Psalm 100
Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth.
Worship the Lord with gladness;
come before him with joyful songs.
Know that the Lord is God.
It is he who made us, and we are his;
we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.
Enter his gates with thanksgiving
and his courts with praise;
give thanks to him and praise his name.
For the Lord is good and his love endures forever;
his faithfulness continues through all generations.
Previous series posts:
God is Grace – Grace Series Part I of III
Introduction to Grace as Life
In this second Circling Series post, we will continue to explore the most important and mind-blowing concept in the history of God (to theists) and maybe even in the history of nature (to atheists), and that is Grace. As noted in the first Grace Series post (and in our Praxis Circle video library), there are many definitions of Grace, like there are for each of the Ten Worldview Concepts (or Pillars) we introduced in the last Grace post.
The definition we used there is “Grace is the godliness of God.” As such, Grace is maybe the primary attribute defining God as we know and understand Him. (We adopt for convenience the traditional Christian pronoun for God here.) The development of that idea will continue into Part III of III.
We will consider other definitions of Grace here as well. Importantly, we should note early on that the Grace concept is at the heart of the praxis process, where theory meets practical experience in the human mind and where God, if any, meets human beings in His image. In other words, Grace is, as an adverbial-type word, very much a process or happening, not necessarily a result or outcome. Indeed, Grace is much the process of human life itself (as well as a state of being for God and human beings). Grace is a verb, noun, object, adverb, and adjective all wrapped into one fuzz ball.
Ok, if the definition of Grace “as the godliness of God” is supremely operable, you might ask, then how could Grace mean anything to atheists? We hope you will understand that by the end of this post, too.
Granted, the secular version of grace is nowhere close to as powerful a concept as the theist version (e.g., Jewish and Christian versions), but it’s still pretty huge and worth considering. Furthermore, it’s really all secularists have to fall back on for inspiration beyond virtue morality, unless you’re a self-serving Nietzschean-type or nihilist.
We should also highlight here the Ten Worldview Concepts introduced in our first post that place Grace squarely in the ” Natural Circle.” We think the Ten Pillars shown there, while tailored to portray the Christian and Jewish worldviews, in particular, are useful in thinking about all major worldviews around the globe. As we’ve noted in prior PC posts, Judaism and Christianity are not the same worldview. Nonetheless, few would dispute that the former is the foundation of the latter, or that the three Abrahamic faiths, including Islam, have substantial similarities.
To demonstrate how the Ten Worldview Concepts can work for other worldviews: If you consider yourself a secular person, you could simply remove the “Supernatural Circle” and everything in it from the diagram, remove Imago Dei and the Cross from the center (an alternative for Imago Dei and the Cross might be You/Me), and draw one circle around whatever you choose to leave on the page. You could then label the circle “The Natural.” Outside the circle would be “Nothing.” (We showed this diagram in abbreviated form in our previous Grace post). You could even insert the three transcendentals—truth, goodness, and beauty—if your want. Plenty of human secularists shape their morality around them.
In our depiction of Christian worldview in the Ten Worldview Concepts diagram, it might appear like we chose to leave out goodness (and its opposite, evil). However, evil is still there underlying all in the diagram in three ways.
First, goodness (versus evil) is perhaps the main issue worldwide underlying all of Morality (inside the “Human Relations Circle”). It’s central to almost every worldview. Defining “the good” and “the bad” is the issue. In every human group, an agreed upon morality is the central unifying force of human relations and Morality makes us, with human consciousness, totally unique in the animal realm. There are “laws of nature” or observations about nature that are self-evident to every person.
Second, in the Abrahamic worldviews, God is truth, goodness, and beauty Itself, so those “being essences” might be thought of as taking up the whole circle depicted in the “Supernatural Circle” above.
Third, since the Biblical God in Genesis says all of being created originally was good, goodness actually characterizes being in all three circles (as does truth and beauty). In contrast, Grace as “the godliness of God” operates in all three circles, yet the Grace force is still separate from being. This is an important theological point separating Christian orthodoxy from other Christian theories, trending toward process or New Age theology, Spinozan philosophy, and various Eastern religions and philosophies.
In sum, we see the Ten Worldview Concepts moving in a clockwise Grace rotation around the center where God (the Cross) and man/woman (Imago Dei) can intervene in praxis at any time (the arrows). The Grace rotation can also move counterclockwise as it did for Moses on Mount Sinai. (We will not have the time to elaborate on this rotation today.)
But to elaborate on the clockwise rotation, we thought it more helpful to show Grace as the first worldview pillar in a clockwise rotation around the chart because the Biblical God created the natural world first and human beings second; with more complex human relations coming into play later in time. This account fits with today’s predominant scientific view, which has human relations existing inside a natural world. It also highlights that Grace is a relational process.
In this Series II post, we discuss God in the natural world as our Creator God influencing nature and man evenly. In the final Series III post, we will emphasize God involved directly with particular human persons and events.
As we explained in Series I when we introduced Beauty as a new PC Pillar, we placed Beauty in the “Supernatural Circle.” It has to go somewhere because it’s so important, as are evil and ugliness (but we digress). Beauty offers the most direct route (read: emotional or passionate) to God from Human Beings without needing reason. Human being are famous for acting first and explaining later!
But Beauty, like Truth and Goodness, is everywhere in God and His creation and in human beings and our relations. It just takes language and reason to understand this and talk about it, as only we human creatures do—which gets us through this introduction and brings us to the Three Big C Words concerning Grace.
Creator, Creation, and Creatures
Perhaps the starting point to understanding Grace is recognizing the radical difference between the God of the Jews in ancient times and the other pagan gods that dominated competing religions. The God of the Jews was a Creator God. Their god created the heavens and the earth and everything human beings encountered.
Other religions either held that the universe, as we think of it today, had always existed, or they had a creation story that involved gods or god-like beings that formed being as we know it. Generally, however, creation was more an aspect of the narrative than the result of a single, all powerful, good, knowledgeable, and wise being. If you had to pick one message in Genesis among all the others, that would have to be it.
We highlighted the famous 100th Psalm at the top here to make this point. The Psalms as a whole offer a constant reminder. Hear, Oh Israel, quoting one line from the 100th: “It is he who made us, and we are his.” We cannot be mistaken that we have a Creator who created creation, and creatures to live there.
The Creator is different from His creation and creatures. Classical Judeo-Christian (CJC) philosophy claims a Creator God is a necessary god given what humanity observes in the world: It is argued there must be an Omni-Great Unmoved First Mover. The ancients felt much more helpless and had less knowledge. As a result, they did not seek to question God or the gods as much about creation.
It is different today. You can argue with God (as characters in the Bible commonly do) as much as you so desire about whether you like creation and life or not . . . and even suggest how you would have designed it differently.
But as the ancients knew: God is God, the Creator God, and you are not. Perhaps the ancients got this part right, along with the need for a First Mover and the order of God’s creative activity in the universe. Based on the historical record, they were obviously just as smart as we are and one heck of a lot tougher (and maybe even wiser). Certainly, we’re all still examining the same, biggest, fundamental questions of life.
The Bible tells us that what God made was good, and everything else transpires in time from there. The obvious conclusion is that, “God being God,” the Creator’s first act of Grace was (note the assumption of the Time and Space Pillars) creating life itself and our existence.
God being God, the one and only living, loving, relational god, prepared the way for life on earth and made it happen. (Not to say there isn’t life elsewhere.) Science and the Man God Narrative (versus the Creator God Narrative we are describing here) are increasingly unable to explain this. Science today sees God’s Mind and traces everywhere.
This brings us to the second definition of Grace we’d like to offer: “Grace is God’s creation, preservation (or sustaining), and continued transformation (or improving) of his creation, especially those creatures made in His image.” The Jewish and Christian faiths believe God made the world good and loves us and has our best interests at heart. God created and sustains us and continuously seeks our best interests. Grace is the unfolding drama of God’s intervention in the world.
In recognition of the supreme importance of the Creator/Creation relationship, we offer the clip at the top of this post where PC Contributor Stephen Meyer discusses the influence of the supernatural (or Mind) on the material and how this manifested itself in the Cambrian Explosion of life (pro-God and con-evolution versus pro-God and pro-evolution), a completely unexplained scientific phenomena that occurred well after the Big Bang. This post’s featured picture is of two creatures that appear in the Cambrian Period’s fossil record, seemingly from out of nowhere in Darwin’s time.
Such life forms are information to Dr. Meyer, who maintains that only minds produce information (and that only minds can understand information). As we have said repeatedly, science is not closing the gaps on the Creator, but exploding the idea that we might ever grasp the most basic aspects of being scientifically. Darwin’s theory of evolution through random change producing favorable, reproducible adaptations has always lacked credibility, and it looks increasingly dead as decades pass. Science is taking us there.
If we can agree on the scientific aspects of time and space generally recognized by Western science, then we must admit that there might be no other way to explain creation and approximately 14 billion years of sustained existence, along with the survival and prospering of mankind, without God’s help. Everything we know and observe in a material universe governed by nothing more than chance seems to be hostile to life.
And yet we are conscious of the world, and it often appears beautiful and good. While most certainly dangerous and ominous, there is a distinct feeling of joyfulness in humans and other animals. Often, all of nature sings in creation.
Secular Grace
So, if the concept of Grace involves God, then how could it relate to a secular materialist worldview at all (you might be wondering)?
Yes, a Webster’s definition of grace is “unmerited divine assistance given to humans for their regeneration or sanctification” or “a virtue coming from God” or “disposition to or an act or instance or kindness, courtesy, or clemency.” Theists attribute this narrative to God and to human beings working together.
Note that human beings alone of almost any worldview can offer unmerited assistance, exhibit virtues, and have a disposition to act in kindness or clemency. In a sense, human beings with natural worldviews group together and help each other all around the world. We seem to offer each other grace. We cannot survive in nature without it. As a result, there is nothing proprietary to theists in a worldview sense concerning the concept of grace.
Two PC Contributors in the playlist displayed below, Jonathan Haidt and Jim Bacon, explain their worldviews and suggest that grace plays a part in their beliefs as well. Dr. Haidt offers a terrific distinction between objective truth (truth that does not depend on human being) and anthropomorphic truth (truth—like moral truth—that does depend on human being).
He also explains that perhaps the primary distinction between humans and other animals is our “shared intentionality.” Human creatures have the highest level of consciousness known to natural science with their ability to place themselves in the minds of others and then act together as one to achieve common goals. Other primates do not do this the same way. All of this makes a high level of human grace possible: people helping each other, even selflessly. Jon also hints at being sympathetic to Judeo-Christian morality, and he allows that some of the more notable and even militant atheists are, too.
Subsequently in the same playlist, Jim takes Jon’s worldview a bit further saying he recognizes his personal moral base comes from CJC morality, and that he appreciates and welcomes it. Who is to say whether it is just natural human law or divine law or even defensible to a pure materialist? Human beings are capable of adopting almost any belief they desire.
Jon and Jim do not need to explain where the mind or consciousness comes from; they just believe it’s obvious it exists. Both believe Darwinism has much explanatory power, even with the increasing problems and issues other scientists and philosophers like Stephen Meyer raise.
Of course, there are extremely good people holding nearly every worldview. We God believers hope good human secularism is capable of sustaining itself in the future, though many of us are increasingly seeing how secularism lacks normal guardrails, taking the logic of materialism to its natural endpoint. As often said, the Truth of God and God being Good—or even simply a good idea—are two separate issues.
Types of Jewish and Christian Grace
As suggested already, it’s impossible to cover well in only three posts the supreme concept known to men and women as Grace. With this in mind, we can only mention in passing that in talking about Grace, human languages have isolated many different types of Grace.
To name Grace’s most commonly cited forms, there is: General revelation, special revelation, common grace, uncommon grace, providence, saving grace, and finally a Catholic series of graces—motivating/actual, habitual, and charismatic grace—not to mention secular grace.
(We highly recommend the exceptional series of videos from The Thomistic Institute on Catholic Grace linked here. Thomas Aquinas‘ genius and writings remain as relevant today as in the Middle Ages, and they continue to influence Christians and other theistic thinking worldwide. If you want to understand why we still live the way we do in the West with more specificity than simply reading the Bible cover-to-cover, enroll in this course on Aquinas’ Summa. The world is fortunate to have an institutions like The Thomistic Institute dedicated to the continued study of Thomas Aquinas.)
These “graces” actively engage such concepts as the relation between the supernatural and the natural, ultimate reality versus natural reality, the mind versus the body, the role of prayer, predestination versus free will, good versus evil, and cause versus effect. Many of these issues are directly or indirectly addressed in our PC playlist presented below that walk the viewer through the Grace Worldview Pillar.
PC Contributor Reverend John Miller from Richmond, Virginia serves as a host for the playlist in appearing in the initial clips. He introduced Doug Monroe, our Executive Director, to the theological concept of Grace in the late 1980s. (Hard to imagine how Doug missed the biggest concept known to man, given his years of schooling and many church services attended prior to that! It also explains why he believes it’s important to bring these PC posts to you.)
It’s safe to say that all of these “Grace issues” (and many more related ones) are covered well in the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments. The traditional Biblical narrative involving creation, fall, redemption, and restoration (or revelation) is often characterized as the story of God’s Grace in relation to the world, most particularly human beings in His image. Our Grace Pillar playlist is taken from our PC library of over 1,500 clips, and it also includes some of our PC Contributors who challenge the ideas of Truth, God, and Grace, etc. If one is to have a mature Jewish or Christian worldview, one is going to have to think through all of the legitimate and serious issues they raise (recognizing that to most Protestants all that’s needed in the end is faith in Jesus Christ).
What our Ten Worldview Concepts add to the traditional Biblical narrative is a way to think about Abrahamic worldview presuppositions. Increasingly, Christian evangelicals are recognizing that the social religious debate in the West centers more on these presuppositions than on the Bible itself, and that churches have failed and continue to fail unnecessarily in this debate. Certainly, this is our position and what we see. Much is due to a lack of training in fundamental areas like the existence of God, Truth, Morality, the Supernatural, etc. Praxis Circle is trying to help remedy this.
In fact, the Creator, creation, creatures idea and our national and Western worldview wars today are so important and lacking clarity that we are experiencing, seeing, and trying to contribute to a Christian worldview advancement, or even a paradigm shift, that requires completely new thinking and terminology which we offer in our posts on various subjects and in our videos.
In any case, to return to the subject at hand: the two large Grace distinctions within the Christian faiths seem to be between (1) Common and Uncommon Grace, or (2) General and Special Grace, being related concepts but not exactly the same. They both distinguish between God’s attention to the world or mankind generally and particular human beings in particular times and places. Common and General Grace are the support the world and all human beings receive through God’s involvement in nature, God still being separate from nature. In contrast, Uncommon and Special Grace are God’s direct help or revelation offered to particular human beings, like you. General Grace is Grace, again, given to all, whereas Special Grace involves salvation offered directly to particular persons from the Father, Son, or Holy Spirit helped by faith in Christ.
We should mention again as we have often in the past: we are not theologians and are not trying to be. To have an informed worldview today, however, we all must dip into theology, philosophy, and pragmatism.
Nevertheless, we do notice in studying history that various types of Grace are emphasized over others over the long course of Western history, and that Special Revelation or Grace as a concept was a key aspect of the Protestant Reformation (but more a rediscovery than wholly original). Here is a random but good listing of New Testament Bible verses making distinctions primarily from the writing of St. Paul among basic types of Grace. If you really want to get bogged down in important theology between the big five Biblical faiths (Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Muslim), enter into a discussion (here Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro) of how believers achieve salvation on Judgment Day. This might be the most important point of interest to all of us, but we certainly will not go there here.
Universal Common Grace
Before closing, we do want to touch on the type of Grace most closely related to life, the world itself, and human beings as a species living in the world, as exhibited in the Cambrian Explosion: that type being Universal Common Grace. (We added the word universal to make the point that it seems to exist or happen in “the material world” in every particle of matter or every wave of energy.) Something seems to be working for existence as particles appear here and there at the same time, holding the world together from a quantum space, and moving it towards an end in spite of the often overwhelming conditions of entropy in material nature or original sin in human beings.
Sunshine and rain falls on all life, and matter and energy pack unexplainable forces of power. The ancients could only have imagined such unseen forces as godly. Right again! We cannot explain the nuclear and magnetic forces; we only describe them. Furthermore, all of life to most since the beginning of recorded history seems to exhibit unmistakable purposes, and the good and beautiful are aided over the long haul in ways that go far beyond chance or coincidence. The more one understands this, the more it becomes detectable, and the more “miracles” appear in the everyday of life’s self-consciousness.
This is why our most recently introduced PC Contributor Eric Metaxas defines miracles not as events that happen that are impossible, but as “God revealing Himself to us as if speaking.” Grace or miracles (not exactly the same thing but close) are a sign or signs from God.
Once human beings open themselves to listening and seeing this way, the world changes completely. All of mankind is capable of moving ahead together with God in a purposeful, good, and even happy or pleasurable way. What we are witnessing in the West—where we are suffering from over-secularization that began with “the Enlightenment”—is a re-enchantment of man’s worldview due to increased experience with and knowledge of reality, not increased or renewed “make believe” out of the Dark Ages.
We hope America is in the process of realigning itself and moving ahead as one via Grace as it has during various rather “miraculous” moments in its 400 plus years of history influenced by the West. We see miracles of human life all over the recent news, and Americans coming together in unity.
When talking about Universal Uncommon Grace, one needs to go all the way back to Genesis and the Big Bang. All of history, for better or worse, is God’s history preparing for and with human creatures. It’s up to us to make it good, with God’s help.
All Grace Types in One Biblical (Old Testament) Story
Next time in Grace Series Part III, we will focus on the type of Grace we’re all most interested in: the kind that involves God speaking directly to you and us. As Reverend John Miller says, St. Paul wound up on his keister blind; as Eric Metaxas says, God handled him a live golden fish out of ice water, and as PC Executive Director Doug Monroe says, God (and his wife!) handed him a newborn baby daughter on his birthday.
We encourage you to review the video clip below that gives an Old Testament rendering of the story of Naaman. (We offer it a second time for those who missed it at the end of Grace Series I, and we will comment on it in Grace III.)
How many forms of Grace can you name in that video?
What are the critical facts that need to align themselves for Grace to operate in the world? Is it predictable? How much is dependent on God, and how much is it dependent on man? Is the phenomenon exclusive to or the property of the gifted few, but not others? Is it possible to harness the power of Grace on your own? How yes, and how no? Who is to blame for the evil (spiritual and physical pain & suffering) in the world, and how might we best handle it? Are we predestined or free? What is the true nature of creation and our purpose here?
In the meantime, we encourage you to enjoy the second half of the summer of 2024 and every moment you are given in this life and in America, as applicable. We’re experiencing today an “as good as it gets” Midsummer Night’s Dream in a largely peaceful America. We hope it continues.
We are here because of Grace, and what we enjoy and grow on, we owe to God. Surely, this is true: For the Lord is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations.
Praise the Lord. It is back in fashion, looking even more relevant than up to 3,500 years ago when first written down. Truth and the wisdom of the ages do not change. “We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we’ve first begun.” To repeat, PTL.
