In church the other Sunday," said the humorist Erma Bombeck,

I was intent on a small child who was turning around smiling at everyone. He wasn't gurgling, spitting, humming, kicking, tearing the hymnals, or rummaging through his mother's handbag. He was just smiling. Finally his mother jerked him around and in a stage whisper that could be heard in a little theatre off Broadway said, "Stop that grinning! You're in church!" With that, she gave him a belt and as the tears rolled down his cheeks added, "That's better," and returned to her prayers.

Early in his new book on grace, Philip Yancey quotes Bombeck to illustrate a troubling anomaly, namely, that while the Christian church's treasure is the gospel of grace, church people don't seem very happy about it. It's not as if they haven't encountered grace. Church people encounter grace all the time. They get their sins forgiven by grace and their lives regenerated. They hear of grace in sermons and receive it by means of sacraments. Their preachers greet and dismiss them with fine little bursts of grace. In between, people in church sing of grace: "Amazing grace," they sing, "how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me."

What's amazing, says Yancey, is that, with all this grace abounding, we Christian people are often pretty graceless. We entangle ourselves in fussy legalisms that almost guarantee hypocrisy. We major in relatively minor matters of law and miss the weighty demands of justice (Yancey quotes a church official who, upon his return from Germany in 1934, reported with admiration that Hitler didn't drink or smoke and that he liked to have women dress modestly). Moreover, we are ungenerous in our judgments and sometimes downright nasty. We write appalling letters to people with whom we disagree, demonstrating a combination of resentment and self-righteousness (the elder brother syndrome) that disqualifies us both to receive God's love and also to pass it along to others.

Isn't this odd? If grace is the church's business, why don't churches get about their business? Why don't they try to "outgrace their rivals"? Maybe one reason, says Yancey, is that evangelicals (the main group he has in mind when he speaks of the church) have gotten swept up into power politics. Their idea is not to preach the gospel but to pass a law or elect a candidate. And it's tough to show grace when you are lobbying for a law, or when you are painting a bad enough face on a political opponent that people will reject her. Maybe another reason is that we conservative Christians are full of fear. We think the country is sliding to hell, and that somebody ought to arrest it. We think that indecency is riding high, and that somebody ought to unhorse it. It's hard to be full of grace when you are full of fear.

The result, says Yancey, is that even though its main business is grace, the church spends an awful lot of time "stigmatizing homosexuals, shaming unwed mothers, persecuting immigrants, harassing the homeless," and seeing to it that lawbreakers get properly punished. But what about the courage to call a sin a sin in this lawless and self- indulgent age? Yancey knows the tension between justice and grace very well and speaks of it eloquently. What do you say to a person you love who has done something very wrong? How can you forgive a person who has slain your child? How can you forgive a person that you'd like to slay? How do we handle the phenomenon that Robert Farrer Capon observes, namely, that if we show grace to someone, the recipient may then take this as permission to minimize or even to repeat his offense?

In this connection, Yancey mentions a man who intended to dump his faithful wife for a younger one and who also planned in advance to be sorry afterwards and to ask various offended parties for forgiveness. What's the right approach to such a person? The author has a proposal, and a very thoughtful one. Indeed, thoughtfulness is a consistent quality of this book, not the least in its insistence that if forgiveness of some heinous offenses seems outrageous, the alternative—round upon round of retaliation—is even more outrageous.

Throughout, Yancey whittles the distinction between grace and ungrace to a very sharp point. He wants to know, for example, why evangelical Christians make so much of the sins of elective abortion and homosexual practice and so little of the sins of pride, mercilessness, and self-righteousness. Does this come anywhere near Jesus' pattern?

We have made our peace with divorce—maybe too readily. We have come to terms with greed. Why are we so tough on homosexuals? Could it be that we think of real sin as something alien, something "over there," something apart from us, something queer? Could it be that when we feel the urge to confess sin we feel first the urge to confess the sins of others?

In a truly virtuoso chapter ("No Oddballs Allowed") we get a lesson in biblical habits of the heart where queerness is concerned. Peter has a vision in Acts 10 of a sheet descending from heaven that is full of unclean animals, reptiles, and birds. As an observant Jew, he is appalled at this dirty dream and still more at the accompanying imperative: "Get up, Peter. Kill and eat." For a contemporary parallel, says Yancey, imagine a convention of Southern Baptists in Texas Stadium. A fully stocked bar descends onto the playing field and a big voice from heaven booms to all the teetotalers, "Drink up!"

The old biblical rule was that Gentiles, women, bastards, the blind, the lame, the crippled, dwarfed, or crazy—all these, plus people with skin diseases, people who had touched a corpse, and guys with damaged testicles—were all unkosher. What's striking in the New Testament is that these are the sorts of people Jesus goes to. These are the people Jesus touches, heals, affirms, forgives. And when the apostles spread the gospel, it's strikingly a gospel of grace for the unkosher—a gospel for Gentiles, women, and Ethiopian eunuchs.

Given this huge New Testament novelty, this push toward aliens, why is the church so uptight with its grace? This is Yancey's persistent question, and he asks it a dozen ways. The reader who begins this book may wrongly suspect it of being pretty. Perhaps, the reader thinks, the author will string out a hundred inspiring stories and anecdotes. Maybe, all told, we'll have more illustrations than the line of analysis can hold—more beads than string.

Indeed, this book does contain a wealth of terrific tales, both of grace and of ungrace. It contains anecdotes, commentary on books and films, observations of national and international events, and imaginative retellings of biblical parables. Some of these things are as lovely as a song. But all this illustrative material is disciplined by the book's topic and purpose. Yancey wants us to know the church's treasure, to taste and see that it is good. But he also wants us to know the church's untreasure, to taste and see that it is graceless. To do these things he has to make judgments.

I'm delighted to say that these judgments show the same graciousness the book praises. A lot of the judgments show up in the interrogative mood. Some of them show up as the conclusion of "I wonder … " statements. A few of them show up as the author's personal confession. This last genre makes demands on an author's honesty. What we often get, says Fred Craddock, is "those familiar dramas of disguise in which the [writer] boasts of weaknesses and humbly confesses strengths." But Yancey's reminiscences are straight and clean, and some of them are painfully revealing.

This whole book has a kind of crispness to it that stiffens the narrative against the sort of sentimentality or overripeness that otherwise threatens to creep over a treatment of grace. The author knows that the grace of God is free, but it's never cheap. In fact, grace often comes to us at terrible cost and is held out to us in bloody hands. Indeed, grace can seem bizarre, but without it there is no gospel—nothing to preach, nothing to sing, and nothing to take to heart when we are sick of our guilt and shame.

Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., is dean of the chapel, Calvin College. He is the author of a number of books, including Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Eerdmans).

Copyright © 1997 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.