THE ROWBOAT NEEDS BOTH OARS
Discipleship and Grace

C. Norman Kraus

Sometime in the late 1960s I was reviewing the sermons I had preached during the first years of my ministry, and I noticed that I had spoken quite often on the subject of love. But I also noticed something else. My emphasis in those sermons was on the command to love. I had urged the congregation to love each other out of a sense of obedience to the command of Christ. I was preaching a love ethic.

Of course Christ did leave us a command to love as he had loved, but that command assumed a prior gift of grace—a transforming relationship with God. "We love because God first loved us." This command of the God who first loved is an enabling command—the command of grace. It is not a matter of command (to love) and grace, as though these were two separate things in conflict with each other. The command to love is the command of love.

The "Law," or Torah in the Hebrew, as the prophets of Israel well knew, is God’s instruction and guidance given as a covenant command of grace. God’s command to love can never be separated from God’s love for us.

There is, to be sure, a certain tension between law and grace, but they are not opposites which cancel each other out. Rather it is as if they are in a dialogue exploring the two sides of one complex reality. In more technical language we call this relationship of grace and command "dialectical," and this dialectic is integral to our concept of discipleship. Without it our obedience to law becomes slavery, not an apprenticeship that by God’s enabling grace develops character.

When I was a boy growing up on the banks of the Warwick River in Virginia, Bishop George R. Brunk (d. 1938), who was a marvelous preacher, would use the rowboat metaphor to explain the necessity of maintaining what I am calling a dialectical tension. In a rowboat one needs two oars to row in a straight line. If one rows with the oar of faith only, she goes in clockwise circles. If one rows with the oar of works only, he goes in counter-clockwise circles. Both oars used in balanced tension , however, propel the boat straight ahead.

Before moving the argument further, I should note that the seventeenth-century Pietist movement tended to emphasize the experience of grace as the divine source of obedience while the Anabaptists of that same century stressed the importance of obedience as the response to grace. Discipleship should not be exclusively associated with either emphasis. For both pragmatic and biblical reasons we need to understand our discipleship as a response to God’s enabling goodness.

Our everyday Christian vocabulary is full of dialectical phrases—although we may not think of them in that way. We speak of "law and gospel," "faith and works," "body and spirit," "evangelism and social service," "trust and obedience," "the life and teaching of Jesus," "Jesus as savior and lord," "the nature and mission of the church" to name a few. In recent years the promoters of church growth have added another, namely, "evangelize and disciple" (verb), as though these were two steps in the process of calling people to salvation.

None of these words joined by and, such as "law and gospel," represent separate detached entities. And they certainly are not opposites in conflict with each other. The words in each pair are in dialogue with each other in such a way that they throw light on each other. The good news is that we have been called and empowered, as Paul puts it, to obey "the law of Christ" (1 Cor. 9:21).

Jesus is not savior if he is not lord. Indeed, it is when we begin following his discipline as lord that he becomes our savior, i.e., he can begin to bring God’s order and purpose to our lives. Jesus makes it clear that acceptance of his discipline, or "yoke," is essential in our relation to him. True Christian faith is not simply believing in Jesus as a savior from guilt. It inherently includes faithfulness to the character and example of Christ. Faith is not faith, or as James puts it, faith "is dead" apart from obedience.

I emphasize this point because our modern analytical minds, which tend to separate and distinguish between aspects of a dynamic whole, often beguile us into simplistic, programmatic definitions that defeat the call of Jesus to follow him. The church is by its very nature the continuation of the messianic mission. And the command to "make disciples of all people" is precisely to evangelize them. The call to salvation is a call to relationship with Jesus as the "Master and Lord," that is, a call to repent. It is a call to "take his yoke" or "discipline" and learn from him. And that is precisely what discipleship means.

Discipleship indicates first of all an attitudinal change toward Jesus. The word metanoia, or repentance, means first of all to change one’s attitude toward Jesus. On the day of Pentecost those who did not accept Jesus as the Christ, or Messiah, were called upon to repent of their insubordination, and to join his new movement (see Acts 2:38f). Their salvation depended on their coming into a disciple relationship to Jesus, and they were promised participation in the Holy Spirit if they would do that.

The call was not first to be saved (evangelized) and then to learn the ethics of discipleship, or as some would put it, then "be perfected." Discipleship describes a saving relationship to Jesus as "my Lord and my God."

By the same token discipleship does not describe a moral following of the teaching of Jesus apart from metanoia and submission. For example, Gandhi was not a "disciple" of Jesus although he respected him as a great teacher. So we should not speak of discipleship as though it were simply an ethical norm to which we try to attain. The essence of discipleship is in the relation to Jesus.

In addition, to describe the Christian walk as a life of discipleship implies that we always remain disciples, or learners. We never attain to "mastery." It is in this context that Jesus told his followers not to call each other "master."

Actually the word translated "disciple" means "apprentice," that is, one who learns through continuing observation and practice under the discipline of the master. So discipleship indicates a continuing relationship of dependence and submission to Jesus as the Master.

And finally, to speak of discipleship points to the hope of transformation into the image of the Master. As we continue in relationship to Christ under the enabling discipline of the Spirit we have the promise that we will be transformed into his likeness from one degree of attainment to the next (see 2 Cor. 3:18).

Thus the call to "salvation by grace" is precisely a call to discipleship. We are not first called to accept Jesus as a "savior" from guilt and punishment (grace), followed by an ethical response of obedience (works). We are "saved" by the gracious call to submit to Jesus as the One who calls us to follow him. The calling is to participate in the discipline of grace and thus find order, meaning, and hope in our human lives.

The relation of a disciple to Jesus as the Master is one of submission, dependence, empowerment, emulation, and finally, transformation by grace. Such is the dialectic of faith and obedience. At its best this has been the goal of both the Anabaptist and the Pietist traditions.

—C. Norman Kraus, retired in Harrisonburg, Virginia, is a Goshen College professor emeritus and has taught in numerous other settings in addition to being a pastor, missionary, and widely published author.