A Book That Stopped Me In My Tracks

David Zahl:

About a year and a half ago, I came across an interview about a book called Surprised by Grace that stopped me in my tracks. In my limited and admittedly cynical experience, “grace” in the title of a book/church tends to signal its opposite, so I was primed to roll my eyes – to be ungracious, in other words. Shame on me! I read it once, and then I read it again. Sure enough, here was a new voice articulating much of the same liberating message that had inspired the founding of Mockingbird: the understanding that the “basic” Gospel message is for Christians as well as non-Christians, that we never move beyond our need to hear it. It was exciting! He spoke about the distinction between the Law and the Gospel; indeed, he seemed totally fixated on the radicality of a grace that eschews balance, that doesn’t hedge its bets or blink when it comes to the “It is finished” portion of Christ’s dying words. Christian freedom, plain and simple, the sort that you almost never hear from the Right (or Left), expressed with the unmistakable passion of a man freshly possessed – indeed, a man for whom this message, far from being mere theological window dressing, had clearly made the difference between life and death.

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