[BBC List] Lord?

[Mike Abendroth]

Understanding the Lordship Controversy 

J. I. Packer

If, ten years ago, you had told me that I would live to see literate
evangelicals, some with doctorates and a seminary teaching record, arguing
for the reality of an eternal salvation, divinely guaranteed, that may have
in it no repentance, no discipleship, no behavioral change, no practical
acknowledgment of Christ as Lord of one's life, and no perseverance in
faith, I would have told you that you were out of your mind. Stark, staring
bonkers, is the British phrase I would probably have used. But now the thing
has happened. In The Gospel Under Siege (1981) and Absolutely Free! (1989),
Zane Hodges, for one, maintains all these positions as essential to the
Christian message arguing that without them the Gospel gets lost in
legalism. Wow.

Nor is this all. Hodges lashes the historic reformational account of the
Gospel, which he labels "Lordship salvation," as a form of
works-righteousness, because it affirms that repentance-turning from sin to
serve Jesus as one's Lord-is as necessary for salvation as faith-turning
from self-reliance to trust Jesus as one's Savior. Such repentance, says
Hodges, is a work, and justification is through faith apart from works. To
preach and teach in reformational terms is to compromise the grace of the
Gospel. It is vital, says Hodges, to see that there is no necessary
connection between saving faith and good works at any stage.

Hodges comes out of that branch of the dispensationalist stable which has
consistently assured everyone that by biblical standards Reformed theology
is systematically off center and misshapen. Hodges' argumentation had
already in essence appeared in the Scofield Bible and the writings of Lewis
Sperry Chafer and Charles Ryrie. He might not have attracted much notice had
not a distinguished fellow-dispensationalist with a Reformed soteriology,
John MacArthur, Jr., attacked his view in The Gospel According to Jesus
(1988), a strongly worded book with forewords by Boice and Packer.
Absolutely Free! was Hodges' reply to MacArthur.

It is an odd situation. Both sides proclaim that God's grace is absolutely
free, that justification is absolutely central, that faith is absolutely
necessary for salvation-and that the other side's account of what it means
to be a Christian is absolutely wrong. Hodges calls MacArthur's position "a
radical rewriting of the Gospel," "Satanic at its core," which has "turned
the meaning of faith upside down," destroying the ground of assurance and
producing doctrine that the New Testament writers would find unrecognizable.
MacArthur calls Hodges' position a "tragic error" that "destroys the
Gospel," "promises a false peace," "produces a false evangelism," and
"offers a false hope." What, we ask, is the point of cleavage that so
drastically divides men who seemed to agree on so much? The question is not
hard to answer. It has to do with the nature of faith.

Hodges defines faith in exclusively intellectual terms, as mental assent to
what God tells us in the Gospel. This intellectualism recalls the Roman
Catholic conception of faith as believing what the church teaches. It
corresponds exactly to that of the eighteenth-century Scottish eccentric
Robert Sandeman, who affirmed that "everyone who.is persuaded that the event
(Christ's atoning death) actually happened as testified by the apostles is
justified." It corresponds also to the view of Karl Barth, for whom faith is
simply believing that because of Christ's death and resurrection one is
already justified and an heir of eternal life, as is everybody else.

By contrast, faith according to reformational teaching is a whole-souled
reality with an affectional and volitional aspect as well as an intellectual
one. It is, as the seventeenth-century analysts put it, notitia (factual
knowledge), assensus (glad acceptance), and  fiducia (personal trust in a
personal Savior, as well as in His promises). It is a principle of new
activity, as the Westminster Confession brings out:

By.faith, a Christian believeth to be true whatsoever is revealed in the
Word..yielding obedience to the commands, trembling at the threatenings, and
embracing the promises of God.But the principal acts of saving faith are
accepting, receiving, and resting upon Christ alone for justification,
sanctification, and eternal life, by virtue of the covenant of grace (XIV
2).

Clearly, if the intellectualism of Hodges, Sandeman, and Barth is right,
Westminster confuses, misplacing the emphasis. Equally clear, if Westminster
is right, what Hodges, Sandeman, and Barth define is less than faith, and
will not of itself bring salvation.

As is apparent, I think Hodges is wrong, and ruinously so. I find his
doctrine of faith involving four major errors.

The first is an error about Christ.

Is Christ divided, or divisible? Has not God joined the three roles of
prophet (teacher), priest (atoner), and king (Lord and Master) in the
mediatorial office of His Son? Does He not in Scripture require mankind to
relate positively to each? Does not Christ's own Gospel teaching, well set
out by MacArthur, show that He Himself does not accept the separating of
salvation from discipleship, whereby He is acknowledged and taken as Savior
but rejected as Lord? My answer is not Hodges' answer, and his teaching does
not seem to me to honor my Savior.

The second is an error about works.

Hodges equates faith as a psychological act ("closing with Christ," as the
Puritans put it) with faith as a meritorious work, and so argues that to
call for active commitment to discipleship as part of a saving response to
the Gospel is to teach works-righteousness. But this is a confusion. Every
act of faith, psychologically regarded, is a matter of doing something
(knowing is as much a mental act as are trusting, receiving, and resolving
to obey); yet no act of faith ever presents itself to its doer as anything
but a means of receiving undeserved mercy in some form. Hodges' inability to
distinguish faith as an act from faith as a work makes him increase, rather
than dispel, the confusion about the terms of the Gospel that he rightly
sees as bedeviling us today.

The third is an error about repentance.

In Scripture, repentance and faith go inseparably together; repentance means
turning from sin, faith means turning to Jesus. Dispensationalists do not
always observe this connection. Some, fastening onto the etymology of
repentance in Greek (metanoia), explain it as merely a change of mind about
who Jesus is; Hodges, seeing that repentance means in Scripture a change of
life, detaches it from the way of salvation (thus contradicting the
Westminster Confession, which on the basis of Luke 13:3, 5, says that "none
may expect pardon without it") and depicts it as a voluntary adjustment to
God that may come before salvation or after salvation or never at all. To
say the least, he fails to convince.

The fourth is an error about regeneration.

When Scripture speaks of regeneration, which it represents as a new birth, a
quickening of the dead, what is in view is an inner transformation of one's
being, or "heart," which makes it impossible for one to go on living under
sin's sway as one lived before. The effect of regeneration is that now one
wants, from the bottom of one's heart, to know, love, serve, trust, obey,
and honor the Father and the Son, so that obedient devotion and discipleship
spontaneously spring up where there was only resentful hostility to God
before. Hodges' account of Christian discipleship as a prudent and
fulfilling, though not a necessary option, shows that he does not understand
this at all. In particular, he does not see that the faith that justifies
only appears as an expression of a regenerate heart.

The pastoral effect of this teaching can only be to produce what the
Puritans called "Gospel hypocrites"-persons who have been told that they are
Christians, eternally secure, because they believe that Christ died for
them, when their hearts are unchanged and they have no personal commitment
to Christ at all. I know this, for I was just such a Gospel hypocrite for
two years before God mercifully made me aware of my unconverted state. If I
seem harsh in my critique of Hodges' redefinition of faith as barren
intellectual formalism, you must remember that once I almost lost my soul
through assuming what Hodges teaches, and a burned child always thereafter
dreads the fire.

(From: Tabletalk, May, 1991, published by Ligonier Ministries, Inc., P.O.
Box 547500,Orlando, FL 32746)

 

 

Charis, 
  
Mike Abendroth 
  

'God rides forth conquering in the chariot of His Gospel. . . He conquers
the pride of the heart, and makes the will which stood out as a Fort Royal
against Him, to yield and stoop to His grace; He makes the stony heart
bleed. Oh! it is a mighty call! Why then do some men seem to speak of a
moral persuasion? That God in the conversion of a sinner only morally
persuades and no more? If God in conversion should only morally persuade and
no more, then He does not put forth so much power in saving men as the Devil
does in destroying them.'   Thomas Watson

www.bbcchurch.org 
  

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.bbcchurch.org/pipermail/bbc_list/attachments/20061020/987c8404/attachment.htm