Cheap Grace

At Coram Deo we say that the gospel changes everything. That's not revolutionary; it's just the Bible. But you wouldn't know it from the face of the evangelical church in America.

Today I happened to pick up a back-issue (April 2005) of the magazine Christianity Today. In it was an interview with Ron Sider (photo) in which he says that the evangelical movement is "riddled with hypocrisy." Sider is a longtime social-justice activist whose book Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (1977) should be read thoughtfully by all of us. His comments in CT nail the core of the problem in American Christianity. And his solution is a return to the biblical gospel. Here is an excerpt:

We need to rethink our theology. We need to ask, "Are we really biblical?" Cheap grace is right at the core of the problem. Cheap grace results when we reduce the gospel to forgiveness of sins only; when we limit salvation to personal fire insurance against hell; when we misunderstand persons as primarily souls; when we at best grasp only half of what the Bible says about sin; when we embrace the individualism and materialism and relativism of our current culture. We also lack a biblical understanding and practice of the church.

I would think that evangelicals would want to get biblical and define the gospel the way Jesus did - which is that it's the good news of the kingdom. Then we see that it means that the way to get into this kingdom is through unconditional grace because Jesus died for us. But it also means there's now a new kingdom community of Jesus' disciples, and that embracing Jesus means not just getting fire insurance so that one doesn't go to hell, but it means embracing Jesus as Lord as well as Savior. And it means beginning to live as a part of his new community where everything is being transformed.