Day 3 - Getting your feet wet

James 2:14-17   “… Can faith save you?  If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. “

How do we understand this passage about faith and grace?

I was reading a part of a book by Richard R. Niebuhr I picked up a time ago, Streams of Grace - studies of Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William James, The Second Neesima Lectures, May 10,14 and 28, 1980. Kyoto, JP: Doshisha University Press, 1983. The book is out of print and good copies may be hard to find.

Dr. Niebuhr in a scholarly way seeks to explain that on its deepest level the way we perceive and understand grace is fundamentally connected to the way we perceive meaning in the world.

He observers, “Each one of us is like a mother who carries the world as a child. The world lives in us according to the purity and fidelity of our imagination (and as such) we become…living symbols of our world. If we imagine faithfully and critically, then the world comes to new life in ourselves; and we in turn give something of ourselves to the world.  (This is) the great responsibility we all have on this green earth…the responsibility of seeing…of imagining.”

In this view, God’s action is identical to individual action. One cannot distinguish in a human God’s action from the human action. (Sounds pretty much like Calvin.) God or any religious discernment, even grace, can be known and experienced (in this human action) but not be quantified.

Grace then is an individually perceived thing, it cannot be defined externally, one simply receives it. Therefore fundamentally, knowledge of grace comes by experience and tradition (more on tradition later).  If one seeks some objective content about grace, one must accept that only history and sheer immediacy of experience are available for communicating the objective context of grace. 

William James opposed the two worlds of scientism (all that is known is known by science) and rationalism (all that can be known is that which is rational, i.e., can be sensed by reason.) James offered a parallel thought (to RRN above) that bears on grace, it can be known only by experience.

Religious experience remains human emotional experience that can be described and analyzed. Thus for James, religious experience is another emotion. Grace is real, it is a human emotional experience. When it happens, it must be manifested in the specific temperament of the person experiencing it.

In other words to know grace is to act and live in the world with imagination that we are symbols of the world. Knowing God's grace is walking in the world as Christ walked - as a mother carrying the world as a child.  One must accept that only history and sheer immediacy of experience are available for communicating the objective context of grace.

As John Ortburg said, "If you want to walk on water, you have to get out of the boat."

This is how you know grace: Get your feet wet!