A Second Counterfeit: The Judgmentless Gospel

What is the gospel?  In my post on August 14, I provided a template for understanding the gospel borrowed from Trevin Wax's The Counterfeit Gospels.  He argues that the gospel is like a three legged stool in that it has three distinct elements and if any of the elements is missing the stool will fall.

As he presents it, these three gospel legs include the gospel story, the gospel announcement, and the gospel community.  Each of these elements are vital for maintaining the truth of the gospel.  Each of these elements are often forgotten, lost, or ignored by segments of the "Christian community."  I think one of the most helpful elements of Wax's book is his take on how these gospel legs are ignored and forgotten.

For example, on August 19, I posted briefly about Wax's first gospel counterfeit, which he calls 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?

There are several popular forms of this counterfeit.  Today, as with every age of the Church, some professing believers claim that everyone is going to heaven.  This belief is nothing more than the old Protestant heresy of universalism.  Wax writes to warn us that this belief is still alive and well. 

Another form of the judgmentless gospel is a bit more pernicious.  This form argues that social action is the real goal of Christianity.  In other words, what is really important is not the afterlife, but our mission in life.  This point is somewhat true (James does say that faith without works in dead!), 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 200 years!  

In fact, as I see it, 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 moralistic 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!  

In other words, if we give up the message of the gospel story, we lose our entire message.  Christianity is founded upon a revolutionary message that includes the gospel story, the gospel announcement, and the gospel community.  We must keep all three in balance to maintain "the faith handed down once for all."