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

Part 3

by Mark McCulley

    I quote from a “new legalist” definition of legalism. “Legalism is the belief that God does not act of grace but acts out of justice in giving his favor.” There you have it; the false gospel of Chuck Swindoll --unmerited favor. Missing from this “gospel” is the righteousness the God-man obtained for those God favors.

    Yes, the Bible teaches God’s love and favor for the elect. But the Bible has no either/or between grace and justice, because God is both just and justifier. When God justifies the ungodly elect, God is not justifying the better performers or the better non-performers. When God justifies the ungodly elect, God is acting out of justice to Jesus Christ and to Himself by crediting these elect with the righteousness the incarnate God-man established for the elect in history. This righteousness is not simply God’s inscrutable “act of grace”; it is perfect satisfaction of God’s law (precept and penalty) and there is legal solidarity between the elect who need this righteousness and Christ who JUSTLY earned this righteousness.

    Are YOU willing to define your gospel and then to have it judged by the Christian Scriptures? You are a cult is if you don’t want to be questioned about your teaching. I am not agreeing to be interrogated by the world’s standard of “reasonable evidence”. Nor can we spend all our time arguing and debating. But unwillingness to be tested even by other insiders (according to the Scriptures) is very arrogant and very dangerous.

    I am NOT saying that we need to first agree that those outsiders who question us are Christians like ourselves. We do NOT say: we are under the authority of the same Bible even though we interpret it differently, therefore we are all Christians. We do NOT say: we all believe the Trinity, even though we interpret it differently, therefore we are all Christians. But refusal to be tested and questioned is cultic, whether this refusal comes in the form of a rhetorically bombastic clergyman or in the form of a community which dogmatically denies that there is only one gospel. Such a “community” consigns the “private” doctrines of  individuals to practical irrelevance.

    The desire for purity, the attempt to have church discipline, the requirement that those to be baptized have a right confession of belief in the gospel, the teaching that we speak peace to only “as many as” follow the rule of the gospel (Gal. 6:14-16), none of these things is cultic. To reject the Bible’s demand for purity is to become a liberal who thinks that the only alternative to legalism is tolerance. It is one thing to tolerate unbelievers and to live with them in a pagan society; it is quite another thing to demand that a community must accept Unitarians or hypothetical redemptionists in order to avoid being known as cultic. Such rhetoric against “cults” is very intolerant.

    Pluralists say that “cults” have a persecution complex. But these same pluralists are often very intolerant and rigid in their attitudes toward “true believers”. Insiders should not for this reason refuse conversation with outsiders; our task is to translate the gospel (without changing it) so that we can not only communicate it jargon-free to the public but also so that the public can have access to our exegesis of Scripture. Have we fallen so in love with our own way of saying things, that we have lost touch with the idiom of the Bible way of saying things? We all need constant surveillance in this area.