A Little Leaven
As an I.T. Pro when the PC Revolution was in its early stages, I was privileged to code complete custom-made applications. In this effort, I rarely got the coding the right the first time. Early automated debuggers would flag the line of code at which the system became aware of a logic error, not the actual line where the programming error occurred.
This allusion came to mind as I perused recent critiques of Andy Stanley declaring persons from the LGBTQ2S+ community as genuine Christians and members of his church. Such critics have discerned a bug in Stanley’s thinking. But the apparent bug, to which these critics are pointing, is not the source of the error. By judging by appearance,1 these critics cannot comprehend how Stanley can coherently and credibly uphold the scriptural and historical teachings on homosexuality and yet claim Justin Lee and Brian Nietzel, “two married gay men” as “Christ-followers today.”2
To such critics, it is both scripturally and rationally inconsistent. There is no argument from this quarter on the former aspect. But Stanley’s stance is entirely consistent with Free Grace Theology, which was likewise taught held by father, Charles Stanley, who died earlier this year. Andy Stanley’s stance on “gay Christians” is the logical corollary and outcrop of that underlying theology.
For under Free Grace Theology, one is saved solely by trusting upon the talisman of Christ’s lifeblood in the Atonement, at least according to the father of this doctrinal framework, Lewis Sperry Chafer (1871–1952), who founded the Dallas Seminary. (Nowadays, one may be saved by accepting Jesus into your heart, even having had a singular hookup experience with God.)
And once saved, always saved.
This heresy is rooted upon a subtle error in Chafer’s reasoning, one to which Protestant Evangelicalism itself has largely been guilty for the last century or two: namely, conflating justification, the formal juridical basis of our salvation in a God who claims that righteousness and justice are the foundation of His throne,3 with the actual ontological reality of salvation. These are not semantically or scripturally the same.
Under Chafer’s reasoning, adding any further conditions to this “justification/salvation” beyond faith in Christ’s finished work at the atonement, such as works, pursuit of virtue/sanctification, etc., undermines the juridical validity of this “justification/salvation.” All the other elements of the Christian walk and armor of God4 are to be deemed optional extras, which God may or may not, in His own good time, allow that “believer” to achieve. Thus, the following reasoning:
In May of last year, Stanley encouraged listeners to be in awe of the self-sacrifice of gay people whose prayers God did not answer and yet who still love God.5
The error of Chafer (and of Evangelicalism in general) is derived by misconstruing the most pivotal verse on Justification. (“He did this to demonstrate His [justice] at the present time, so as to be just and to justify the one who has faith in Jesus.”6 One is justified from out of trust upon Christ Jesus, which Chafer limited to the doctrine of the Atonement. But in the passage, there exists no scope limitations as to the nature of that trust, a true Christian must have. One must trust upon His person, truth assertions, ethical and prudential counsels, warnings, and promises, as well as practicably trust upon the amnesty scheme established by God through Christ through His atoning blood.
Christ and his atoning blood alone suffices to meet the claims of an exact and exacting divine and natural justice. However, all these “optional extras” are instrumentally necessary in order for a believer to endure to the end,7 faith intact: this being the Terms of Salvation.
For I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. From now on there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day8
For if Chafer was right, was Apostle Paul being disingenuous to his good and trustworthy friend, Timothy, when intimating that his salvation was ever in doubt after he had his hookup with Christ on the way to Damascus? After all, once saved, always saved.
In salvation, one’s faith may be fledgling, battered, and one’s acts ethically imperfect. For unlike the Terms of Justification, the Terms of Salvation does not require a faith which is perfect, only a faith which has experientially and demonstrably survived through the trials and tribulations of life.
Why do you call Me ‘Lord, Lord,’ but not do what I say? I will show you what he is like who comes to Me and hears My words and acts on them: He is like a man building a house, who dug down deep and laid his foundation on the rock. When the flood came, the torrent crashed against that house but could not shake it, because it was well built. But the one who hears My words and does not act on them is like a man who built his house on ground without a foundation. The torrent crashed against that house, and immediately it fell—and great was its destruction!”9
Trusting upon Christ in all the other aspects of His being serves as the instrumental and consequentialist means by which one’s faith will remain intact unto the end. For there exists a palpable psychological logic, discernible within a genuine Christian walk, in which distrusting God in Christ, even on the most trivial matters, spawns an insidious dynamic towards distrusting God in Christ on the most essential and necessary matters of the Christian Faith. “A little leaven works through the whole batch of dough.”10
The Atonement of Christ provides God with a just amnesty scheme which provides exiles the legal authority (exousian) to immigrate into Kingdom of God. Justification, the formal juridical basis of Salvation, accomplished through the Atonement of Christ, is appropriated from out of the conduit of faith. But while Justification provides a potential convert with the legal authority to immigrate into the Kingdom, that convert must still endeavour to come to that Kingdom. Mere affirmation of this Salvation hardly brings the immigrant to Ellis Island, so to speak.
The exile must begin an arduous and perilous journey to that Promised Land, just as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim set his course on the narrow and winding path to the Celestial City. Herein, Justification by Faith serves as the Wicket-gate. It becomes the badge of legal authority which grants rightful entry into the Kingdom.
CHRISTIAN: Then why did you not enter at the Wicket-gate which is located at the beginning of this way? Don’t you know that it has been written, “He who does not enter in by the door, but climbs up some other way, that same person is a thief and a robber?”11
But if one lacks a committed faith in Christ in the whole of His being, in His assertions, counsels, and promises, one is liable to turn back (apostasy), go off course (heresy), fall into one of the many traps (persistent sin), or become distracted along the way (re: Bunyan’s Vanity Fair). One shall never reach the gates of that Celestial City and may even lose the badge of legal authority on the way. Ultimately, people fall away because there exists some critical and uncorrected deficiency in their faith.
This is not “works righteousness” nor “Lord Salvation.” One is neither justified because of any works, even act of believing. Justification requires resting upon the finished work of Christ alone. Salvation, however, is instrumentally accomplished indirectly through one’s works and their natural cause-and-effect ontological consequences, this in order for one’s faith to endure unto the end, including keeping practical faith in Christ’s atonement for one’s Justification.
It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is intolerable even among pagans: A man has his father’s wife. And you are proud! Shouldn’t you rather have been stricken with grief and have removed from your fellowship the man who did this?12
At what ethical demarcation point, if any, would Stanley stop declaring that, while an individual is engaging in lawlessness, that person yet remains a Christian because he or she “loves God?” (But what God does that person love and trust, the one of his/her own fetish imaginations or the one who has revealed Himself?) Does a person need to be a member of the Einsatzgruppen before Stanley says enough is enough? If so, has Stanley not arrogantly set aside scriptural wisdom for his own. (His critics are no less guilty of the same, ostracizing people and organizations who, while advocating unbiblical practices, those practices do not fall under the explicit categories which Scriptures mentions. Such go beyond what is written.)
But this is the problem I have in all this. Charles Stanley and others have been teaching this dangerous doctrine for decades. Yet the self-anointed Guardians of the Evangelical Orthodoxy were not calling Charles out with regard to this heresy. But because the application of this heresy regards a current hot button issue among conservative Evangelicals, it is now a thing.
This issue of the Free Grace Heresy has been dealt with at length in January 2023 in Why I Am No Longer an Evangelical (Part 5a, 5b, 5c, 5d), but a Beyond Evangelical.
John 7:24
Sam Allberry, “Andy Stanley’s ‘Unconditional’ Contradiction,” Christianity Today, October 4, 2023, https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2023/october-web-only/andy-stanley-unconditional-conference-theology-lgbt.html.
Psalm 97:2. Cf. Psalm 89:14; Isaiah 9:7.
Ephesians 6:10
Denny Burk, “Andy Stanley’s Version of Christianity, CBMW.org, October 1, 2023, https://cbmw.org/2023/10/01/andy-stanleys-version-christianity.
Romans 3:26 (emphasis added)
Matthew 24:13
2 Timothy 4:6–8 (emphasis added)
Luke 6:46–49
Galatians 5:9. Cf. Hebrews 12:15.
John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, 1678; [REPRINT] Buffalo, NY: Geo. H. Derby, 1853, Chapter 11.
1 Corinthians 5:1–2