PB takes thoughts from last Monday’s post in
an interesting direction:
“ ‘Grace’ as understood today does indeed fall woefully short of conveying the depth of
meaning in charis. Gratia, whence cometh grace, was ‘a goddess of charm, beauty, nature, human
creativity and fertility in Greek mythology’, so it isn’t that the meaning has
changed — it’s pretty close actually. It’s as you say — we don’t have an
equivalent in English for charis.”
If we are to talk usefully
about grace to people who do not understand what we mean by it, we are probably
best to use four or five different English words, each conveying a single aspect
of the meaning of charis.