JW Hewitt sums up the difference between Greco-Roman and Christian conceptions of charis in a 1925 Classical Weekly essay. Greek religion, “which discovered no impassible gulf between god and man, the relations of man to man and god to god were supposed to hold between man and god.” This means that “as man’s own moral nature develops and he comes to recognize the duty of gratitude, and as, parallel with this, his view of the gods and of his relation to them develops along the lines of anthropomorphism and anthropopathism, he tends to explain the duty of the gods to make return for worship as he would explain his own obligations to make return for gifts or favors accorded to him.”
Christianity cannot accept “the thought of any obligation of god to man for services received.” He adds, “Do whatever you may in the way of service to God, you cannot earn his thanks, any more than the servant who serves his master at meat expects thanks therefor. With our best endeavors we are still unprofitable servants and we cannot earn charis from God, in the sense of gratitude or thanks. What we do receive from God is charis in quite another and quite opposite sense – grace, something unearned and unearnable.”
Christianity breaks the cycle of gift and counter-gift at a decisive point. It’s not a closed circle, because the Giver is ultimately the Giver even the gifts He receives; the ultimate source is a source of grace not thanks. There’s something profound going on here: Bonds of gratitude can, after all, be forged into chains. Christian faith affirms charis in both senses of the word, but does so in a way that secures freedom.
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