Naked Preacher and Cheap Grace

In the spring of 1982, I was standing in a mall in Atlanta.  I was with several friends from Atlanta Christian College.  We were at the Atlanta-wide Goodwill, used book sale.  We were skipping class so we could be among the first to sort through the books.  We were hoping to fill our fledgling libraries on the cheap. As we thumbed through the titles a friend handed me a book and said, “I’ve got a copy of this, if you don’t, you should buy it.”  At 50 cents a book, my five dollars went pretty fast, so while my richer friends continued to search, I found a bench and began with chapter one: “Cheap Grace is the deadly enemy of our church.”  The Cost of Discipleship remains one of my favorite books, one that I read over and over.

Bonheoffer’s battle against cheap grace is a little different from the battle we fight, but his words are hauntingly true for us today.  Later in that opening chapter Bonheoffer wrote: “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves.  Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession.  Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”

Those words came to my memory this week when I heard news of a pastor from a very large church that was caught having sex with a woman from his congregation.  The woman’s gun toting, enraged husband chased him naked from the home.  News of the event spread across the city rapidly.  We might expect that in such a situation the church might require a season of repentance, counseling, church discipline and accountability.  Rather, the next Sunday (two days later) he informs the church:

“What I want from God I’ve already received it ― and that’s his forgiveness.  If I stop preaching, if I stop doing what the Lord called me to do over this, it presupposes that I was qualified to do it in the first place. ... We will move forward.”  A video of his statement is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CzdZc3ymMs.  He apparently has no plans to step down.

The grace we bestow on ourselves is forgiveness without any consequence for sin or the hurt caused by it.  It covers the cancer with a Band-Aid, but never seeks to root out the disease.    This grace allows us to return to “normal” as quickly as possible without considering that “normal” is grossly wrong.  In self-applied forgiveness, we do not hear the heart wrenching sorrow we hear from David in Psalm 51. We have been warned by Bonheoffer, “Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner”.  Cheap grace is completely incapable of changing the heart; it will only make the sinner more careful to cover his tracks.

Maybe we have lost sight of the awfulness of sin.  Maybe we have forgotten what was required for our forgiveness.  Maybe we are just too cavalier with forgiveness and we are ready to “forgive ourselves” (a concept fraught with theological problems) in a moment.

My heart breaks for this minister, his wife, the other woman, her husband, all their kids, the local congregation, and the church universal.  But we must not assume that a huge covering of generalized “forgiveness, forgetfulness and now we move on” will make things better.  Cheap Grace will only sicken the local congregation and the church universal.