The Way of Grace: Who We Become
How following the law of love shapes our souls.
The Way of Grace is a three-part series exploring how God’s grace draws us into God’s family, shapes who we are becoming, and reminds us that our choices matter in the life of faith. Drawing from Paul’s letter to the Galatians—and stories from everyday life—these reflections invite us to walk the path of grace with love and purpose.
This is Part 2 of The Way of Grace.
Part 1: How Grace Weaves Us Into the Family of God
Part 2: How Grace Shapes Who We Become
Part 3: How Our Choices Matter in the Life of Grace
Last week we started a three-week series on the power of grace. We talked about how God’s love for us makes us members of a single family: the family of God’s beloved. This week we’re turning to how the power of Grace shapes the pattern of our everyday lives. I’ll start with a cat I once knew.
An old friend of mine had a cat called Hobbes. When I first met the cat, I asked if she had named him after the talking cat featured in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes.
“No,” she told me. “Thomas Hobbes. I called him that because he’s nasty, brutish, and short.”
That’s the sort of humor you get from philosophy PhDs. Obscure to much of the world. So let me explain. And before I do, I promise you that this has everything to do with what Paul has to say about the power of Grace in his letter to the Galatians.
Anyway, Thomas Hobbes was a 17th century political philosopher frequently compared to and contrasted with John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. All three of them asked the same question: what does a just society look like? Each of them started with a theory of human nature and ended up with what’s called a social contract theory of the just state.
I won’t go into any detail here. My point is only to share what Hobbes said about human nature in his book Leviathan. Human beings are made of matter. Period. There is no immaterial soul. In fact, there is no immaterial anything.
Natural law governs human behavior. Our most basic drives are self-preservation, fear of death, appetites for or aversions to things, desire for power and comfort, and a craving for glory. There is no higher moral law that might curb any of these impulses. In other words, I want what I want when I want it. Only fear of harm or death keeps me from pursuing whatever I want.
In the state of nature—before there were societies and governments, laws and police forces—human beings were in a state of war. A war of all against all. By our very nature we’ll do anything to gratify our own desires without regard for others. Even at the expense of others. Hobbes characterized that kind of life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hence, the cat’s name.
To improve the quality of life, humans formed a state. More precisely, we elevated one person as a powerful king who will impose civil law and order on us with force. And here’s an important point. Even after we get a king, nothing changes about our basic nature. We’re always on the verge of collapsing back into chaos—into the state of war—precisely because we’re still driven by the same radically selfish impulses.
And that brings us back to Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Hobbes, as it turns out, could be said to have been channeling one strand of Paul’s thinking. People can, in fact, follow a path laid out by entirely self-centered urges. Paul refers to that pathway as works of the flesh. And, he says, such a path ends in precisely the destination you might expect: “enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy.” (Galatians 5:20-21a) Sound familiar?
In his book The New Leviathans, the philosopher John Gray argues that we are seeing a collapse of the civil society built upon liberal democracy. Predictably, the chaos described by Hobbes is reemerging. In Gray’s view, this explains the rise of authoritarianism around the globe. His basic assumption is that Hobbes’s bleak view of humanity is right. And since Gray appears to be an atheist, there is no Transcendent power capable of transforming human nature.
And this is where Paul offers an alternative: the power of grace to transform the human heart and to reform human communities. Simply put, grace is the power of God’s love. Not only does God exist, but the Spirit breaks into this very life here and now. Not to push us around or to threaten us with hell. Instead, God recalls us to who we truly are: the image of the loving God.
A spirit-animated life begins with a perhaps vague sense that God loves us. A yearning to return that love emerges. As we begin to see that God loves our neighbor just as surely as God loves us, our love for God unfolds as inseparable from loving our neighbor as ourselves. Love of neighbor is what our love for God looks like in space and time.
To use Paul’s own language, the fruit of the Spirit is both the personal and the communal destination of the spirit-animated life: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” (Galatians 5:22-23a)
To be clear, Paul did not advocate erecting a Christian nationalist state, imposing our devotion to Jesus on everyone else. Instead, he was counseling the Galatians, and urging those of us who follow Jesus, to acknowledge Jesus and only Jesus as the authentic sovereign of our own lives. No state, no earthly ruler, no party can legitimately lay claim to our heart of hearts. And even if such earthly powers seek to do so, we can and must resist. The ancient Christian martyrs died in the arena doing precisely that.
As I’ve written elsewhere, we live as resident aliens wherever we may reside on this planet. To use Augustine’s language, we are citizens of the City of God while dwelling in the City of Man. The law of heaven—the law of love—governs us whether we live in Russia, the United States, or China. As Jeremiah instructed the exiles in Babylon, we should work for the good of the community in which we dwell. (Jeremiah 29:7) But our home and our ultimate allegiance lie elsewhere.
Next week we’ll finish up this series by turning to how grace holds us accountable for what we do and what we leave undone.
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Thanks Jake, I really enjoying listening to you
Thank you, Jake, for including philosophy in your homilies. Although I’ve always been interested in the subject, I haven’t formally studied it - so I really do appreciate your sharing of some of the history.
Second, THIS is what gives me comfort, hope, and security: “No state, no earthly ruler, no party can legitimately lay claim to our heart of hearts.” My beliefs and the way that the grace shown to me motivates me to offer grace to others is something that cannot be taken away - ever. Those of us who love people CAN change the world.