Grace, part two

For your reading, I present the Wikipeda article on Grace in Christianity. The church of christ stance would be considered arminian.

In protestant christianity, grace is often defined as unmerited favor. You get something good from god that you did not earn. Even more than that, you get something good that you didn't deserve. The implication being that you actually deserved something bad, but you got something good instead. What do you deserve? Condemnation. Death and destruction. No ifs ands or buts.

God's gracious act to the human race was supposed to be sending Jesus to die in your place, even though he didn't deserve to die, you did. You filthy trash. Wait a minute, that's quite offensive.  I wouldn't want to be called filthy trash even if it were true. Do unto others. Tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to spread a little of god's grace around and I'm not going to verbally condemn you, even if I believe you probably are going to hell. I'm going to be gracious because I feel sorry for you. There is no point in making you experience hell any sooner than necessary. We would be in the same sinking boat if I hadn't let Jesus save me.  "But for the grace of god, there go I." These kinds of christians are often labelled "liberal."

There are some christians who don't want to be gracious. They want to call a spade a spade and an unsaved sinner an unsaved sinner. They want to prophetically call out the sins that the people are committing. They fear for your immortal soul. So they give you a little taste of coming fire and brimstone, hoping you will learn to fear for your own soul, so they won't have to. No pain no gain. These are the people that the gracious christians call "legalistic."

What does Jesus have to say about grace in the gospels?  Nothing. Zip. Nada. I find that quite odd. However, the letters ascribed to Paul have a whopping 89 instances of the usage of the word grace.
The word grace  occurs in the gospels four times. This is the same exact greek word that Paul uses.
*Luke 2:40- (speaking of the child Jesus) "he was filled with wisdom and the grace of god was upon him." This is confusing. Would a christian say even Jesus did not merit gods favor? Are there different kinds of god's grace?
*John 1:14 (speaking of Jesus) "The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only who came from the father, full of grace and truth." Does it make sense here to call grace unmerited favor? Clearly it means something else, but what? Does it mean grace is a quantity of unmerited favor that Jesus can dispense?
*John 1:16 &17(speaking of Jesus). "From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." But what is grace? If Jesus gave/gives grace, how come he never talked about grace in the only accounts of his words and life?

Here is my take on christian grace: The greek word used in the New Testament is charis. This is defined as a blessing, favor, or kindness. It is where we get our word charity from. There is no implication of being undeserving in the original word at all. In the Luke passage, we might just say god blessed Jesus. (Though what constitutes a blessing isn't exactly clear either) However, christianity has taken Paul's statements in his letters, that we don't work for or earn god's grace through merit, and extended them to mean that noone deserves god's grace, which they have equated with salvation and eternal life. They have equated merit with deserving. Therefore, since noone can do anything to merit god's favor, christianity says everyone who receives salvation is undeserving. In Romans 1:18-32 there are those who are even more undeserving than others. They don't get salvation. According to this passage, they merit death. If you don't fall on the list of the condemned, you qualify for salvation, but don't forget you didn't earn it.

It doesn't seem right to me that you can earn hell but not earn heaven.