Toward a Relational Understanding of Salvation

In his popular book Believing Christ, Stephen Robinson relates a parable which at least in my experience has become quite influential in LDS discussions of grace. In this story, Robinson’s young daughter asks if she can have a bicycle. Robinson replies, save your pennies until you have enough. Some time later, he discovers that his daughter has diligently followed his instructions, and has managed to save all of sixty-one cents. They go to look at bicycles, but his daughter is devastated to realize just how much more the bicycle costs than she is able to contribute. Robinson, however, tells her that if she gives all that she has, he will pay the rest, and he purchases the bicycle.

The parallels here are fairly obvious. We cannot achieve salvation on our own—but we are still required to contribute however much we can, no matter small it may be. In this approach, 2 Nephi 25:23—“it is by grace that we are saved after all we can do”—describes a situation in which we do what we can, we contribute what we have, and grace makes up the (vast) difference.

I think this parable has good to offer, particularly in its stress that we are not expected to do more than we can, and its focus on Christ’s ability to save us. In this, it serves as an important corrective to an over-emphasis on works. However, I have some serious reservations about it.

For one thing, I believe this account fails to deal adequately with the question of why our works matter. Why, one might well ask, does God need the sixty-one cents? Perhaps the most obvious answer is that God doesn’t actually need it—but we need to put in the effort of contributing it, for our own growth and development. This means, however, that we have not really escaped the problem of salvation by works, even if it has been given a makeover. Salvation is still something we are in some way bringing about through our actions, even if our contribution is meager at best. And if they only contribute an infinitesimal amount, it is hard to see how our works really matter.

And I think this inevitably raises the question of, what does it mean to do “all that you can”? The emphasis that this is enough is meant, I believe, to relieve us of the burden of being super-human. But do any of us truly do all we can do, live up to all that we can be? What does that even mean, or look like? In practice, I think it usually gets interpreted as “try really hard and repent a lot,” which isn’t terrible advice, but I think still has the potential to leave people theologically stranded, wondering if they will ever measure up—whether they can come up with even the sixty-one cents.

At the same time, I am wary of a model of grace in which salvation is so much a free gift that it is unrelated to human action. The usual criticism is that this approach runs the risk of encouraging complacency, and what theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer refers to as “cheap grace”. And even going beyond that, I think it makes it difficult to meaningfully connect salvation to our actual, particular lives.

What to make, then, of grace and works? In listening to many LDS discussions of this topic, I am struck by the tendency to treat the question of salvation as a kind of formula. We know that grace plus human effort equals salvation; the challenge, then, is to correctly determine what weight each of these variables contributes to the equation. God promises to perform certain tasks, and humans promise to perform certain tasks, and these two elements combine to produce the desired result. A notable point in such a model is that while our relationship with Christ is crucial, it is a means to an end. Christ’s role is to makes up the difference, both for our sin and our inability to get where we need to be. But this relationship is not ultimately the goal; the goal is the saved or perfected person who emerges from it. In other words, salvation is something brought about by a relationship; it is not itself a relationship.

But I believe that this is off the mark—because salvation, I would argue, must be relational. The LDS understanding of what it is to be human centers on relationship: we talk about our most core identity as being children of God, and we describe an exaltation which cannot be achieved in isolation. It is interesting that frequently when we discuss perfection, we use negatives to describe it—defining it in terms of what it is not, as a state without sin. But this is a strikingly static view, and is clearly at odds with our deeply dynamic understanding of exaltation as something involving eternal progression. And perfection understood positively, I believe, has fundamentally to do with relationships—with our continually evolving connection with God, and with one another.

The notion that grace is God’s favorable disposition toward us is helpful here, as it arises from a relational context. Notably, this does not only come after sin, as a way to counter it. It is primary. It comes at the beginning. It is a basic element of who we are; it circumscribes our lives. Grace is more than about reconciliation and forgiveness for sin, or even about making us into better people. God’s relation to us is the very premise and ground of our existence. It is also a call to transformation, to be born again, to become new creatures; put another way, to participate in this relationship. In the LDS sacrament prayers, the promise from God is that we will always have the Spirit. This is a relational promise, pointing to the fact that it is in and through this relationship that we are changed. Again, it might be tempting to see this as a means to an end, as if the goal is for the Spirit to purify us into some pristine state of autonomous perfection. But I would argue that the work of the Spirit is rather to draw us into deeper communion with God, and thereby also with one another.

So what about our sixty-one cents? What about the idea that we need to do all that we can? In the context of such a model, I am most persuaded by an approach which emphasizes righteous desires rather than particular actions. It is clear in Paul’s description of the characteristics of charity in 1 Corinthians 13, for example, that this does not refer to particular acts—in fact, a focus on the acts can get us into trouble—but rather to an orientation, a way of being in the world.

But we still run into trouble with this. Because what if our orientation is elsewhere? What if we find that not only are we not all that good, we don’t even really want to be? Grace might be able to make up for our lack if we have the desire but fail to live up to it; but what if we struggle to even have the desire in the first place? Is there any hope for us in such a case? The desire for righteousness, it seems to me, must itself be the result of grace, something which arises from an encounter with the divine. This perhaps makes the most sense when we look to the experience of human love. The only way to truly understand what love is is through experiencing it, through being in a loving relationship. I note that this is a very different model than one in which we learn the good in a kind of intellectual way and then enact it in our lives, in which salvation is about properly applied knowledge. Rather, it is relational experience that is transformative.

This is not about sentimentality, it is worth pointing out; it can actually be deeply unsettling. Perhaps one of the most potentially disorienting aspects of it is that it moves us away from what is sometimes described as spiritual economy of exchange, in which people get exactly what they have merited and blessings are doled out precisely in proportion to human effort. Grace calls us to look at the world in a drastically different way—to stop measuring and weighing and balancing the books. Again, this orientation is not about us diligently doing our part in the equation; it is an intrinsic aspect of being in this relationship and letting it affect us.

This leads me back to my earlier question about why our efforts matter. If God could get the task of salvation done with or without our involvement, our participation runs the risk of being reduced to a kind of token effort that God graciously accepts. If grace is about relationship, however, our actions matter; because that is the case in any genuine relationship. It is not that we can somehow persuade God, through our efforts, to pursue a relationship with us; that is already a given. But if this relationship is an authentic one, it must be mutual, and our own choices as well as God’s are going to play a role in its nature and quality.

“All we can do,” then, is not a matter of doing our duty, diligently performing the tasks required of us to fulfill our part of the equation of salvation. Rather, it is a description of what it means to be in this relationship, which involves letting it affect us, and taking responsibility for the fact that our actions also affect it. This is why, I would argue, that the first and most basic commandment is to love God with all our heart, might, mind, and strength. I interpret this as a call to bring all of ourselves into this relationship—even, and perhaps especially, the aspects of ourselves that we most dislike, that are ensnared in sin. For if we do not bring our wrongs into our relation with God, they cannot be healed; our weaknesses cannot be turned into strengths. This sense of “all we can do” is not a precondition of grace, nor does it point to a grace which comes into play despite all we can do. Rather, it is what we are called to by the very nature of the relationship which constitutes salvation.