The divine conspiracy, p.7
The Divine Conspiracy, page 7
No doubt! But what then are we to say about the multitudes, right and left along the theological spectrum, who today self-identify as Christians while having hardly a whiff of Christlikeness about them and no idea that it might even be possible—who perhaps even have a settled conviction that genuine Christlikeness is impossible? What is the gospel they have heard?
The Gospel on the Right
The Atonement as the Whole Story
If you ask anyone from that 74 percent of Americans who say they have made a commitment to Jesus Christ what the Christian gospel is, you will probably be told that Jesus died to pay for our sins, and that if we will only believe he did this, we will go to heaven when we die.
In this way what is only one theory of the “atonement” is made out to be the whole of the essential message of Jesus. To continue with theological language for the moment, justification has taken the place of regeneration, or new life.8 Being let off the divine hook replaces possession of a divine life “from above.” For all of the talk about the “new birth” among conservative Christians, there is an almost total lack of understanding of what that new birth is in practical terms and of how it relates to forgiveness and imputed or transmitted righteousness.
Moreover, what it is to believe that Jesus died for us is currently explained in various ways, with differing degrees and forms of creedal content or association with a local church or denomination. Indeed, as we shall see presently, this issue—what the faith that saves is—is a flash point of current controversy. But for some time now the belief required to be saved has increasingly been regarded as a totally private act, “just between you and the Lord.” Only the “scanner” would know.
And so the only sure outcome of belief is that we are “just forgiven.” We are justified, which is often explained by saying that, before God, it is “just-as-if-I’d” never sinned at all. We may not have done or become anything positive to speak of. But when we come to heaven’s gate, they will not be able to find a reason to keep us out. The mere record of a magical moment of mental assent will open the door.
Practically, there has always been a great problem with knowing for sure that you have performed the right private or mental act, because its only essential effect is a change in the books of heaven, and these cannot be seen now. Thus there occurs the familiar and often bitter struggle in the Protestant tradition to know whether or not you are “among the elect” and will certainly “get in.”
On the understanding of the theological right there is no behavior that absolutely indicates belief and none that is absolutely ruled out by it. Grace and forgiveness (salvation) by grace, “plus nothing and minus nothing,” is thought to require that. To insist that something more than mere faith must be present would be to add “works” on to pure grace. And that, we know from our Protestant cultural heritage, cannot be done.
“Lordship Salvation”
Widespread acceptance of this interpretation of salvation within the evangelical and conservative churches of North America is what has produced the situation sketched earlier, in which those who profess Christian commitment consistently show little or no behavioral and psychological difference from those who do not. This in turn has led to what is called the “Lordship salvation” debate among leading evangelicals and their followers.
The issues involved in that debate may seem a little difficult to follow, but a brief examination of them will do much to aid us in understanding how things now stand with the invitation to life as commonly heard.
One of the most influential writers in the conservative camp today is John MacArthur. He has defended the view that you cannot have a “saving” faith in Jesus Christ without also intending to obey his teachings. You must accept him as Lord, hence the name Lordship salvation.9
Obviously, for MacArthur, you can and must say much more about a Christian than that he or she is forgiven. He has painstakingly defended his view by biblical exposition and historical and theological analysis.
In replying to MacArthur, Charles Ryrie states that “the Gospel that saves is believing that Christ died for our sins and rose from the dead.”10 “The good news,” he continues, “is that Christ has done something about sin [paid for it] and that He lives today to offer His forgiveness to me.”
In supporting his position, Ryrie provides a clarification of what he calls “the issue in reference to the Gospel”:
Some of the confusion regarding the meaning of the Gospel today may arise from failing to clarify the issue involved. The issue is, How can my sins be forgiven? What is it that bars me from heaven? What is it that prevents my having eternal life? The answer is sin. Therefore, I need some way to resolve that problem. And God declares that the death of His son provides forgiveness of my sin…. Through faith I receive Him and His forgiveness. Then the sin problem is solved, and I can be fully assured of going to heaven.11
Ryrie does not try to support his claim that removal of sin-guilt (not of sin itself, as his words might suggest), to secure entrance into heaven after death, is the problem or issue. He quite correctly assumes that all parties to the current debate will agree with him about this. But in the face of Christian history and of the biblical record, that claim does need support—support it can never find. The Christian tradition certainly deals with guilt and the afterlife, but by no means does it take them to be the only issues involved in salvation.
This fact is hidden from Ryrie and others on his side by their own systematic way of reading New Testament references to faith or belief in Christ and to “the gospel” so that they fit their account of what is at issue.
For example, he states that all of Matthew’s references to the gospel of the kingdom have to do with the coming of the Messiah to rule the earth in the Millennium. The Millennium is a projected one-thousand-year period when the actual government on earth will be under the personal direction of a returned Jesus. The “kingdom” that the good news is about is said by Ryrie and many others to be the very same thing as this future millennial reign—a future political reality, not the present action of God’s will in creation and in Christ.
Could this possibly be correct? Certainly if we substitute the phrase millennial reign for the kingdom in such passages as Matt. 6:33 and 8:12, we get language that makes little or no sense: “Seek ye first the millennial reign of God” and “the children of the millennial reign shall be cast out.” We need an explanation of why kingdom must mean something different in such passages while allegedly meaning “millennial reign” in “gospel” contexts such as Matt. 4:17 and 9:35.
If, by contrast, we understand the kingdom of God to be simply what God is actually doing, as previously explained, then the “kingdom” passages in the Gospels all make sense, and yet leave plenty of room to deal with future dimensions of the kingdom, including a millennial reign of a political nature.
Ryrie is so sure that the saving gospel is about Jesus’ death that, in Matthew’s story of Mary Magdalene’s anointing of Jesus for burial, he simply inserts the words about his death after the word gospel in Matt. 26:13. This makes the passage say, in Ryrie’s words, “that wherever the good news about His death was preached, Mary Magdalene’s good deed of anointing Him in anticipation of that death would be known” (italics mine).12 But the scripture text itself simply says, “Wherever this gospel is preached” and does not indicate that it is “about his death” at all. The gospel certainly includes the death of Jesus for humankind, but much more besides.
Salvation Cut Off from Life
Construing texts in this manner makes it possible for Ryrie, and many others, to make a distinction between what you believe for salvation and other things you can correctly believe about Christ. In itself a perfectly correct and helpful distinction, it still must be used with care.
“To believe in Christ for salvation,” he says, “means to have confidence that He can remove the guilt of sin and give eternal life [read heaven]. It means to believe that He can solve the problem of sin [read guilt] which is what keeps a person out of heaven.”13
There are a multitude of things that, according to Ryrie, you can correctly believe about Christ but are not required to believe for salvation, among them:
You can believe that what He taught while on earth was good, noble, and true, and it was…. You can believe He is able to run your life, and He surely is able to do that, and He wants to. But these are not issues of salvation. That issue is whether or not you believe that His death paid for all your sin and that by believing in Him you can have forgiveness and eternal life.
“When one believes, he commits to God,” Ryrie explains. “Commits what? His eternal destiny. That’s the issue, not the years of his life on the earth”. The nonsalvation “issues belong to Christian living” or “relate to the Christian life, not to the issue of salvation.” “I do not need to settle issues that belong to Christian living in order to be saved”.
But Is That the Issue?
The difference between adherents of Lordship salvation and its critics has to do with what makes up saving faith. But we should also consider where the two sides agree. They agree that being lost or saved is solely a matter of demerit and merit, on what it is for faith to be saving faith, and on what being “saved” amounts to. These points form the heart of the gospel on the theological right.
Also, the phrase eternal destiny is used much by all parties. They all agree that the matter at issue is what Ryrie says it is: forgiveness of sins because of transferred merit, with the resultant admission to heaven after death. You are saved if you have got this, and saving faith is the personal quality or attitude that is required to “get” it. The point of difference is over what that faith is that saves. What exactly must one believe if the belief is to save us?
MacArthur agrees with his critics that the issue at stake in salvation is forgiveness and eternal destiny. If he did not, there would be no significant disagreement at all; the two sides would just be talking about different things. MacArthur would be saying that in order to have A (salvation) you must have B (commitment to Lordship), and his critics would be replying, “No, in order to have C (another ‘salvation’), you do not have to have B.”
Associated with this agreement that the issue in salvation is only “heaven or hell” is a further agreement that being saved is a forensic or legal condition rather than a vital reality or character. No one is in this “saved” condition until declared to be so by God. We do not enter it by something that happens to us, or in virtue of a reality that moves into place in our life, even if that reality is God himself. The debate then is about what must be true of us before God will declare us to be in the saved condition.
Finally, the two sides agree that getting into heaven after death is the sole target of divine and human efforts for salvation. It is what such efforts are aimed at, rather than a by-product or natural outcome of something else that is the target.
But we get a totally different picture of salvation, faith, and forgiveness if we regard having life from the kingdom of the heavens now—the eternal kind of life—as the target. The words and acts of Jesus naturally suggest that this is indeed salvation, with discipleship, forgiveness, and heaven to come as natural parts. And in this he only continues the teachings of the Old Testament. The entire biblical tradition from beginning to end is one of the intimate involvement of God in human life—or else alienation from it. That is the biblical alternative for life now. “The crooked man is an abomination to the Lord,” as the proverb sums it up, “but He is intimate with the upright” (Prov. 3:32 NAS).
Recalling Abraham’s Faith and Righteousness
Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness, we are told (Gen. 15:6). What did Abraham believe that led God to declare or “reckon” him righteous? Was it that God had arranged payment for his sins? Not at all. The story makes it very clear that Abraham believed God was going to give him a male baby, an heir, and through that baby a multitude of descendants who would possess the land promised to him. He trusted God, of course, but it was for things involved in his current existence.
He believed that God would interact with him now—just as those who later gathered around Jesus did. He even dared to ask God how he could know that the promise of a male heir would be fulfilled. In response, God directed him to prepare animals for sacrifice. Abraham did so and then waited for God to act (Gen. 15:8–11). He waited until God materialized fire “out of thin air.” God acted from surrounding space, the atmosphere—that is, from the “first heaven” of the Bible. This was the answer to Abraham’s question. Much later “God visited Sarah” and Isaac was conceived (Gen. 21:1).
In the face of such faith, God declared Abraham to be righteous. Does that mean he declared he would go to heaven when he died? Not precisely that, but certainly that Abraham’s sins and failures would not cut him off from God in the present moment and in their ongoing relationship in life together.
But would he go to heaven when he died? Of course! What else would God do with such a person? They were friends, a fact made much of in scripture (2 Chron. 20:7; Isa. 41:8; James 2:23), as we are to be friends of Jesus by immersing ourselves in his work (John 15:15). No friend of God will be in hell. Jesus even assured us that “whoever, as one of his apprentices, gives a ‘little one’ just a cup of cold water to drink shall not lose his reward” (Matt. 10:42).
Certainly forgiveness and reconciliation are essential to any relationship where there has been offense, and also between us and God. We cannot pass into a new life from above without forgiveness. Certainly it is Christ who made possible such a transition, including forgiveness, through his life and his death. We must be reconciled to God and he to us if we are going to have a life together. But such a reconciliation involves far more than the forgiveness of our sins or a clearing of the ledger. And the faith and salvation of which Jesus speaks obviously is a much more positive reality than mere reconciliation. The stories of Abraham and other biblical characters beautifully illustrate this.
The issue, so far as the gospel in the Gospels is concerned, is whether we are alive to God or dead to him. Do we walk in an interactive relationship with him that constitutes a new kind of life, life “from above”? As the apostle John says in his first letter, “God has given undying life to us, and that life is in his Son. Those who have the Son have life” (1 John 5:11–12).
What must be emphasized in all of this is the difference between trusting Christ, the real person Jesus, with all that that naturally involves, versus trusting some arrangement for sin-remission set up through him—trusting only his role as guilt remover. To trust the real person Jesus is to have confidence in him in every dimension of our real life, to believe that he is right about and adequate to everything.
Ryrie comments, with reference to the use of “gospel” in the Gospels of Mark and Luke, “Our Lord is the central theme of the good news.”14 And this is certainly right. But he and many others see no distinction between saying that and saying, “The Gospel is the good news about the death and resurrection of Christ”—or that it claims an arrangement for forgiveness of sin has been made that leaves Christ, the now living person, simply irrelevant to our present existence.
The sensed irrelevance of what God is doing to what makes up our lives is the foundational flaw in the existence of multitudes of professing Christians today. They have been led to believe that God, for some unfathomable reason, just thinks it appropriate to transfer credit from Christ’s merit account to ours, and to wipe out our sin debt, upon inspecting our mind and finding that we believe a particular theory of the atonement to be true—even if we trust everything but God in all other matters that concern us.
It is left unexplained how it is possible that one can rely on Christ for the next life without doing so for this one, trust him for one’s eternal destiny without trusting him for “the things that relate to Christian life.” Is this really possible? Surely it is not! Not within one life.
When all is said and done, “the gospel” for Ryrie, MacArthur, and others on the theological right is that Christ made “the arrangement” that can get us into heaven. In the Gospels, by contrast, “the gospel” is the good news of the presence and availability of life in the kingdom, now and forever, through reliance on Jesus the Anointed. This was Abraham’s faith, too. As Jesus said, “Abraham saw my time and was delighted” (John 8:56).
Accordingly, the only description of eternal life found in the words we have from Jesus is “This is eternal life, that they [his disciples] may know you, the only real God, and Jesus the anointed, whom you have sent” (John 17:3). This may sound to us like “mere head knowledge.” But the biblical “know” always refers to an intimate, personal, interactive relationship.
Thus the prophet speaks for God in saying to Israel, “You are the only ones I have known from among all of the families of the earth” (Amos 3:2). And Mary, in response to the angel’s statement that she would bear a child, asks, “How can that be, since I know no man?” (Luke 1:35). Obviously God knows about other families on the earth, as Mary knows about men. The eternal life of which Jesus speaks is not knowledge about God but an intimately interactive relationship with him.
The Gospel on the Left
The Gospel as Entirely Social
At the opposite end of the theological spectrum stands a large number of ministers, priests, and congregations who take an entirely different view of what the issue is in the gospel and of the gospel itself.
It would be a mistake, however, to refer to them as “liberal” without considerable qualification. They are, indeed, the legitimate offspring of the liberal Christian church of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. But anyone really familiar with ministers and theologians from the older liberalism (up to the nineteen sixties) may find many of them closer to MacArthur and Ryrie, in the substance of their teachings as well as in their morality and practical spirituality, than to the currently dominant figures and teachings of the Christian left.
