Faith is the goal and not the condition of the gift

Derrida’s well known thesis that every counter-gift—especially every expected counter-gift—turns a gift into an exchange, and thereby retrospectively annuls it as pure gift. For Paul Gerhardt, as for every Christian and theologian, the Creator, as the unconditioned and unobligated Giver, wills to have a counter-gift, the response of faith. Gerhardt would contest with all his energy the claim that this counter-gift changes the nature of the gift or annuls it. The gift calls for a counter-gift, a response, and empowers the giving of it. This orientation and expectation of the gift cannot and need not be understood as a condition attached to it: it need not be understood as its causa finalis. Goal-directedness is not necessarily a condition.

The question does not arise, then, whether every imaginable counter-gift encroaches upon the character of a pure gift as gift, or even goes so far as to destroy it. It is rather a matter of asking which counter-gift is commensurate and corresponds to the gift in such a way that the latter is comprehended in its essence, apprehended, acknowledged in its truth.

(Oswald Bayer, The Ethics of Gift, LQ Vol XXIV (2010))

What I understand Bayer's laboured prose to be saying is that:

• When we give a gift we expect it to be received (by faith)
• When we call something we give to someone 'a gift' we implicitly call on the recipient to receive it
• Receipt (faith) is the goal of the giving - but it is not a condition attached to the giving
• In fact, by God's grace and power, in the act of giving his Son he also provides the faith which is the goal. In Christ, representing God and Man, is both the giving and the receiving done for us - and that is applied to us by his Spirit which he pours out on us [not all that is in Bayer].
• If we treat it as an exchange our response is not the goal of the gift but means we lose out, the gift is dirtied, and the giver is dishonoured.

As an aside, Derrida's thesis was not well known to me, but his way of thinking is very familiar to me from my heart and the days we live in where we are suspicious of all authority. Perhaps it is a generalisation, but I wonder if Modernists trusted certain classes of people too much, and others too little. But Post-modernists distrust everyone - including God.