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A RECIPE FOR A DOCTRINE
OF ABSOLUTE CHURCH AUTHORITY |
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Bring Justification and Reconciliation to a boil in a base of Western legalism, add condemnation to taste, then mix in equal parts of Judgment and Salvation. Simmer for at least a millennia. To disguise the taste, serve in bowls labeled "getting saved" and "being born again" to God's people, who are hungry for the truth of the Scriptures. Caution everyone you can that whoever does not eat the concoction will burn forever in Hell.
A confusing recipe? It is – and the confusion
is evident within Christianity. The
sometimes extreme legalistic and Gnostic yoke under which much of
Christianity operates today is evident in its teaching on sin, repentance
and judgment. In an attempt to illustrate this unfortunate reality,
let us compare an example of evangelism-related literature, and the
presuppositions behind it, with the Scriptures. Christian Equippers
International (CEI) publishes an evangelism tract that guides individuals
in determining their eternal destiny (Heaven or Hell) with two short
questions. Perhaps you have seen the tract before? As a young believer, I
used it for a witnessing tool on the campus of the In
summary, the tract maintains God’s perfection and man’s
sinfulness and then
states that “God determined the just punishment for SIN is
death (eternal separation from His presence)” (…heaven9.html, emphasis
theirs) and offers Isaiah 59:2 and Ezekiel 18:4 as proofs. The tract
concludes that “God will only give eternal life to those who…Have FAITH (completely trust) in Jesus Christ” (heaven11.html,
emphasis theirs). To paraphrase, CEI maintains that if a persons sins, even
once, God must, in the name of the legal requirements of the law, sentence
that person to an eternity of suffering in Hell unless at some point before
physical death that person becomes a Christian, that is, cognitively places
faith in Jesus as the means of salvation. One does not need to read the Bible
any further than the rest of Ezekiel 18 to understand that the concept of sin
as presented by CEI and the concept of sin as revealed through the
prophet are substantially at odds with one another. For CEI and those
who embrace the Doctrine of Absolute Church Authority, sin is viewed
as a static event that, even when (for the sake of argument) committed only
once and followed by repentance, places the transgressor forever in a legal
position of deserving to be punished by eternal separation from God. The Doctrine
maintains that the only way to satisfy the legal requirement is to pay the
penalty oneself or, by becoming a Christian, claim Jesus and His death as a
legal substitute. It is important to note that this view obligates God
to act a certain way: that is, to judge all non-Christians as unacceptable
and all Christians acceptable. Judgment has been taken out of the hands of
the Judge and now rests fully in the Doctrine of Absolute Church Authority.
This line of thought also places Mercy in a role subservient to Judgment
despite the clear record of the Scriptures summarized by James that “mercy
triumphs over judgment” (James 2:13). The
presuppositions behind CEIs tract are
clearly unbiblical. Placing Ezekiel’s declaration of the word of the Lord
that “the soul who sins will
die” (Ezekiel 18:4b, NASB) in the context of the chapter, we understand
that God does not view sin as something that places an individual in a
particular legal status and it certainly does not obligate Him; rather, it is
a condition of the heart in rebellion to Him. God’s answer for sin appears later in the
chapter:
Some will argue (unscripturally
– see Deuteronomy 30:11) that no one can “observe all My statutes”
but it is clear that the passage assumes this outcome as very much a
possibility. Furthermore,
God is not demanding a perfect record in terms of legalistic observance of
the law, that is why we see a preponderance of grace
throughout the Scriptures. He is concerned that our hearts be humbly
turned toward Him. God’s answer for the person who has turned away from Him is,
simply, repentance or turning back to Him. This latter view of sin and
repentance is consistent with the record of the Bible in which the God of
Israel continuously calls His people, So
where did the former, static and legalistic view of sin, encapsulated in the “Are
You Going to Heaven” tract originate? In his book, Understanding the Atonement
for the Mission of the Church, John Driver discusses what he labels the “preoccupation
with guilt” in Western Christianity. He writes, “To understand the law as basically a
system of just retribution and sin as primarily guilt which deserves punishment is to read the New
Testament from the post-biblical perspective of Roman law and a Western sense
of guilt” (p 33). He maintains that the legalistic concepts of law at work in much of Christian
thought and so evident in the CEI literature are an
In other words, Christianity paid the price for
separating itself from In
the next Tzemach Letter, we will look at the concepts of Justification
and Reconciliation as presented in the Scriptures and compare them to
the Doctrine of Absolute Church Authority that so many of my Christian
brothers and sisters continue to force feed to themselves and to a world
hungry for the love of the God of Israel.
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