The Big Relief
The Urgency of Grace for a Worn-Out World
By David Zahl
Brazos Press, 176 pages, $26.99
The Big Relief is a right-sized book with universal intentions. David Zahl defines the notion as the undeniable reality of God’s grace in every life, whether we know it or not. Zahl and a few others founded Mockingbird Ministries in Manhattan nearly two decades ago—a group of Christians who saw the deepening need for spiritual relevance in the lives of their peers.
This pithy, funny, direct book is designed to be both accessible and Christian. To Zahl, “Grace is the Big Relief at the heart of Christianity. When grace is downplayed or qualified, faith turns into a project and then a burden.” He then follows through on this human connection to reflect on this generation’s loss of connection to organized religion: “when churches bed down in technique, they do so at the expense of the Big Relief.”
The Big Relief is the third in a series, spanning two publishers. The books started in 2020 with Seculosity (Broadleaf Books) that defined new cultural religions like “career, parenting, food, politics, and romance,” then Low Anthropology (Brazos Press), which saw the Christian core within each of us. The Big Relief ventures into the Bible and theological essence of the grace “that passes all understanding.”
In The Big Relief, Zahl uses the words of theologian Adel Bestavros—and I see the missions of the books in them. Bestavros describes the trinity of patience in Christianity that contour to the books’ intentions: “Patience with others is Love” (think Low Anthropology describing Christian love), “Patience with self is Hope” (think Seculosity’s mirror of our complicating lives), and “Patience with God is Faith” (grace is not earned by ritual, canon, or creed).
Zahl is rigorous in simplifying the vast intentions and messages of faith. He studiously crafted messages and language that eschew any triggers of our culture’s growing condemnations of religion’s prescriptions and judgments. The essence of that perspective is found in the book’s organization. Zahl devotes chapters to grace, forgiveness, favor, surrender, atonement, imputation, rest, play, and rescue.
While humanized in description, God’s love is anything but rationalized. To Zahl, “grace is never reasonable.” To him, there is no transaction in grace, and traditional religion as a way to define faith has been outflanked by today’s overwhelming transactions:
As trust in a shared moral authority has eroded, the result has not been an absence of such authority but a multiplication of it. A rush of strident voices has filled the void left by capital-R Religion, with more voices popping up every day. This means that instead of (or in addition to) God’s wagging finger, we contend with the wagging finger of Madison Avenue, the weight scale, the social media algorithm, the legal system, the parenting-industrial complex, our children’s history books, our neighbors on Nextdoor, and so on.
Rather than a book of bromides or spiritual hacks, The Big Relief weaves essential theological understanding behind all the potent factoids. The essential conflict between law and grace has a direct resolution in Zahl’s insight: “while Luther claimed that the law is ‘a constant guest’ in our conscience,” Zahl asserts that “The law shows us that we need to be forgiven: The gospel announces that we have been forgiven. … You and I are not loved by God because we are special, we are special because we are loved by God.”
And he uses the words of others like Philip Yancey: “Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more. And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less.”
I think it is significant that Zahl is not a cleric, does not have a degree in any form of theology. In his full embrace of Christianity so clearly conveyed in his trilogy of writings, he speaks to all of us outside the church-centered world: “Jesus is not just a teacher or healer; he is a savior. He comes to rescue captives—that is, real people with intractable problems—from the prisons they live in, both the prisons we make for ourselves and the ones the world makes for us. … There is a big difference between rearranging the furniture within our prison cell and actually getting out.”
Duo Dickinson, an architect based in Madison, Connecticut, has designed more than 1,000 projects, including homes and churches.
