‘Money can’t buy me love’ – Miroslav Volf & fixing broken Britain

Listening to this Tim Keller talk he quoted an extract from an essay by Miroslav Volf  entitled Shopkeeper’s Gold. Volf speaks with prophetic power into our country’s situation after the events on our streets in recent weeks.

Could the hope for the inner cities lie in part in the retrieval of the doctrine of justification by grace? How could dead streets receive life from a dead doctrine? Imagine that you have no job, no money, you live cut off from the rest of society in a world ruled by poverty and violence, your skin is the “wrong” color – and you have no hope that any of this will change.

Around you is a society governed by the iron law of achievement. Its gilded goods are flaunted before your eyes on TV screens, and in a thousand ways society tells you every day that you are worthless because you have no achievements. You are a failure, and you know that you will continue to be a failure because there is no way for you to achieve tomorrow what you have not managed to achieve today. Your dignity is shattered and your soul is enveloped in the darkness of despair.

But the gospel tells you that you are not defined by outside forces. It tells you that you count – even more, that you are loved unconditionally and infinitely, irrespective of anything you have achieved or failed to achieve, even that you are loved a tad bit more than those whose efforts have been crowned with success.

Imagine now this gospel not simply proclaimed but embodied in a community that has emerged not as a “result of works” (Eph. 2.10). Justified by sheer grace, it seeks to “justify” by grace those who are made “unjust” by society’s implacable law of achievement. Imagine furthermore this community determined to infuse the wider culture, along with its political and economic institutions, with the message that it seeks to embody and proclaim. This is justification by grace, proclaimed and practiced. A dead doctrine? Hardly.

As I was reflecting on the social significance of justication by grace, I remembered a passage from Nietzsche’s Thus spoke Zarathustra … “O my brothers, I direct and consecrate you to a new nobility: you shall become begetters and cultivators and sowers of the future – truly, not a nobility that you could buy like shopkeepers with shopkeepers gold: for all that has a price is of little value.”

Justification by grace, I thought, musing on Nietzsche’s profound observation, is so deeply at odds with our “shopkeeper’s culture”. It takes the price tags off human beings not so as to devalue them but so as to give them their proper dignity, a dignity not based on what they have achieved but rooted in the sheer fact that they are loved unconditionally by God. Divine love is that indispensable nourishment for the human soul of which the prophet speaks when he calls, “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters: and you that have no money come buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” (Isa. 55:1)

The hope for our communities, for our cities, for the next generation is the life-transforming gospel of grace.