reflections on grace -- a book review

Tom Langford was my theology prof at Duke Divinity.  He was also the supervisor for my master's thesis on Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  I've missed Tom's wise and grace-full voice in my life for over sixteen years.  So I was excited to find his wife Anne Marie had posthumously released a number of his personal essays, written toward the end of his life, and compiled in Reflections on Grace.  (I'm still waiting, though, for the publication of the collection of his personal journals, with all the prayers and poetry that Tom had shared with me toward the end of my time at Duke.)

It was Tom, after all, who helped me begin to negotiate some difficult moments in my own theological development, and it was his CT 32 lectures (all of which centered around the grace of God in Jesus Christ) that helped me begin to formulate, even when I didn't realize it, my own theology of grace.

So when I found this little book, I became excited.

From the opening words -- "God present is grace" -- Tom begins this collection of brief, but rich, reflections on the most precious of realities -- the inexhaustible grace of God.  In under 100 pages, Langford shares with us his reflections -- penned during the last years of his life, and in which I find so many of our own personal conversations reflected -- of what he learnt over a lifetime of learning about grace as gift, as truth, and as the converse of disgrace.  Ever interpreted christologically, and never divorced from its enfleshment in the realities of creation and in the nurturing and interpretation within the community of God's people, Langford gently -- graciously! -- invites readers to catch glimpses of nothing less than the Triune God, and to believe that this God not only speaks in "the tongue of our time" (p. 22), but that he holds nothing of himself back as he throws himself into the most despicable and hopeless of human situations in order to bring transformation.  This is grace's self-giving and cruciform "edge"; it is "as real as the conditions in which life must be lived" (p. 29).

Grace, Langford argues, is not only God's "way of being", but -- precisely because it is such -- it establishes our way of being, and makes possible "the integrity of the faithful responder" (p. 105).  Rejection of this grace, therefore, issues in the malformation of life.  This United Methodist minister reminds us that our attempts to live as though God were absent atrophies human possibility and being.

I can't say I agree with everything here.  Langford still strains at a disjunction between God's love and law, which he always seemed to do in lectures in and in our conversation.

But Reflections on Grace is a beautiful book.  Those of us who studied with Tom will be able to hear his gentle North Carolinian voice in the words.  So it's a book to be relished and read slowly.  And if, like me, you were blessed enough to have a class or two with Tom, you particularly deserve to give this little, graceful gift to yourself.