KNOW WHAT GOSPEL YOU ARE OF
26/11/24 10:46
I attended an on-line funeral in which the pastor, attempted to give comfort to the mourners when he declared that Sybil, not her real name, was assured of a place in heaven due to her service. The word service among some Believers is unfortunately code for ‘earning Christ’ - a performance mentality consisting of good works and morals - service that is held to provide entitlement to a reward.
This is the kind of non-gospel in which ‘service’ earns us Christ and ‘service’ that means that your salvation is earned by you. Homilies in this mode often centre around the notion of ‘you better shape up’ and modes of cajoling the self into working in ways that are deemed ‘worthy of Christ.’ Like the time a principal told his staff that they should consider seeing every pupil in their class as an image of Christ.
Such legalistic Christianity is un-Christlike and devoid of the Spirit of Christ in us. A scrappy kind of externalist manipulation it produces minimalist religion of the kind that suffocates life in the Spirit and cripples our humanity.
ANOTHER GOSPEL
This is not the gospel of grace and neither is it the apostle’s doctrine. It’s a form of Arminianism in which you earn Christ before you can have Him as your Saviour and your life. In other words it is a lie
We have not been made part of a contract. We have been included in Christ’s life by His atonement/incarnation.
NEW PERSPECTIVES
This post is primarily about the heresy of ‘earning grace’ and the ‘Other Gospel’ of N.T Wright.’ He claims he is not denying that Christ took believers’ sins and they in turn get His righteousness; he’s simply saying that’s not what the apostle Paul meant when he spoke about justification.
This a faulty reinterpretation of Paul and it misunderstands Scripture in a way that fatally undermines the doctrine of justification by faith and the principle of sola fide … It appeals to those sects already soaked in legalism.
ANOTHER GOSPEL
It can easily be argued that this portrayal is not Christian but an aberrant version of grace that so deviates from the apostle’s doctrine that it is another gospel. We find this kind of teaching in Pelagianism* and Arminianism where the workers have to earn Christ before they can have Him. This is the ‘keeping close to Jesus’ mentality so perverse that it turns Christ Himself into a legalism. If this is our culture we should not imagine that we represent the Kingdom Jesus began.
DILUTED GOSPELS
Some communities overtly build their religion on the law. Many Christians just live a subtle culture of legalism in which one earns acceptance with God by doing right and avoiding wrong. This is a skeletal version of Christianity and is non-Kingdom life.
NEW PERSPECTIVES/OLD CHRIST IS NOT OUR LIFE
With considerable insight Timothy Keller wrote, “You cannot ultimately drive a wedge between nationalism and legalism as if they are two separate things. [as the new perspective’s folk do] Indeed, the book of Galatians addresses a controversy that had at its heart a racial/ethnic pride and superiority. Peter in 2:11-15 is clearly in the grip of this, and in this he surely has been affected by the Judaizers (2:12). These teachers were pressing Jewish cultural boundary markers on Gentile Christian converts. And so, works of the law probably does include them. But nationalism is a form of legalism. [Like the intimation that belonging to a particular denomination is a cultural legalism affording acceptance with God].
“Legalism is adding anything to Jesus Christ as a requirement for full acceptance with God… Paul shows us in the most vivid way that the gospel calls us out of religion as much as it calls us out of irreligion.”
ANOTHER GOSPEL
N. T. Wright’s New Perspectives are not aligned with the Gospel of Jesus and the apostles or the Church Father’s and the Nicaean Creed. New Perspectives comes under the heading of what Paul called, ‘No Gospel at all’ – a fact that we may not notice if we have been socialised from day one into a non-gospel of legalism.
DIFFERENT
‘New Perspectives’ do fit however, with the ‘different gospels’ of certain sects who follow a revisionist path by remaining in the old covenant with an attachment to the law. In this frame a lesser Jesus, subordinate to the law lives to help people keep the law, live out moralism and be a poster-board for ‘Christian Values.’
OUR INHERITANCE
“But what does Scripture say? "Get rid of the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman's son will never share in the inheritance with the free woman's son.’ GAL 4.30 NIV.
A BETTER GOSPEL
Our inheritance in Christ is better than New Perspectives. What Jesus left us was not a religion but Himself through the incarnation and Holy Spirit. Christ come in our flesh means that God lives in us and by the Spirit, Jesus manifests as us so that we are growing into ourselves as daughters and sons to bring God glory and to enter our own glory as genuine sons of God – which we can because the essential us is born again. We are not striving to stick externalities to our person as we do in any version of the law.
‘New Perspectives’ makes an appeal to those who never knew the real Gospel in the first place.
ELIMINATING CHRIST
Paul is explicit. If we are in combination with the law and live by such a hybrid we have negated the efficacy of Christ for us. He wrote ‘I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!’ Gal 2.21 NIV.
RED HERRING
According to Wright, what Paul means by justification is not ‘how you become a Christian’, so much as ‘how you can tell who is a member of the covenant family.’ But the deep issue of our life in God has never been whether we belong in that collection of Believers who are called the Church but whether we belong in God and are embedded in Christ without some gospel of our own.
AGENCY OR DISEASE?
It cannot be a real comfort to know that one belongs to the Body if one belongs as a tumour or a disease. The belonging that is ours is one of vitality and agency because we are incarnated with God and the expression of Christ by the Spirit who is in us.
CUT AND COVER
Any degree of legalism degrades Christ and deforms us. Wright was not the first person to suggest that Paul was talking about the ceremonial law as not binding so as to rationalise the continuation of the law and old covenant into the post cross age. There are sects that have done this, and the result is not only a lesser gospel and a lesser christ but lesser people who form themselves in woodenness in the abstractions of the law/tree of knowledge. Rather than becoming themselves an expression of Christ they become ideologues of a christian hybrid. We can choose between being a wood-pile or a tree of life.
MANNING AND REAL GRACE
Brennan Manning declares in a sermon on YouTube that we are loved by Christ as we are and not as we should be. This is real love and true grace. But this can come as an affront to those who live from religion and entitlement. But it is what Jesus was teaching when he told the parable of the workers who turned up near knock-off time and got the same wage as those who came at 9.00am.
Grace that is deserved is no grace at all.
WORKERS AND SLAVES
Christ’s grace is grace without dilution or meddling. N.T. Wright’s theology makes its adherents workers and slaves but not sons of God in the Reformed sense. His theology is not Reformed Theology by any stretch of the imagination. It is merely a new rendition of the captivity of the sons of the slave woman who live without their inheritance of extravagant grace because they will not abandon the law.
EARNING BELONGING
‘New Perspectives makes a person’s approximation to ‘what they should be’ the basis of final justification, thus grounding the ultimate declaration of righteousness in the believer’s own works, rather than grounding justification completely in the finished work of Christ on their behalf.’
BONZAI RELIGION
This would not normally be anything to rejoice over but it can comfort the religious mind that is adept as reducing the law and personal righteousness to something so minute that he can manage it.
YES/NO GOSPELS
Wright teaches a ‘covenant faithfulness’ that is accorded the Believer as a result of performance. Somewhat like teaching in which it is affirmed that we are saved by grace followed immediately by a listing of all those things a saved person must do to be included in that grace. This is the habit of some sects.
‘OTHER GOSPEL’
Believers have been brain-washed over the years into believing that the issue of Christianity is moral rectitude. This is not irrelevant, but it is the effect and not the issue. The fruit is the result of oneness. Not the reason for it. The issue is our achieved and already gifted union with God. Are we living in it or in some invention of our own?
UNION WITH GOD is the basis of your life in God. John emphasised incarnation as the core of Kingdom Life. ‘I say this because many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world. Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist’ 2 John 1.7 NIV.
NEW COVENANT
There is a covenant that applies to you and to all and this is it. You have been included in God by Christ. God lives in you and this is called Christ come in your flesh. John then forcefully asserts that those who deny this are operating in the spirit of antichrist who lives to neutralise the cross and undo the new creation. The new creation advances due to the incarnation of God in His daughters and sons. It stagnates and retreats wherever people are bound to their own performance and the law. Thus it is too common that we can focus on sexual sin and continue to kill the earth for the sake of ‘jobs and growth’.
CHRIST IN US AND WITH US
Christ’s teaching is that He Himself is our life. ‘Jesus replied, "Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them’ John 14.23 NIV.
You can make the transition to new birth in union with God. Jesus said, ‘Realise that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you’ John 14.20. Just agree with Christ.
*Pelagianism. The notion behind steps to Christ in which you deserve Christ by fulfilling a ‘contract’ of good works. It’s the essence of superficial Christianity and legalism.
This is the kind of non-gospel in which ‘service’ earns us Christ and ‘service’ that means that your salvation is earned by you. Homilies in this mode often centre around the notion of ‘you better shape up’ and modes of cajoling the self into working in ways that are deemed ‘worthy of Christ.’ Like the time a principal told his staff that they should consider seeing every pupil in their class as an image of Christ.
Such legalistic Christianity is un-Christlike and devoid of the Spirit of Christ in us. A scrappy kind of externalist manipulation it produces minimalist religion of the kind that suffocates life in the Spirit and cripples our humanity.
ANOTHER GOSPEL
This is not the gospel of grace and neither is it the apostle’s doctrine. It’s a form of Arminianism in which you earn Christ before you can have Him as your Saviour and your life. In other words it is a lie
We have not been made part of a contract. We have been included in Christ’s life by His atonement/incarnation.
NEW PERSPECTIVES
This post is primarily about the heresy of ‘earning grace’ and the ‘Other Gospel’ of N.T Wright.’ He claims he is not denying that Christ took believers’ sins and they in turn get His righteousness; he’s simply saying that’s not what the apostle Paul meant when he spoke about justification.
This a faulty reinterpretation of Paul and it misunderstands Scripture in a way that fatally undermines the doctrine of justification by faith and the principle of sola fide … It appeals to those sects already soaked in legalism.
ANOTHER GOSPEL
It can easily be argued that this portrayal is not Christian but an aberrant version of grace that so deviates from the apostle’s doctrine that it is another gospel. We find this kind of teaching in Pelagianism* and Arminianism where the workers have to earn Christ before they can have Him. This is the ‘keeping close to Jesus’ mentality so perverse that it turns Christ Himself into a legalism. If this is our culture we should not imagine that we represent the Kingdom Jesus began.
DILUTED GOSPELS
Some communities overtly build their religion on the law. Many Christians just live a subtle culture of legalism in which one earns acceptance with God by doing right and avoiding wrong. This is a skeletal version of Christianity and is non-Kingdom life.
NEW PERSPECTIVES/OLD CHRIST IS NOT OUR LIFE
With considerable insight Timothy Keller wrote, “You cannot ultimately drive a wedge between nationalism and legalism as if they are two separate things. [as the new perspective’s folk do] Indeed, the book of Galatians addresses a controversy that had at its heart a racial/ethnic pride and superiority. Peter in 2:11-15 is clearly in the grip of this, and in this he surely has been affected by the Judaizers (2:12). These teachers were pressing Jewish cultural boundary markers on Gentile Christian converts. And so, works of the law probably does include them. But nationalism is a form of legalism. [Like the intimation that belonging to a particular denomination is a cultural legalism affording acceptance with God].
“Legalism is adding anything to Jesus Christ as a requirement for full acceptance with God… Paul shows us in the most vivid way that the gospel calls us out of religion as much as it calls us out of irreligion.”
ANOTHER GOSPEL
N. T. Wright’s New Perspectives are not aligned with the Gospel of Jesus and the apostles or the Church Father’s and the Nicaean Creed. New Perspectives comes under the heading of what Paul called, ‘No Gospel at all’ – a fact that we may not notice if we have been socialised from day one into a non-gospel of legalism.
DIFFERENT
‘New Perspectives’ do fit however, with the ‘different gospels’ of certain sects who follow a revisionist path by remaining in the old covenant with an attachment to the law. In this frame a lesser Jesus, subordinate to the law lives to help people keep the law, live out moralism and be a poster-board for ‘Christian Values.’
OUR INHERITANCE
“But what does Scripture say? "Get rid of the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman's son will never share in the inheritance with the free woman's son.’ GAL 4.30 NIV.
A BETTER GOSPEL
Our inheritance in Christ is better than New Perspectives. What Jesus left us was not a religion but Himself through the incarnation and Holy Spirit. Christ come in our flesh means that God lives in us and by the Spirit, Jesus manifests as us so that we are growing into ourselves as daughters and sons to bring God glory and to enter our own glory as genuine sons of God – which we can because the essential us is born again. We are not striving to stick externalities to our person as we do in any version of the law.
‘New Perspectives’ makes an appeal to those who never knew the real Gospel in the first place.
ELIMINATING CHRIST
Paul is explicit. If we are in combination with the law and live by such a hybrid we have negated the efficacy of Christ for us. He wrote ‘I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!’ Gal 2.21 NIV.
RED HERRING
According to Wright, what Paul means by justification is not ‘how you become a Christian’, so much as ‘how you can tell who is a member of the covenant family.’ But the deep issue of our life in God has never been whether we belong in that collection of Believers who are called the Church but whether we belong in God and are embedded in Christ without some gospel of our own.
AGENCY OR DISEASE?
It cannot be a real comfort to know that one belongs to the Body if one belongs as a tumour or a disease. The belonging that is ours is one of vitality and agency because we are incarnated with God and the expression of Christ by the Spirit who is in us.
CUT AND COVER
Any degree of legalism degrades Christ and deforms us. Wright was not the first person to suggest that Paul was talking about the ceremonial law as not binding so as to rationalise the continuation of the law and old covenant into the post cross age. There are sects that have done this, and the result is not only a lesser gospel and a lesser christ but lesser people who form themselves in woodenness in the abstractions of the law/tree of knowledge. Rather than becoming themselves an expression of Christ they become ideologues of a christian hybrid. We can choose between being a wood-pile or a tree of life.
MANNING AND REAL GRACE
Brennan Manning declares in a sermon on YouTube that we are loved by Christ as we are and not as we should be. This is real love and true grace. But this can come as an affront to those who live from religion and entitlement. But it is what Jesus was teaching when he told the parable of the workers who turned up near knock-off time and got the same wage as those who came at 9.00am.
Grace that is deserved is no grace at all.
WORKERS AND SLAVES
Christ’s grace is grace without dilution or meddling. N.T. Wright’s theology makes its adherents workers and slaves but not sons of God in the Reformed sense. His theology is not Reformed Theology by any stretch of the imagination. It is merely a new rendition of the captivity of the sons of the slave woman who live without their inheritance of extravagant grace because they will not abandon the law.
EARNING BELONGING
‘New Perspectives makes a person’s approximation to ‘what they should be’ the basis of final justification, thus grounding the ultimate declaration of righteousness in the believer’s own works, rather than grounding justification completely in the finished work of Christ on their behalf.’
BONZAI RELIGION
This would not normally be anything to rejoice over but it can comfort the religious mind that is adept as reducing the law and personal righteousness to something so minute that he can manage it.
YES/NO GOSPELS
Wright teaches a ‘covenant faithfulness’ that is accorded the Believer as a result of performance. Somewhat like teaching in which it is affirmed that we are saved by grace followed immediately by a listing of all those things a saved person must do to be included in that grace. This is the habit of some sects.
‘OTHER GOSPEL’
Believers have been brain-washed over the years into believing that the issue of Christianity is moral rectitude. This is not irrelevant, but it is the effect and not the issue. The fruit is the result of oneness. Not the reason for it. The issue is our achieved and already gifted union with God. Are we living in it or in some invention of our own?
UNION WITH GOD is the basis of your life in God. John emphasised incarnation as the core of Kingdom Life. ‘I say this because many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world. Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist’ 2 John 1.7 NIV.
NEW COVENANT
There is a covenant that applies to you and to all and this is it. You have been included in God by Christ. God lives in you and this is called Christ come in your flesh. John then forcefully asserts that those who deny this are operating in the spirit of antichrist who lives to neutralise the cross and undo the new creation. The new creation advances due to the incarnation of God in His daughters and sons. It stagnates and retreats wherever people are bound to their own performance and the law. Thus it is too common that we can focus on sexual sin and continue to kill the earth for the sake of ‘jobs and growth’.
CHRIST IN US AND WITH US
Christ’s teaching is that He Himself is our life. ‘Jesus replied, "Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them’ John 14.23 NIV.
You can make the transition to new birth in union with God. Jesus said, ‘Realise that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you’ John 14.20. Just agree with Christ.
*Pelagianism. The notion behind steps to Christ in which you deserve Christ by fulfilling a ‘contract’ of good works. It’s the essence of superficial Christianity and legalism.
