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

Part 2

by Mark McCulley

    Pluralists would rather talk about HOW I am communicating instead of about what I AM communicating. Pluralists don’t like my tone. Why am I being so paranoid and defensive? Don’t I know that this is not the way to influence people? Don’t I know that the only way to influence people is for me to let them influence me first? And then we can agree to call this “mutuality”. Then we can live together peacefully like man and wife.

    To which Christians say: do not forget that we never made any pledges to you. The main debt we have to you is the debt we have to God to love you enough to tell you the gospel. When we tell pluralists the gospel, we listen to them to find out if they are understanding it. When we tell them the gospel, they may have valid points to make. Our duty is to agree with them when their point is right and to let them know when their point is wrong, especially when that point is evidence of their rebellion against the gospel.

    It is not reasonable to disagree with the gospel. If one disagrees with the gospel, then one is not being rational. The God who made all of us is the God who has revealed the gospel. The God who demands PERFECT righteousness is the God who had sent God the Son to obtain that righteousness for the elect.

    Christians are evangelists not apologists. The urge to repent for what God says in the gospel is wicked. The desire to leave out some of the gospel is evidence of a mind and will still at enmity with God. If all we ever want is peace at any price, then we should never claim to have any news from the Sovereign Creator of this world. When people say that talk like my talk is “hateful”, that only means that they have now understood that I am an enemy of their false gospel and all false gospels. When the enemies of the cross say that talk like this is a “conversation-stopper”, their assumption is that the only way to have a conversation is to agree first that we are all saved but that we interpret things differently. Believers have been born again in order to believe the gospel. Non-elect unbelievers were created in order to never believe the gospel and thus be destroyed. (II Peter 2:1-12).

    What happens in reaction to “first legalism” is often an either/or mindset. Either what we left, or what we are now. It does not seem to occur to reactionaries that a third alternative is possible. The truth is that there are many false gospels, many ways to be lost, and just because you have rejected one wrong way does not mean that you now believe the true gospel. The true gospel is NOT that there is no true gospel! When one has abandoned the moral scoldings of “first legalism” for the moral pep talks of “the discipleship in community” preachers, one has only exchanged one form of moralism for another. Still a legalist, only a different kind of one.

    If anything one is worse off. Now one claims that there is no moral code in the New Testament but only one command to love. Worse, now one thinks that grace means that theological doctrine doesn’t matter when it comes to saved and lost. One comes to think that it would be cultic abuse to judge individuals saved or lost based on the evidence of their gospel doctrines. Unless we tell all people without exception, without respect of persons, that God demands a perfect righteousness and that God provided this righteousness only for the elect, then we still have a man-centered legalistic cult. It may be a happier kind of cult. But it still is not submissive to God’s gospel.

    Some of the liberal Mennonites who no longer drive black cars are still legalists who think one gains or loses salvation depending on one’s work in community. Some of these liberal Mennonites no longer believe in saved and lost. Most of them, though, believe the Chuck Swindoll false gospel which says that God does not demand righteousness but only the faith to “not-perform”. As the old blues song goes, "start stopping"...!

    Where the old legalism said that it was saved because it out-performed others, the new legalism claims to have done it the right way now, and to have performed not-performing where others were still trying to perform. But in neither case is the finished for the elect performance of Jesus Christ even in the picture.

    The apostle Paul was devoted to the true gospel. He not only said that he himself was lost when he did not believe that gospel, but said that everyone who was still ignorant of that gospel was lost. (Romans 9:32-10:4). This "hard teaching" caused problems and “miscommunication” in well established religious communities. Some people even left their families for Paul’s cult. Instead of staying well rounded with a wide variety of media and a constant input of various perspectives, these Pauline cultists wanted people to be under the control of Paul’s letters. They even spent a lot of time trying to “renew their minds” (Romans 12:1-2) by trying to exegete and understand Paul’s letters.

    This is a good example of “cultic thought reform”: this idea that not only that there is one authoritative book but that there is a right and wrong way to understand that book. It is not only un-American, undemocratic but downright cultic to say that different interpretations of a text are “wrong”. One of the keys to having a community which works is to know that the difference between right and wrong interpretation is only a matter of degree.

    If one claims to know the true gospel in such a way that other gospels are “false”, the accusation comes that "ideology" is at work in such "totalism". One is really claiming to know everything if one claims to know anything. The only way to avoid being a "totalist" is to admit that one’s gospel is only one version of the basic gospel which one has in common with those who teach that Jesus died for everybody. This of course means that nobody ever really needs to know what the gospel is or isn’t. After all, the gospel is a person not propositions about the person. And since no individual has a total exhaustive knowledge of the gospel propositions, then nobody really knows the gospel. And that’s good: it will keep us all humble.

    Thus ends my sarcasm.