From Adam S. Miler’s book “Original Grace”:
In the summer of 1976, my father found himself in a difficult position. Despite his hard work things weren’t going according to plan. The ends weren’t meeting. He wasn’t winning. . . . .
I was married, and we were about to have a third child. I had completed my four-year college program in three years, while working full time at night. I had no job, no prospects, and did not know what to do. I had been taught to work for what I got. Well, Stanley, a church member gave me his old lawnmower. I used $20.00 to fix the push mower. Put an ad in the paper. I started cutting any lawn for what I could get. I cut hedges and hauled the limbs away in my car. I was worth more than I got. I made over $2,000 that summer to help feed my family. July 26 of that year Adam was born. About two weeks later I was watching Adam as Kay and the family went out. I sat holding him and crying because I did not know how to make money to feed him. I begged Father to help! Holding Adam, I went over to the desk and wrote out our tithing, bringing the balance to zero. The money was all gone! I returned to my chair and just held him and wept.
I’ve never found myself in anything like this same position. I’ve never held my newborn child in my arms and wondered how I would feed them. And I’ve certainly never been forced to weigh that hunger against my tithing—and then had the courage to pay the tithing.
Weeping in that chair, holding me in his arms, did my father feel Benjamin’s nothingness whistle through him, cool and intense? Did it whisper the truth in his ear? Did it leave a bruise in his heart? And then, was that nothingness transfigured when he sacrificed what little he had left? Was it transfigured into light and life and grace? I have strong evidence—a lifetime’s worth of evidence—that my father was deeply familiar with both this nothingness and, on the flipside of that coin, with God’s grace.
“Then a miracle occurred!” my father continues. While still sitting in that chair, still holding me in his arms, “the Altoona School District called and offered me a job!” The lesson” “Trust in God,” he concludes, not yourself or the world around you.2
The basic problem with traditional “grace vs. works” debates is that they involve only two of eternity’s three pillars. They ignore the grace of creation, begin with the fall and assume the logic of original sin. They play out eternity with too-narrow confines of a special theory of grace and dependably start from the assumption—shared ironically, by both sides—that grace and justice are incompatible and the purpose of God’s law is to judge what we deserve.
When our view of grace is constricted by the logic of original sin, salvation shows up as a tug-of-war between our agency (expressed in works) and God’s agency (expressed in grace). Salvation, rather than being a covenant partnership with God, ends up being a zero-sum competition with God. Traditional debates about grace all tend to be variations on this same competition-based arguement about who gets credit for what. Posed in this way, the question will always require some division of credit as an answer. As long as I am required to divide up credit, I’ll also end up divided from God.
This, of course, is how the logic of sin works: regardless of how you answer, it divides you from God. According to the logic of sin, if you can save yourself without God’s grace, you’ve proven you don’t need God. But if you can’t save yourself with your own works, you’ve proven you don’t deserve God. Either way, you’ve been separated from God. Trapped inside this logic, a covenant partnership with Christ will always look like a crutch that must be outgrown in order to achieve a “real ” perfection. ~~Adam S. Miller, Original Grace(Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2022) p. 85-87
