A few days ago, Bob Wilkin of the Grace Evangelical Society came out with a blog post titled “Are All Who Identify as Free Grace Cessationists?” Now, given the title of the piece, you’d expect it to be about people who are Free Grace and their views on the sign gifts. You’d expect that…but no.
I encourage you to read the piece; it’s an impressive little piece of bait-and-switch journalism. Were anyone at GES inclined to give the question a straightforward answer, the answer, in a word, is NO. Which, it seems, is the one thing they really didn’t want to say. So we get treated to some very clever framing instead.
The article begins by posing the question from the title and defining cessationism. Then, instead of talking about Free Grace people and their positions on cessationism, the article pivots to focus on charismatics and their views on the gospel. R. T. Kendall, Michael Eaton, and Jack Deere all get a favorable mention, and then we get this clever little sentence: “Beyond those three, I do not know of any third wave or charismatic theologians who hold to eternal security, let alone FGT.” He then continues, “My guess is that there are more. But most would not agree with FGT on justification or sanctification.”
The claims of fact are technically true, but the overall effect is lying by omission. The paragraph cultivates a general impression that Free Grace people are basically cessationists except for R. T., Michael, and Jack, the first two of whom don’t seem to have ever publicly identified as Free Grace anyhow, and we don’t know if Jack still holds to it. Hardly any overlap between the camps, it would seem….
But remember the question we started out with? “Are all who identify as Free Grace cessationists?” By dodging that question and focusing on charismatic theologians (who might be Free Grace), Bob has avoided addressing the question he actually started with, which is whether all Free Grace people are cessationist. The answer — and Bob knows this; don’t make me get my screenshots and prove it — is no. That there are a number of us non-cessationist Free Grace folks, not least the man who was for 10 years Bob’s right-hand man (until 5 days before this blog post went up). Ahem.
So why didn’t he just say so? He could have just said, “No, not all Free Grace people are cessationist; we don’t have to agree on that to be Free Grace.” He didn’t. Why not?
Note: Unfortunately, GES seems to have made a habit of this sort of thing. Drew McLeod of the Provisionist Perspective and I discussed another instance a few months ago.
Posted by Tim Nichols 
Full Contact Christianity 