"Scandalous Grace," "Jesus Plus Nothing," and Very, Very Dangerous Christian GobbledyGook

We get Christianity from the Bible.  What we get from the Bible then won't disagree with historical, biblical teaching.  I'm saying if it is Christianity, then it won't be new.  Christianity is what it is, the last part of that sentence overused but still true.  What Christianity is comes from the Bible and agrees with historical Christianity.  If you read something new, you should doubt it at least, and usually you should just reject it. Here's what happens though.

Especially many millennials, but even more than that, don't like actual Christianity.  They want to fit into the world.  They want to live like they want.  In other words, they don't want repentance, or actual Jesus.  Jesus always submitted to the Father, and that's what Christianity looks like, submission.  The Father was well-pleased with the Son, because the Son was doing what He wanted.  Many, however, don't want to change to be like Jesus Christ, but they still want to credit for doing so.  What do they do?  What I've noticed for my entire life, revealing itself in many different forms and by different names, is changing the grace of God.  I've talked about it for a long time.

How can someone just turn from biblical Christianity by doing what Jude wrote, turning the grace of God into lasciviousness?  That's in the Bible.  People turn the grace of God into lasciviousness.  That is not the grace of God.  It's lasciviousness.  Paul in Galatians calls it using grace as an occasion to the flesh.  I've written a lot in the past about evangelicalism doing this.  It's now also all over the place among independent fundamental Baptists.  Evangelicals and these professing Baptists have merged now.

So how, the question in the first sentence of the last paragraph?  They are not grounded in what the Bible says about grace and then they are allured or deceived by false teachers, which is what Peter talks about in 2 Peter 2.  If someone is really saved, he won't be pulled into this false teaching.  He will reject it.  If he sticks with this teaching and practice, he is indicating that the actual grace of God is foreign to him and he doesn't believe in the actual Jesus Christ of the Bible, but an idolatrous one of which he approves.

Somebody that I love very dearly has gotten messed up with a crowd of professing Christians, evangelicals, one of which, a major one, David Brady, is on staff at Andy Stanley's church.  Brady grew up in an independent Baptist church, and has left independent Baptist fundamentalism. I left fundamentalism as I've told in a long series that I wrote here on the blog, and that's because New Testament Christianity isn't represented by fundamentalism.

Brady, who is on staff at Northpoint in Atlanta, gave a podcast interview.  I knew he was influencing this person I love dearly, so I listened for evaluation with an open mind.  I always want to be open minded.  I wanted to understand where Brady was coming from, also to get an understanding of what was influencing this one I love dearly.  I found that it's just a repackaged perversion of the grace of God.  He really, really likes his version of grace, which I think agrees with what Andy Stanley would say it is.  Andy Stanley is a dangerous false teacher that is fooling many people with many, helping lead evangelicalism into apostasy.

I could have just ignored this not unique perversion of the gospel and the grace of God for the rest of my life.  It isn't affecting our church at all, but it is affecting this person I love dearly, who lives elsewhere, so I am going to write about it now.  In his "testimony," Brady said he was saved when he was fifteen years of age at the IFB church, and he knew that grace was about salvation, but after he was saved, he found out that grace there at his church, despite there being a lot of great Christians there who loved the Lord, wasn't for after salvation, but about rules, essentially keeping rules.  This rang a bell with what I've heard from this person I love dearly.  I could say that I get it now.

People who love the world, which you can't if you love God (1 John 2:15-17), will sometimes look for justification of their love for the world.  This cheap grace, actually not even grace at all, they think vindicates their love for the world.  All of the worldliness is apparently just covered under grace.  If one says anything about a pagan, worldly, godless, profane, or fleshly act, he's an agent against the grace of God, which just covers for everything.  This truly is grace as a "get-out-jail-free-card."  This corruption of grace has existed obviously at the time of the writing of the New Testament, but I've seen various permutations of it with different names and labels in my thirty plus years of pastoring.  Many, many books are written about it.

David Brady said that he almost abandoned Christianity, but then someone gave him a book by Tullian Tchividjian, called, Jesus Plus Nothing.  At the time he was a student at Bob Jones University.   I listened to everything this young man said, and it wasn't new, what he reported to have picked up from Tchividjian.  One of the words he used was "performancism," a particular word I had not heard before, but it's not a surprising one.  Another couple of words that he used again and again were "scandalous grace."

Does "scandalous grace" sound right to you?  It isn't in the Bible, and I had never heard it.  It reminded me some of John Piper's "Christian hedonism."  That doesn't sound like it could be right either, but the two are similar in that they both arrest one's attention, because both sound wrong.  Without further explanation, they couldn't be right.  Brady explained scandalous grace by giving an example.

Someone "sleeps with someone."  Brady didn't use either the word fornication or adultery.  The next morning that person who just slept with someone needs to be thinking that he is exactly the same before God as he was before he fornicated (my word).  That's how this fornicator, according to Brady, needs to look at the grace of God.  This is why it is "scandalous."  Instead, someone should ask if this is a person who has never been converted, and if he professes faith, how this even squares with the grace of God, rather than giving credit to "scandalous grace."  With that illustration, I understood the attraction of this particular view of grace, which again, isn't new.  This is also what Peter describes in 2 Peter 2 (v. 19):

While they promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption: for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage.

He promises liberty to those who are servants of corruption and they are brought into bondage with this teaching.  In Peter's description, it is the way to apostasy.

There is no way that someone could teach the above view of the grace of God and be preaching a true gospel.  It is a rejection of lordship and repentance.  It is not a biblical or historical position on sanctification.  It is not the same Jesus as the Jesus of the Bible.  It is a different Jesus.  It is not biblical belief either.  It is a placebo faith and grace and all the components of the gospel.   It neither saves nor sanctifies.

I'm not the only one who rejects the Tchividjian presentation of sanctification, which didn't work for himself, if you read his bio at Wikipedia.  Dan Phillips, who despite taking a looser view of grace than I do, still writes the following about Tchividjian's position from the perspective of this particular book of his, even before Tchividjian had to quit pastoring:

Tullian Tchividjian, now a pastor, admits to having been such an incorrigible 16yo that his father actually booted him out of the house. But Tchividjian continued on a rebellious, ruinous path... and his father fully subsidized it. At one point, after Tchividjian had screwed up a job and lied to his father about what had happened, dad gave him a blank check, no questions asked. Though Tchividjian took advantage of that check, it didn't stop there. Tullian snuck into the family home and committed repeated acts of theft and felony, stealing dad's checks and forging his signature. Dad (a clinical psychologist, or so I read) was aware of his son's crimes, and let him go on (you'll pardon me) unchecked and unconfronted. 

But see: it had a happy ending. By all accounts, Tchividjian's now converted, is a good guy and a celebrated and well-positioned preacher of wide renown. So we know it was the right thing to do. Right?

In proof and as a capper, Tchividjian quotes a bunch of directly-relevant Scriptures counseling Christian parents to handle rebellious, criminal dependents in just exactly this manner. 

No, I'm kidding. Tchividjian doesn't do anything like that. What he does instead is quote Steve Brown, whose rather appalling teachings about "grace" I've examined at great length elsewhere. 

But it's a feel-good story, and anyone who disagrees can only be cast as a legalist and anti-grace and a hater and a good-story-spoiler and all those awful things. Besides, it's at The Gospel Coalition, so it has to be all right, right? They're all sound there. Right? 

Tchividjian's book Jesus + Nothing = Everything received a fair bit of friendly critical pushback, most of which centered around accusations that it fell short of Biblically relating the indicative to the imperative. . . . 

It is tough critiquing an article like this, as the critics of Tchividjian's book clearly struggled in their criticisms. How do you criticize such a piece, without sounding as if you're criticizing grace — even though it may be a "you keep using that word" situation. If writers or speakers can just say words like "grace" and "love," and let our imaginations roam free, this is what we're likely to come up with. 

Phillips has written another about Tchividjian, that is worth reading (here).  Jeremiah Johnson and Wayne de Villiers also skewer the false teaching of Tchividjian (here, here) [also this].  In an interview celebrating his fiftieth anniversary of pastoring, John MacArthur speaks with Phil Johnson about Tchividjian:

PHIL: There are some small ones. And as you said, the issue of – it’s antinomianism, we call the no-lordship view. But it’s antinomianism. And that has resurfaced in recent years through like the writings of Tullian Tchividjian who’s a Presbyterian, and some other surprising places that a similar kind of antinomianism has cropped up again. So it’s not as big an issue as it used to be, but it is an ongoing controversy. 

JOHN: Well, I would say it doesn’t have the doctrinal defense that it once had at a high level. But antinomianism, or no-lordship salvation, just the idea that you can ask Jesus to be your Savior, and save you from hell, come live in your life, and then go live any way you want, that’s always going to be around; and that’s what antinomianism is. It’s an overstatement of grace. And that’s why somebody like Tullian Tchividjian, everything he talks about is built around the word “grace.” It’s grace, grace. It’s just drowning in grace as if you could do anything and be anything and you’re still under grace. It’s almost like God celebrates your sin because it lets Him put His grace on display. That’s always going to be around, because it’s just inherent in religious people to want a kind of religion that allows for them to sin the way they want to sin. 

PHIL: Right. And to be clear, that’s a twisting of grace. 

JOHN: Totally. 

PHIL: That’s what Paul said, people twist the concept of grace to accommodate their own – 

JOHN: And everybody that I’ve personally sort of interacted with through the years who is a strong advocate of an antinomian view or a no-lordship view, if you get behind the curtain you’re going to find it’s a theology that accommodates their life. And they have an affection for sin, and they want to hold onto that and hold onto what they think is salvation at the same time; and that’s an accommodating idea.

This teaching presents a false gospel.  It should be rejected as a false gospel.  Paul in Galatians 1:6-9 says that if anyone preaches another gospel than what he preached, let that person be accursed.  This is a false gospel equal to what Paul reveals in Galatians 1.

More to Come