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Commentary
GEN-X RISING: Trading new patterns for old Andrew C. Thompson, Feb 4, 2010
Andrew Thompson
By Andrew C. Thompson UMR Columnist
Editor’s note: This is the second in a multi-part series on the means of grace in Christian practice.
My last column began looking at our need to re-engage the means of grace. These are—in the apt phrase of Methodist scholar Laceye Warner—“disciplined practices of Christian formation.” And they help us to grow as mature disciples of Jesus Christ by drawing us to a place where God’s grace can transform us.
The means of grace are crucial to the Church’s future for one important reason: Never before has the deck been so stacked against the possibility of our salvation.
Salvation is a Latin word, the root of which is salus. And salus means health or well-being. So salvation simply describes what it means to be healthy in an ultimate sense. As we are saved, we are healed of diseases both physical and spiritual so that we can be restored fully to the image of God in which humanity was originally created.
I am drawn to Wesleyan teaching partly because it refuses to concede that salvation only happens after our earthly deaths. Why did Jesus bother with the Resurrection, when he could have died on the Cross and ascended directly to heaven? It’s because he took on flesh not only to point the way to paradise but also to show us that salvation starts here and now.
John Wesley himself insisted that Methodists understand salvation in this sense. “It is not a blessing which lies on the other side [of] death,” Wesley wrote, “or (as we usually speak) in the other world.” Salvation is rather something that the Holy Spirit begins working in our lives at the present.
For Wesley, salvation extends “to the entire work of God, from the first dawning of grace in the soul till it is consummated in glory.”
When I say that the deck is stacked against us, I’m talking about the character of our society. Cultural messages tell us we’re just fine and that we deserve to satisfy whatever appetites happen to seize us. The popular fast-food motto “Have it your way” could serve for our entire consumer culture: Food, sex, power, money and more junk than you can stuff in a mini-storage unit are all there for the taking.
The truth is that we do have real needs. They’re just not the ones you see advertised in most TV commercials. The real irony is that one of our truly greatest needs is the need to be freed from the gluttony and avarice that drive our insatiable consumerism.
Here’s where the means of grace become really important: As disciplined practices of Christian formation, the means of grace have the ability to replace the unhealthy patterns of our lives with healthier ones. And in the process, they can open us up to the kind of transformation that heals us of our sin and sets us on a new way of life.
The persistent tug of our surrounding culture is to keep our eyes cast toward the things of the world. But when we begin to adopt a pattern of life shaped by faithful practices of discipleship, we find that the incessant temptations of the world begin to lose their hold.
Thomas à Kempis wrote, “Habit already formed will resist you, but it shall be overcome by a better habit.” We can be assured of that statement’s truth because the better habits we’ll be adopting are nothing less than practices given to us by Jesus and that serve as channels of his grace.
In the next few columns, I’ll look at examples of the means of grace—and why each is important. But first, I wanted to show why they are so crucial for us today.
Wesley insisted that an outwardly changed life depends on an inward renewal of the soul. And he was equally insistent that such a change—salvation!—progresses according to our intentional use of the means of grace.
At one point, he summarized our faithful participation in the means of grace as an “exercise of the presence of God.” And he followed that with an assurance: “Never can you use these means but a blessing will ensue. And the more you use them, the more will you grow in grace.”
Andrew Thompson
