Bonhoeffer, the famous Christian German theologian, who was executed in WWII for his Christian resistance against Nazism, coined the terms “cheap grace” and “costly grace”. In making this distinction, Bonhoeffer saw cheap grace as problematic and while costly grace was the true gospel. While I appreciate the distinction that Bonhoeffer makes between the two types of grace, I am not a fan of his terms nor the judgements that come from them. Rather than “cheap” and “costly” grace, I see both experiences as expressions of legitimate grace, just that Bonhoeffer’s costly grace is a deeper form of grace leading to transformation. Let me explain. Bonhoeffer wrote that “cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, . . . Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate” (The Cost of Discipleship, 44) In contrast, he believed that “costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. (The Cost of Discipleship, 45). What Bonhoeffer labelled “cheap grace” is called experiences of transcendence within the Diamond Approach. These are experiences of the sacred that cause us to rise above our issues or be freed momentarily from the emotional burden that our issues cause us. Many people can point to mystical experiences in their life where they felt touched by God whether it be a conversion, forgiveness, or a healing experience. Many people find sacred music, sacred ritual, and prayers as times when they feel the presence of the Divine. During most of these experiences, some form of emotional release happens. This catharsis is a form of grace for we can’t make catharsis happens; it is a gift that arises as we let go of or release that which we are holding onto. This is why cathartic experiences are seen by many people as sacred, times when God’s spirit touched us or anointed us or released us from our oppression. In the Christian tradition, we have many phrases that capture these divine moments. However, what often happens, for most people who have these type of experiences, is that within a few weeks, they find themselves struggling with the same issues and feelings that they had before the sacred experience occurred. They may now identify as Christian, maybe even strongly identify as Christian because their sacred experience was so powerful, but they find themselves struggling with their fallen human nature again. In fact, this struggle is now more pronounced for newly identified Christians are often more conscious of the human divided nature that Apostle Paul describes so well in Romans 7 (“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” Rom 7: 15). Many Christians find this intense struggle disheartening and very confusing. From a Diamond Approach perspective, this resistance is a common and natural pattern. Our egoic nature seeks to return us to our asleep state where it can operate without interruption. Much of what we do in Christian worship fall into this category of transcendent experiences. Through music, prayers, ritual and preaching, we help people experience moments of God’s presence, transcendence. They can transcend the experiences of their fallen nature momentarily. They are released for a period from the heavy emotions of guilt, shame, anger, hate, etc. that weighs them down. These are all valid moments of God’s grace. Within Bonhoeffer’s framework, he saw such moments of grace as “cheap grace” for little permanent transformation had happen to the person’s fallen nature and character. The issue for me is not that the experience of God’s grace was not real or true. Rather, the issue is one of depth. The spirit of God’s spirit had not penetrated to the deeper levels of the person’s soul where most of the ego structures that make up one’s fallen nature reside. So how do we experience these deeper levels of divine grace? When people seek experience of God’s grace, they are usually seeking to escape their pain and negative feelings from their life and history. This is why transcendent experiences are so popular for they do exactly that--they take us away from our pain. However, such transcendent experiences don’t often change or transform the ego structures and painful memories in our soul. These unresolved painful memories still remain and so when our transcendent experiences pass away, we return to our normal operating state and find ourselves re-experiencing and re-enacting our fallen nature all over again. What would happen if instead of transcending our painful past, we instead descended into the painful places of our soul with the goal of allowing God’s spirit to minister to these parts? From a Diamond Approach perspective, this is the pathway to deeper experiences of God’s grace that lead to transformation. This is the “costly grace” that Bonhoeffer talks about…a grace that arises as we seek to find the hidden treasure that was lost in each painful or traumatic moment of our past, including many parts of our childhood in our family of origin. This challenging path of descent into our brokenness and pain is what the Christian tradition calls the path of the cross and the dying to the egoic self, something our egoic self avoids at every turn. There is lots of resistance to this journey of soul transformation. And yet, when we experience grace in these deeper places of our soul, profound sacred experiences arise, ones that change us and our souls forever. When we experience God’s compassion at this level, our soul softens and we able to experience aspects of our painful past with all its rawness and emotions. As these negative emotions arise, we also can experience God’s spirit holding and responding to our experiences in ways that our parents could not and did not do due to their human limitations. We discover that God’s spirit can hold all our anger, guilt, shame, weakness, hurt, hatred, fear, anxiety, etc. without any judgement. This is how God’s unconditional love is experienced. It is why the church teaches that the core of God’s character is that of unconditional love. As we sense God holding all our negative experiences in this gracious way, insights and understandings come to us that cause us to release all the negative emotions, hurt and pain trapped in our soul. With all these painful emotions no longer imprisoned in the deep levels of our soul, we have no need for the ego structures that held this pain and kept us from re-experiencing it. Aspects of our egoic self start dissolving, disappearing for they are no longer needed. We find that our soul is more spacious, freer to experience others, ourselves, life and God as they really are, and not through the filters and blinders of our fallen nature due to our history. We begin to experience everything in our lives as more alive, real, true… This experience of soul transformation that I have just described never happens at once. It is a journey, a transformation journey that we will be on all our life for our egoic self is constantly resisting it. However, as our soul transforms one ego structure at a time, we taste more the freedom, aliveness and wholeness that comes from “working on our salvation” (Phil 2:12). The more our soul tastes this freedom and integration, the more our soul longs for its full salvation, to come fully whole, one, and home with God, the more our soul is determined to follow this journey of spiritual life to its completion, no matter what the costs.
This journey of transformation, compared to transcendence, is not an easy path for our egoic self or human fallen nature resists it. Even within the church context, there is lots of resistance for while we often preach about this cross journey that leads to resurrections, we have few settings where people find the support they need to do the work needed for this transformation journey. This is one of my hopes as I begin to train pastoral counsellors and spiritual directors within a congregational setting. I am hoping that these specially trained people can become the safe places where people can experience the holding and support they need to “work on their salvation”. In doing so, they will discover a fuller sense of life and wholeness that God seeks for everyone to experience on Earth. Questions to Ponder:
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