fromhttp://sg.christianpost.com/dbase/education/697/section/1.htm
Monday, Mar. 2, 2009 Posted: 6:50:20PM HKT
An itinerant preacher believes that 'grace' and prosperity preachers have an impoverished understanding of the finished work of Jesus Christ.
"Within this school of thought, Christians are encouraged to surmise that Christian freedom 'in Christ,' is a 'freedom' to achieve, acquire, and gain without guilt," said Monte Lee Rice, in his November essay titled Lose That You May Find.
“Yet for all this talk of calling believers to a life of grace ‘in Christ,’ resting in the finished work of Christ’s atonement, reigning with Christ and receiving His riches, the proponents of this movement have ironically failed to grasp the greater fullness of Christ’s atonement! Its weakness lies so ironically, in its impoverished doctrine of Christ’s atonement.”
He went on to discuss how ‘grace’ preachers proclaim Christ’s atonement as primarily directed towards the forgiveness of sins, thus granting believers a positional righteousness, or in other words a forensic view of the atonement. He added however that such a view fails to take into account the other benefits of Christ’s atonement.
This includes setting believers free from the works of the devil, restoring them to God’s likeness, by granting them the ‘right script’ to live their lives – in which Christ recapped the human life journey as the perfect human being, paving the way for them to live as He lived, through each phase of His own human life – providing His life as a paradigm for their own human life, thus God’s intended ‘script’ for living their own lives, which results in their being conformed to the likeness of Jesus Christ, and granting them a moral and life example for them to follow Him.
Emerging as a direct counter-response to what its proponents perceive as the guilt-driven, legalistic ‘do’s and don’t’ form of Protestant evangelical spirituality, and as a result of Protestant Evangelicalism’s failure to preach the full gospel, the success-themed ‘grace’ movement is a captive of arrogant modernity, where the quest and journey towards human actualisation takes center-stage, and “envisions the biblical experience of redemption according to a story-line that is radically counter to the Bible’s archetypical plot of Jesus’ self-emptying journey.”
Even so, he noted that people because they are created in God’s image still have an inherent need for the experience of redemption and so “our every-day talk is filled with redemptive metaphors” like ‘every dark cloud has a silver lining’, ‘it’s always darkest before dawn’ and ‘no pain, no gain’, phrases which suggest that suffering in life can often lead to growth or fulfillment. He suggested that this is why people like to watch and be entertained by movies, read stories, or listen to motivation speakers in one way or another speak to their innate desire to experience redemption.
“So recognising the human need for some kind of development experience of redemption, and yet wanting to avoid appropriating the Gospel teaching of ‘self-denial’ into our ‘Christian education,’ what we end up with is construing Christian development according to varied paradigms of pop psychology,” wrote the preacher.
“[T]he result of trying to conceptualise Christian development primarily according to human developmental theory, without the sometimes painful message of ‘self-denial,’ leads to a non-Christian conception of spiritual growth. The result is that we envision spiritual maturity as having a healthy self image, and a ‘freed-up’ life-style, evidenced by a substantial income and a guilt-free comfort with being ‘in-sync’ with the latest cultural trends, fashions, and bench-marks of material success. The truth is that so much of the premised teachings about ‘God’s grace,’ in the newer success-themed churches, largely reflect premises derived from pop psychology about human self-esteem and self-actualisation… Consequently, Evangelicalism now possess little if any kind of ‘counter-culture’ critique, since it has become so ‘thoroughly enmeshed in consumer-capitalist ideology and confuses success with the eschaton’ (e.g., Christian life journey).”
Lee Rice also discussed the smugness of members of success-themed churches, who see themselves as people who have arrived and see no need to engage or reflect on the spiritualities existing within other Christian traditions, either in the present day or down through history. They “choose rather to base their entire conception of Christian faith exclusively upon the teachings of their movement’s leaders or local senior pastor” and “Bible texts often serve no higher purpose than to anchor messages based more deeply upon pop psychology or modern leadership and motivational theories and platitudes.
“There is as well, a mindset amongst so many believers, particularly amongst those highly influenced by the more success-themed teachings, that the things they possess are signs of God’s favour towards them. Coupled with this is their conviction that their consumerist life-style is in some way, their ‘Christian right.’ These believe that ‘in Christ,’ they are free to purchase the most non-essential or trivial items- at whatever the cost, without any whim of conscience. But let it be unreservedly said that their consumer-driven life-style is a blight to the counter-cultural witness of the Church, particularly during this time of economic crisis.”
At the end of his paper the preacher highlighted four broad ways in which ‘grace’ churches could find their call and centre within the greater body of Christ. Firstly, they must acknowledge both the dark and light sides of material wealth. Secondly, they will have to shift their mindset away from the world’s rags to riches idea of redemption and back towards the biblical paradigm plot of riches to rags foremost modeled for them in the life of the Lord Jesus Christ. Thirdly, they need to embrace the full gospel of God’s grace, which is only possible by embracing all the major purposes of Christ’s atonement. Finally, they have to embrace the fear of the Lord.
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