Wednesday, December 17, 2008

A Proposal for the Free Grace Camp

The recent post on the death of Zane Hodges brought a firestorm of replies in the comment thread. Honestly, I don't have the time to engage in lengthy debates on threads and I find it difficult to track all of the responses.

I do think it's important to lay out point by point the main issues when it comes to the Free Grace camp's position(s) on the nature of saving faith. I'm grateful for all of the feedback on the Hodges thread because I've learned how marked the differences are between men like Charles Ryrie and Zane Hodges (and his false prophet, Bob Wilkin). I'm glad to see that men like Lou Martenac recognize Hodges' gospel as a "Crossless" gospel. However, Lou, I think that the position that the majority of the Free Grace camp holds is simply the doctrine of Free Grace drawn to its logical conclusion. I'm sure you disagree with me, but I hope to prove this statement over the weeks ahead.

So, the proposal is this: over the next five or six weeks (at least), I am going to post a series of posts here which will address the teachings of the Free Grace camp point by point. This will give all of us one issue to respond to at a time. If y'all want to debate what I write (and I hope you do) go for it. All I ask is that if you choose to respond to the posts, please limit your discussion to the points discussed in the original post. For example, if it's about the true definition of repentance, please limit your responses to that issue. If you want to say something about the definition of faith, please wait until the post on faith comes up before going there. This will help keep things focused.

I hope you will join us for this important discussion. The Free Grace\Lordship debate was not resolved in the 1980's and I'm not foolish enough to think that this will resolve it now. But we're talking about the Gospel and in this day of doctrinal error the Gospel needs to be clarified, as evidenced by some of the responses to the Hodges post.