IT IS BY GRACE ‘AND’ FAITH, BELOVED: NOTES TOWARD THE DISMANTLING OF A FALSE DICHOTOMY

SCRIPTURE. “For it is by free grace (God’s unmerited favor) that you are saved (delivered from judgment and made partakers of Christ’s salvation) ‘through [your] faith.’ And this [salvation] is not of yourselves [of your own doing, it came not through your own striving], but it is the gift of God; Not because of works [not the fulfillment of the Law’s demands], lest any man should boast. [It is not the result of what anyone can possibly do, so no one can pride himself in it or take glory to himself].” – EPHESIANS 2:8-9, AMPC

KEY TERMS. Grace; Faith; Gift; Works

QUOTATIONS

MACDONALD. “‘Grace easily turns to Hyper-grace’ in a world that has lost its view of God’s throne room and a Biblical theology of sin.” ― James MacDonald, Downpour: He Will Come to Us Like the Rain, 2006; edited

TOZER. “This is one of the Marks of our Modern Time—that many are guilty of merely ‘nibbling’ at the Truth of the Christian Gospel. I wonder if you realize that in many ways the preaching of the Word of God is being pulled down to the level of the ignorant and spiritually obtuse; that we must tell stories and jokes and entertain and amuse in order to have a few people in the audience? We do these things that we may have some reputation and that there may be money in the treasury to meet the church bills … ‘In many churches Christianity has been watered down until the solution is so weak that if it were poison it would not hurt anyone, and if it were medicine it would not cure anyone!’” ― A. W. Tozer, I Talk Back to the Devil: The Fighting Fervor of the Victorious Christian, 2001, pp. 30-31’ edited

THESIS. After seven years of radical reassessment of my Christian faith while observing a radical wrenching of American and Christian culture, I have come to a Conclusion about the American Church that is at the core of our current National Crisis:

‘American Christians and their pastors have become spiritually lazy.’

Meaning this. We want everything delivered to us easily. We don’t really want to work so hard at spirituality since we work hard enough at our jobs. And, by all means, we want to have reserve time for relaxation, enjoyment, and entertainment. I mean after all:

We’re Americans, and we deserve it.

THE RESEARCH. I turn here to the wisdom of Asbury Theological Seminary educated writer and CEO of Saintly Living, SAMUEL ZULU. His analysis is entitled, “Seven Major Causes of Spiritual Laziness in Christians Today” (June 14, 2022; edited). Here is the Summary of those SEVEN CAUSES.

• Spiritual Laziness or any kind of laziness is frowned upon by God’s word, that is why the Apostle Paul tells us in Romans 12:11 in the New Testament that we must not be slothful in business but ‘be fervent’ in spirit, serving the Lord. Laziness is a silent killer of many Christians. It is the reason why many Christians are not growing in their faith, not going to church, and not serving the Lord the way they ought to … ‘Spiritual Laziness is the inability to take action because of fear.’ It’s also the tendency to seek an easy way out, rather than the difficult path that God wants us to take.

1. If you don’t have any motivation or inspiration to do anything meaningful for yourself and God worth remembering, you won’t see any reason why you must work hard for anything meaningful in life as you will see no point in doing that … So, if you are a lazy person, you need to find the motivation to do something meaningful in your life if you don’t have that yet, and the starting place to do that is to realize that ‘God created you with a purpose in life’ [Jeremiah 29:11], and not just to water away in your slothfulness.”

• You need to understand that if you have no purpose in life, you will just meander and idle along in life without doing anything worth remembering in your life as that purpose to drive you to be a hard-working person will not be there … ‘Be a purpose-driven Christian on a mission to serve God’ and not just sit and idle along in your life wasting your God-given potential in your laziness and slothfulness, which just leads to poverty as Proverbs 10:4-6 tells us in the Old Testament.”

• Believe it or not, sin is in fact the primary cause of laziness in any lazy person who doesn’t want to work with their God-given hands as Ephesians 4:28 tells all of us to do, if we don’t want to come to want or be beggars who rely on handouts … ‘God never created us to be idlers. ‘He created us to do something with our hands.’ Which explains why the Lord Jesus Christ said in the parable of the lazy and unprofitable servant in Matthew 25:30 that ‘the lazy and unprofitable servant was cast in outer darkness’because the unprofitable lazy servant never utilized what he was given due to laziness.”

• If you are a lazy person who fears failure, you will not see the reason why ‘you must work hard in life or at least try to do something’ because your fear of failure will ensure that you don’t do that but just sit and idle around wasting your time scrolling on social media. Don’t let the fear of failure be the reason you fail to accomplish that which God meant you to do on earth and use that as a scapegoat as to why you are too lazy to do anything meaningful in God’s Kingdom or your personal life [Isaiah 41:10].”

• Social Media such as Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, etc. are also one of the major reasons and causes as to why many Christians are lazy, especially in the things of God. Nowadays, many so-called Christians can spend countless hours on social media posting and reading useless stuff that won’t even edify them or help them grow spiritually [1 Peter 5:8] … Social media have made many Christians lazy and unproductive in their own lives and God’s kingdom as they waste their time there just scrolling and reading useless posts. ‘Don’t let social media ruin your life but use it for your good and God’s.’”

• The Bible in Proverbs 24:33-34 warns that if you love too much sleep, you will eventually come to poverty, which explains why some Christians are poor and are always in want or need. You need to remember that sleep and rest only belong to the hard-working people who are diligent and industrious in their business and not lazy people … Stop loving too much sleep if you are a lazy and slothful person but ‘reduce your love for sleep’ and put those hands and brains God has given you if you want to have plenty in your life and not to come to want.’”

• Unfortunately, some believers have been misled to believe that they don’t need to work hard in their lives and that all they need is to have faith and everything will magically fall in place in their lives. But this couldn’t be further from the truth dear saint as James 2:14-26 tells us ‘faith without works is dead’ … Remember, faith and grace in your life are not a license to laziness because if you are lazy like the unprofitable lazy servant Jesus Christ said in Matthew 25:30 as we saw earlier, ‘you will be cast into outer darkness if you have dead faith.’”

Please to not miss the High Standards set before us by Messiah. Nothing like the soft underbelly of the ‘American Gospel’ we have become used to in the last generation or two. So now a much deeper dive into how all this Spiritual Sloth spilled into the American Church in the last 25 years or so.

THE AMERICAN SEMINARY. During my doctoral graduate studies and Bowling Green university in the 1970s, I was thoroughly schooled social theory and scientific methodology. All the sciences of course are based on the universal presupposition of a Cause-Effect Cosmos. As SIR ISAAC NEWTON proposed centuries ago in his Third Law of Motion: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction” (1687).

My reasoning that follows from that Fundamental Proposition is this: If the American Pulpit is as unfaithful to the entire Canon of Scripture as many studies show it to be, then there must be a ‘First Cause.’ And that Cause must be traceable at least in significant part to what our Pastors are being taught today in the American Seminary.

In order to drive straight at the heart of what I see as the Dissolution of the American Seminary, I turn to a lucid and learned analysis by DR. JOHN OSWALT, another distinguished American scholar and professor of Old Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary. His analysis is entitled, “Crisis of Faith in Seminaries,” published on June 2, 2022, for the American Family Association.

FOOTNOTE: It is the height of mysterious irony that Asbury Seminary professors Zulu and Oswalt both published their work in June 2022, eight months before the ostensible “Asbury Revival” commenced on February 8, 2023. I frankly don’t know what to make of that yet but felt constrained to point it our for your further contemplation.

In any event, Dr. Oswalt summarizes the Crisis in terms of THREE DANGEROUS TRENDS that he first addressed in 1997 at Wesley Biblical Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi. Twenty-five years later he now sees them as reaching Critical Mass, and fervently advocates for urgent solution, lest Theological Education in America dries up entirely.

1. CRISIS OF FAITH. “‘The Crisis of Faith is a diminished trust in the Bible.’ Over the last 250 years, the Bible has come in for many serious, unrelenting attacks. The historicity of its accounts has been attacked; its origins in revelation from the one, true God have been attacked; the character of its religious claims has been attacked … ‘Thus, the challenge for theological seminaries is to equip students with a confidence in the Bible as Truth with a deep understanding of its content, and an ability to counteract the attacks on it with competence and a Christian spirit … Yet we see seminary after seminary teaching the Bible in such a way that the students’ confidence in it as the Fount of Truth is not built up but eroded.”

• CRISIS OF VISION. “The second crisis, I call a Crisis of Vision. ‘What does a seminary exist to do? I argue that it exists to train pastors who are deeply capable biblical theologians. Other people can mow the lawn, change the light bulbs, and run the potlucks, but there is almost certainly only one person in the congregation who is or should be trained to answer the question ‘What says the Word of God?’… We must find ways to publish the truth that there is no higher calling than the call to pastoral ministry, to lovingly shepherd the flock that is often cantankerous, rebellious, and wayward, but utterly lost without a shepherd. Maybe it will mean giving up a ‘guaranteed appointment.’ Maybe it will involve bi-vocational ministry or church planting, but we must find ways to say to students that if they are called to the pastorate, they should not stoop to be kings or queens.”

• CRISIS OF NERVE. “The third crisis in theological education is a ‘Crisis of [Courage]. ‘Someone has said that the strongest drive in the human psyche is the drive for acceptance.’ Whether that is true for individuals or not, it is certainly true of institutions. We want to be accepted, to be honored. ‘But whose honor do we seek?’ Too often, as it was for Israel, the honor we seek is that of the sophisticated, cultured Canaanite. So we pursue ‘excellence,’ not so that we may be approved by God, but so that our peers will no longer look down on us. We want the approval of the world, and ‘we prostitute our mission in order to gain that approval. I want to ask myself and my colleagues, ‘Who are you working for? … What are you working for?’”

THE PRESCRIPTION. “‘If we will hold fast our Faith in the Bible,’ our Vision for training shepherds, and our Nerve to stand against the world,’theological education will continue in one form or another until the Lord returns. ‘Have we the nerve?’”

Permit me to fire from the hip here in addressing that burning question: ‘No! So far at least – you do not!’

You’ll forgive my bluntness (or perhaps not), but after seven long years of agonizing through the Precipitous Collapse of the American Church since 2015 and the explosion of Trump Christian Nationalism, ‘I hear not one major Christian leader’ rallying the Church to much higher ground.

• The First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s had its JONATHAN EDWARDS along with George Whitefield, Gilbert Tennent, Samuel Davies, Jonathan Dickenson and others.

• The Second Great Awakening of the 1790s and early 1800s saw TIMOTHY DWIGHT alongside James McGready, John McGee, Lyman Beecher and Nathaniel Taylor and others.

• The Azusa Street Pentecostal Revival of 1906 was led by African American WILLIAM J. SEYMOUR, who with seven other men waited upon the Holy Spirit who at one point arrived like “a bolt of lightning,” and the rest, as they say, is Church history writ large indeed.

A QUESTION. Now then, may I ask you all to name three such leaders in the American Church today crying out for Reformation against the current scourges of Soft Theology and Christian Nationalism? Just three. Three. Perhaps two then. Well, then ‘just one voice’ crying in America’s Spiritual Wilderness whose reach is long and his impact great.

I am grievously reminded of YAH’S ANCIENT LAMENT about here.

“The people of the land have used oppressions, committed robbery, and mistreated the poor and needy; and they wrongfully oppress the stranger. So I sought for a man among them who would make a wall, and stand in the gap before Me on behalf of the land, that I should not destroy it; but I found no one.’” – EZEKIEL 20:29-30, NKJV 

ALBERT BARNES COMMENTS: “The land might be said to perish for the lack of such interpositions as saved their forefathers when Moses ‘stood in the gap.’ This was a proof of the General Corruption, that there was not in the city sufficient righteousness to save it from utter destruction. ‘Prince, prophet, priest, all fail.’” – Notes on the Old and New Testament, 1884; edited

Prince and prophet and priest all fail, catastrophically, leaving the American Church sitting in a mess of theological sewage, without a rudder, without a strong voice helping to guide it through our present gale force headwind against both Christ and Canon.

THE CHEAP CHURCH. My passionate argument is that this breathtaking Collapse of the American Church into the lap of an inarguably wicked, brutal authoritarian, the ‘Very White Mr. Trump,’ is a direct result of ‘Seminaries in Crisis’ for at least two generations and more.

Specifically, ‘Hyper-grace Christianity’ has grown out of the confusion and chaos and frankly the doctrinal cowardice of our seminaries. Since I have detailed a good deal of the Hyper-grace Movement in in previous commentaries, I won’t belabor it again here, except to remind us of why it has had such a disastrous impact on the American Church.

“The term ‘Hyper-grace’ has been used to describe a new wave of teaching that emphasizes the grace of God to the exclusion of other vital teachings such as repentance and confession of sin. Hyper-grace teachers maintain that all sin, past, present, and future, has already been forgiven, so there is no need for a believer to ever confess it. Hyper-grace teaching says that, when God looks at us, He sees only a holy and righteous people. The conclusion of hyper-grace teaching is that we are not bound by Jesus’ Teaching, even as we are not under the Law; that believers are not responsible for their sin; and that anyone who disagrees is a Pharisaical legalist. In short, Hyper-grace teachers ‘pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality’ (Jude 1:4) and flirt with Antinomianism [i.e., ‘against law’].” – EDITORS, Got Questions, ret. Apr. 23, 2023; edited

This pernicious and pervasive Doctrine of Demons has crept in some measure into an overwhelming number of Right-leaning Evangelical Churches across the American landscape. Equally disastrously, the Mainline Denominations have their own Cheap Grace Crisis by leaning hard toward Leftist secular-liberal theologies and philosophies such as found in Liberation Theology based in Marxist thought, thereby doing their own rigorous work to cripple the Christian who sits in their pews.

To see where we can possibly go from here, we turn to a detailed exploration of the important passage under review in Paul’s Letter to the Church at Ephesus – the one that John the Apostle records later that had “left her first love” (Rev. 2:4) – no small point to our conversation, beloved.

III. THE TEACHING

SCRIPTURE. “For it is by free grace (God’s unmerited favor) that you are saved (delivered from judgment and made partakers of Christ’s salvation) ‘through [your] faith.’ And this [salvation] is not of yourselves [of your own doing, it came not through your own striving], but it is the gift of God; Not because of works [not the fulfillment of the Law’s demands], lest any man should boast. [It is not the result of what anyone can possibly do, so no one can pride himself in it or take glory to himself].” – EPHESIANS 2:8-9, AMPC

KEY TERMS. Grace; Faith; Works

• GRACE. ‘Charis’ [χάρις]: “Favor, gratitude, thanks; a favor, kindness; concession; reaching (inclining) to people because He is ‘disposed’ to bless (be near) them [yes, God has favorites!]; graciousness as Divine influence on the heart; acceptable, worthy.”

• FAITH. ‘Pistis’ [πίστις]: “Belief, trust, confidence; ‘fidelity, faithfulness;’ credence; moral conviction of religious truth; esp. reliance upon Christ for salvation; ‘constancy in such profession of religious (Gospel) Truth itself;’ assurance; sincerity.”

• WORKS. ‘Ergon’ [ἔργον]: “Refers to a task, employment; a deed, action; that which is wrought or made; any product whatever, anything accomplished by hand, art, industry, mind; an undertaking of the works of men [human effort].”

COMMENTARY. “‘For by grace are ye saved – By mere favor. It is not by your own merit; it is not because you have any claim. This is a favorite doctrine with Paul, as it is ‘with all who love the Lord Jesus in sincerity;’ compare the notes at Romans 1:7; Romans 3:24, note.

‘Through faith’ – Grace bestowed through faith, or in connection with believing; see the notes at Romans 1:17; Romans 4:16, note. ‘And that not of yourselves’ – That is, salvation does not proceed from yourselves. The word rendered ‘that’ – τοῦτο touto – is in the neuter gender, and the word ‘faith’ – πίστις pistis – is in the feminine. The word ‘that,’ therefore, does not refer particularly to faith, as being the gift of God, but to ‘the salvation by grace’ of which he had been speaking. This is the interpretation of the passage which is the most obvious, and which is now generally conceded to be the true one …

‘Whether this passage proves it or not, it is certainly true that faith is the gift of God.’ It exists in the mind only when the Holy Spirit produces it there, and is, in common with every other Christian excellence, to be traced to his agency on the heart. This opinion, however, does not militate at all with the doctrine that man himself believes. It is not God that believes for him, for that is impossible. It is his own mind that actually believes, or that exercises faith;’see the notes at Romans 4:3. In the same manner ‘repentance’ is to be traced to God. It is one of the fruits of the operation of the Holy Spirit on the soul. But the Holy Spirit does not ‘repent’ for us. It is our ‘own mind’ that repents; our own heart that feels; our own eyes that weep – and without this there can he no true repentance. No one can repent for another; and God neither can nor ought to repent; for us. He has done no wrong, and if repentance is ever exercised, therefore, it must be exercised by our own minds. So of faith. God cannot believe for us. ‘We’ must believe, or ‘we’ shall be damned. – ALBERT BARNES, Notes on the Old and New Testament, 1884; edited

THE EXERCISE OF FAITH. “‘Faith is a principle of action and of power,’ our Bible Dictionary states, ‘and by it one can command the elements and/or heal the sick, or influence any number of circumstances when occasion warrants … The Bible Dictionary further instructs that faith in Jesus Christ ‘is more than belief,since true faith always moves its possessor to some kind of physical and mental action.” – EDITORS, “Exercise Faith,” Church News Archives, Sep. 26, 2009; edited

In delightfully similar fashion, I have just recently heard this so well taught by my young pastor, BRANDON LAKE, at Anchor Point Church: “Mere belief is not enough!” More is required of us, beloved, including: Sincerity of commitment; sustained constancy in fidelity to the Messiah (never forsaking Him!); continued proclamation of one’s faith to others. It is most assuredly NOT the “sloppy agape” we constantly hear from our pulpits, dangerously suggesting, with Augustine and Calvin, that it’s all a done deal, requiring nothing from us.

No! We must fulfill our part of the Covenant. Selah.

To do so, we must find like-minded, spiritually sound believers and pastors with whom to fellowship and to whom to remain accountable in the perilous times ahead. Most especially when the conventional churches move more and more into the political column as they did in World War II Germany.

ENTER: ‘The American Confessing Church.’

IV. LAST THOUGHTS

I have waited for quite some time to move forward on a proposal of sorts for an American Confessing Church Movement. The times are fairly shouting for it at this point, and given the swiftness of current political and spiritual developments, I believe we must seriously consider where to begin.

A SHORT HISTORY. I turn now to a superb and authoritative brief review of the emergence of germanys confessing church. The author is LEONORE SIEGELE-WENSCHKEWITZ who originally published this piece in History Magazine, issue #9, in 1984.

The author (1944-1999) was a distinguished German Church historian and director of the Evangelische Akademie Arnoldshain. She was also co-editor of the journal Kirche und Israel (during 1986–1993) and of the issue Arbeiten zur kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte. She was known for her work on anti-Jewish tendencies in Christian theology.

Please, I pray, pay close attention to what she writes, that I believe is portent  for what is soon coming to American shores – and is already here. Remember GEORGE SANTAYANA: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” – The Life of Reason, 1905

“ON 30 JANUARY 1933 ADOLF HITLER, leader of the ‘National Socialist German Workers’ Party,’ came to power in Germany. His aim was to mould Germany’s political and community life to fit in with his own ideas. This totalitarian approach left no room for deviant views or independent organizations and institutions; the whole of public life was to be controlled or, as the fashionable term put it, ‘co-ordinated’ by the Nazi Party. The two major churches-Lutheran and Catholic- to which almost every German belonged, were no exception to this general control.

‘But National Socialism also had a particular interest in the churches,’ and it was inevitable that conflict would arise. Nazism saw itself not just as a political party, but as ‘a philosophy’ – based on extreme racism. Only the Aryan race was acceptable, and the Aryans’ worst enemy was the Jewish people – hence they must be exterminated. This racism led to the infamous death camps of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Ravensbruck …

‘Nazism was a challenge as well as a threat to the churches:’ it disturbed their security and forced them to ask fundamental questions: What is the Church? What does it mean to be a Christian? What is so basic to the nature of the Church and to being a Christian that it cannot under any circumstances be surrendered? …

MARTIN NIEMÖLLER played a major part in gathering clergy and congregations of the Lutheran Church into what came to be known as the ‘CONFESSING CHURCH’ … As it became clearer that National Socialism and Christianity were irreconcilable, the Confessing Church was ever more ready to see itself as independent of the State. It based its life on the essential foundation of the Bible, dissociated itself as far as possible from government measures and opposed the policies of the State …

A central figure in the Confessing Church’s ecumenical involvement was DIETRICH BONHOEFFER who ‘became a symbol of Christian Resistance’ to the Nazis’ … Dietrich Bonhoeffer collected his experiences as a Christian in Nazi Germany and reflected on them in the light of the Christian Gospel … He called for mature, credible Christian faith to be lived out in an increasingly secular, irreligious world. He struggled with the problem of how the Biblical message of liberation and redemption can be announced to a world which has ‘come of age.’ The Church does not live for itself- it is the Church of Jesus Christ for others. He firmly believed that the Good News of Jesus Christ breaks through denominational and national barriers …

Bonhoeffer was one of the first Christians in the Confessing Church to recognize clearly the significance of ‘the Jewish question’ in Nazi Germany. As early as spring 1933 he pointed out that the Jews were becoming victims of the State’s policies – but his was a lone voice. He saw that the age-old policy of confrontation, which Christians had practised towards the Jews from the Church Fathers through to Luther and later, had made Christians in Germany passive, blind and indifferent to the fate of the Jews.

‘Bonhoeffer wanted to awaken the Church to the fact that a monstrous injustice was being done to the Jews, and that the place of Christians was alongside their persecuted Jewish brothers … But he could not persuade [even] the Confessing Church to make a public statement on behalf of the Jews. As the Second World War progressed, the growing persecution of the Confessing Church by the Nazi authorities crippled the Church’s ability to help others.”

On December 19, 2009, the Bonhoeffer Blog published this: “From his bunker in Berlin, Hitler personally ordered Bonhoeffer’s execution. Thus it was that at dawn on the morning of April 8, 1945, Bonhoeffer was led naked into the execution yard while prison guards jeered and ridiculed him. At the foot of the scaffold Bonhoeffer paused to kneel and pray. He then got up and climbed the steps to the gallows. Using a meat hook from a slaughterhouse, Bonhoeffer was then slowly hoisted by a noose formed of piano wire. Asphyxiation is thought to have taken half an hour.”

CODA. What does all this mean for the American Church, where we apparently have no Niemöller’s or Bonhoeffer’s or Confessing Church? As I proposed in my last Commentary: ‘It is up to us, beloved.’ We cannot follow the corrupt cowardice of the American Church, nor depend on any human leader ever again.

‘But where do we even start in our Sustained Resistance to the forces of Antichrist that are prophesied to grow stronger in the Last Days?’ Now that, my intrepid friends, shall be the subject of my next Commentary, under the following DOCTRINAL BANNER:

“For see, the wicked are bending the bow; they make ready their arrow upon the string, that they [furtively] in darkness may shoot at the upright in heart. If the foundations are destroyed, what can the [unyieldingly] righteous do, or what has He [the Righteous One] wrought or accomplished? The Lord is in His holy temple; the Lord’s throne is in heaven. His eyes behold; His eyelids test and prove the children of men. The Lord tests and proves the [unyieldingly] righteous, but His soul abhors the wicked and him who loves violence. Upon the wicked He will rain quick burning coals or snares; fire, brimstone, and a [dreadful] scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup. For the Lord is [rigidly] righteous, He loves righteous deeds; the upright shall behold His face, or He beholds the upright.” – PSALM 11:2-7, AMPC

Stay sober. Stay alert. Stay vigilant. Stay ever hopeful that our Mighty God is calling His true followers to Himself for this Last Grand Battle for the souls of many. May we all now be willing to say, as did the then-young Prophet in ISAIAH 6:8:

“Here am I Lord, send me!”

Ever your servant, DK

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