September 11 and Pluralism
Why "grace not justice" Calvinism is worse than Islam

Part 1

by Mark McCulley

    Many pluralists think that they grew up legalists who now have outgrown legalism, but who in reality have only exchanged one form of legalism for another. This new legalism is a “legalism against legalism”. Living in reaction to their own past, they feel very SELF-RIGHTEOUS in regard to the ignorant folk who still think like they used to think. Thus they fail to see their own present ignorance and self-righteousness.

    They have not even repented of their first version of legalism. They blame that legalism on those who taught them. They claim to have been Christians even when they were legalists. They cannot see their present legalism.

    They are not yet submitted to the righteousness revealed in the gospel. In reaction to being a legalist, they have now become pluralists who deny that any belief system or doctrine is necessary. They fail to see that this reactionary idea is itself a belief system and a doctrine. We don’t have rigid doctrine, they claim, but only love and community. But just wait to find out how their loving community will treat you if you say that there is only one gospel and that those who do not believe it are lost!

    Even pluralism is a doctrine. The insiders in power these days are often professing pluralists: outside pluralism -- they assume -- are those who have lost their minds! It’s not that “in-group” jargon has been overcome. Rather, new and different “code language” has been adopted. Before one talked about lost and saved, now one talks about individualists vs. living in community. Before one said that doctrine defined the person you believed in, now you have a doctrine about “community” which demands that all other doctrines be adjusted or sacrificed to fit that paradigm. Those who will not submit to be included or translated into this pluralist framework are consigned to the margins.

    We who are not pluralists know that Satan is on the other side. We know that the lie of free will is of Satan. We know that Satan does not agree with God about lost and saved. God says to those who do not have the righteousness required: ye shall surely die. Satan says: let’s discuss that, let’s find a way to verify that empirically. Satan says: nobody knows for sure. Satan says: do you think you are God that you know for sure? Then Satan says: and who are you to think you know for sure what God has said? Satan says: and who is God to say for sure you will die. Satan says: that was a generalization about people dying, but on this historical occasion, we can’t know for sure what will happen, since you have freewill and the future is not only future to God but open.

    I am not saying that the pluralists have been unfair to me. I have no desire to sit down at the liberal’s table and “cast my vote” and “say what I have to say” and then agree to whatever happens. I do not agree. God’s gospel is clear and is not a matter for negotiation. I have no desire to talk to anybody if the cost of talking is to agree with them first that they are saved even if they don’t agree with me about the gospel. I have no desire for an apologetic which lets the enemies of the cross decide what counts as “reasonable” evidence.

    You can call us fanatics and cultists if you like, but we know that nobody can know the truth we know until they believe the gospel we do. And the truth we know is not a partial truth which is only true for us. Even though we are sinners, even though we do not know anything exhaustively, nevertheless we know the truth. When liberals tell us that they know that we know nothing, they sound very sure of what they know. When evolutionists talk of a “fallibilism” by which they are self-corrected by the “facts”, they are not confessing sins but only confessing again that there is no God who will tell them what the facts are and what the facts mean.

    So when I talk about the gospel to liberals, I refuse to agree first that they might be right. If they agree with me about the gospel, then they will learn to repent of being wrong. But the gospel is still true, if we believe it or not.

    Even after September 11, we supposedly live in a world where the nation-states are not an enemy to religions, and religions are not enemies of the nation-states. This "neutral" world is what the enemies of the cross have always wanted, but it is not neutral but a hostility to the true Jesus which has always existed, and which will continue to exist until Jesus Christ comes again.

    Galatians 6:14 “God forbid that I should glory except in the cross of OUR Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified to me, and I to the world.” Even though it has not always been politically feasible to accuse all non-pluralists of being cultists, the world has always known that those who believe the true gospel are dangerous and subversive to Satan’s status quo.

    We do not need a poll from the world to tell us what the gospel is or what sin is or what we need. The Bible has already told us what the gospel is. The gospel defines as self-righteousness all the false gospels taught by all those who are not submitted to the true gospel.  The Christian's duty is to talk with outsiders about that gospel with clarity so that they will understand it well enough to be either believe it or to be offended by it. But it is not our duty to stop being aliens in this society. We are citizens of heaven, and the earth belongs not to the pluralists but to the Lord. We have no plans for going to heaven, because we know that heaven is coming to earth and that all who oppose the gospel will be banished and destroyed.

    We Christians need each other so that we might resist any temptations to moderation or abridgment of the gospel. We need to know who our brothers and sisters are in order not to be swallowed up in a false fellowship where we would participate religiously with those who remain enemies of the cross. We will work jobs for and with enemies of the cross, but when they pray to their patriotic but generic god (that abstract god who is supposed to include the names of all our sectarian gods), our heads will not bow and our knees will not bend.