What do the New Testament and the free software movement have in common? (Besides both ending in “ment”.) The most interesting answer, I believe, is that both of them are alternative social systems designed to subvert and surpass the burdensome ones in place. I studied the New Testament for most of the years of my life, and have worked within the free software movement over the past few. Over-familiarity with an idea can leave you blind to its essential meaning. The Christian concept of grace was so well-worn in my mind, so confined to the text of the Bible, that I almost didn’t recognize it when it showed up elsewhere. Seeing it through another prism helped me, in turn, to understand grace better.

The free software movement was started by Richard Stallman and protected with the GPL, or the GNU Public License; its purpose was to create software that was free to use and distribute, without any sort of usage fees, sales, or copy protection. The basic provision of the GPL is that you can use the software for whatever you want and without any additional obligation except to (1) maintain its integrity, by submitting to the author any fixes you make, and (2) making it freely available to others, not mixing it into something commercial.

It is sometimes referred to as a “gift economy”, but I think that’s the wrong phrase. Many societies use gift economies that become onerous webs of carefully accounted obligations. The free software movement is not like that. You can take and take and take from it all you like, without ever creating or contributing a piece of free software, and nobody minds, so long as you don’t attempt to keep anyone else from the same wellspring. That sort of middleman rouses the deepest ire of free software’s apostles.

Speaking of apostles, about half of the ranting in Paul’s epistles comes down to this same issue.

Throughout his epistles, Paul carefully lays out the way that God’s grace operates: it cannot be exhausted, is available to everyone who wants it, and cannot be paid for because Jesus has already paid the full price. This is not an economy of legal tender, of course, but one of divine favor and good works. There’s a strong human impulse to square things up between oneself and God, and another strong impulse to appoint a few other human beings as “moral bankers”, able to draw up the precise invoice of sacrifices required for wrongs done or favors granted.

Paul forcefully and repeatedly refutes this impulse, just as Jesus himself did. In the early church (and now), it was easy to take this fresh principle and say, “Yes, grace is wonderful of course, now here’s what you have to do to get it or keep it,” and follow that with an increasingly lengthy list of rules. Kind of like charging someone for a free software distro.

One of my favorite parables from the Gospels is that of the unforgiving servant. In this parable, a servant owes his master something like a billion dollars, which he has no hope of paying off. To avoid being thrown in debtors’ prison, he begs the master for time to repay it, promising that he will repay it all. The master, having compassion, forgives the entire debt and releases him. Unfortunately, the forgiven servant does not really understand what just happened, because as soon as he meets a fellow servant who owes him a thousand bucks, he starts to choke him and demand repayment. When the master hears about this, he has the unforgiving servant brought back before him and thrown into prison to work off the debt, saying that he should have shown others the mercy he had been shown.

This, then, is the grace economy: everything is free to you, so long as you keep it free for others. I said before that about half of the ranting in Paul’s epistles had to do with defending God’s grace against its unwanted mediators. The other half of his ranting has to do with people like the unforgiving servant, who abuse grace with ignorance and ingratitude, remaining unchanged and expecting to profit on both ends.

Parables illuminate mysteries like flashes of lightning, using the hearer’s experience of something ordinary to help them glimpse the extraordinary. Because of this, they need to be retold for every generation, or else they just become two-ended riddles. I see the free software movement as another sort of parable, helping us to understand, by direct experience, something of the idea of grace.