Faith & Spirit Quote by Thomas Erskine

Erskine draws a clean, almost provocative line: Christianity isn’t a moral self-improvement program with heaven as the prize. It’s a gift first, a response second. “Religion is grace” refuses the transactional logic that so often hijacks faith - the idea that God is a cosmic auditor and virtue is spiritual currency. By defining “religion” as grace, Erskine relocates the center of gravity from human performance to divine initiative. You don’t climb toward God; you wake up already addressed.

Then comes the sharper move: “ethics is gratitude.” He isn’t lowering the bar on moral behavior; he’s changing its fuel. Gratitude is not law, but it can be more demanding than law because it’s internal. A rule can be obeyed cold; gratitude implicates the whole self. If you’ve been met with unearned mercy, cruelty and stinginess start to look not merely “wrong” but absurd, like hoarding air after being rescued from drowning.

The context is 19th-century Scottish theology wrestling with two pressures at once: stern Calvinist moralism on one side and a rising Victorian respectability culture on the other. Erskine’s phrasing pushes back against both. It also anticipates modern anxieties about “religion” as judgment and “ethics” as branding. He offers a different logic: the only credible moral life is one that isn’t trying to earn its own legitimacy. Gratitude becomes ethics not as a polite thank-you, but as a reorganized way of living in the aftershock of grace.