The Heresies of John F. MacArthur Jr.

I had not intended to write this essay.  I was only going to share a link through e-mail to a video that the online Christian (Presbyterian) apologist Redeemed Zoomer had made about the Nestorianism of John F. MacArthur Jr.  In what was supposed to be a brief explanation of why I thought the video was important, I mentioned that MacArthur had taught several other false doctrines.  That grew into a full essay so I decided to share that here.  Here is the Redeemed Zoomer video: Is John MacArthur HERETICAL??? - YouTube

 

 

Nestorianism is a heresy that many prominent evangelical leaders of the last century or so have shared with John F. MacArthur Jr.  Several years ago, for example, I pointed out in an essay that an article the late R. C. Sproul had written criticizing Charles Wesley’s hymn “And Can it Be” for the line “that Thou my God shouldst die for me” was based entirely on Nestorian assumptions and reasoning.

 

 

Nestorianism is not the only heresy that John F. MacArthur Jr. has taught over the years.  The only one of his heresies of which he has publically recanted is Incarnational Sonship.  This was his doctrine, shared by J. Oliver Buswell Jr. and Walter Martin among others, that Jesus Christ was eternally the Logos, the Word of God, but that He became the Son of God in the Incarnation.  This is heresy.  Many evangelicals don’t recognize it as such because they think “he’s got three co-equal, co-eternal, Persons, Who are one in essence, that’s the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, this is just quibbling about names and titles.”  This is not the case.  If Jesus is the Son of God only because of the Incarnation, in which He was born of the Virgin without a human father, then the persons of the Father and the Holy Spirit are confused.  This is because in both St. Luke’s nativity account and that of St. Matthew, the Holy Spirit is identified as the Agent in the conception of Jesus by Mary.  If Jesus’ Sonship is due to this then the Holy Spirit is His Father.  The confusion of the Persons of the Trinity is one of the most ancient heresies.  Tertullian addressed it under the label Patripassionism in his second century work Against Praxeas.  Historically it was known as Sabellianism after Sabellius who taught it in the early third century.  Today it is called modalism and is taught by the kind of Pentecostals who call themselves “Unity” or “Oneness” Pentecostals.

The orthodox doctrine is the Eternal Sonship of Jesus Christ.  The Father was always the Father because He always had the Son, and the Son was always the Son because He was Son of the Father.  Closely related to the doctrine of Eternal Sonship is the doctrine of the Eternal Generation of the Son.  Jesus Christ is eternally the Son of God because while there never was a time when the Father was without the Son, the Son’s sharing the Godhead, the numerically singular essence/nature/substance of God is derived from the Father in a relational sense that is called Generation because begetting/siring/generation is the closest analogy we have to it.  The implication of the Scriptural references to Jesus as the “only-begotten”, it was articulated by Origen of Alexandria in the third century and was incorporated into the Nicene Creed to combat Arianism in the fourth.  It has been denied by apologist William Craig Lane and theologian Wayne Grudem, although Grudem has apparently since recanted the denial.  MacArthur taught Incarnational Sonship from 1983 until the end of the twentieth century.  He apparently recanted it in 1999, although the article on his website containing the recantation was published in the Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (the flagship publication of complementarianism, the weenie compromise position promoted by John Piper and Wayne Grudem for evangelicals who have enough sense not to fully buy in to feminism and egalitarianism but don’t have the gonads to take a stand for patriarchy) in 2001.  The doctrinal statement of Master’s Seminary has finally been redacted to teach the orthodox view of Eternal Generation and Eternal Sonship.  This was not the case a couple of years ago.  It only took him a quarter of a century after his recantation to do this.

 

 

MacArthur has not recanted to the best of my knowledge for the false teaching over which Bob Jones Jr. of Bob Jones University raised the first red flag in an article for Faith for the Family back in 1986.  This is his teaching that the blood of Jesus Christ has no value in se but merely as a sign or symbol representing the death of Jesus Christ.  The following is from a sermon MacArthur preached in April 1976:

 

 

The term “the blood of Christ” is a metonym that is substitute for another term: “death.” It is the blood of Christ that simply is a metonym for the death of Christ, but it is used because the Hebrews used such a metonym to speak of violent death. Whenever you talk about the blood of somebody being poured out, to the Hebrew that meant violent death. And when you commune with the blood of Christ, it doesn’t mean the literal blood of Christ, that is a metonym for His death; you commune with His death.

Now let me say something that might shake some of you up, but I’ll try to qualify it. There is nothing in the actual blood that is efficacious for sin. Did you get that? The Bible does not teach that the blood of Christ itself has any efficacy for taking away sin, not at all. The actual blood of Christ isn’t the issue. The issue is that His poured out blood was symbolic of His violent death. The death was the thing that paid the price, right? “The wages of sin is” – what? – “death.”

He died for us. It is His death that is the issue. The Hebrews spoke of it as His outpoured blood because that was something that expressed violent death. And they believed, for example, in the Old Testament it said, “The life of the flesh is in the blood.” And so, the pouring out of blood was the significance of death.

And so, when it says here we are communing with the blood of Christ, it does not mean the literal blood of Christ is efficacious, it does not mean the literal blood of Christ is involved; it means we enter into a genuine, vital participation in His death. But it is not the blood; the blood is only the symbol of the poured out life. 

 

 

Do you recognize what is wrong this doctrine (which MacArthur shared with the late Col. Robert B. Thieme Jr. of Berachah Church in Houston, Texas)?

 

 

There are different aspects to the Atoning work of Jesus Christ.  The Scriptures speak of it as a ransom paid for the release of hostages.  This was emphasized in the early Church.  The New Testament and the book of Isaiah also use the language of vicariousness and substitution to speak of Christ dying for us.  This was emphasized in the Reformation and this is what MacArthur emphasizes.  There is nothing wrong with that.  However, when the language of blood specifically is used, it is the Atonement as a sacrifice that is being emphasized. 

Now a blood sacrifice involved more than just killing an animal. In the Old Testament, there are three identifiable elements to animal sacrifices – the slaying, the offering, and the eating.  The first is when the animal brought as an offering was killed at the door of the Tabernacle/Temple. (Lev. 1:3-5) This killing of the animal alone did not make it a sacrificial offering.  Indeed, the priests were not the ones who did the killing unless they were offering the sacrifice for themselves.  The priest would burn the portion of the animal that was to be burned – the fat and fatty portions – on the altar (Lev. 1:8-9).  The priest would also take the blood of the animal and sprinkle it on the altar (Lev. 1:5) which was near the door of the Tabernacle/Temple.  If it were Yom Kippur and he was the High Priest he would take it further into the Holy of Holies and sprinkle the Mercy Seat (Lev. 16:14-15).  It is these actions by the priest that turned what otherwise would have just been the slaying of an animal – which the Israelites were permitted to do themselves in their own homes if they lived too far from the place (Jerusalem) appointed for sacrifice (Deut. 12:15, 21-22) – into a sacrificial offering.  Finally, except for the olah or whole burnt offering which was entirely burned,  the rest of the animal was divided between the portions assigned to the priest (Lev. 7:31-35) and the portions assigned to the ones who had brought the offering and eaten (Lev. 7:15-20, ; Deut. 12:6-7). 

In the epistle to the Hebrews St. Paul, for it is he who wrote that epistle, tells us that Moses was given a vision of Heaven on Mt. Sinai, that the instructions for the Tabernacle and system of worship he was given were imitations of the pattern he had seen there, (Heb. 8:5) and that it was into this Tabernacle made without hands that Jesus Christ, as High Priest after the order of Melchizedek, entered with His own blood to make the one offering that effectively takes away sin (Heb. 9:11-14, 23-28).  This is not symbolic language for the crucifixion.  The crucifixion took place in time and history, in a specific place on a specific date.  It corresponds to the slaying of the animal in the Old Testament sacrifices.  Note that as the OT sacrifices were slain at the door of the Tabernacle, so Jesus was crucified on Calvary outside the walls of Jerusalem.  Of course, His suffering and dying had precisely the vicarious significance with regards to our salvation that MacArthur et al. assign to it.  However, the offering of His blood that makes the whole thing a sacrifice is not something that took place in time and history, in a specific place on a specific date.  This offering occurred once, but in the Holy of Holies of the Tabernacle in Heaven, which is situated in eternity, outside of time and space as we know them because time and space are dimensions of Creation.  The death and the offering of the blood are two very distinct elements in the dispensation of Atonement, this is clear in both Testaments, and MacArthur missed it all.  Astonishingly, he repeated this error in his commentary on Hebrews of all places.

 

 

In each of these instances MacArthur’s serious doctrinal error are arguably the result of his taking Protestantism too far.  Protestantism, in the sense of the branch of the Christian tradition that emerged from the sixteenth century Reformation, is alright in itself, since the Reformation was a necessary response to real abuses on the part of the Roman ecclesiastical authorities in the late Middle Ages.  When one acts as if the history of orthodox Christianity took a hiatus after the completion of the New Testament canon until All Hallows Eve in 1517 and so sets his Protestantism against the Catholicism that is the general tradition of first millennium Christianity prior to the East-West Schism, then one can go very far astray.  If he looks with suspicion on Catholicism as defined in the previous sentence, then he feels free to ignore the Creed with which Christians around the world have confessed their faith for almost two thousand years when it says that Jesus is “the Only-Begotten Son of God, Begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, Begotten not made.”

 

 

Furthermore he feels free to ignore the rulings of the Ecumenical Councils to which the bishops of the entire Church were invited (whether they attended or not is another matter) to address problems of doctrine and discipline, the decisions of which were received as authoritative by the Church such as the ruling of third Ecumenical Council, that of Ephesus in 431 AD, that it is heresy to reject the term Theotokos, God-Bearer or Mother of God, for Mary, as Nestorius did on the basis that Jesus did not derive His deity from Mary, because in Jesus deity and humanity, while remaining distinct natures, are united in One Person of Whom Mary was Mother.  John MacArthur wrote “It’s heretical to call the blood of Jesus Christ the blood of God, and it demonstrates a failure to understand what theologians have called the hypostatic union, that is the God-man union in Christ.”  Ironically, it is MacArthur’s sentence here which is heretical precisely because he himself fails to understand the hypostatic union a consequence of which is that whatever is the property of Jesus in either of His natures is His property as a Person and can be attributed to Him as such even when speaking of Him in terms of the other nature.  For example, a counterpart in the Scriptures to calling Mary the Mother of God (an equivalent of which also appears in the Scriptures in Luke 1:43) is when Jesus tells Nicodemus “And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven” thus identifying Himself by His humanity in the same breathe in which He references His omnipresence. 

 

 

Finally, it is because of His suspicion of the Catholic tradition of the first millennium that MacArthur refuses to acknowledge that Christ’s offering of His blood is not just metynomic language for His death on earth, but is rather referring to the one offering Jesus made in His priestly office in the Heavenly Tabernacle in eternity.  If he acknowledged that, then He would have to admit that it is from that offering in the Heavenly Tabernacle, which being situated in eternity is therefore equidistant to every single point in time in history from Creation until the Last Judgement that the benefits of Christ’s Atonement come to us where we are in space and time.  This would be admitting the foundation of the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist (the first millennium understanding before it got twisted into a caricature of itself in the late Middle Ages) that the earthly offering of bread and wine in the Eucharist is mystically united to Christ’s Heavenly oblation so that when the faithful receive the bread and wine, Christ’s one sacrifice becomes the meal that sustains the new life as Jesus explained in His Bread of Life Discourse in John 6, which completes the correspondence of the New Testament sacrifice with those of the Old Covenant.  Slaying of animal – Crucifixion.  Offering of blood on altar/Mercy Seat – Offering of blood in Heavenly Tabernacle.  Eating of the sacrifice – the Eucharistic meal.

 

 

One might think from this that MacArthur must at least sound in the teachings that were important in the Reformation.  MacArthur certainly sees himself as a champion of Reformation orthodoxy.  When Hank Hanegraaff, Walter Martin’s successor at the Christian Research Institute, joined the Eastern Orthodox Church in 2017 MacArthur acted as if Hanegraaff had converted to Islam or Buddhism or just apostatized.  Hanegraaff, quite capable of defending himself, provided clips from MacArthur’s remarks in his response. By joining the Eastern Orthodox Church, MacArthur felt, Hanegraaff had abandoned or was close to abandoning the Gospel.  Not the Gospel as St. Paul identified it in 1 Corinthians 15, that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, and was buried, and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, of course, because that Gospel is confessed in the Nicene Creed which Eastern Orthodoxy confesses, but the doctrine of justification by faith alone. 

 

 

Justification by faith alone is, of course, a central doctrine if not the central doctrine of the Reformation.  While it was not until the sixteenth century that it was put in that wording it is essentially identical to St. Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith and not by works.  In St. Paul’s epistles, especially Romans, it is stressed that justification is by faith and not by works.  It has to be by faith and not by works, St. Paul argued, because only then can it be by grace, that is, by God’s favour, a gift freely bestowed.  If it were by our works it would be a wage or reward rather than a gift.  This is an important truth and, indeed, in Ephesians 2:8-9 St. Paul says that salvation, which is larger than justification, is a gift of grace by faith and not works.  The importance of this truth should not be minimized, but it does need to be kept in perspective.  It is a truth about what is sometimes called the mechanics of salvation.  The Gospel is the Good News of that salvation proclaimed to the world of sinners, Jew first then Greek.  Its content is Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Who He is and what He did.  The Gospel is all about Jesus Christ.  Justification by faith and not works is about us, what we believe and what we do or rather what we don’t do to receive what Jesus Christ has done.  It is an important truth, but truths in which we are the subject rather than Jesus Christ are not on par with the Gospel truths about Jesus Christ and we ought not to make them out as if they were.  The evangelical Protestant habit of referring to the doctrine of justification by faith alone as if it were itself the Gospel rather a truth about ourselves derived from the Gospel is a very bad one.  Any truth can become a heresy when it is taken out of its proper context.  The proper context for Sola Fide is as the answer to the question “what is the hand with which we reach out and appropriate to ourselves the gift of salvation that God has given to us in Jesus Christ” because this is the role that belongs uniquely to faith. 

 

 

In his negative remarks on Hanegraaff’s chrismation into Eastern Orthodoxy MacArthur treated justification by faith alone as an essential article of faith to which one must formally subscribe to be a Christian.  How much is such subscription worth, however, when you affirm the doctrine formally while stripping it of all real meaning?

 

 

One of John MacArthur’s best known books was The Gospel According to Jesus, first published by Zondervan in 1988.  This book was his response to a real problem afflicting evangelicalism.  MacArthur called the problem “easy believism” but it would have been more accurately called “mass production evangelism” because it was basically large-scale evangelism, designed to get as many conversions as possible no matter how shallow, through a lowest-common denominator approach to the Christian message. Had MacArthur written a book denouncing the factory assembly-line approach to evangelism and its bad “decisionism” theology and tracing it back to the neo-Pelagianism of Charles G. Finney in the early nineteenth century it could have been a very worthy volume.  It would have been a completely different book from The Gospel According to Jesus, however.  Instead, MacArthur’s book retained the basic structure of evangelical decisionism but called for the decision to be defined in the much more demanding terms of total commitment, which arguably merely returned it to the point at which it went wrong in the teachings of Finney.  MacArthur wed this with a type of Dortian Calvinism that is entirely incompatible with it producing theological incoherency.   He is heavily indebted to heretical, liberal, “God is dead” theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer for his thesis, although Bonhoeffer’s  The Cost of Discipleship is not listed in the bibliography, at least in my copy (the 1989 paperback edition), nor is Bonhoeffer listed in the index. There was a revival of interest in Bonhoeffer at the time MacArthur was writing this book, brought about in part by the dishonest promotion of Bonhoeffer as a “martyr.”  A martyr is someone who is put to death for his faith.  Bonhoeffer was not executed for his faith but for his political activities, including his involvement whether actual or merely assumed due to his associations in an assassination plot.  No matter how worthy political activism may be or how deserving of assassination an intended target may happen to be it does not make the person executed for such into a martyr, much less does it transform a heretical theologian into a sound one. Nor did MacArthur succeed in turning Bonhoeffer’s bad theology sound by slapping lipstick on the pig and rebranding it in The Gospel According to Jesus.

 

 

In The Gospel According to Jesus, MacArthur affirmed justification by faith alone as an essential article of faith, but gutted it of all its meaning.  Remember that Romans St. Paul argued that justification had to be by faith and not by works so that it might be by grace and therefore a gift rather than a wage.  A gift is something that someone gives and another person receives.  It is not something that one person gives to another in exchange for something else.  MacArthur however wrote “The important truth to grasp is that saving faith is an exchange of all that we are for all that Christ is.” (p. 143).  This does not describe the giving and receiving of a gift but is precisely the sort of transaction that St. Paul says that justification/salvation is not.  In his next sentence MacArthur says “We need to understand that this does not mean we barter for eternal life.”  However, when you say “the water is full of sodium chloride” you cannot clarify your sentence by adding “this does not mean that it is salty” because this is contradicting not explaining yourself and this is the case with MacArthur.  A barter is precisely what MacArthur had described in the first sentence.  Nor is this the only place in this book where he speaks of salvation as a two-way exchange.  Clearly the man who pastors Grace Community Church and whose radio program is entitled Grace to You understands the word grace rather differently from St. Paul.  Since he has difficulty with the entire concept of a gift of grace that is St. Paul’s reason for stressing justification by faith without works it is not surprising that MacArthur’s book is also chock full of statements like this “True faith is humble, submissive, obedience.” (p. 140).  Note that this does not say that true faith is accompanied by humility, submission, and obedience.  It says that true faith is these things.  Basic deductive reasoning here.  If X = Y and Y = Z then X = Z.  Obedience and works are the same thing.  If faith is obedience then faith is works.  If faith is works, then saying that justification is by faith and not works or that justification is by faith alone is utterly meaningless.  It would be one thing if this were a one-time slip of the pen, but is basically what MacArthur argues for throughout the entire book.  Nor is he merely saying what Jesus said when He answered the question of “what shall we do, that we may work the works of God?” with “This is the work of God, that ye believe in him whom he sent.” (Jn. 6:28-29).  Indeed, his intent is clearly the opposite of Jesus’ in this passage. 

 

 

Ironically, much of this book is dedicated to justifying disobedience, disobedience, that is, to Matt. 7:1.  True, as is indicated elsewhere in the New Testament or even in the verses that immediately follow, Jesus did not intent to prohibit all judgement in this verse.  However, statements like “If a person declares he has trusted Christ as Savior [sic], no one challenges his testimony, regardless of how inconsistent his life-style may be with God’s Word” (p. 59) variations of which complaint are found repeatedly in these pages are evidently calling for a kind of judgement that if it is not fall under Jesus’ prohibition, nothing does.

 

 

The title of the second chapter “He Calls for a New Birth” displays just how muddled MacArthur’s theology is in this book.  When Jesus told Nicodemus that he must be born again this was not a call for a new birth.  It was an indicative statement of the necessity of the new birth.  A call for a new birth would take the form of Jesus telling Nicodemus that he requires a new birth from Nicodemus, that Nicodemus is capable of meeting the requirement and needs to undergo such a birth to meet the requirement.  That, however, is not the conversation Nicodemus and Jesus had.  Nicodemus does not understand Jesus’ statement and when he asks for clarification Jesus tells him that the new birth is the work of the Holy Spirit, and is like the wind which blows where it blows, and can be identified by its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it going (Jn. 3:8).  If the new birth is the work of the Holy Spirit, it is not something Jesus calls for from us.  Jesus does identify in this same passage where our responsibility lies and that is to believe in Him.  MacArthur’s attempt to confuse the simplicity of what is conveyed in this part of the interview involves a textbook example of the meaning of eisegesis “In order to look at the bronze snake on the pole, they had to drag themselves to where they could see it.  They were in no position to glance flippantly at the pole and then proceed with lives of rebellion.” (p. 46) Exposition like this makes one wonder what the expositor was smoking at the time he wrote it.  Oddly, MacArthur’s treatment of the new birth in this chapter is very much at odds with his Reformed theology in which regeneration is very much a sovereign act of the Holy Spirit.

 

 

Less oddly, he divorces regeneration from baptism.  With regards to the water of John 3:5 he writes “This has nothing to do with water or baptism – H2O. It cannot be accomplished by a bath” (p. 40).  This comes from his Hyper-Protestantism.  That regeneration is a work that the Holy Spirit accomplishes, that baptism is the sign and seal of this work, and that as a Gospel Sacrament it is used instrumentally to convey the grace it signifies is not merely the Roman understanding but the Catholic understanding of the entire Church of the first millennium.  It is also the understanding of the Lutherans, Anglicans, and even the more orthodox of the Reformed.  Dr. Luther and the English Reformers saw no contradiction between this and their doctrine of justification because there is no contradiction.  There is no contradiction for two reasons, a) Baptism is a Sacrament not a work, and b) the role of Sacraments such as Baptism in salvation is not the same as that of faith.  Faith is the instrument we use to appropriate the gifts God gives us in His grace.  Sacraments and the Church that administers them are like the Word proclaimed the instruments that God uses to give us those gifts.

 

 

If in his error discussed in the previous paragraph MacArthur departs from where the traditions of the Magisterial Reformation are in full agreement with Rome and not only Rome but the entire Catholic tradition when it comes to assurance of salvation he departs from the Reformation tradition on what was one of the most important issues in the Reformation and one on which Dr. Luther and Calvin very much disagreed with Rome.  “Genuine assurance comes from seeing the Holy Spirit’s transforming work in one’s life, not from clinging to the memory of some experience” (p. 23).  This statement is true in what it denies.  Assurance does not come from “clinging to the memory of some experience.”  It is very, very, wrong in what it affirms.  This is because assurance and faith are the same thing.  It says so explicitly in the Bible.  St. Paul in Hebrews 11:1 writes “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”  While I am quoting the Authorized Bible and very much hold the position that translations of the last century or so are in general greatly inferior to it in this case where they generally have “assurance” where the Authorized has “substance” or “certainty” in the case of the NASB (the NIV uses “assurance” where the Authorized uses “evidence”) it is helpful in making the meaning of the verse clearer.  Faith is assurance or certainty of its object and content. The Holy Spirit’s transforming work in our lives manifests itself in works.  Saying that assurance comes seeing this transformation, then, is the same thing as saying that we must put our faith in our works.  That assurance is faith, and that faith/assurance is not to be placed in our works or anything else in us but in Jesus Christ as He is proclaimed in the Gospel was Dr. Luther’s position and remains the Lutheran view to this day.  John Calvin taught the same thing.  Both men told their flocks not to look for assurance within themselves but to find it outside themselves in Jesus Christ.  John Calvin famously wrote “But if we are elected in him, we cannot find the certainty of our election in ourselves; and not even in God the Father, if we look at him apart from the Son. Christ, then, is the mirror in which we ought, and in which, without deception, we may contemplate our election. For since it is into his body that the Father has decreed to ingraft those whom from eternity he wished to be his, that he may regard as sons all whom he acknowledges to be his members, if we are in communion with Christ, we have proof sufficiently clear and strong that we are written in the Book of Life.“  (Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.24.5) MacArthur’s Puritanical view of assurance is a greater departure from the Pauline and Reformation doctrine of salvation by faith and not by works than that of Rome.

 

 

MacArthur, in my opinion, missed his true calling.  Instead of teaching the Bible, he should be peddling snake oil or selling used cars.

Modern Evangelicalism’s Orthodoxy Deficiency

The movement known as evangelicalism within contemporary Protestantism is often considered to be, and often considers itself to be, the conservative or orthodox side of Protestantism. In this essay we shall look at several ways in which its orthodoxy, by both small-c catholic and historical Protestant standards, is appallingly deficient.

The Gospel

If there is anything evangelicalism ought to be orthodox on it is the Gospel. It derives its very name from the Gospel (Greek εὐαγγέλιον – “good news”) thus, advertising itself to the world as a brand of Christianity that is uniquely sound on the Gospel. If we were talking about sixteenth century evangelicalism, the evangelicalism of Luther, Calvin, and the English Reformers (1) then we would indeed be speaking of an evangelicalism that was strong and sound on the Gospel, but this is considerably less true of today’s evangelicalism.

The Gospel is the most important of the two messages of the Holy Scriptures. The other message, the Law, contains God’s commandments as to how we are to live and describes the righteousness He demands from us. The Law is described as a “ministry of condemnation” (2 Cor. 3:9) because it can only ever accuse and condemn us, never justify us. It is powerless to produce the righteousness it demands and its primary purpose is to reveal to us that we are hopelessly lost in sin so as to prepare us to receive the Gospel. The Gospel is the good news that God provided for our salvation from our lost estate by giving us His Son Jesus Christ to be our Saviour, Who took away our sins by dying for them on the Cross and rose again from the dead.

Many, perhaps most, contemporary evangelicals distort the Gospel message by tacking on to it a call to make a decision, an act of the will, of some sort. The nature of that decision is described by countless expressions, generating much confusion. Examples include “invite Jesus into your heart”, (2) “give your heart – or life – to Christ”, “make a commitment to Christ”, and “accept Jesus Christ.” (3) The response the Scriptural Gospel calls for, however, is not a decision or act of the will of any sort, but belief. Those who believe in Jesus Christ, it declares and promises, have been saved by His death on the Cross, are declared righteous before God on the basis of His death, and possess everlasting life as a free gift. The Gospel declaration that anyone and everyone, without exception who believes in Jesus, is saved by Him, and that only those who so believe are so saved, is repeated well over a hundred times in the New Testament. Contemporary evangelicalism’s preference for non-Scriptural terminology over the simple Bible word “believe” creates confusion at the very least and the potential for misleading people into putting their faith in their own “decision for Christ” instead of in Jesus Christ Himself, as proclaimed in the Gospel message. (4)

Trinitarian and Christological Orthodoxy

God is, in His eternal being, one. In the Scriptures, however, we meet God as a plurality of divine Persons – the Father, His Son, and the Holy Spirit. These Persons are not identical to each other – the Father is neither the Son nor the Holy Spirit, nor is the Son the Holy Spirit – but they are not three Gods either. Nor is it true to say that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are parts or components of the One God – Whose essence is simple, that is to say, indivisible into subcomponents – but rather the one divine essence is found in its entirety in each Person. There is, of course, a mystery in this, one which we can never fully comprehend as to fully comprehend it would mean that we would be God ourselves, but this is the teaching of the Scriptures, as stated concisely in the Apostles’ and Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creeds, and rather more comprehensively in the Athanasian Creed. The doctrine of the unity of the three Divine Persons in the One God has since Tertullian in the third century been called the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

Orthodox Trinitarianism, however, is not merely a matter of neither dividing the essential unity of God (as the heresy of Tritheism does) nor confusing the Divine Persons (as the heresy of Sabellianism does), but also affirms the relationships within the Trinity. In orthodox Trinitarianism, the Father is not begotten of any, but possesses the one divine essence in Himself. The Son is begotten of the Father and possesses the divine essence as the Son of the Father. Since, however, He is co-eternal and co-equal with the Father, His Generation (having been begotten) of the Father is not an event before which there was any prior moment, but the eternal relationship between the Father and the Son. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, but in a different way than the Son since the Son is the only-begotten Son. He is the breath, breathed out by the Father. (5) As with the Generation of the Son, so with the Spiration of the Holy Spirit, this is not an event but an ongoing and eternal relationship.

The Eternal Generation of the Son is clearly affirmed in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. It is affirmed in the words “And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, Begotten of his Father before all Worlds” and later supported by the word “Begotten not made.” The Sonship of Jesus Christ belongs to His deity, rather than His humanity, and is itself therefore eternal. (6)

There have been several evangelical leaders in the last century who have denied the Eternal Sonship of Christ and taught Incarnational Sonship, the idea that Jesus became the Son of God through His Incarnation. These have included televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, Dr. Walter R. Martin the founder of the Christian Research Institute, author of The Kingdom of the Cults, and the original Bible Answer Man, and, most notoriously, author, pastor, seminary president, and radio Bible teacher, Dr. John F. MacArthur Jr. The latter, to be fair, publicly recanted this viewpoint almost twenty years ago, (7) although it can still be found in his Seminary’s Statement of Faith. (8) Incarnational Sonship treats Jesus’ Sonship as belonging to His humanity, rather than His deity. This, however, undermines the doctrine of the Trinity by hopelessly confusing the Persons. The agent in the Incarnation is clearly identified as the Holy Spirit in both the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke. (9) Making the Incarnation the source of the Sonship of Christ, therefore, confuses the Persons of the Father and the Holy Spirit.

Incarnational Sonship is not the only Trinitarian/Christological heresy to rear its head in contemporary evangelicalism. Several years ago the late Dr. R. C. Sproul published a book entitled The Truth of the Cross. (10) In a chapter of that book, that he later posted as a separate article on his ministry’s website (11) he took issue with the words “How can it be, that Thou, my God, shouldst die for me” from Charles Wesley’s much-loved hymn “And Can It be”. In his efforts to make the obvious point that the divine nature cannot undergo death he crossed the line into the ancient heresy of Nestorianism. “We should shrink in horror from the idea that God actually died on the cross” he wrote. The obvious problem with that statement is that Jesus Christ died on the cross and Jesus is Christ is God. Since the Person Who is God died on the cross, albeit in His human rather than His divine nature, it is correct to say that God died on the cross. To deny this is to divide His Person, separate the natures in the Hypostatic Union, and basically treat each nature as a Person, in exactly the way Nestorius did.

It could be argued that this was merely an unusual case of sloppy thinking from an ordinarily precise theologian who was so gung-ho about avoiding one heresy that he inadvertently espoused another without realizing it. Certainly there is no widespread movement in evangelicalism to have Wesley’s hymn expunged from all of our hymnals. There is, however, a broader tendency towards Nestorianism in evangelicalism.

If asked the question “Is Mary the Mother of God?” the average evangelical would probably answer “no.” In defense of his answer he would probably say that God is eternal and had no beginning and therefore has no mother and would likely lump the title “Holy Mother of God” in with the blasphemous titles of Co-Redemptrix and Queen of Heaven, with doctrines such as the Immaculate Conception, Perpetual Virginity, and Assumption, with the practice of praying to Mary and asking her to intercede with her Son Who is Himself called our Intercessor in Scripture, and basically all the trappings of the Roman cult of Mariolatry. Nevertheless, he has given the Nestorian, not the orthodox, answer to the question, which indeed, was the very question at the heart of the Nestorian controversy, long before the Marian cult was started. Nestorius refused to use the title Θεοτόκος (literally God-bearer, but usually rendered “Mother of God” in English) for Mary on the grounds that she was the mother of His humanity not of His deity. While it is certainly true that Mary was not the source of Jesus’ deity, the orthodox position, defended by Cyril of Alexandria and articulated in the Definition of the Council of Chalcedon is that in the One Person of Jesus Christ, the divine and human natures are inseparably joined. Consequently, anything that can be said of either nature can be said of the Whole Person. Mary is the Mother of Jesus, and therefore the Mother of a Person Who is God, and so, while not the source of His deity or a divine person herself, is indeed, the Mother of God. (12)

Heroes of the Faith

Christ’s Apostles knew that the church would be plagued with false prophets and false teachers. St. Paul, when he had summoned the leaders of the church in Ephesus to himself at Miletus, warned them to take heed to themselves and the church because “after my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock. Also of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them.” (Acts 20:29-30) He also included warnings against false teachers in many of his epistles, especially the ones addressed to church leaders (1 Tim 6:3-5, 2 Timothy 4:3-4, Titus 1:9-16) and wrote an entire epistle to combat the false teachers who were telling the Galatian church that they needed to be circumcised and to follow the Old Testament Law in order to be saved. Similarly, St. Peter devoted most of his second epistle, beginning in the second chapter, to a lengthy warning against false teachers, St. Jude wrote his epistle to combat false teachers, and St. John filled his first and second epistles with warnings against the proto-Gnostic false teachers he dubbed “antiChrists” who denied that Christ is come in the flesh.

It was the Lord Jesus Christ Himself Who taught His Apostles to beware of false teachers. His Olivet Discourse, towards the very end of His ministry, included a warning against those who would come in His name seeking to deceive, but much earlier in the Sermon on the Mount He had warned:

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them. (Matt. 7:15-20)

By their fruits, that is, their doctrines, the false prophets would be known. This passage comes shortly after Jesus’ warning against judging others (vv. 1-5). This makes it quite ironic that the first response of many contemporary evangelicals, whenever somebody takes Jesus’ warnings against false prophets seriously and points out the deadly heresies in the teachings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King Jr., men widely revered by today’s evangelicals as heroes of the faith, is to unthinkingly, and often hysterically, regurgitate “judge not,” generally in a much more judgmental spirit than the person pointing out the heresy in the first place.

Bonhoeffer and King were both clergymen. Bonhoeffer was a German Luther minister and King was an American Baptist. It is because of their political activities, however, and not their teachings that evangelicals revere them as heroes. Bonhoeffer was a member of the resistance movement against the tyranny of the Third Reich. King was the leader of the Civil Rights Movement that opposed racial segregation in the southern United States. Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Nazis in April of 1943 for smuggling Jews out of Germany. On July 20th of the following year, Operation Valkyrie, which his resistance group had been working on for years, a plan to assassinate Hitler, failed and its chief operative, Claus von Stauffenberg was captured and executed. The following year, Bonhoeffer was executed for his own involvement in the conspiracy. King was assassinated in April of 1968, four years after the American Congress passed the Civil Rights Act for which he had long campaigned.

Whether or not their political activities warrant the esteem in which they are held is not relevant here. (13) Bonhoeffer and King were both liberal theologians. A liberal theologian is not just a theologian who is also a political liberal. A liberal theologian is a theologian whose theology itself has been shaped and formed by the rationalistic, naturalistic, and materialistic assumptions that underlie modern philosophy. Foremost among those assumptions is that everything that occurs in this world in actual history can be fully explained by observable, natural, laws so that events, presented in the Bible as supernatural miracles, either have a natural explanation, or did not occur at all. The liberal theologian, starting with this assumption, regards Christianity as being essentially an ethical religion, rather than a religion of supernatural redemption, although he may borrow the language of redemption albeit redefining it to refer to the reshaping of human society in accordance with progressive ideals. Doctrines such as the deity, virgin birth, and resurrection of Jesus Christ are treated by liberal theologians as later additions to Christianity, non-essential to its basic ethical message, and are either denied outright or redefined in such a way that what is really unbelief (“Jesus body remained in the tomb and was not restored to life”) is disguised as faith (“Jesus rose in that He lives on in the hearts of His followers”)

Liberalism was the theology in which Dietrich Bonhoeffer was indoctrinated at the University of Tubingen and Berlin, and later at Union Theological Seminary in New York where he pursued his post-doctorate studies. It was also the theology with which Martin Luther King Jr. was indoctrinated at Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University. Bonhoeffer had never been taught any other kind of theology, unlike King whose father was a much more orthodox preacher. At Union Theological Seminary Bonhoeffer was taught by Reinhold Neibuhr and upon his return to Germany was very much captivated by Karl Barth. Neibuhr and Barth were among the leading neo-orthodox theologians of the time. Neo-orthodox theologians were liberal theologians, who had lost their faith in the tenets of liberalism and were moving in the direction of Creedal orthodoxy, but who usually fell short of actually getting there.

Liberalism is not only the theology Bonhoeffer was taught, it was the theology he taught himself. His most important, and certainly his most widely known, work was his The Cost of Discipleship, first published in German in 1937. Also of importance are the Christological lectures that he delivered at the University of Berlin, where he was lecturer in systematic theology, in 1933, which were later collected by Eberhard Bethge and published under the title Christ the Centre, and his posthumously published Letters and Papers from Prison. In The Cost of Discipleship and his Christology lectures, he questioned the historicity of the virgin birth (14) and resurrection of Jesus Christ, (15) treated the matter of their historicity as of no relevance, and treated the sinlessness of Jesus Christ in the same way. (16) In The Cost of Discipleship his basic thesis is a blasphemous denial of the freeness of the grace of God as proclaimed in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and the proposal that grace is only obtainable through taking up one’s own cross and following the ethnical teachings of Jesus as found in the Sermon on the Mount. (17) Although disguised as a call for repentance, confession of sin, and discipleship to a church that has grown lax on these things, this thesis is ultimately the liberal idea that the essence of Christianity is found in the ethical teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, and that everything else in secondary at best, accidental and a distraction from the ethical message at worst. In his Letters and Papers from Prison, he expressed a preference for the Old Testament over the New on the grounds that it was this-worldy and not a religion of redemption looking to the next life, (18) and when he took exception to Rudolf Bultmann’s project of demythologizing the New Testament (19) it was not from the standpoint of orthodoxy, but from the point of view that Bultmann did not go far enough (20). Recent efforts to portray Bonhoeffer as some sort of conservative, orthodox, evangelical (21) are, to say the least, grossly misleading. (22)

The theology of Martin Luther King Jr. was no more orthodox than Bonhoeffer’s. He thoroughly rejected the doctrine of the Atonement as legal, penal, substitution that was so vital to the doctrine of justification as taught by St. Paul (2 Cor. 5:21) and the Reformers, and dismissed any view of the Atonement as “the triumph of Christ over such cosmic powers as sin, death, and Satan” as “inadequate”. (23) He dismissed the doctrines of “a supernatural plan of salvation, the Trinity, the substitutionary theory of the atonement, and the second coming of Christ” as “ancient ideas” that are “contrary to science” and which only “fundamentalists” wish to preserve. (24) He outright denied the deity (25) and virgin birth (26) of Jesus Christ, and reinterpreted His resurrection in a non-literal way. (27) Evangelicals who regard King as a Christian hero will sometimes, when presented with this evidence, posit that he changed his views and become more orthodox (28) but there is a dearth of evidence to support the idea that King, who continued to identify as a theological liberal, ever embraced Biblical and Creedal orthodoxy.

More often, however, the evangelical response is to sputter and fume and throw out “judge not” in a most judgmental manner, and basically demonstrate to all and sundry that keeping their idols, Bonhoeffer and King, (29) is more important to them than earnestly contending for the faith once delivered unto the saints against the antichrist deceivers who come in Christ’s name, but have not the Apostolic doctrine of Christ.

(1) This excludes the heresies of Anabaptism and English Puritanism, both of which also emerged out of the sixteenth century Reformation, but which retreated from the Gospel as recovered by the early Reformers, into forms of works-salvation that were even more legalistic than the Romanism against which the Reformers protested.

(2) Revelation 3:20 is cited as justification for this terminology but this verse is addressed to a church not to prospective converts.

(3) This last is the only of these with any real Scriptural warrant for being included in the Gospel, John 1:12, but those who “received Him” in this verse did so not by an exercising their will and making a decision but by believing in His name.

(4) Several evangelicals within the “Reformed” theological tradition have thought that the answer to the error of decisionism was a return to the teachings of Puritanism. This, however, is merely a return to the source of the error for Puritanism was the original decisionism. It departed from the teachings of the early Reformers by teaching that the difference between saving and non-saving faith was not merely its object but also that the former included repentance in the sense of a decision to abandon all sin and obey God fully, and that the genuineness of one’s repentance and therefore one’s faith could be known, even by the believer himself, only by seeing its fruit in a life of devoted piety. This is the reverse of the Scripturally orthodox view, held by the sixteenth century Reformers, that the only difference between saving and non-saving faith is that the former has Jesus Christ, as revealed in the Gospel, as its object, that repentance is not an act of the will at all but the revelation, worked in the soul by the Law, of one’s own utter sinfulness, and that it cannot save apart from the faith produced by the Gospel, which faith looks to Jesus Christ and not to itself, to one’s own repentance, or to the outworking of faith and repentance in the life of the believer. Among those who to varying degrees have prescribed the neo-Puritan cure to evangelical decisionism that is worse than the disease itself, have been J. I. Packer, John F. MacArthur Jr., James Montgomery Boice, John Piper, Wayne Grudem, John H. Gerstner, R. C. Sproul, John R. W. Stott, D. A. Carson and A. W. Pink.

(5) The technical theological term for this is spiration. Note that the Eastern church and Western church have been divided for a thousand years over whether the Spirit proceeds (is breathed out) by the Father only (the Eastern position), or the Father and the Son (the Western position).

(6) Jesus’ enemies certainly understood His claim to a unique Sonship to be a claim to deity. See His interaction with them at the end of both the eighth and tenth chapters of the Gospel according to St. John.

(7) John F. MacArthur Jr., “Reexamining the Eternal Sonship of Christ”, first released by its author in September 1999, later published in Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, Vol. 6, No. 1, (2001) pp. 21-23.

(8) The Master’s Seminary, Doctrinal Statement, God The Son, sixth paragraph. “We teach that, in the incarnation, the second person of the Trinity laid aside His right to the full prerogatives of coexistence with God, assumed the place of a Son” (italics added).

(9) Matthew 1:18, 20; Luke 1:35. The latter verse has been taken as supporting Incarnational Sonship because of the “therefore” clause. This clause can mean either a) Jesus is the Son of God because His conception was caused miraculously by the Holy Spirit or b) the miraculous conception wrought by the Holy Spirit was the appointed means whereby the Divine Person Who was the Son of God from eternity past would take human nature to Himself and enter the world. Only the latter meaning is acceptable, because meaning a) leads to the heresy of Sabellianism.

(10) R. C. Sproul, The Truth of the Cross, (Sanford, Florida: Reformation Trust Publishing, 2007).

(11) https://www.ligonier.org/blog/it-accurate-say-god-died-cross/

(12) This demonstrates the extent to which Puritan and Anabaptist thinking have permeated contemporary evangelicalism. These movements, which believed that the Magisterial Reformation had not gone far enough in its reforms, thought that anything with the slightest sense of “Rome” to it should be done away. In this case, sound Christology was sacrificed in the process.

(13) Bonhoeffer certainly does not deserve the status of “martyr” he is often awarded for his actions, however one chooses to regard them, since he was put to death for his political actions and not his faith. Perhaps the awarding of martyr status to clergymen put to death for reasons other than their beliefs should be called “cheap martyrdom”? The evaluation of King’s career depends entirely upon whether one considers de jure integration to be better than de jure segregation. The Jim Crow laws, which were an example of the latter, were struck down by the Supreme Court of the United States of America in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas in 1954, one year prior to the Montgomery Bus Boycott which put King in the spotlight and launched his career as a Civil Rights activist. Obviously, the SCUSA decision did not immediately put an end to the practice of segregation, but the American federal government was already prepared to enforce the Court’s decision, and it was this, not the actions of King, that ultimately killed Jim Crow. King’s biggest accomplishment was the passing of the US Civil Rights Act, which rather than merely abolishing de jure segregation, established de jure integration in certain situations. That this was the great leap forward in justice and race relations that progressive dogma insists that it was is highly debatable.

(14) He said “We should speak not of God becoming human but of the God who became human, for the former is a “how” question, to be found in the old doctrine of the virgin birth. The biblical witness is uncertain with regard to the virgin birth. If the biblical witness really gave this as a fact, the dogmatic lack of clarity about it would have nothing to say. The doctrine of the virgin birth is supposed to express how God becomes human. But does it not result in the decisive point being missed, that Jesus became like us? This question remains open, because the Bible leaves it open.” This is the translation from Clifford J. Green, Michael DeJonge, eds, The Bonhoeffer Reader, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013). The translation in the older Christ the Centre is slightly different, but the difference does not affect what is theologically objectionable here. Bonhoeffer does not outright deny the virgin birth, but he subtly undermines it by suggesting that it conflicts with what he sees as the “point” of the Incarnation that “God became like us” (we aren’t virgin born). Read Genesis 3 and see if that kind of reasoning reminds you of anyone in that chapter. At any rate, it would undoubtedly come as a surprise to St. Matthew and St. Luke to learn that the Bible, to which they contributed two of the Gospels, leave this question “open”.

(15) The subtlety with which this is done exceeds even that of his remarks on the virgin birth. The first paragraph of his chapter on “Baptism” in The Cost of Discipleship, begins by noting that while the Synoptic Gospels stress Jesus’ disciples following Him, St. Paul has little to say about His earthly ministry in His epistles, stressing instead “the presence of the risen and glorified Christ and his work in us.” Bonhoeffer then goes on in the rest of the paragraph to argue that the language of Paul and the Synoptic Evangelists confirm and complement, rather than contradict each other, and that “Our faith rests upon the unity of the Scriptural testimony.” This sounds very orthodox, but in the note that accompanies this paragraph Bonhoeffer say that “if we take the statement that Christ is risen and present as an ontological statement, it inevitably dissolves the unity of the Scriptures, for it leads us to speak of a mode of Christ’s presence which is different e.g. from that of the synoptic Jesus.” Later in the note he says “The assertion that Christ is risen and present, is, when taken strictly as a testimony given in the Scriptures, true only as a word of the Scriptures.” What is the difference between the resurrection as an “ontological statement” and the resurrection as “a word of the Scriptures?” Bonhoeffer leaves this rather ambiguous in The Cost of Discipleship but in his earlier Christological lectures he had argued against tying faith in the resurrection to the news of the empty tomb. He said: “Between humiliation and exaltation lies oppressively the stark historical fact of the empty tomb. What is the meaning of the news of the empty tomb, before the news of the resurrection? Is it the deciding fact of Christology? Was it really empty? Is it the visible evidence, penetrating the incognito, of the Sonship of Jesus, open to everyone and therefore making faith superfluous? If it was not empty, is then Christ not risen and our faith futile? It looks as though our faith in the resurrection were bound up with the news of the empty tomb. Is our faith then ultimately only faith in the empty tomb? This is and remains, a final stumbling block, which the believer in Christ must learn to live with in one way or another. Empty or not empty, it remains a stumbling block. We cannot be sure of its historicity.” John W. de Gruchy, ed. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Witness to Jesus Christ, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991) pp. 122-123. What Bonhoeffer is saying here is that the “truth” of the resurrection is found in our experience of Christ through faith, and that this is independent of the question of whether it occurred as an historical event or not. Note that again, Bonhoeffer does not outright deny that the resurrection was a historical event, he just makes its historicity irrelevant to its “truth” as an item of faith. This is the same distinction he was making, under the cover of technical philosophical terminology, in the note to The Cost of Discipleship. St. Paul, who provided a long list of then-living witnesses to the resurrection, in the chapter in which he argued that if Christ is not risen our faith is in vain, had the exact opposite opinion of the importance of the historicity of the resurrection to that of Bonhoeffer.

(16) Bonhoeffer said “Simply stating the sinlessness of Jesus fails if it is based on the observable acts of Jesus. His acts take place in the homoioma sarkos. They are not sinless, but ambiguous. One can and should see both good and failure in them.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christology, (London: Collins, 1966, 1978) p. 113. As we have seen above in divorcing the Christ of faith from historical fact, Bonhoeffer had not outright denied the virgin birth and resurrection, but here he outright denies the impeccability of Jesus as a historical reality. After throwing out a quotation from Kierkegaard that does not mean what he thought it meant, Bonhoeffer went on to say “We should not therefore deduce the sinlessness of Jesus out of his deeds. The assertion of the sinlessness of Jesus in his deeds is not an evident moral judgement, but an assertion of faith that it is he who performs these ambiguous deeds, he it is who is in eternity without sin.” Orthodoxy has always recognized that truth is greater than mere fact and cannot be reduced to what we know through history and science. Bonhoeffer’s neo-orthodoxy borrows this terminology, but inverts it, so divorcing what it considers to be the “truth” known existentially by “faith” from fact, as to make it less than mere facts rather than more.

(17) In the first chapter of the book, entitled “Costly grace”, which introduced both that expression and the expression “cheap grace” to the world, Bonhoeffer consistently fails to distinguish between the results of grace in the life of the believer and the terms of obtaining grace, or to recognize the difference between a gift that is freely given and received, and a commodity sold on the cheap. The grace of God is given to men freely in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is the Gospel. Something that is given freely as a gift is not paid for by the recipient. This does not make it “cheap” because the cost of it has been paid by the Giver. Indeed, the price God paid for the grace that He freely gives us was so high, the death and shed bled of His only-begotten Son, that it could only ever be given as a free gift because to offer anything at all in exchange, is to insult the Giver. Bonhoeffer’s blasphemous terminology was enthusiastically embraced by John F. MacArthur Jr. in his 1988 book The Gospel According to Jesus, a critique of decisionism that prescribed Puritanism as the solution. While MacArthur like Bonhoeffer believes in the unity of the Scriptural testimony, and unlike Bonhoeffer believes the truth of that testimony to include historical veracity, in practice, the methodology of his book is to interpret all of the Gospel of John’s many promises of everlasting life as a free gift to all who believe in Jesus as shorthand summaries of all the demands Jesus made of His followers in the Synoptic Gospels. This tortured methodology reveals that underneath MacArthur’s and Bonhoeffer’s profession of faith in the unity of the Scriptural testimony, lies the liberal assumption that the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels is a more authentic, more historical, Jesus than the Jesus of John’s Gospel, and since the liberal way of dealing with this assumption (treating John’s Gospel as a later, theological, treatise about Jesus that reflects Pauline theology more than the historical Jesus) is not available to either MacArthur or Bonhoeffer because of their assertion of the unity of the Scriptural testimony, this sort of pseudo-exegesis becomes necessary.

(18) He wrote “In contrast to the other oriental religions, the faith of the Old Testament is not a religion of redemption. But Christianity has always been regarded as a religion of redemption. But isn’t this a cardinal error, which separates Christ from the Old Testament and interprets him according to the redemption myths?” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Reginald Fuller trans, Letters and Papers From Prison, (New York: Macmillan, 1971) p. 336.

(19) Rudolf Bultmann was Professor of New Testament at the University of Marsburg. Bultmann was noted for an approach to the New Testament that could be described as the opposite of the “Quest for the Historical Jesus” approach, discussed by Albert Schweitzer in the work of that title, while accepting the same heretical presuppositions that many of the events of the New Testament did not historically take place. The “Quest for the Historical Jesus” approach, was the attempt, based upon this heretical presupposition, to distill from the New Testament as a whole the words and acts of Jesus that are genuinely historical. Bultmann believed this to be a waste of time, arguing that what mattered instead was the kerygma of the Christian faith, i.e., the message it proclaims to the world, and that it is this that should be distilled from the New Testament through a process he called “demythologization”, i.e., removing the miraculous elements.

(20) This was in his May 5th, 1944 letter to Eberhard Bethge. He wrote “You probably remember Bultmann's essay on ‘demythologizing the New Testament.’ My opinion of it today would be that he went not ‘too far,’ as most people thought, but rather not far enough. It's not only ‘mythological’ concepts like miracles, ascension, and so on (which in principle can't be separated from concepts of God, faith, etc.!) that are problematic, but ‘religious’ concepts as such. You can't separate God from the miracles (as Bultmann thinks); instead, you must be able to interpret and proclaim them both ‘nonreligiously.’ Bultmann's approach is still basically liberal (that is, it cuts the gospel short), whereas I'm trying to think theologically. What then does it mean to ‘interpret religiously’? It means, in my opinion, to speak metaphysically, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, individualistically. Neither way is appropriate, either for the biblical message or for people today.” In the rest of the letter he made it clear that to “speak metaphysically” means to speak in terms of a world beyond this one. He was thus reiterating one of Nietzsche’s major objections to Christianity, i.e., its other-wordliness, and calling for the basic Christian “concepts of repentance, faith, justification, rebirth and sanctification” to be “reinterpreted in a ‘worldly’ way” which he speaks of as “the Old Testament sense.” Nietzsche too, preferred the Old Testament to the New, and for the same reason, but he had the honesty not to pretend that his thinking was compatible with Christianity. The influence of Nietzsche’s thinking is quite apparent in Bonhoeffer’s prison letters. He also wrote “God is teaching us that we must live as humans who can get along very well without God. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us. The God who makes us live in this world without using God as a working hypothesis is the god before whom we are standing. Before God and with God we live without God.” Bonhoeffer has here taken the “God is dead” concept from The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where it refers to the idea that reason and science have made faith in the Christian God unavailable to the modern world, and blended it with the Christian concept of the suffering and death of Christ on the cross, in a way that is utterly heretical (there is certainly nothing in the New Testament that hints at the idea that God is teaching us to get along without Him) and which anticipates the later heresies of Harvey Cox, Paul van Buren, and John A. T. Robinson. Further, Bonhoeffer’s rejection of speaking “individualistically” here cannot be understood in a political sense, a rejection of liberalism’s placing the individual ahead of the community. He makes it clear that by speaking “individualistically” he means speaking in terms of personal salvation. Bonhoeffer’s “religionlessness”, therefore, is worlds-of-meaning separate, from what Fritz Ridenour had in mind when he wrote How to Be Christian Without Being Religious. Ridenour’s separation of religion from Christianity is itself an absurdity, but it does not contain the heterodoxy of Bonhoeffer’s, and at any rate is a subject for another essay.

(21) Foremost among these is Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, with its John le Carresque title, by Eric Metaxas, which was published by Thomas Nelson in 2010. This book won the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association’s “Christian Book of the Year” award for that year, and became a New York Times bestseller. Timothy J. Keller, the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York, wrote the Foreword. Metaxas and Keller are both men who ought to have known better.

(22) The Myth of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Is His Theology Evangelical? by California State University history professor Richard Weikart, is not a response to Metaxas having been first published by International Scholars Publications in 1997, thirteen years prior to Metaxas’ book. Weikart’s review of Metaxas’ book, entitled “Metaxas’s Counterfeit Bonhoeffer” is available on the California State University’s website: https://www.csustan.edu/history/metaxass-counterfeit-bonhoeffer

(23) “A View of the Cross Possessing Biblical and Spiritual Justification”, submitted by Martin Luther King Jr. to Crozer Theological Seminary for the two-term course “Christian Theology for Today” that he took in his second year in the Seminary (1949-1950). Found in Clayborne Carson, Ralph Luker, and Penny A. Russell eds, The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Volume I: Called to Serve, January 1929-June 1951, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1992). King based his dismissal of these views on the idea that “this dualistic view is incompatible with a thoroughgoing Christian theism”, confusing the heresy of dualism, in which Satan and evil are elevated to eternal forces equal and opposite to God, with the presence of sin, death, and Satan in the created and fallen world. He rejected the Pauline/Reformers doctrine of the Atonement, as well as Anselm’s and Grotius’, on the grounds of “the abstract and impersonal way” that this type of doctrine “deals with such ideas as merit, guilt and punishment; {the guilt of others and the punishment} due them are transferred to Christ and borne by him.” He outright denied that merit or guilt “can be detached from one person and transferred to another” and condemned the idea that someone can be “punished in place of another” as “immoral.” He embraced liberalism’s “moral influence” theory of the Atonement as “best adapted to meet the needs of the modern world.” In this theory, the Atonement is a revelation of the “sacrificial love of God” which inspires us to love God in return. It is this theory, however, that is inadequate, because apart from the aspect of the Atonement that King denies, that it satisfies the justice of God as the basis of the pardon and justification of the sinner, the “sacrificial love of God” could hardly be revealed in the Crucifixion. As for the idea that satisfaction theories of the Atonement are “impersonal”, anyone who has found peace with God in Christ and His Cross through faith in God’s having taken our sins upon Himself, will recognize this as the blasphemous absurdity that it is.

(24) “The Source of Fundamentalism and Liberalism Considered Historically and Psychologically”, submitted by Martin Luther King Jr. to Crozer Theological Seminary for the same course as above, and found in the same volume of his collected papers. The final paragraph in its entirely reads “Others [sic] doctrines such as a supernatural plan of salvation, the Trinity, the substitutionary theory of the atonement, and the second coming of Christ are all quite prominent [sic] in fundamentalist thinking. Such are the views of the fundamentalist and they reveal that he is oppose to theological adaptation to social and cultural change. He sees a progressive scientific age as a retrogressive spiritual age. Amid change all around he was {is} willing to preserve certain ancient ideas even though they are contrary to science.” Note that while the fundamentalism that King discussed in this paper was and is a distinct movement within Protestantism, the doctrines he dismisses here are not distinctives of fundamentalism as a movement as, for example, Darbyite eschatology would be. A supernatural plan of salvation, the Trinity, and the second coming of Christ are found in the Apostles, Nicene-Constantinopolitan, and Athanasian Creeds, and are affirmed by all orthodox Christians, just as the substitutionary theory of the Atonement is affirmed by all orthodox Protestants.

(25) In his paper, “The Humanity and Divinity of Jesus”, again submitted by Martin Luther King Jr to Crozer Theological Seminary for the second term of the same course as above, and found in the same volume of his writings, King affirmed the full humanity of Jesus (which is sound) but affirmed only “the presence of the divine dimension within him”, an “element in his life which transcends the human” which is unsound because it falls short of an affirmation of his full deity. Indeed, the word deity appears nowhere in the paper, only the word divinity, which is itself often an indicator of liberal theology. King offered the following as a summary of the orthodox Christian view of the divinity of Jesus: “The more orthodox Christians have seen his divinity as an inherent quality metaphysically bestowed. Jesus, they have told us, is the Pre existent [sic] Logos. He is the word made flesh. He is the second person of the trinity. He is very God of very God, of one substance with the Father, who for our salvation came down from Heaven and was incarnate be the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary.” He then proceeded to reject this viewpoint. “Certainly this view of the divinity of Christ presents many modern minds with insuperable difficulties. Most of us are not willing to see the union of the human and divine in a metaphysical incarnation. Yet amid all of our difficulty with the pre existent [sic] idea and the view of supernatural generation, we must come to some view of the divinity of Jesus.” His own liberal view of the divinity of Christ he stated as follows “We may find the divinity of Christ not in his substantial unity with God, but in his filial consciousness and in his unique dependence upon God. It was his felling [sic] of absolute dependence on God, as Schleiermaker [sic] would say, that made him divine. Yes it was the warmnest [sic] of his devotion to God and the intimatcy [sic] of his trust in God that accounts for his being the supreme revelation of God. All of this reveals to us that one man has at last realized his true divine calling: That of becoming a true son of man by becoming a true son of God. It is the achievement of a man who has, as nearly as we can tell, completely opened his life to the influence of the divine spirit.” The orthodox doctrine of the full deity of Jesus Christ, i.e., that He is “very God of very God”, or, as King put it, that He “is divine in an ontological sense”, King dismissed as “harmful and detrimental” on the grounds that in his, that is King’s, view, we can all become as divine as Jesus by following His example (this is NOT what the Greek Fathers meant by theosis) and the idea that Jesus possesses full deity as part of His essential Being is a discouragement to making the attempt.

(26) In the paper “What Experiences of Christians Living in the Early Christian Century Led to the Christian Doctrines of the Divine Sonship of Jesus, the Virgin Birth, and the Bodily Resurrection” which Martin Luther King Jr. submitted to Crozer Theological Seminary in the first term of the same course as the above, and found in the same volume of his collected works, King said of the virgin birth “This doctrine gives the modern scientific mind much more trouble than the first, for it seems downright improbable and even impossible for anyone to be born without a human father” as if the pre-modern mind thought it an ordinary, everyday occurrence. He went on to “admit that the evidence for the tenability of this doctrine is to shallow to convince any objective thinker” and to raise the standard liberal arguments against it. He argued that the early Christians, influenced by the Greek idea that “an extraordinary person could only be explained by saying that he had a father who was more than human” used the pre-scientific concept of a virgin birth to explain the “uniqueness of quality and spirit” that they had witnessed within Jesus. “We of this scientific age” he then said “will not explain the birth of Jesus in such unscientific terms, but we will have to admit with the early Christians that the spiritual uniqueness of Jesus stands as a mystery to man.”

(27) In the same paper referred to in the previous note, King said of the Resurrection that “This doctrine, upon which the Easter Faith rests, symbolizes the ultimate Christian conviction: that Christ conquered death” but that “From a literary, historical, and philosophical point of view this doctrine raises many questions” and “In fact the external evidence for the authenticity of this doctrine is found wanting.” Albert Henry Ross, who under the penname Frank Morison wrote the book Who Moved the Stone? (1930) arguing for the historicity of the Resurrection after attempting to write against it and finding the evidence was otherwise, would beg to differ. At any rate, King went on to take the same position as Bonhoeffer, that “the external evidence is not the most important thing.” The early Christians, he argued, through living with Jesus “had been captivated by the magnetic power of his personality” which experience “led to the faith that he could never die” which, again in “the pre-scientific thought pattern of the first century” took the “outward form” of the doctrine of the Resurrection. Like Bonhoeffer, King saw the “truth” of the Resurrection as to be found in a faith experience of Christ as living that is completely independent of whether He actually rose from the dead in real space and time.

(28) Granted that all the papers cited in the previous five notes were submitted for the same second year seminary course, it is still up to those claiming that he later embraced more orthodox views to provide evidence of this change. There is evidence that he moved closer to neo-orthodoxy – the theology of Karl Barth, Reinhold Neibuhr, Emil Brunner, Dietrich Bonhoeffer – while studying at Boston University after Crozer Theological Seminary, but so far nobody has been able to provide evidence that he repudiated the views presented in the above papers and embraced true Creedal orthodoxy. His sermons read like liberal/Marxist political addresses barely disguised as Christian moral theology than faithful expositions of the doctrines of the Christian faith.

(29) Herman J. Otten, who pastored the Trinity Lutheran Church in New Haven, Missouri from 1958 to 2013, published many articles in his Christian News newspaper over the years that pointed out the deadly heresies of both Bonhoeffer and King. Seven years ago he published a valuable collection of these in book form. Herman J. Otten, ed., Bonhoeffer and King: Their Life and Theology Documented in Christian News 1963-2011, (New Haven: Lutheran News Inc., 2011).

Grace and the Way of the Cross

We adore Thee, O Christ, and we praise Thee.
Because by Thy Holy Cross Thou has redeemed the world.

A traditional devotion for Holy Week, and indeed for the entire Lenten period, is the Stations of the Cross, in which fourteen stages of the Saviour’s sorrowful path from the sentencing under Pilate to the laying of His body in the tomb, are meditated upon. It is an entirely appropriate devotion. All Christians are called to take up their cross and follow their Saviour and in the Stations this is enacted symbolically and liturgically. This is, of course, no substitute for actually obeying Christ’s call to take up the cross and deny oneself and if treated as such a substitute, it will be of little benefit to anyone.

Much has been preached and written about the Way of the Cross – not the Stations but Christ’s call to His disciples to follow in His path – over the years. Sadly, much of it has fallen into one of two great errors. The first of these is the error of trivializing the cross, of equating the minor inconveniences we face in everyday life with the cross we must bear. The second is the error of presenting the call to take up the cross in such a way that it compromises the grace of the Gospel.

If we consider the challenge to take up the cross in the context in which it was originally made there can be no danger of falling into the first error. Jesus first made this challenge at a turning point in His teaching ministry. In the sixteenth chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, the Pharisees and Sadducees come to Jesus and ask Him to show them a sign from heaven. He tells them that no sign shall be given to them but the “sign of the prophet Jonas.” This is not the first time this exchange had taken place – earlier in the twelfth chapter of the same Gospel He had given them the same answer, explaining that “as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” The sign, in other words, is His death and resurrection. After the repeat of this exchange, Jesus warns His disciples of the “leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees”, and, when they arrive at the coasts of Caesarea Philippi, asks them whom men say that He is. They throw out a few of the rumours circulating as to His identity, and then He follows up with “But whom say ye that I am?”

At this point St. Peter gives his famous confession of faith “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” which Jesus responds to by saying:

Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

Jesus then instructs them to tell no man that He is the Christ. This may perhaps seem odd. Peter’s confession was not the first time He had been identified as the Christ, nor the first time He had confirmed this. John the Baptist had identified Him as the Christ at the very beginning of His ministry (Jn. 1:32-36), and it was on this understanding that His Apostles had become His followers in the first place (Jn. 1:38-49). He had certainly shared His identity as the Christ with the Samaritan woman at the well, (Jn. 4:26) long before this. Nevertheless, at this point His identity as the Christ was being treated as a secret among His disciples (including the Samaritan woman and those she introduced to Christ), although whispers of it were clearly circulating around the larger public of Judea as evidenced by the repeated requests for a sign. The secrecy would be dropped on the first Palm Sunday, of course, when with obvious reference to the prophecy of Zechariah 9:9, Jesus presented Himself publicly to Israel as their Messiah, riding into Jerusalem on a donkey.

An explanation, at least in part, of the secrecy at this earlier stage, is that Jesus had important instructions to give His disciples in preparation for what would happen when He “went public” as the Messiah. Accordingly, Matthew next tells us that “From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his disciples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day.”

This, we recognize in retrospect, was the entire purpose for which Jesus came as the Messiah, as prophesied in the third and fourth of the Servant Songs of the Book of Isaiah (50:4-9, 52:13-53:12). The disciples, however, raised as they had been to think of the Messiah in entirely different terms, were shocked to receive this teaching from Him Who had just received and acknowledged their confession of Him as the Christ. Peter responded by rebuking Him Whom he had just confessed to be “the Christ, the Son of the living God” and received a rebuke in return.

It is at this point that Jesus issued that famous challenge:

Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.

In this context, these words can only mean one thing. He has just told them that He was going to Jerusalem, to be handed over to the elders, chief priests, and scribes, who would put Him to death, and that He would be raised from the dead. This challenge, in this context, was for His disciples to join Him in His suffering and death. To be His disciple was to be His pupil, one who followed after Him and learned from Him. Teachers test their students and here Jesus lays out what the test will be for His disciples. Included in the challenge was the promise that they would also join Him in His resurrection:

For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.

Clearly then, this challenge cannot be reduced merely to putting up with our everyday burdens, toils, and nuisances. In its most literal sense, however, it could only ever have been fulfilled by those to whom it was first addressed, as the opportunity to be literally crucified alongside Christ came once in history. Even in the second most literal sense of martyrdom, while this has been going on throughout history and continues in some parts of the world today, it has never really been an option for every single person called to follow Jesus. Does it have any other meaning?

Traditionally, the church has answered this by pointing to the words “let him deny himself.” This does not mean merely “let him deny himself this or that comfort or pleasure”, but “let him deny his own self – his ego, his will, etc.” In this light, to “take up his cross” means to “die” to self, sin, and the world – the world, in the sense of “the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (1 Jn. 2:16). These things – the gratification of bodily desires (encompassing far more than just the sexual), the desire for material gain, and the desire for the praise and esteem of other people – are the motivations that rule most people’s lives and to die to them is to cease living for them, and hence to cease living for one’s self. It is the death of the old, self-seeking, self-governing, self-willed self, to make way for the life of a new self.

Unfortunately, many who understand this to be the enduring meaning of this challenge, and avoid falling into the first error of trivializing the cross, fall into the second error of compromising the grace of the Gospel.

This is done by making fulfilment of the demands of discipleship the “cost” the disciple pays for receiving the grace of God. This, of course, completely undermines the concept of grace, which is that of favour that is freely given, rather than offered in exchange for something, and which is paid for by the giver, not the receiver. One well-known example of this error is the 1937, The Cost of Discipleship, by the neo-orthodox, (1) German Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who is widely, if erroneously, thought of as a martyr today. A martyr is someone put to death for their faith. Bonhoeffer was put to death by the Nazis for his political activities – his involvement in the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler on July 20th, 1944. However laudable such activities may or may not have been, being put to death for them does not qualify one for martyrdom. (2)

It is not only heretical pseudo-martyrs, like Bonhoeffer who made this mistake, however. One of the books that I read this Lenten season was A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. Written by second generation non-juror, (3) William Law, this was a classic of eighteenth century spirituality, which influenced, among others, John Wesley and Dr. Johnson. The book is a call to Christians to practice true devotion, i.e., not just allotting a quick prayer to God here and there, but devoting all of their lives, including the aspects that would be labelled “secular” today, to God, and emphasizing that nothing less is required of all of Christ’s followers, whatever may be their condition in life.

Overall, it is an excellent book and far superior to Bonhoeffer’s highly overrated tome, but it is very weak on grace, despite the author’s having demonstrated a thorough grasp of the subject in his personal correspondence, and in the seventeenth chapter he writes:

And we are to suffer, to be crucified, to die, and rise with Christ; or else His Crucifixion, Death, and Resurrection, will profit us nothing.

Here, Law has gotten the cart, as the saying goes, before the horse and, as a result, he misses the meaning of the verses he then proceeds to cite to support this assertion (Rom. 6:6, 2 Tim. 2:11). For the orthodox teaching is not that it is our following the Saviour down the path of suffering, crucifixion, and death that procures for us the benefits of His saving work on our behalf but that it is His saving work on our behalf, the benefits of which are given to us freely and which we receive through faith, that procures for us the following Him along the way of the Cross.

Consider again the call to take up the cross, in its original, literal, meaning. Did any of the men who heard that call that day pass the test of discipleship?

They certainly promised to follow Him to the death. When Lazarus died and Jesus returned to Judea to raise him, St. Thomas, in words that have something of a feel of resignation to fate to them, said to the others “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” (Jn. 11:16) On the eve of His arrest, Jesus told the Apostles that they were about to fail the test:

All ye shall be offended because of me this night: for it is written, I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered abroad. (Matt. 26:31)

This was met with St. Peter’s famous boast, that “Though all men shall be offended because of thee, yet will I never be offended” to which the Lord replied by predicting that the Apostle would deny Him three times that very night, prompting the further denial “Though I should die with thee, yet will I not deny thee”, which all the others echoed.

When the moment of testing arrived, after putting up an initial resistance to the arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, which ended when Christ Himself told them to back down, they scattered as predicted, when St. Peter tried to hide himself among the crowd in the high priest’s courtyard to hear the outcome of the trial, he ended up denying his Master three times, as predicted, and of the Twelve, only St. John dared show up, along with the Lord’s Mother and some of His female followers, to witness the Crucifixion.

The story did not end here, however. Following the Resurrection, the Ascension, and the sending of the Holy Spirit, the Apostles became bold witnesses for Jesus, proclaiming Him to the crowd at Pentecost (Acts 2), and suffering persecution and imprisonment for Him (Acts 4:1-21, 5:18) and ultimately to undergo martyrdom – with the exception, according to most traditions recounting the history of the early church, of the Apostle who had been present at the Crucifixion.

Clearly, a powerful transformation had taken place. It was not merely the disciples themselves, however, who were transformed by the power unleashed in the Gospel events, but the call to take up the cross and, indeed, all of Jesus’ teachings and commandments. Considered apart from Jesus’ Death, Burial and Resurrection, and the grace of God revealed therein, Jesus’ teachings, such as those found in the famous Sermon on the Mount, very much ring with the tone of Mt. Sinai: “this do and live.” Apart from the saving grace revealed in the Crucifixion and Resurrection, Jesus’ words at the end of the eleventh chapter of Matthew’s Gospel seem ironic and mocking. Paraphrasing the words of Sirach 5:23-27, Jesus gives the invitation “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matt. 11:28-30). Five chapters later, He says that burden is a cross! Easy? Light?

All of this takes on a very different appearance in the light of the Gospel of grace and not merely because Jesus, unlike the Pharisees, had Himself born the burden He placed on the backs of His followers. In the Gospel as proclaimed by the Apostles, we are told that Jesus Christ died for our sins, was buried, and rose again the third day and we are invited to believe in Him as our Saviour. In further teaching and expounding this, the Apostles tell us that we are to consider, by faith, Christ’s death to be our death, and His resurrection to be our new life, to regard ourselves as having been joined by the Spirit to Christ in His death and resurrection, and therefore to reckon ourselves dead to sin, and alive to God and righteousness. Fallen human beings are unable to meet God’s righteous demands, but God in His loving grace and mercy, makes provision for us. This is the very essence of the Gospel.

When St. Paul wrote “I through the law am dead to the law, that I might live unto God. I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Gal. 2:19-20) did he mean that by his own effort he had accomplished the crucifixion of his own self as the necessary precondition of receiving the grace of Christ? Of course not. Such an interpretation of these words, from the epistle written to the Galatian church to tell them that not only do they enter the Christian life by faith, but they continue in it and live it out the same way as well, would be not only absurd but obscene. The Apostle continues by saying “and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.”

The clearest passage on this subject is found in the sixth chapter of the epistle to the Romans. Earlier in the epistle, St. Paul had indicted the heathen nations with sin (1:18-32), then the Jewish nation which had been given God’s law (2:1-29), showing that with or without the law, all will be judged by their works, (2:9-16), but then showing that nobody will be justified by his own works because all, Jew and Gentile alike, have sinned (3:9-23), however, God freely justifies sinners, Jew and Gentile alike, who believe in Jesus, on account of the propitiatory sacrifice He made on the cross (3:24-26), and that this justification is according to the principle of grace rather than law and therefore by faith and not by works (3:27 to 5:1), contrasting the abundant grace that has come to the world through Christ with the sin and condemnation that had come through Adam (5:2-21). Here, in the sixth chapter, the Apostle answers the legalistic objection that his teaching will lead to licence to sin (6:1) by saying:

How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein? Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection: Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. For he that is dead is freed from sin. Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him: Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him. Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him. Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof. Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God. For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace. (Rom. 6:2-14)

Instead of producing licence to sin, the Apostle is saying, the Gospel doctrine that God justifies sinners freely by grace through faith in Jesus Christ and not their own works frees men from the tyranny of sin. The believer is united with Jesus Christ in His Death and Resurrection, and so should consider himself to be dead to sin in Christ’s Death, but alive to God in Christ’s Resurrection. Note that in this passage the believer’s participation in Christ’s Death and Resurrection is not something that the believer is to strive to achieve through vigorous self-mortification, but something he is to look to by faith as an established reality. It is connected here with his baptism, i.e., the Sacrament that is the rite of entrance into the Christian faith.

Christ’s Death and Resurrection changed everything. Before His Crucifixion He set before His disciples the path of the Cross, the path of self-denial and sharing with Him in His sufferings and death. The path remains, but His Death and Resurrection has transformed it from one in which sharing in Christ’s suffering and death is something we are to strive to achieve, but something that has been accomplished for us by grace and which we are to live out by faith. Again, we do not strive to share in Christ’s sufferings and death in order to obtain the benefits of His Crucifixion and Resurrection, which are given to us freely by grace through faith, rather it is the grace given to us through the Crucifixion and Resurrection, which gives us the power to follow, however falteringly, in the footsteps of our Saviour.


(1) The neo-orthodox were liberal theologians who had lost faith in their own liberalism. They moved closer to orthodoxy, but did not actually embrace it. Bonhoeffer was a forerunner of the regrettable “God is dead” theology of the 1960s.
(2) If you are looking for an example, from the same era, of the genuine article to which Bonhoeffer was a counterfeit, I recommend Edith Stein. I recently read her biography and have been reading, over Lent, her The Science of the Cross, the treatise on the writings and thought of St. John of the Cross that she was completing in her last days. While the book does sometimes lean towards the second of the errors discussed in this essay, she also, following her subject, grasps that crucifixion is not something one can do to oneself but must come from God, and that faith is the path to union with Him. She was raised Jewish, studied phenomenology under its founder Edmund Husserl, whose teaching assistant she became. While pursuing her academic career she converted to Christianity and joined the Roman Catholic Church. Heavily influenced by the writings of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, she joined a Discalced Carmelite convent and became a nun taking the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She was transferred to a convent in the Netherlands after the rise of the Third Reich, but after the Nazi takeover of this country, she was arrested by the SS, sent to Auschwitz, and martyred there. She was canonized a saint by the Roman Catholic Church during the pontificate of John Paul II, despite complaints by the, in my opinion at least, Christophobic hate group the Anti-Defamation League of the Binai B’rith and its leader Abraham Foxman.
(3) Non-jurors were orthodox churchmen who refused to swear the oaths required of them, when Parliament changed the reigning monarch in 1688. Second generation non-jurors, like Law, refused when the throne passed from the Stuarts to the Hanoverian succession after the death of Queen Anne.