Properties of Grace

God's Grace is the expression of God's Love.

God's Grace entails the Presence of God.

God's Grace entails the Closeness of God.

God's Grace involves a spiritual Feeding (or filling) that allows for moral Growth.

God's Grace Heals spiritual wounds and spiritual ills.

God's Grace results in Happiness.

God's Grace entails God's Protection.

Grace is not earned.

God gives his Grace freely and unconditionally.

God's Grace must be accepted if one is to receive the benefits of Grace.

Only through receiving God's Grace do people learn to act morally toward others (to feel love, feel empathy, act for the benefit of others and so on).

To learn to act morally toward others, one must receive God's Grace (e.g., one must be in God's presence, be close to God, etc.).

Since grace is understood metaphorically as nurturance, it is of course the central concept in Nurturant Parent Christianity. The central need in this version of Christianity is the need for God's Grace – -his nurturance along with his presence and closeness – if one is to learn to act morally and if one is to be spiritually filled, sustained, and healed. What gives rise to this need is a separation from God, a separation that is natural to the human condition.

Original Sin in the Nurturant Parent interpretation is rather different than in the Strict Father interpretation, as is sin itself. Sin is nonnurturant action toward others. The idea behind Original Sin is that we naturally act nonnurturantly toward others and we must learn to act nurturantly.

The way we learn to act nurturantly (that is, morally) is through being nurtured and then imitating the actions of those who nurture us, thus incorporating the capacity for nurturing into ourselves. But our own parents are never perfect nurturers, and may be very imperfect ones. Moreover, since we naturally start separating ourselves from them at an early age – in toddlerhood – we can never receive full and constant nurturance from our parents. The very best of nurturant parents cannot come close to making us perfect nurturers, that is, fully moral beings. Original Sin, then, is our inherent inability to be fully moral (that is, nurturant) beings for these reasons. It is also the state of being born and raised separate from God, the ultimate nurturant parent. The task of becoming a fully nurturant person is thus to find God, the ultimate nurturant parent, and receive his perfect continuing nurturance – his Grace.

On the Nurturant Parent interpretation of the Bible, Eden is the state of being completely loved and nurtured in early infancy. Eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is reaching the stage at which we begin to separate from our parents, follow our own desires, and have to learn to act morally toward others. The expulsion from Eden is reaching the stage at which we no longer are completely loved and nurtured, as in infancy, and have to face the difficulties of the world and learn to act morally. Thus we are faced with the problem of finding God and, through his Grace, growing morally and becoming as fully nurturant as we can be.

Let us now turn to how Christ fits into this picture. I begin with the general notion of Moral Accounting, as it applies to both the Nurturant Parent and Strict Father models: