My Beloved is Mine and I am His: non‐commensurable‐giving as a metaphor for the divine‐human relationship

Abstract

At the heart of Christian belief is a gift: the ‘free gift of God. . . in Jesus Christ our Lord’. The language of gift is peppered through the New Testament and constitutes one of its most distinctive features. It portrays an abundant and generous God who acts out of love, without expecting return, and whose generosity in no wise depends on our activity. Traditionally, this utter gratuitousness of God’s gifts has been cited and defended in connection with the doctrine of divine sovereignty: God’s gifts must be offered without expectation of any return, because to claim otherwise would be to imply that God desires something, and so lacks it in the first place.However, this affirmation is in some tension with another: that at the heart of Christian life is a response, in the worship and works of God’s people. While the image of a needy God is alien to Christian understanding, it is equally alien to the Christian understanding to postulate a God who does not want or intend a responsive movement from God’s people. Herein lies a dilemma for Christian theology: how to hold together such an exalted view of the necessary freedom and unconditionality of God’s gift with the maintenance of human responsibility and so capacity to respond?So Christians must at one and the same time preach that God gives freely; and that to love God is necessarily to serve God. This tension is a familiar and perennial one, beginning with the faith-versus-works controversy of the New Testament itself, and re-emerging regularly throughout Christian history.