibility of a third option, really, is what interests me: neither disagreement within the framework nor agreement within the framework, but rejection of the framework itself. In the first two options, the frame itself is never called into question. Our received notion of justice as a lawful mechanism for sometimes requiring good rewards and sometimes requiring evil punishments is never called into question. Also, the corresponding definition of grace as an exception to what a just law would otherwise demand is never called into question.
My argument, though, is that this whole framework is morally suspect and that both this definition of justice and the corresponding definition of grace should be called into question.
Is it lawful to do good?
What if, instead of hesitating like Pharisees, we just immediately and unconditionally answered: yes, Lord, it is always and only lawful to do good?
A Sabbath Day Case Study
It may be possible to offer a reading of Mark 3:4 that sees Jesus’ question—“Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath?”—as only aiming to clear some local space for a compassionate exception to what the law of the Sabbath would otherwise demand. In this reading, even if the law would justly restrict what good may be done in these circumstances, what we’re given is an example of how Jesus has come to challenge that law and make some much-needed room for extrajudicial compassion. And this reading would fit neatly, then, with our assumed ideas about justice—ideas that position grace and compassion as special exceptions to what the law otherwise commands.
But on the story’s own terms, that reading of Mark 3:4 doesn’t seem obvious to me. Jesus doesn’t ask if we should find a way to do what is good even when the law would otherwise forbid it. Rather, He’s asking whether goodness is lawful. He’s asking us to rethink the underlying logic of the law in relation to what’s good.
The verses feeding into the opening of Mark 3 are occupied with this same question. When Jesus and his disciples walk “through the corn fields” on the Sabbath and “pluck the ears of corn” to eat as they pass by, they’re questioned along these same lines: “And the Pharisees said unto [Jesus], Behold, why do they on the sabbath day that which is not lawful?” In response, Jesus declares Himself “Lord of the Sabbath” and justifies His claim with this striking statement of moral principle: “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.”
Here, again, Jesus isn’t asking for a compassionate exception to the demands of justice. He is not saying that, because of their hunger, His disciples should be excused from obedience to the law. Rather, Jesus’s tack is radical and He means to uproot fundamental assumptions about the logic of the law: the law, Jesus says, was made always and only for the good of the people, not people for the sake of fulfilling the law.
Jesus isn’t carving out an exception to the law. He’s revealing the true logic that animates the law and that, thus, defines justice itself.
Love as Law
Does Jesus ever directly address what, in His view, the underlying logic of the law should look like? At the very least, it seems to me that, as Jesus gives it, the logic of the law must square with the fact that love is commanded.
As Paul puts it: “If there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” [emphasis added]. Or, as Jesus puts it: “On these two commandments”—love of God and love of neighbor—“hang all the law and the prophets” [emphasis added]. Here, again, love and compassion are not being positioned as special exceptions to what a just law would otherwise require. Rather, they’re being positioned as the substance of what justice does require. My salvation doesn’t turn on God finding a way to make a legal loophole for me.
This is the law: love even your enemies.
The law not only commands what is good for those who have done good. The law commands what is good for those who have done evil. And this isn’t just a special rule for fallible mortals. This is how God Himself operates, Jesus says, “For he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”
If love means anything like “willing the good of another,” as Thomas Aquinas suggests, then I don’t see how the logic that underwrites our common sense account of justice can be compatible with the logic of justice as Jesus lays it out. It seems to me that Jesus quite explicitly rejects the idea that the logic of justice is good for good and evil for evil. Rather, in one telling gesture, he explicitly names this bad assumption, rejects it, and replaces it. On Jesus’s account, the logic of justice is good for good and good for evil. This is what justice itself looks like. This means that love cannot be justly treated as a special and conditional reward. Rather, love must be treated as an unconditional law.
Or: the law can never be justly treated as a mechanism for judging what good or evil is deserved. Rather, justice always and only judges what good is needed.
Is it lawful, then, to do good? I think the answer is: always. The law always and only commands us to do good. And could it be lawful, ever, to do evil—even in response to evil, even if you were God? I think the answer, as Jesus gives it, is never.
The moral contrast between these two divergent approaches to justice is stark. The conditional logic of “good for good and evil for evil” is, I think, a form of moral relativism that relativizes moral obligations to judgments about what someone deserves—sometimes good, sometimes evil. Whereas the unconditional logic of “good for good and good for evil” allows for no exceptions to the rule that what’s good is always just and always commanded.
Paul on Grace and the Law
Say we reframed the “grace vs. works” debate in light of this alternate account of justice. What would happen to our “grace vs. works” debate? Rather than being won or solved, it may, I think, simply be dissolved.
If grace is a name for still doing what’s good even when that good is not deserved, then this grace is not barred by the demands of justice. And, too, if this is true, then grace cannot be positioned as an exception to the demands of justice—an exception that is variously big or small or variously accessible via faith or works.
Rather, if grace is a name for still giving what good is needed even when that good is not deserved, then grace is what justice demands. If grace is loving your enemy, then grace is the substance of what the law itself commands.
With respect to justice, grace is not an exception. Grace is the paradigm case.
In this spirit, it’s not hard to imagine a reading of Paul’s letter to the Romans that starts from this premise and takes Matthew’s command to “love your enemy” as its interpretive frame.
Paul’s own general formula for describing the relation between grace and law in Romans 3 does, I think, closely mirror Jesus’s own in Matthew 5. Before telling us to love our enemies, Jesus says: “Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.” And in Romans, Paul says essentially the same thing: “Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law.”
What if these formulas simply mean the very same thing: that whatever we might predictably (and wrongly) think about justice, returning good for evil (i.e., grace) does not destroy or void the law but rather is the only way to fulfill and establish it?
This reading fits, I think, with Paul’s baseline definition of “unrighteousness” in Romans 1, a definition that explicitly describes sinners as those who “suppress the truth” about God “because what can be known about God is plain to them” (Romans 1:18-19, cf. 1:18-24, NET). For Paul, in some fundamental sense, sin is this suppression of the truth about the nature of God and his righteousness or justice. (Where “righteousness,” here, is always just dikaiosyne: that is, the Greek word for “justice”).
In parallel fashion, in Romans 3, Paul’s baseline description of Christ’s soteriological work is as the work of revealing—once and for all, incontrovertibly—the truth about God’s justice, a truth that sin has actively suppressed. In Christ, Paul says, “The righteousness [or justice] of God has been disclosed and is attested by the Law and the Prophets” (Romans 3:21, NRSV). God put Christ “forward as a sacrifice of atonement,” and “he did this to demonstrate his righteousness [or justice]” (Romans 3:25-26, NRSV).
Here, the soteriological logic is one of revelation. Christ’s sacrifice saves by revealing (i.e., by “disclosing” or “demonstrating”) the truth about God’s justice, a truth that sin, by definition, suppresses. And what is the truth about God’s justice? As Paul says in Romans 5, the truth is exactly what Jesus told us in Matthew 5: the truth is that God’s own justice commands love even for one’s enemies. And this is exactly what God has done via Christ’s sacrifice: He has fulfilled his own law by loving those who live as his enemies. Paul says, “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us . . . For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely . . . will we be saved by his life” (Romans 5:8, 10, NRSV). In this respect, the gospel itself is just God’s open invitation to join him in obeying this law of faith and grace. The invitation is to join Him in believing the truth He has revealed about His justice in Christ.
Crucially, Paul is also quite clear that what distinguishes this “law of faith”—which is, precisely, a law and not an exception to the law—from what he calls the “law of works” is the underlying logic. “Then what becomes of boasting?” Paul asks. “It is excluded. Through what kind of law? That of works? No, rather through the law of faith” (Romans 3:27, emphasis added, NRSV). The difference between the law of works and the law of faith is marked in turns of whether these laws support “boasting.” That is, the difference is marked in terms of whether the underlying logic of that law is a logic of deserts. If I can use the law to deserve rewards, then I can boast about them. But if the law itself never assigns deserved rewards and punishments—i.e., if the logic of the law is not the conditional logic of good for good and evil for evil—then boasting is always excluded. Boasting, though, isn’t excluded in this case because I’m personally not good enough to boast, as if the problem were just practical in character. No, boasting is excluded because love—as an unconditional law—cannot be deserved, ever, by anyone.
Love cannot be deserved (or not) because love is always a law and never a reward.
Only the logic of this kind of law—a law of faith, a law that commands good even in response to evil—can unconditionally exclude boasting.
Here, then, my salvation doesn’t turn on God finding a way to make a legal loophole for me, such that He can still give me a good I don’t deserve. It turns instead on God convincing me—through the truth revealed in Christ’s loving sacrifice for me as His enemy, by His willingness to join me in bearing my death and suffering—to trust Him enough to put down my active suppression of this fundamental truth and, instead, finally join Him in the work of unconditionally obeying love as a law.
“Do we then overthrow the law through this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law” (Romans 3:31, NRSV).
Conclusion
The takeaway of this experiment—and the takeaway, really, of my whole book Original Grace—is that grace, far from overthrowing God’s law, is the only way to uphold it.
This, though, is not just another Protestant-like defense of a robust doctrine of grace. Instead, it’s actually a Restoration-inspired defense of God’s uncompromising commitment to justice. My claim is that divine grace and divine justice may both be better understood when grace is not treated as an exception to God’s law and, in turn, when the law’s commandment to love is not treated as conditional and relative. Rather, divine grace and divine justice are both better understood when God’s commandment to love—even, perhaps especially, one’s enemies—is treated as unconditional and, thus, when the commandment to join God’s work of extending grace is understood to be absolute. If moral relativism is excluded by our willingness to always and only do what is good, never returning evil for evil, then we can happily agree with Jesus that it is always lawful to do good. And if it is always lawful to do good, then grace, no longer positioned as an exception to divine law, is revealed as the only possible path to justice.
