THE BIBLICAL CONCEPTION OF CHARIS
Old Testament (Torrance):
There is no one word for grace in the Old Testament as there is in the New, nor are the precise lineaments of the New Testament thought manifest, but the substance of the doctrine is there. In fact there is no language that expresses so profoundly and so tenderly the unaccountable love of God as the Hebrew Old Testament. This is not thought of abstractly but in intensely personal terms as the active love of one who is essentially the living and loving God of Israel. The dominant thought throughout is the amazing choice of Israel by God as grounded only in His free and unlimited love as creating a community in fellowship with God who bestows himself upon them as Father and Saviour forever.
There are four Hebrew words, and I don’t have the ability to reproduce them, so I will produce the transliterations as Torrance gives them:
aheb: unsolicited and unaccountable love. A love which is unconditioned except by His love and His will to love. “The Lord did not set His love upon you nor choose you because ye were more in number than any people, for ye were the fewest of all people; but because the Lord loved you, and because he would keep the oath which he had sworn unto your fathers” (Deut 7:7, 9:4, 10:15, 23:5).
hanan: to bend or stoop; to be favorable toward, or condescending toward; (Judges 21:22). Action which generally passes from the superior to the inferior, carrying with it the idea of unmerited favour.
hen: unmerited favour, supreme condescension on the part of the giver, who is the superior. There is not the slightest obligation on the part of the superior to show this hen. It is all his generosity. There is no thought of any charge of harshness against him if he is not so gracious. The suppliant has not the slightest claim nor is he in a position to do anything to enforce his claim beyond the actual petition itself … when applied to God, it is quite clear that an attitude is involved which cannot be enforced and cannot be claimed.
hesed: God’s “lovingkindness”, closely related to “covenant”, the fundamental relationship upon which the whole structure of Israelite society rested. Includes mercy and forgiveness, but its true significance is that the hesed of God, is that it is everlasting, determined, unshakeable. Wonderful as His love is for His covenant-people, His steady persistence in it is more wonderful still. The most important of all the distinctive ideas f the Old Testament is God’s steady and extraordinary persistence in continuing to love wayward Israel in spite of Israel’s insistent waywardness. Because it is grounded outside the relation of mutual obligation in the eternal promise of God, the hesed implied in it is one in which God’s people can trust forever, for thought the mountains depart and the hills remove, God’s mercy remains true. Even though Israel will prove faithless and break the covenant, God will still hold fast to His loving purpose and will not be thwarted (Is. 58:4, Hosea). Hesed brings men into a positive relation to the righteous will of God, and entails righteousness or tsedeq, another covenant word; hesed and tsedeq involve each other. Because God shows hesed he both requires tsedeq and bestows the means whereby men may conform to it. These concepts merge and overlap. The whole emphasis is on mercy. Torrance notes that, “the thought of the Hebrew Old Testament is greatly impoverished in the LXX, and particularly at the very point where the Old Testament bears the full seed of the New Testament charis.
New Testament (Torrance):
In the New Testament charis (χάρις) becomes a terminus technicus. While other meanings are still current, there is a special Christian sense of the word coined under the impact of Revelation to convey something quite unique.
He divides “Grace in the New Testament” among three groups which he analyses: Grace in the Gospels, Grace in the Epistles of Paul, and Grace in the other New Testament writings. Of these, he summarizes, “there seems no doubt that the Pauline usage of charis became normative for the whole church”.
Grace in the Gospels: God’s love is bestowed spontaneously and freely, and is not evoked by anything in His creatures. Indeed, God’s love has all its reason within Himself. It is its own motive. (Matt 20:1-16). Jesus is constantly reminding men that they do not need anxiously to inquire whether they deserve that God’s favour shall fall upon them (Matt 5:45). The absolute initiative of God’s redemptive love is referred directly to the divine will. That stands out very clearly in the parables of the lost coin, the lost sheep, and the lost son, for example … Such initiative in the divine love completely takes man by surprise. God is among men with redemptive purpose before they are aware of it (22-23).
[Such grace] means the complete undercutting of the human status based on ordinary ethical rights. Therefore even when we have done all those things which we are commanded to do we must confess “we are unprofitable servants; we have done that which was our duty to do”.
In [Christ] the grace of God became event and confronted men as a fait accompli. That is everywhere apparent in His life and teaching, though it is particularly clear in the incident at Nazareth, where, after reading from the book of the prophet Isaiah of “the acceptable year of the Lord”, he said, “This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears.” “And all bare him witness at the gracious words that proceeded out of his mouth.” Christ was declaring quite openly that the saving initiative of God to redeem was embodied in Himself. It is God who comes seeking and forgiving sinners in Christ. The Eternal is present not simply in his word, in the proclamation of His mercy and forgiveness, but in actual fact in Christ. The astonishing thing to so many of His contemporaries was that Jesus spoke with such power, for His word was deed, and His deed was word. Thus Jesus deliberately confronted men with His own person as being identical with the Word of God (Luke 24:19, Acts 1:1, 2:2, 10:36-38. pgs 24-26).
Grace in Paul: For Paul, it is always described as Ἡ χάρις τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ”. And of Paul’s usage, makes several points:
In Paul, there is no separation between the person and the work of Christ. He does not know Christ after the flesh, but Christ crucified and risen after the Spirit. Christ crucified and risen is God’s power and God’s grace-act among men. In the background there is always the thought that charis is the grace of God, but in the foreground it is the person of Christ, and the act of Christ that fill the focus of vision.
The simplest and the most profound expression of grace Paul gives is perhaps the following: δικαιούμενοι δωρεὰν τῇ αὐτοῦ χάριτι διὰ τῆς ἀπολυτρώσεως τῆς ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ (justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, Romans 3:24). It would be safe to say that Paul never speaks of grace, except as grounded in the self-giving of God in the person and death of Jesus, and in every instance it is the objective side of its content that predominates. There is no hint of any psychologising in his use of the word charis. ….
In its primary sense in St. Paul’s epistles grace has to do with the act of divine intervention rather than with our receiving of it. Charis is now the presupposition of all man’s relations with God and constitutive of the whole Christian life. Grace is the decisive deed [accomplished by God] which makes the ground of our approach to God an act and word of His in which He irrevocably committed. It means the establishing of something quite new among men, a new relation to God, not one in which the divine command forms the basis of our relations with God, but one in which the divine self-commitment invites us to approach Him on the grounds of love, because in Christ the divine will has been perfectly fulfilled on our behalf. Grace is a colossal deed that cuts away the ground from all our [“any other”] human religion, and establishes a new religion in the Gospel, so wonderful that men are utterly overwhelmed, and so radical that it entails a complete reversal of all previous attitudes and ideas. Such a reversal means that we cannot think our way in to the wisdom of God, which is, as Paul says, the Cross, because God has done a deed which makes our wisdom foolish and which interrupts us in our career.
“…Grace is the will of God to constitute man’s life afresh on a wholly new basis and in a renewed world, to set him free from sin and Satan; to endue him with the Spirit, to make him the possessor of a supernatural life. It is thus the presupposition of the whole Christian life, not one principle which (along with others) works within that life.”
There can be no doubt that Paul did think of the impact of grace upon men in terms of power, for “the Kingdom of God”, he said, “was not in word only, but in power”. The Gospel was not in word only, not a fiction, but in power and reality, creating its own results in righteousness and truth. … The Christian’s righteousness, wisdom, sanctification, and redemption are to be found in Christ Himself, and so Paul can speak of these as differentiations of charis even when they are manifest in the believer … Charis is never adjectival on the lips of Paul, but always dynamic.
... Grace means the primary and constitutive act in which out of free love God has intervened to set our life on a wholly new basis, but also means that through faith this may be actualized in flesh and blood because it has been actualized in Jesus Christ, who by the Cross and Resurrection becomes our salvation, our righteousness, and our wisdom. Thus any attempt to detach grace in a transferred sense from the actual embodiment of God’s grace in Jesus Christ is to misunderstand the meaning of the Pauline charis altogether.
Grace in other New Testament writings: There seems no doubt that the Pauline usage of charis became normative for the whole Church. Certainly there is little indeed in the other New Testament writings to suggest any divergence. The only two passages worth noting here come in Hebrews and the Epistle of James which correlate charis with the Spirit (Hebrews 10:29; James 4:6).
To sum up: Grace in the New Testament is the basic and most characteristic element of the Christian Gospel, It is the breaking into the world of the ineffable love of God in a deed of absolutely decisive significance which cuts across the whole of human life and sets it on a new basis. That is actualized in the person of Jesus Christ, with which grace is inseparably associated, and supremely exhibited on the Cross by which the believer is once and for all put right with God. This intervention of God in the world and its sin, out of sheer love, and His personal presence to men through Jesus Christ are held together in the one thought of grace (33-35).
New Testament (TDNT):
“In Paul χάρις is a central concept that most clearly expresses his understanding of the salvation event. Naturally the term does not have in every passage the specific sense of Paul’s doctrine of grace… [But] specifically Pauline is the use of the word to expound the structure of the salvation event. The linguistic starting-point is the sense of “making glad by gifts” of showing free unmerited grace. The element of freedom in giving is constitutive, δωρεὰν, [“freely”]. Unlike Philo, Paul orientates himself, not to the question of the nature of God, but to the historical manifestation of salvation in Christ. He does not speak of the gracious God; he speaks of the grace that is actualised in the cross of Christ (Gal 2:15-20, 21) and that is an actual event in proclamation. If God’s favour is identical with the crucifixion, then its absoluteness is established. We are saved by grace alone. Grace is shown to the sinner (Romans 3:23f; Romans 5:10; Gal 2:17;21; Romans 11:32). It is the totality of salvation (2 Cor 6:1). Every Christian has it (1 Cor 1:4)…
It comes to view to the destruction of self-glorying and paradoxical self-glorying in the Lord (1 Cor 1:29, 31) in the cross (Gal 6:14), in weakness (2 Cor 12:9). Grace “is sufficient”.
The power of grace is displayed in its work, the overcoming of sin (Romans 5:20-21). The understanding of its superiority is not quantitative, but qualitative and structural. It is not just superior to sin and its result, death. It is also structurally different. It does not come in the form of destiny, like death. It is free election (Romans 11:5-6). The understanding of grace as a power is historical. It actualizes itself in the Church (Phil. 1:7), e.g., in the collection that Paul makes for the original community, (2 Cor 8).
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