Grace. What in the world is it?

More fundamentally, what do we mean by “grace”? In the Christian tradition, the nature of “grace” has been the subject of intense controversy and polemical redefinition; the term comes to us already over-determined by particular connotations. It is the strategy of this book to place the relevant terms and concepts, both those of Paul and those of his fellow Jews, within the category of “gift.” This is not to say that all the vocabulary we take into our purview is best translated as “gift”: in some cases, even for χάρις, that is manifestly not the case. It is rather to claim that the conceptual field we are studying, with its varied terminology, is best captured by the anthropological category of gift. This category is broad, but covers a sphere of voluntary, personal relations that are characterized by goodwill in the giving of some benefit or favor and that elicit some form of reciprocal return that is both voluntary and necessary for the continuation of the relationship. Hence, our study is confined to no single term (and certainly not to χάρις); its focus is on concepts, not words. Among other things, by approaching this topic through the category of gift we hope to gain some analytical distance from the specific theological meanings of “grace,” even where we continue to use that term.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift 2–3