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Just this, according to Paul in Romans 1, is the guilt of the gentiles who do not accept God's acceptance. But it is also the guilt of the Jews who seek to achieve righteousness before God by fulfilling the law. In both cases, what is involved is godlessness, in the literal sense of trying to live without God's gift, of trying to earn what has already been freely given. Thus Paul came to recognize that as a Pharisee he had been motivated by the goal of achieving righteousness before God, of working to earn the reign of God. Thus he scrupulously observed the prescriptions of the law and the traditions of the fathers (Phil 3:6; Gal 1:14). Only when he came to realize that what he was striving for had already been given did he recognize that he had acted without understanding. He had wanted to run to God only to realize, finally, that his was a godless running because he always already could and should have run with God_._

Notwithstanding this godlessness, however, God never ceases to give the gift of communion with God, acceptance by God, righteousness before God--giving it explicitly and decisively through Jesus Christ, who is rightly understood to be the decisive re-presentation of God's gift of communion with Godself. And what makes one a Christian is that one accepts God's gift as it is decisively given through Jesus Christ and then lead's one's life accordingly, one's action as a Christian being, in the very nature of the case, always a passive action, an action growing out of one's prior acceptance through faith of God's action, of God's prevenient grace. Otherwise put: Christians are not motivated to act by a goal out ahead of them in the future still to be attained, but rather by a goal that has already been attained in the past, to which they can open themselves and out of which they can ever and again live and act.

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