God Owes us Nothing

This is the title of a book I read a while ago by the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. The book is actually about Blaise Pascal and the way the Catholic church rejected the Jansenist frame of mind in the C17th, but that's by the by. What has got me thinking again is the title: God Owes us Nothing. It's a powerful thought, maybe on first sight depressing, but the more I have thought about it, the key to a whole lot of wisdom.

Kolakowski's point is that this is essentially the insight at the heart of the Augustinian tradition in Christianity, something common to much mediaeval thought, to Luther, to Calvin and to Pascal. The book chronicles how it was firmly shown the door by the RC church in the Jansenist/Jesuit/Molinist controversies of the C17th. Although initially forbidding, I am increasingly convinced this insight is the way to a truly liberating way of life. If God owes me something – happiness, wealth, health or whatever, I will naturally feel short-changed if I don't get it. You regularly hear stories of people who believed in God, until a friend got ill, or died, or they saw some tragedy, or heard about the tsunami, or encountered real suffering and 'lost their faith'. I suspect this happens because deep down we think that God owes us something, and if God doesn't give it, then the problem is with God – either that he is unkind, or simply doesn't exist. If God owes me something and he doesn't provide it, I lose faith in God. To begin however from the perspective that God owes us nothing – that we have no rights over him, no claim on him, means that everything we do get comes as a gift – as a sheer delight, something to be deeply grateful for. Every breath, friendship, act of kindness, chocolate, football, strawberries – they are all gifts not rights. It suddenly turns everything about my life from something I feel I have right to, and moan mercilessly about if I lose it, to something that is a true surprise. Our natural cry 'it's not fair' when something bad happens to us reflects this same basic idea – that we somehow deserve fairness or justice.

To that extent the Dawkins brigade are perhaps right – we should not think the universe is made for us, that we are any more than specks of life on a distant planet, and we should give up our delusions of deserving divine intervention when things go a bit wrong. The essence of Christian faith is the faith that although this is precisely what we should expect, the surprise is that we do receive so much from the hand of God. Despite our insignificance, we have been privileged by God to play a key role on this planet of reflecting his image to the rest of creation. We do sometimes enjoy gifts of health, laughter, sport, music, shelter etc., and these are neither random accidents of a faceless universe, nor things we have a right to expect because of our inherent deserving, but gratuitous, free gifts from the heart that beats behind it all.

It is so much better to view everything as unexpected and gratuitous gift than as right. 'Rights' make us grasping, holding onto things and insisting on them – it centres life around me and what I deserve. 'Gift' makes us grateful, always delighted with the new things that come, and a bit more philosophical about stuff we lose. In the Christian life, if I think God owes me something, then grace and mercy will not seem a miracle to me at all – after all, it's only what I deserve. If God owes us nothing, his grace, the gift of Jesus, the Holy Spirit his provision of my needs are all miracles, things I don't deserve and thus to be given thanks for with a constant sense of wonder and amazement. This insight is perhaps the key to a truly thankful and (relatively) carefree life. It is perhaps the key to happiness.