Full Contact Christianity

If you’re here for my work on Ephesians 2, follow the links to the article or book.

Tricking us into forgetting God’s grace seems to be one of the devil’s favorite pastimes. At the micro level — a particular moment on a particular day — it’s a trick we’ve all fallen for. We fall for it as a group, too, and it becomes necessary for God to raise up people to remind us who He is and what He has done for us. Such movements of the Spirit speckle the history of the church. They take different forms at different times: sometimes intellectual/theological, sometimes mystical, sometimes moral , sometimes communal. They seem to pop up even in the most unlikely (theologically speaking) times and places.

Today, one such group (they’re not the only one, but I won’t tell if you don’t!) refers to itself as “Free Grace” theology. Effectively beginning with Lewis Sperry Chafer (1871-1952), followed by such notables as Ray Stanford (1917-2012), Charles Ryrie (1925-2016), and Zane Hodges (1933-2008), Free Grace has championed a radical understanding of the depths of God’s grace. The best of the Free Grace tradition deserves your attention.

Free Grace is exegetically and theologically driven, and it is above all a theology of assurance, of the freeness of God’s grace and the incredible costliness of discipleship. In addition, Free Grace offers some maverick exegesis that’s a welcome breath of fresh air, and a compelling understanding of personal eschatology. Thus far Free Grace theology.

The Free Grace movement, alas, is another kettle of fish. On this page, I’ll give you some starting points to engage the theology, which you should. Down at the bottom, I’ll have some comments on the movement, its social dynamics, and some possible ways forward, for those who are interested in such things.

A Theology of Assurance

Contrary to the popular belief that God is waiting for you to do good things before He receives you into His family, Free Grace has championed the grace of God. He receives you simply because you ask. Anyone who wants to be part of the family, will be, and God isn’t going to hold “Maybe you’re in, maybe not” over your head like some people would. The new birth is not contingent on your earning it, maintaining it, or proving it, and you can know—not think, not guess, not hope—know that you have eternal life.

Once you’ve believed the gospel, your status is never in doubt. You have eternal life right now, and you always will. It’s the life of the age to come, and the age to come will last forever. God has graciously and permanently removed the question of your eternal destiny from the table. You are his child, period. The remaining question is, what kind of son or daughter are you going to be? 

People who are new to God’s grace often wonder, where’s the motivation to live a holy life? Shouldn’t there be at least a little fear of hell, just to keep the unruly folks in line? That is a “We love Him because He first scared us” approach to the matter. That’s not what God does, and for good reason: it’s not possible to terrify someone into a life of gratitude. If God just wanted you to follow some rules, then sure. Most anybody can be scared into obedience, if the threat is good enough. But God is aiming for your life to be an overflow of love and gratitude, and that takes a different motivation.  

By holding to this strong view of assurance, Free Grace unmasks the quiet agreement between Arminianism and late-Puritan Calvinism in difficult pastoral situations where a believer has fallen into serious sin. Proponents of these two views like to pretend they’re opposites (and that they’re the only two options) but in reality neither of those things is true. Those two views certainly do disagree about whether post-new-birth good works certify (Calvinism) or maintain (Arminianism) the believer’s salvation, but they agree that a person lacking such works is not saved. 

The practical, pastoral result is ugly: say we’re talking about a Christian with a serious porn problem. In the Arminian interpretation, he’s losing his salvation by succumbing to his addiction. In the late-Puritan Calvinist interpretation, he’s demonstrating that he was never really saved to start with. In practice, that means his battle with porn becomes a battle for assurance: when he’s doing ok, he feels like he’s going to heaven, and when he’s sinning, he’s afraid he’s going to hell. It’s a theological distinction without a pastoral difference–and it doesn’t work. 

With either of these approaches, at the moment when a believer most needs to be assured of God’s love and provision, at the very moment when it most matters to assure him that he is righteous in Christ and has been gifted in Christ with both the obligation and ability to live out that righteousness–at that moment, these folks pry off the poor fellow’s breastplate of righteousness and stab him through the heart with accusations that he is not Christ’s, that no son of God could behave in such a way, and so on. This is a theology that does the devil’s work for him, and to hell with that!

(Luther and Calvin themselves did not encourage such doubts, by the way, and I’ve little quarrel with their modern descendants who actually follow their example. Wish there were more of them!) Free Grace, like the early Reformers, assures the believer that he is a part of the family, challenges him to ask for the power of the Spirit, which God will freely give, and encourages him to live on that basis. We believe, in other words, that God is a good Father, and He gives us the power to live well. 

A good brief starting point would be Six Secrets of the Christian Life by Zane Hodges.

If you want to dig a little deeper, Grace Awakening by Charles Swindoll and Absolutely Free by Zane Hodges will give you more. Hodges focuses principally on the new birth; Swindoll goes deeper into what a grace-based life looks like. If you’d like a swan dive into the deep end, try Free Grace Soteriology by Dave Anderson, and edited by James Reitman.

Maverick Exegesis

Clear-eyed exegesis is always worth engaging for its own sake, but those who are looking for an exegetically based antidote to the pastoral failures of Arminianism or late-Puritan Calvinism will find a lot of help in the Free Grace tradition. Some of our leading Free Grace thinkers are often willing to depart from theologically-driven consensus, asking further questions of the text, and looking carefully for answers. Even if you don’t agree with their answers, you will find their questions helpful.

Zane Hodges and John Niemela are both worth paying careful attention to in this regard. Hodges tended to stick to devotional-level commentary in his published work, but in personal conversation I found him to have defense in depth for anything he said. Of course he’s no longer around to talk to, but when I disagree with him, I take that as a cue to dig deeper. I don’t always come around to his way of thinking, but I am rarely disappointed by an inquiry into why he might have taken a particular position. 

 There’s no question that John Niemela is the premier exegete of the Free Grace movement. John has provided useful work on a number of difficult passages. He’s the kind of man who will do a word study on a conjunction that occurs 700+ times, just to establish if there’s a pattern to when it’s used in a particular way. (Yes, he really did that; I was there. The results of that study are in his work on Revelation 3:10.) As a trainer of exegetes, he is simply without peer. (And yeah, I’m biased. But he is, in fact, that good.) 

Unfortunately, John’s work can be a little hard to find, but you can find a good bit of it on the Message of Life publications page, the CTS Journal back issues page, and the JOTGES page.

My own Dead Man’s Faith challenges the consensus on some aspects of Ephesians 2. The “regeneration precedes faith” interpretations don’t fare so well when you read the passage carefully, and Arminian “prevenient grace” readings fare little better. The problem turns out to be the assumptions that Calvinist and Arminian readings both make. In other words, I’m not finding a mediating position between those two allegedly opposite poles; I’m disagreeing with them where they agree with each other. (Quiet as it’s kept, a 17th-century intramural debate in the Dutch church doesn’t encompass all the options. Of course, they pretend it does — what could be more Dutch than that? — but we ought to know better than to take them seriously.)

Zane Hodges’ devotional commentaries on James and the Johannine epistles are worth your time; commentaries or essays on several other books are also available. Zane’s Free Grace Primer addresses a number of key passages around assurance and personal eschatology. Jody Dillow’s Final Destiny: The Future Reign of the Servant Kings contains careful exegesis of a wide array of passages on its subject, and I highly recommend it.

Personal Eschatology

One popular Free Grace speaker used to enjoy scandalizing audiences by starting his sermons with, “I don’t want to go to heaven!” He would proceed to elaborate on the New Earth as our ultimate destiny, with all the attendant glories. If you want to know why heaven won’t be boring, this is good stuff to look into.

Secrets of the Vine by Bruce Wilkinson is a good starting point. Final Destiny: The Future Reign of the Servant Kings by Joseph C. Dillow will take you far; it’s massive, but well worth your effort.

 The classic Free Grace teaching on personal eschatology really sits up and sings when you marry it to an understanding of the present and future Kingdom of God (which they mostly don’t). If you’re interested, you can start with the presence of the Kingdom in Jesus’ time, continue into the rest of the New Testament, and right up to today. It’s an area I’d like to write more about in the future.

…and the Movement (such as it is)

Thus far Free Grace theology. The Free Grace movement is a separate matter, and frankly less of a joy to contemplate, although there are some encouraging signs. The movement, in my view, lost its way when it shifted from constructive work to a sort of intra-Christian apologetics where the enemy is something like Lordship Salvation doctrine in all its forms. Chafer was an evangelist, so was Ray Stanford. Their purpose wasn’t to defeat Lordship Salvation; it was to win people to Jesus. They both founded schools; those schools didn’t exist to defeat Lordship Salvation but to train evangelists and ministers. Of course, they were training up the sort of ministry workers who wouldn’t be confused by Lordship Salvation or other aberrant soteriologies and knew how to answer them effectively, but their mission was broader than that — fundamentally constructive, rather than fundamentally destructive.

This shift from a creative and constructive purpose to a destructive one fundamentally changes the character of the movement. It also means that the sorts of people we select into leadership often end up being skilled at destruction, rather than at construction. This is a major problem, because such leaders are simply untrustworthy. (Don’t ever trust someone who doesn’t build. Today, they might be taking apart bad things that needed to be dismantled, but if all they ever do is tear down, they’ll get around to you eventually!) Such leaders frequently define themselves by who their enemies are, and they only way they know to grow is to designate more enemies. That dynamic will inevitably drive a movement toward an unhealthy pursuit of uniformity: if your business model depends on regularly designating new enemies, everybody who disagrees with you on anything whatsoever is a potential enemy.

Happily, a number of people have noticed the dysfunction, and are seeking to correct it. Among us, I see grounds for hope: grace gives us a different approach to community. We know there’s no sin a believer can’t commit; we aren’t going to get scandalized when you’re struggling with something. The way Scripture teaches us to live is called “walking in the light” in 1 John…and almost everybody misreads that passage. For some reason we tend to think “walking in the light” means doing the right things and not sinning. But look at what the passage says:

If we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.

1 John 1:7

If “walking in the light” means not sinning, what sin is He cleansing us from?

No, walking in the light means not hiding. Live your life in the open, where people can see you. Tell your brothers and sisters what’s going on with you, and get their help: “Confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed.” Likewise, invest yourself in others’ growth: “Consider one another in order to stir up love and good deeds.” That word translated “consider” means “study, scrutinize.” Invest some time and effort to really see your brothers and sisters. Let them see you.

The fear is that they will see your sin–and they will, too! The fear is that if you don’t hide your sin, it will blow up the relationship. But look again at 1 John 1:7: God promises exactly the opposite. If you will live openly with one another, if you will not hide from each other, then you will have fellowship with one another. What happens with the sin? Jesus will cleanse you from all of it.

Like Adam and Eve, we want to hide our sin. We stitch together fig leaves in a frantic effort to conceal our shame. But God came down into the garden and called out, “Adam! Where are you?” Today, Christ seeks you through His Body. In your fellow believers, Christ is truly present, and He is present to them in you. You have the Holy Spirit: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven.” God has given us the ministry of reconciliation. Let’s be about it.