Outrage Porn, Glawspel, and God's One-Way Love

If sanctification is my work, neither grace nor God is free.

Journalist Chris Cilliza recently made a wise observation about the incentives to express outrage over the once and again president.

He writes:

“In the decade since Trump came down the golden escalator, a cottage industry has developed: Outrage porn.

What is outrage porn and who does it? It’s anything that is designed to make you angry. To piss you off. The purveyors? Mostly writers and pundit types who have made a very good living by being shocked, appalled, angry and, yes, outraged by every little thing Trump has done. Candidly, it’s exhausting. And, from a political standpoint, it’s proven to be almost entirely ineffective.”

A week into the next four years, and I’m definitely exhausted— and I’ve largely tuned out the news as best as I can.

I mention this not to dabble in politics but because the cottage industry Cilliza identifies has a theological correlative, glawspel:

Muddling the gospel with the law.

The outrage compels many Christians, preachers especially, to hortatory, muddling the gospel with the law, and positing, for example, “social holiness” as itself the good news rather than its fruit. The gospel of baptism, for instance, is not that the candidate pledged to “resist the spiritual forces of wickedness;” the gospel of baptism is that the word attaches to water so as to cloth the candidate in Christ’s own righteousness, Jesus’ permanent, perfect record. While outrage may be understandable, perhaps even justified, there is a cost that comes with letting politics lure us away from the promise of what Paul Zahl calls God’s one-way love in Jesus Christ.

Going all the way back to Augustine and later to Luther, the church’s insistence on the primacy of grace as both the content and mode of our message has always been a matter of pastoral concern.

Robert Jenson explains what’s at stake:

“Augustine’s fundamental insight, against Pelagians or Arminians (full, semi-, demi-semi-, or whatever) is veridical: theology that makes my conversion, or my subsequent persevering in sanctity or growing in it, dependent on my own decision to seek holiness or on my own sanctified decisions or actions, must “beware, lest … the grace of God be thought to be given somehow in accord with our merit, so that grace is no longer understood as grace” [De praed. sanct. 1.6]. There is indeed no escaping the logic: if at any step or stage of spiritual life my choice or action determines whether or not I am in fact to be sanctified, then indeed that is what it does, and God’s role can only be to confirm my choice.

Which is to say, God’s grace is not free, and so is neither God nor grace.

Augustine did not cultivate this logic for its own sake, but as a pastor, for the comfort of the bewildered North African believers of his time. They compared themselves to martyrs and other spiritual heroes of the just previous age of persecution, and had to doubt the worth of their own choices and actions; that is, if Pelagius was right, they had to doubt the possibility of their salvation.”