Canter Bridge

The fifth chapter of the apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans shows the man bending his mind to sketching grace’s geometry. Over against the human tendency to imagine that heaven’s blessings fall—mechanically and by the dictates of our power of decision—in proportion to earthly behavior, Paul traces out a different story.

For him, heaven’s actions are not divine response to human provocation, whether for good or ill. Indeed, God is hardly the responder at all. Rather, he lavishes disproportionate love upon what appears to us to be a template our deeds have prepared but which in fact bears little relationship to what, as it were, comes down.

Paul’s argument does not cling to an anchor made up of action-and-response, nor does it correspond to the proportionalities of human logic to any recognizable degree. To the contrary, its core statement is not about similarity but about contrast:

But the free gift is not like the trespass.

From this Pauline conviction about generosity’s assymetry flows any number of lovingly misshapen corollaries. For Paul, the angles and bulges of divine grace are everywhere to be seen and exuberantly to be welcomed. Yet they so easily pass unrecognized before unopened eyes.

For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many. And the free gift is not like the effect of the one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification. If, because of the one man’s trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. But law came in, with the result that the trespass multiplied; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, just as sin exercised dominion in death, so grace might also exercise dominion through justification leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Paul would have us believe that divine intentions do not so much respond to the vagaries of human conduct and the insipid rebellions of the human soul. Rather the divine purpose prevails over such things, dissolving the roadblocks thrown up by our species’ vanity to the loving embrace of God’s project in his world.

The free gift—this is what the apostle would underscore at cost of ink, pride, and despair—is not like the trespass.

Generosity, this strange man would urge upon us, is not bound. It is liberatingly, lavishingly, irreppressibly assymetrical.