Tillich’s hypothesis may be related to a puzzling passage in the New Testament (Matthew 11:12), where Jesus says:
The kingdom of heaven has been forcefully advancing, and forceful people have been seizing it.
It is no innovation on Tillich’s part to say that grace is active. But if we consider the breathtaking scale and scope of what grace accomplishes, ‘active’ might be an understatement. To completely cover all the sins of a human being, to gain admission into eternal life for that person, and empower that person to begin to live a new life even here and now in this world: that is an amazing power.
To accomplish all of this, not for one human being, but for billions of people, and to do so completely, effectively, finally, and in a way that can’t be cancelled or nullified - this is power and strength on a scale so grand and cosmic that ‘active’ does indeed seem like an understatement.
Tillich uses a verb of violence: he says that grace ‘strikes’ us:
Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life which we loved, or from which we were estranged. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage.
The assertive nature of grace shatters our negativity, our vanity, and our self-indulgence. It sometimes manifests itself in our losses and in our griefs. God says, after all, that “My power is strongest when you are weak” (II Corinthians 12:9).
When grace strikes us, we might not at first be able to totally conceptualize the experience - to turn the sensation into a perception. Moses, after all, had to ask God what His name was. Moses was experiencing God before he could articulate the nature of God.
Tillich uses another violent verb: grace ‘breaks into’ our lives:
Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything, do not perform anything, do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!”
Grace’s invasion into our life does not instantly transform us into perfect beings: We are still sinful, imperfect, broken, and flawed. It is God who is perfect, not we.
Although we are still corrupted by means of sin, what is established by grace is our relationship to God. Our ontological status is not changed, but our relational status is.
Tillich uses yet one more violent verb. Grace ‘conquers sin,’ and thereby creates the foundation for a relationship:
If that happens to us, we experience grace. After such an experience we may not be better than before, and we may not believe more than before. But everything is transformed. In that moment, grace conquers sin, and reconciliation bridges the gulf of estrangement. And nothing is demanded of this experience, no religious or moral or intellectual presupposition, nothing but acceptance.
God’s liberating grace is often forceful. The exodus out of Egypt was a violent event. The escape from the Babylonian captivity required the destruction of the Babylonian empire.
Given that God’s grace is capable of changing the foundational dynamics of the universe, one could hardly expect it to be cuddly and domesticated influence.
