As we read on Monday, the gospel is like a three-legged stool. Each leg represents an important part of the entirety of the gospel; and if any part is missing, the entire stool falls to the ground.
These three legs include the gospel story, the gospel announcement, and the gospel community. Yesterday we looked briefly at the therapeutic gospel. The therapeutic gospel denies the beginning of the gospel story by rejecting the biblical truth of the fall of humanity. It makes our happiness the goal of Christianity instead of God's glory. In the process, the therapeutic gospel denies our very real need to repent and confess the very real sin that inhabits each of our hearts in this fallen world. Such a practical theological move diminishes the need for Christ and God's grace.
Today we will briefly look at the Wax's second counterfeit gospel, the judgmentless gospel. This fake is becoming increasingly popular in the evangelical world, and it matches perfectly with the tolerance movement driven by the popular culture of the day. It takes many forms, but at its heart it denies the reality that God's judgment will be given on all. As Wax states,
The Temptation in our day and age is to let the last part of the Apostle's Creed slip by unnoticed. Many evangelicals talk a lot about justice and very little about judgment. Justice here and now is a popular subject. Judgment there and then? Not so much.
But justice and judgment are two sides to the same coin. You cannot have perfect justice without judgment. God cannot make things right without declaring certain things wrong. It's the judgment of God that leads to a perfectly just world. Try to take one without the other and you lose the good news.
The judgmentless gospel distorts a major part of the gospel story- the end. And if you've ever heard a good story, you know that once you change the ending, you alter everything. (The Counterfeit Gospels, 68)
So what does this look like in real life? Some people claim that everyone is going to heaven. It appears that the old Protestant heresy of universalism is alive and well!
Others claim that what is really important is not the afterlife, but our mission in life. This point is somewhat true, and it might be a corrective to those churches which teach the sole goal of believers is to get people into heaven. The problem is when people go to the other extreme of believing and teaching that the real goal of Christianity is social justice.
Honestly, Wax does not do a great job of fleshing out the expressions of this false gospel. I am not sure why he did not go into more detail! For many of the points he makes, he could just point out that old school Protestant liberalism has maintained many of these perspectives for 140 years!
The judgmentless gospel is Protestant liberalism. The problem is that in recent years, many evangelical leaders and churches have suddenly become infatuated with these ideas. They believe they have uncovered something new; but when they forget the holiness of God and the reality of God's justice, they branch unto well-worn paths that have led to the demise and contraction of most mainline denominations.
How do they get on these well-worn paths? In the name of tolerance and love, folks stop speaking of God's holiness and the reality of sin. In so doing, they reject the need for Jesus to be a savior for very real sinners. He becomes a good moral teacher or an example. He is not a savior. What often follows is a rejection of substitutionary atonement as important. From this we lose justification and instead focus on our works as what proves our righteousness. From this, we have a mix of Christianity, Buddhism, self-help messages, and other moralist religions. In one generation, the Christian part transforms into something sub-Christian at best.
A better book to deal with this judgmentless gospel is Tim Keller's, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just. It is simply not true that one either has to be concerned with someone's salvation or working toward a just society. The real gospel allows and encourages both!
If we give up the message of the gospel story, we lose our entire message.
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