We're at the halfway point already. Can you believe that? So we're starting, as it were, the second half, not only of today, but the second half of the conference as we start session five. By now, you might gather that I like picking quizzical titles for each of these sessions. And this one is another two-parter. We're calling this the Neo-Pelagian Captivity of the Church. This first part is going to talk about the historical roots. In other words, where does it come from? Where does this idea of Pelagianism, if it's not familiar to you at the moment, it will be shortly. So I'll ask you to hold on as we begin to unpack this. The question we want to address in this section is, what is Pelagianism and where did it start? Now, I'll start by saying that there's a couple of goals that we want over the course of this next session or two. One is to provide an historical context for Pelagianism and also to define the terminology that we use, including the term Pelagian. So think of this as a bit of a flyover and we'll take a bit of a closer look as we go along at the Jerusalem Council. Now the terms Arminian and Pelagian I tend to use interchangeably, so don't be surprised when I do that, but I'll try to stick with the terminology of the session here. So we're interested in answering the question, where did Pelagianism start? How long has it persisted? We could ask the question, why are we referring to Pelagianism as a heresy? And the reason is because it strikes at the heart of the gospel of salvation by grace alone. And that is the very, very strong message that Paul has in his letter to the Galatians. Now part of the inspiration for me in titling the session as I did is from an article by R.C. Sproul that he wrote back in 2001 for Modern Reformation Magazine, which he titled, The Pelagian Captivity of the Church. So just to make it sound like I didn't completely rip him off, I put Neo in front of it. Neopelagia. The allusion here is to Luther's book called the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and that was particularly regarding the sacraments and his understanding of the sacraments, and that book is considered to be the irrevocable breakpoint of Luther from the Roman Church. Now Sproul, in his article, speculates that if Luther lived today and were to pick up his pen to write, The book he would write in our time would be entitled, The Pelagian Captivity of the Evangelical Church. So we're going to pick up on that theme in this session. Sproul says, I would be willing to assume that in at least 30% of the people who are reading this issue, which is referring to modern Reformation in 2001, and probably more, if we really examine their thinking in depth, we would find hearts that are beating Pelagianism. We are overwhelmed with it. We're surrounded by it. We're immersed in it. We hear it every day. We hear it every day in the secular culture. And not only do we hear it every day in the secular culture, we hear it every day on Christian television and on Christian radio. We're immersed in it. We're surrounded by it. This was true 22 years ago. My point would be it's only more true today than it was a generation ago when Sproul wrote those words. Now another quote that I'll give you is from the historian Earl Cairns who published his history of Christianity back in 1954. So this puts us right in the middle of the 20th century and here's how he said it in his time that modernism in our day is only a resurgence of the Pelagian idea that man can achieve salvation by cooperation with the divine will through his own efforts. Nothing has changed over the years. If anything, it's only gotten worse. Now to establish the categories here, I want to impress upon you the impossibility of the Arminian or the Pelagian view by the contrast between the two covenants. And if you have your notes there, you can take a look at the quotations from Westminster chapter 7, paragraphs 2 and 3. Let's take a look at those to help set the stage for a discussion. There are two covenants, okay? 7.2, the first covenant made with man was a covenant of works wherein life was promised to Adam and in him to his posterity upon condition of perfect and personal obedience. 7.3, man by his fall, having made himself incapable of life by that covenant of works, the Lord was pleased to make a second, commonly called the covenant of grace, wherein he freely offered unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ, requiring of them faith in him that they may be saved, and promising to give unto all those that are ordained unto life his Holy Spirit, to make them willing and able to believe. That's the contrast. So I want you to have this in mind, that there are two covenants and only two. You are either under the covenant of works or you are under the covenant of grace. And the problem with any form of, well, Pelagianism tries to put us back under the covenant of works, but Arminianism in particular tries to put us in the middle space between those two. As if, yeah, we've got grace over here, but we're just going to add a little bit of works of our own to that grace in order to have salvation. And I want to impress upon you that there is an absolute dichotomy between those two covenants. It is all of one or it's all of the other. And again, you're going to protest that it's not fair that we can't try to save ourselves. And the point is, Adam had the chance to do that and he didn't. So that covenant of works was a legitimate covenant in terms of the potential for salvation at that time, but by Adam's disobedience, we have now removed ourselves from that covenant of works as a path to salvation. So we've been trying for a long time to stake out some middle ground where there isn't any. There is no such thing as Arminianism or semi-Pelagianism. My argument is if you call yourself an Arminian, it's because you don't want to admit that you're just a Pelagian, or you don't want to admit that you're actually a Calvinist. You don't want to admit either one of those, but you have to be one or the other. There's no middle ground. Man is either going to be saved by works or by grace. If salvation is due as a wage, then grace is not a gift. But if salvation is a gift, it is not owed as wages to the one who receives it. It's either a gift or it's a wage. It's one of the two. Again, the Bible speaks in terms of total dichotomies. And the problem is in our fallenness, what do we try to do? We want to mix things together a little bit. If salvation is a matter of works, then we also notice man has a little bit to boast about. Maybe not much. We're humble about that. But we'll boast just a little bit. On the other hand, if salvation is a gift, then I hate to tell you this, but man doesn't deserve any credit at all for it. Now, where did this start? It's funny because every time I ask this kind of question, I come upon a question and I say, where did this start or where did this verse show up? And the answer is almost always it shows up in the book of Genesis. And here we are again. Look at that verse again that Kirk read to us just a moment ago. What's my point of italicizing the last part of that? What was the reaction that Adam and Eve having discovered, as it were, their guilt and their sin, what do they set about trying to do? Salvation by works. Let's make fig leaves and cover ourselves. Let's hide in the bushes. It is man's effort to try to cover his moral guilt by his own works. And how well did that go, by the way? Not very well. Right? What did God have to do? Yes, as I like to put it, there was death in the garden that day. It wasn't Adam and Eve who died in the garden, but there was a substitute that was killed in the garden. Blood was shed in the garden that day in order to do what? To cover the guilt of the man and the woman. We have the picture of what we call substitutionary atonement from Genesis chapter 3. We also have what's called the proto-gospel in Genesis chapter 3. The promise that the seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent. So from the very early chapters, we not only have man and his dignity as a created being, but his fall, and then God's response to that, which is to intervene in order to save people from their sin. So we'll start with that point of reference that Adam and Eve were the first Pelagians, even though they didn't call it that. The terminology came much later. But this is the contrast that we see from the beginning. fallen man trying to save himself by some form of works righteousness, and God having to do everything in order to save man. It's one or the other, and there's no middle ground. So we see that starting with the Garden of Eden. I will take another example from the book of Genesis just to emphasize the point and also because it's part of the basis for the Apostle Paul's argument when we get to the book of Romans. And that is the contrast between salvation by faith and the sign of circumcision. So I'll read a selection, a few selections here, starting in Genesis 15, the first six verses. where it says, after these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision. Fear not, Abram. I am your shield. Your reward shall be very great. But Abram said, O Lord God, what will you give me? For I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus. And Abram said, behold, you have given me no offspring, and a member of my household will be my heir. And behold, the word of the Lord came to him, this man shall not be your heir, your very own son shall be your heir. And he brought him outside and said, look toward heaven and number the stars if you are able to number them. Then he said to him, so shall your offspring be. And he believed the Lord and he counted it to him as righteousness. That is what we call the doctrine of justification by faith. Abraham was justified by his faith. Notice the order of things. There's a promise from God. There is a response to that promise, which is placing trust in it. Afterward, Abraham offers worship. And then the sign of the covenant is going to come much later. 13 years later. It's also interesting that God is going to rename Abraham and then give him the sign. So we pick up the narrative in Genesis 17 and verse 9. And God said to Abraham, as for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your offspring after you throughout their generations. This is my covenant which you shall keep between me and you and your offspring after you. Every male among you shall be circumcised. You shall be circumcised in the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you." Now Paul picks up on this in the fourth chapter of Romans, and it's one of the ways that the New Testament is making a very clear distinction between faith and works. So let me read the first 12 verses of Romans chapter 4. What then shall we say was gained by Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh? By descent that is. For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. For what does the scripture say? Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness. Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift, but as his due. And to the one who does not work, but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness. Just as David also speaks of the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works. Quote, blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven and whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin. Is this blessing then only for the circumcised or also for the uncircumcised? For we say that faith was counted to Abraham's righteousness. How then was it counted to him? Was it before or after he had been circumcised? It was not after, but before he was circumcised. He received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised. The purpose was to make him the father of all who believe without being circumcised so that righteousness would be counted to them as well and to make him the father of the circumcised who are not merely circumcised but who also walk in the footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham had before he was circumcised. So there's a clear separation between the faith that justifies Abraham, that allows God to credit him or count him as righteous, and the sign that comes much later. And Paul makes a very clear point about that. We don't want to confuse the justification by faith with the sign that may accompany or help to point to that justification. Now let's think about the ministry of Jesus for a moment. What does Jesus find regarding the scribes and the Pharisees during the time of His ministry? They were lost in the salvation of works. What are some things that He says? That they do their works to be seen by men. And He also adds that they have received their reward in full. What does that mean? They might as well enjoy the praise of men now because what's going to happen afterward? There's only judgment that follows. There's not going to be any reward in the next life for that kind of hypocrisy. They claim to be children of Abraham, but he calls them children of the devil. They claim to be free, but Jesus says that they are in bondage, that they are blind guides who lead men astray. He also says that they make the word of God of no effect with their traditions. So traditions and works, those kinds of things, are displacing the true gospel. Now, I point that out because we're going to see that this legalistic distortion is going to spill over into the early church. So now let's consider for a few minutes the Jerusalem Council and the book of Galatians, as well as some of the epistles. Now, the Jerusalem Council took place, we think, in the late 40s. And then if you look at when the epistles were written, Galatians was written about the same time. The letters to the Corinthians were written in the mid-50s. The Book of Romans was written in the mid-50s, and Philippians was probably written around the early 60s. So you have a span of 10 or 12 years from the late 40s to the early 60s where those epistles are being written and where also the Jerusalem Council takes place. Now what was the Council about? There was a false understanding of Judaism that was beginning to invade the early church. Now is this a case of a mistake, just mistakenly believing that Gentiles have to convert to Judaism before they can become Christians? Or is there something more to it than that? It seems to be that there's more than that. Because if you base your answer to that question simply on the tone of Galatians, it's apparent that Paul saw this not as a misunderstanding of a process of integrating Gentiles into the church, but it really was a matter of salvation or condemnation. And that if you were pursuing a kind of righteousness by works, you were still under the law. And Paul says, yeah, you can be justified by the law. All you have to do is keep it perfectly. But nobody does that. man is not able to keep the law after the fall. On the other hand, if it's not by the law, then it has to be by grace, and again, those two have to be kept separate. I'll share a little bit of what others have had to say about this. The Jerusalem Council, G. Campbell Morgan said that it was an important decision, one that affects the whole history of the church from that moment to this. In other words, the church was really standing at a potential dividing point. So it was important to have that issue resolved carefully. He also says, it's the first lesson. The first lesson is that the Christian man and the Christian church is free from the bondage of Hebraism. Nothing is necessary to salvation other than faith in Christ and consequent life in the spirit neither baptism Nor the Lord's Supper nor the observance of any ordinance or ceremony Let us decide as did this council That we will trouble men no further that we will no more insist upon this right or that ceremony in order to gain salvation He also points out that the Hebrew people in the process of the ages had entirely missed the meaning of the rite of circumcision for which they were now prepared to fight. So they were fighting over something that pertained to the old covenant. And it never pertained to salvation per se. A couple more thoughts here. This from James Montgomery Boyce. He says, the hardest of all ideas for human beings to grasp is this doctrine of salvation by grace alone. This is because we all always want to add something to it. If a person is trying to add anything to the work of Christ for salvation, that person is not saved and is operating under a fatal misunderstanding. Paul is speaking to the Galatians. regarded that the view of the circumcision party was a heresy. And indeed it is. And he considered those who were advancing it to be subverters of the church and God's enemies. He pronounces an anathema upon them. And Boyce also makes the point that if the Judaizers were correct, then that meant that Paul and Barnabas were false teachers. They weren't teaching the proper doctrine. Boyce says, if it was necessary for the Gentiles to keep the law of Moses to be saved, then faith is not enough. In other words, we must reject the Reformation. We cannot affirm sola fide, justification by faith alone, then Gentiles throughout the world are not saved. This really is a critical issue at a critical moment in the history of the church. So it's not just a rejection of the Reformation, but of the whole understanding of grace from the Garden of Eden onward. Grace has always been by faith in the promise of God. So we have that picture of the early church. Now we'll fast forward a few hundred years to where we get the terminology, the disagreement between Augustine and Pelagius. which took place in the early 400s. Pelagius says this, God has not willed to command anything impossible, for He is righteous, and He will not condemn a man for what he could not help, for he is holy. Pelagius thought he had some airtight logic in regard of opposing the idea, as Augustine expressed it, that he asked God to command whatever he wanted, but also to grant what he had commanded. not just that God had expressed His law, but God had enabled the one He's given the law to, to obey the law. Pelagius argued against that and said, no, God's not going to command something that man can't do. Well, where's the problem? Was Adam able to keep the original command? And the answer is yes. Did he? No. And since he didn't, are we now able to keep the law? Because having fallen in Adam, we have become disabled in regard of the law. So Pelagius had a deficient, a defective understanding of the fall. And that's why we spent so much time before lunch considering just how bad the fall is. I want to refer back momentarily. Let's take a look at the confessional excerpts from chapter 19 on the front of your notes. 19.1 says, God gave to Adam a law as a covenant of works, which he bound him and all his posterity to personal, entire, exact, and perpetual obedience. promised life upon the fulfilling, and threatened death upon the breach of it, and endued him with power and ability to keep it. Adam was created perfect, and God gave him a law that he could keep. 19.2, this law, after his fall, continued to be a perfect rule of righteousness, and as such was delivered by God upon Mount Sinai in Ten Commandments and written in two tables. The first four commandments containing our duty towards God and the other six, our duty towards man. And 19.6, that first part that I've included here, although true believers be not under the law as a covenant of works to be therefore justified or condemned, the law is a guide to the Christian life, but it's no longer a question of how we are saved. We are saved by grace, and then our response is obedience to the law. So the law doesn't disappear when grace comes, but our relationship to the law changes drastically. Now, Pelagianism, the idea that man was not affected by the fall, that every man since Adam has the same capacity that Adam does to either keep the law or disobey it, that was condemned as a heresy early in church history and repeatedly. Now, that wasn't the end of the story because something came along a short time afterward called semi-Pelagianism. And again, it's that idea, we've got the covenant of grace over here, we've got the covenant of works over here. Well, where's the middle ground? And so we're trying to find some middle ground between the two with semi-Pelagianism. R.C. Sproul expresses it like this, while we are so fallen that we can't be saved without grace, we are not so fallen that we don't have the ability to accept or reject the grace when it's offered to us. The will is weakened, but it's not enslaved. There remains in the core of our being an island of righteousness that remains untouched by the fall. It's out of that little island of righteousness, that little parcel of goodness that is still intact in the soul or in the will, that is the determinative difference between heaven and hell. That's the Arminian or the semi-Pelagian view, that there's some little bit of righteousness somewhere and there's just enough of the human will left that when grace is offered, we can receive it. I'm reminded of a Sunday school class we had in this church about 20 years or so ago. There was a young mom sitting in that class who had her youngest child in her lap at the time, her third, and we were talking about Pelagianism and Pelagius, and she made the quintessential remark. She said, Pelagius must not have had children. She had an understanding, a better understanding of human depravity than Pelagius did. Now we're going to fast forward 1,000 years or so to the early 1500s. And we have a scholar named Erasmus who publishes a tract on the freedom of the will. And we have a monk named Luther who writes a book in response called The Bondage of the Will. Luther considered the bondage of the will to be one of the best two things he had ever written. Stephen Nichols has this to say, that Luther made a very important theological point in his treatise, Scripture Teaches the Bondage of the Will. He also made a very important methodological point in this treatise that Christians assert. In fact, we delight in making assertions. Now, Luther could be a little cheeky. He had this to say in his book, speaking to Erasmus, he says, I owe you a small thanks, for you have made me far more sure of my own position by letting me see the case for free choice put forward with all the energy of so distinguished and powerful a mind, but with no other effect than to make things worse than before. In other words, Erasmus wasn't making much of an argument for man's free will. This was the controversy at the time of the Reformation. Again, it's one that continues to come up again and again. And a little later, about 100 years later, a little less than 100 years later, we now have a conflict, ironically, between two men who are dead by this time, Calvin and Arminius. And this is where we get the terms, as you can gather, Pelagianism on the one hand and Arminianism on the other. Pelagianism comes from Pelagius, the conflict between Augustine and Pelagius, and Arminianism comes from the conflict between the followers of Calvin and the followers of Arminius. So we're now in the early 17th century, and those supporters of Arminius bring what's called a remonstrance and are calling for a Senate to have their views considered. The Senate took place a few years later. It's called the Senate of Dort in 1618 and 1619. From that, we get what are called the Canons of Dort. And those five Canons of Dort have become what we call the five points of Calvinism, even though they didn't come from Calvin himself. The Canons of Dort liken the Arminian view to Pelagianism. So if you've read the Canons of Dort, you'll notice that the idea of Pelagianism shows up at least a half a dozen times. Yeah, Kirk reminds us that the Canons of Dort are in the back of the Trinity Psalter hymnal, if you're interested in taking a look at that. It's online as well. So those who are responding to the Arminian remonstrance understand that what the Arminians are really saying is Pelagian in nature. The idea, again, being that there's not really a middle ground between the covenant of grace and the covenant of works. We don't get to add something to it. So the canons of Dort liken the Arminian view to Pelagianism. make reference to them several times, pointing out that, quote, the ancient church has long ago condemned this doctrine of the Pelagians. And that's referring to the idea that grace does not precede the working of the will. The will of God works after the will of man. The historian Karen says, Arminianism had considerable influence upon one wing of the Anglican Church in the 17th century, the Methodist movement of the 18th century, and the Salvation Army. And I think we can safely say that the effects of Arminianism run throughout the church today. We have some others that we could think in terms of. Charles Finney is considered to be we could say a towering figure in American evangelicalism, but for the wrong reasons. Finney was explicitly Pelagian in his theology. He denied the fall. Sproul says he is the patron saint of 20th century evangelicalism. And he is not semi-Pelagian, he is unvarnished in his Pelagianism. Much of what happens in the church today is downstream of Finney and the revivalist movement. The idea that if we can create the right environment and the right message, then we can get more people to make a decision for Christ. Now if we go back just a hundred years ago, we could talk a little about the the disagreement or the conflict between Machin and Fosdick in the 20s, the conflict between what's called fundamentalism and modernism. In 1922, Fosdick preached a sermon called, Shall the Fundamentalists Win? Pretty sure his goal was to say no. In 1923, Machin published Christianity and Liberalism. where he expressed that this thing that is called liberalism that is becoming so influential in the church in the early 20th century is not a variation of Christianity, but it is a different religion. And now we can bring that down to the present day. Where do things stand today? This is about as contemporary as you can get in terms of modern conflicts because if you've been watching the evangelical news over the last couple weeks, you'll know what this is about. It's Andy Stanley versus Al Mohler. So, just this month, Andy Stanley held what has been called the Unconditional Conference at North Point Church. And it was ostensibly designed to minister particularly to parents of those or parents who have children who are either gay or some other kind of aberration, gay or trans. It was kind of a backhanded way again to bring some woke theology into the church. It may start out subtle, but it always ends up becoming more explicit as time goes by. Now in World Magazine, Al Mohler said that Andy Stanley has departed from biblical Christianity. And here's where I'm going to quote a little bit from Andy Stanley. He says, I want to go on record and say I have never subscribed to Moeller's version of biblical Christianity to begin with, so I'm not leaving anything. And if he were here, he would say, well, Andy, I've never subscribed to your version of biblical Christianity. And that's OK. We can agree to disagree, but this is so extraordinarily misleading. In my opinion, just my opinion, his version of biblical Christianity is the problem. His version, this version of biblical Christianity, is why people are leaving Christianity unnecessarily. Stanley goes on to say, you shouldn't be criticizing us, you should come and learn from us. and referring to a couple of gay men who were speakers at his conference, they asked God to change them and God did not answer their prayer. And now they feel confident with their small group leader in church. We are restoring relationships and we are literally saving lives. Now the author of the World Magazine article points out that Andy Stanley is no stranger to controversy related to his views on the Bible and sexuality. In 2018, Stanley suggested in a sermon that the Christian faith must be unhitched from the Old Testament. And at a pastor's conference last year, Stanley dismissed the Bible's so-called clobber passages, verses that speak directly against homosexuality. This is part of what we're dealing with in the modern church. And it's a bottomless pit. There's no stopping point. Here's some more that Stanley had to say about Scripture. Christians are not expected to believe what we believe based on a collection of ancient manuscripts written by men who never met each other over the course of hundreds of years at a time when everybody was superstitious and everybody believed in the gods and there was no modern science. The foundation of our faith is far more substantial than that. It's far more sustainable than that. The Christian faith does not rise and fall based on the accuracy or the inerrancy of 66 ancient documents we call books of the Bible. Yes, that should be a reaction. Now there's an outright repudiation of scripture. We could probably do a conference just unpacking that one quote and all of the fallacies in that quote. Now obviously if the Bible is just ancient superstition written by men who never met each other over hundreds of years, then why would we assign any meaning to it or why would we place any authority in it? John Stone Street, who works for Breakpoint, has this to say that This is Andy Stanley's primary and most problematic contention, that pastoral ministry can be and really must be unhitched from theology. With this presumption, Stanley has continued to insist that North Point Community Church remains committed to biblical teaching about sex as only for marriage and about marriage as only for a man and a woman. In other words, he's trying to have it both ways. And it sounds a lot like what happened in the PCA just a few years ago with the so-called Revoice Conference, where we had the pastor in St. Louis who was saying, we have to adjust our approach to ministry so that we can reach this community. It all may sound very good at the outset, but it ends up going down a very dark path. Now again, if you're keeping up with news in the broad Christian world, and I mean really, really broad, to include the Roman Catholic Church, then this may resonate for you. Carl Truman just wrote this a few days ago. He says, both Andy Stanley and the Pope appear to share, what, sorry, Both Andy Stanley and the Pope appear to share a commitment to the therapeutic anthropology that pervades modern Western society. And the implicit assumption that any significant challenge to this from a traditional Christian perspective is unloving or bigoted. Affirming people in their sexual and gender identities seems to be the order of the day. And with the Pope and Andy Stanley, pastoral strategy must therefore be developed in isolation from, and arguably in opposition to, traditional Christian teaching. So we're increasingly abandoning the Scripture both in terms of accommodating sin and in terms of attempting to address the consequences of that sin. There's an expression that captures this idea. We could call it Oprah theology. Pattern with skeptics and unbelievers that we don't even notice the irony of man dismissing the Word of God with a wave of the hand. We see that the Bible is only useful insofar as it reinforces our feelings. So theology then comes down to feelings. As I've mentioned a couple times, the modern theology is what I want. So we've come full circle. What Machen said a hundred years ago that liberalism is a different religion is being articulated very clearly here by Andy Stanley. We are using Christian labels to describe two distinct, mutually exclusive religions. And we need to stand up and say it clearly that this is a lie. This is not Christianity. And what it is, is a case of moral appropriation and supportive deception. This is the Satan, as it were, trying to borrow God's moral capital in order to reinforce a lie. We need to make the point that God's electing love is unconditional. I'm a little annoyed that he used the word unconditional for his conference because we use that to describe election. Election is indeed unconditional, but election is not affirmative. It does not baptize our sins. it is designed to release us from the power, both the power and the penalty of that sin, to live lives of righteousness in Christ. So, we'll conclude here, and in the next session, number six, we will talk more about the bitter fruits of Pelagianism as it shows up in the church today. Session six, to conclude our afternoon. And this is part two of the Neo-Pelagian Captivity of the Church, which I have subtitled Bitter Fruits. Now just to recap, what do we mean by Pelagianism? It is the idea that has been around since the Garden of Eden. that man's will has not been wrecked by the fall, that man can still choose today just as he did when Adam had that first choice placed in front of him, either to obey or disobey. And we've seen through these last two sessions particularly that the Bible doesn't give us a very good reason to believe that. So let's think in terms of what this Pelagianism or Neo-Pelagianism has done to the church. There are two big elephants in the room. We may sound like we're exaggerating the severity of the problem, but I don't think so. The first, I would say, are false conversions. False conversions both in the pews and unfortunately, in the pulpits as well, that the church is full of people on the basis of Pelagian theology who have some kind of conversion experience but are not truly converted. And then another big one is what it's done to worship, the degradation of worship. And if it's the case that our churches are full of unconverted people, And I hate to point this out, but that means our churches have become centers of idolatry. We're not worshiping in spirit. And in truth, we are not worshiping rightly. Instead, what we end up doing is putting man at the center of worship. And that's one of the trends that we see over and over again, if you've been around visiting some different kinds of churches, you've probably seen this more than once, that worship is becoming more and more not about what God requires, but about what man wants. How can we appeal to man? The first of these problems, false conversion is a matter of deception. The second is a case of idolatry. And if those are correct, then the churches are indeed in very serious shape. And depending on how severe this is, it could mean that most of the churches are in fact not churches at all, in spite of outward appearances. we have to acknowledge that there is a form of theology that exceeds the bounds of what it means to be the true church. Our confession points to this and if we have time we'll look at some of these passages. You'll notice that we have like two pages of confessional excerpts for this section. The Bible and the Confession both give us very sober warnings about the degradation of the church. And when the church has devolved to a point, it becomes a synagogue of Satan. It sounds like hyperbole, but it isn't. The good news is that where we find those kinds of warnings, both in the Confession and in the Bible, there is nevertheless an opportunity to forsake that error. There is opportunity to repent and to be restored and to return to the truth. And both individually and collectively, we are being called to do that. Now in this section, we're going to talk about the tension in the law. It's been said that you're not preaching the gospel, or the true gospel, if you're not being accused of something called antinomianism. Now, what do we mean by antinomianism? It means a disregard of the law. If you understand grace, that you're not saved by works, then you might naturally think, well, I don't have to worry about the law. But that's not correct. The concern for those who are preaching free grace is that we might sound like we're preaching a kind of looseness. In other words, how are we going to maintain a moral standard if we're going to disconnect salvation and works? The good news is the Bible does not leave us without an answer. So let's see if we can think our way through this, that this tension in the law can be resolved. First of all, we are not saved by works. But works become the evidence of salvation and works are subject to examination. And they're subject to examination by ourselves individually and by others. Now there's also something called sanctification. And sanctification, after conversion, is designed to bring us into greater obedience to the law. Just checking to make sure it's not our building that's on fire. Antinomianism, a disregard of the law, could be evidence of a false conversion. Some years ago, probably 20 or 30 years ago, the expression carnal Christian was somewhat popular. The idea that I'm a Christian, I'm just not sanctified. And the Bible doesn't give us good reason to think there is such a thing. On the other end of the spectrum, and this is where we're struggling, antinomianism or a disregard of the law on the one hand, and then legalism on the other hand, which is going beyond what scripture says and adding things to it. And so we live in that tension. We don't want to be antinomian, and we certainly don't want to be legalistic either. Now, salvation is not by grace alone. Then we're going to start to confuse our terminology. We have terms like justification and sanctification and perseverance that we're going to get those things confused if we think that justification is by some combination of grace and works. In other words, if I try to argue that salvation is a matter of my own personal choice, I went to such and such a church on such and such a date and there was an altar call and I went up and I got saved. If that was my doing, then what does that imply for the Christian life that is supposed to begin at that point and follow afterward? Do I continue in my Christian life as on the basis of my own works or on the basis of my own effort? And frankly, if you're in the category of a Pelagian or an Arminian thinking that you contribute something to your salvation, then you better be prepared to hang on to it. Because if you can choose salvation, certainly you can un-choose it. You can lose it. Now, in such a case, that kind of false assurance, I think, is going to leave you very uncertain and very unstable. There could be overconfidence on the one hand, uncertainty on the other hand. And either way, we're missing the point of our salvation, which is being saved to good works. So let's think about these for a second. This is where we can think probably in terms of people that we know, or maybe we can see ourselves in some of these things at different points. Do you or someone you know ever have the experience of being certain of your salvation, and yet you discover later on that you weren't actually saved at that time? that something subsequently happened that convinced you that that belief was a false belief. On the other hand, if it's the case that you are counting on your contribution to keep you in a state of grace, then how can you ever really feel secure? You're always going to be striving and trying to do what you can to hang on to it. So if justification is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, if it is God's doing from start to finish, then it's not just your justification that is a settled question, but your continuance in it is also settled. And that can free you up to those good works that Christ has saved you to do. Otherwise, you end up very unstable. I'd be willing to bet that you know some people, maybe you've experienced this yourself, where you said, yes, I've been saved five times or 10 times. Or you know somebody who is so insecure in his salvation that just about every week he goes to church and he goes to the front to get saved. And we treat that as a very light thing, as if it's just a matter of something that we choose or something we can choose salvation on Sunday while we're at church, and then something happens the next day where we lose our salvation and we go back to church the next week to get saved again and so forth. Great deal of uncertainty. Here's a big false assumption. And this takes us back to the idea of materialism. What do we think about a materialistic and an evolutionary kind of worldview? We make an assumption that time and technology have the potential to improve the moral condition of man. That if we are on that escalator going up, getting a little better every day, getting closer to whatever definition of perfection that is, that things are getting better. And we shouldn't expect to continue to see the kinds of things that we do see, the atrocities that we are seeing in times of war. And my quotation from the Old Testament earlier was meant to point out that even 2,000, 3,000 years ago and even further back, going even back to before the flood, There's nothing new about violence, about men doing terrible things to one another. It's part of our moral condition, and time does not fix that, and neither does technology. In fact, what is the paradox of technology? The more technology that we have, the more that we can do. This is very troubling, actually, because I think there is a divergence that we are seeing in our day. The technology that we're developing at the very moment when we're losing any sense of right and wrong. Think about it like this. For me, I'll use the Walmart dilemma. I had this existential experience in Walmart many years ago. Super Walmart. I needed toothpaste. So I went to the toothpaste aisle and what did I see? About 10,000 different kinds of toothpaste. How do you choose when you have so many choices? We're faced with choices. And if we're losing our ability to discern between choices, what's good and what's bad, or what's even better or worse, then we're in real trouble. And that's part of what technology does for us. And we might say also, those of us who remember email when it first started a few years ago, The promise of those kinds of things, and computers in general, is that it's going to make your work easier. Has it done that? No. It's made your work harder. In fact, it's created entirely new forms of work that we couldn't have imagined 30 years ago. And now we spend all of our time with all those new kinds of work that technology brought us, supposedly, to help us. So there's that paradox of technology. It's not going to solve our problems. It's going to confront us with choices that are becoming more difficult. If our technology is divorced from a Christian moral framework, then the real danger is that it becomes an atrocity. And I won't go into examples. There are too many examples to name. I would argue that there's nowhere that's more apparent in civilized America where we have this kind of issue than we do in the health care system. If we see what's taking place in the name of health care, a large part of it is not health care. Now, this leads to rabbit trails. If we think that technology is a solution when it's not, then we can end up spending a lot of time pursuing some kind of technology, thinking that it's going to solve our problems, when it doesn't even get to the root of it. And what is it that we've been saying this morning about the root of a problem? It's in our fallenness. It is a spiritual problem, and a spiritual problem has to have a spiritual solution. I might argue that the church has become ashamed of the doctrine of man's depravity. That number one, we don't really believe it. We don't preach it. And consequently, we don't really preach the gospel. Because the gospel stands in contrast to man's depravity. The gospel is that that power that Paul continually refers to, to convert men from spiritual death to spiritual life. Now let's talk about a few Pelagian myths. One is that man is basically good. Man is basically good. Or that man is good enough. So we can either say that man is good in and of himself, or he's good enough, the kind of idea that God grades on a curve, and as long as you're a little better than somebody else, then you're okay. A big one is that man has free will. Now we use that word free will, and our confession uses that as well. But what do we mean when we talk about free will? It's probably gonna require a little explanation. Now if man has free will, then he probably deserves at least a little bit of credit for his salvation. And if some men choose and some men don't, then that kind of implies that some men are better than others. And I've also heard Arminians say that God doesn't violate man's free will. In fact, that God can't. violate man's free will, that it would be a moral violation on God's part if he did something that was against an individual man's choice. Another that you might hear is that God has done everything He can. He's done as much as He can. Now He's just standing by and waiting for men to respond to the offer. Quoting Earl Cairns again, the historian, he says that revivalism has been a continuing characteristic of American Christianity. The idea of revivalism is what? It's like evangelism on steroids. It is instead of gathering together to worship God, we turn our gatherings into more of an evangelistic crusade, a kind of tent meeting. where we try to create just the right conditions with just the right message, all the lighting and all the right furniture and all the right places, having elders and deacons and men standing by to pray for you and everything that we can do in order to get you to come up and make that decision. And it's very common in the churches today, part of the way that we see that is in the altar call at the end of the worship service. We don't do that in a church like this because we don't think that it's our job to get men to come up and make the commitment. It's the work of the Holy Spirit through the reading and the preaching of the word that brings conversion and not some kind of human technique, not clever messaging and that kind of thing. Many of our churches are more like revival services or revival meetings than worship services. Now, Pelagianism has borne some bitter fruit in the church. So let's talk about some of the things that Pelagianism has done. First of all, it's a rejection of what Scripture teaches from cover to cover. about the condition of man after the fall. I say cover to cover the only exception of the first two and the last two chapters. First two chapters, everything is perfect. The last two chapters, everything is perfect. Everything else in between pertains to that present age under the fall and under the curse. Some things that Pelagianism creates. One is the diminution of God's sovereignty. It's a confusion of the foreknowledge of God where He sets His love upon those who are the elect and His foresight of those who will either choose or not choose. And by diminishing God's sovereignty, we're also diminishing His glory. Now the problem is we don't think that's a big deal because we don't really mind sharing a little of God's glory with Him. And we don't think he should mind either. As we saw a little while ago, there's also a confusion of the covenants. Pelagianism causes a confusion of the two covenants. They're mutually exclusive. If we're under the covenant of works, we are under what Paul will refer to as the ministry of condemnation. That if you are under law, if you are under works, the only result of that can be condemnation. and there can be no salvation through works since the fall. There's a distortion of the doctrine of the new birth. The question is, what is the new birth and who does it? And when does it happen? Is it something that you choose? Is it something that you do? Or is it something that happens to you? Now, we talked earlier how the fall created or brings this thing called spiritual death. And how did we describe spiritual death? The disconnect, the spiritual disconnect between man and God so that we are spiritually alienated from God. What then is the new birth? It is the reestablishment of that spiritual connection between God and His creature. And who does that? Is that something that you choose? Or is that something that you do? Or is it something by virtue of its nature that it has to be done by God? Pelagianism has given us a low view of the fall, that we have diminished the severity of our rebellion, and we tend to diminish its effects on creation. it is the case that there's still a great deal of good that we see in the world but we don't have a clear point of reference either and what i mean by that is that we cannot imagine having lived in the world as it's fallen and as it's cursed we can imagine what the world was like when it was originally created before the fall and before the curse and if we think that there's beauty to the world as it exists today, there's still a remnant of that, but it's nothing like the world before the fall. Another bitter fruit of Pelagianism is a diminution of the atonement of Christ. In other words, what did Christ do on the cross? The Pelagian will say He died for sin, in a very general sense. He died for everybody. Not anybody in particular, but everybody in general. And then it's a question of who's going to choose what has been atoned for on the cross and who's going to pass it by. There are some serious problems with that view. In the Calvinistic view, we say that atonement is limited. which means it's particular. That it pertains only to those who God has chosen from all eternity. Those who are the elect. So that there is an exact justice to God in the cross. You can think in terms of the problem of double jeopardy. If it's the case that Christ died for everybody, so that everyone's sin has been pardoned, then what happens to those who don't choose that? What are they going to be punished for? How can God punish someone for sin if he's already pardoned that sin through the cross? You end up with two possible extremes if you have that view of the atonement. One is something called universalism. Everyone is saved. And the Bible certainly does not teach universalism. The other problem, which is a really big problem, is the possibility that nobody is saved. That Christ died for everybody but nobody chose that salvation and so Christ's suffering was effectual for no one. So very serious problems that it creates with the atonement. Create some difficulties with respect to the gospel that salvation becomes a choice of free will rather than a choice or rather than a matter of free grace. We could talk about how it affects ministry. How does it affect the church? We've already mentioned how it affects worship. But if we turn our church into essentially an evangelistic tent meeting, then it's no longer serving the purpose that the church was made for. There can be evangelism within the church, certainly, and many may be converted through the ministry of the church. But the church is not designed around the unbeliever, it's designed around the believer to gather God's people together to worship Him in His appointed way each week. Pelagianism is going to have this effect as well. That we're going to put a great deal of emphasis on the number of converts. And here I have to use my air quotes again. Think about it like this. I haven't actually seen this, but it's not hard to imagine seeing something like this. You drive by McDonald's, and what do they have on their sign in front of the building? They have how many billions of people they have served, right? They want you to know how many billions of people have come through the door. Well, we could pretty easily imagine a Pelagian church putting on its electronic sign out front, thousands saved. right we we say five thousand people this week or this year that we put the emphasis on the numbers How does that end up affecting ministry? If the focus is on how many people were getting saved, quote unquote, then we're going to be doing those kinds of things that we think are going to make those numbers look better. If you've been in and around the world of business, you know how tempting that is. We want to make the numbers do what we want. In fact, it might even be something we can put in the budget. We're going to save 10,000 people this year or something absurd like that. And here's where we end up confusing a profession of faith with a confession of faith, or the possession of it, I should say, with the profession of it. It's easy enough to say that you believe, but possessing faith is a different matter. And unfortunately, so many who are under the influence of Arminian evangelism are professing Christians, but they are not possessing Christians. And where could we see evidence of that? I've been looking at Barna survey numbers for some years. And it will tell you something along these lines that about two-thirds, somewhere around 65, 70% of Americans say they're Christians on the basis of having made a profession or having some meaningful conversion experience. Now, when you look around, based on what we've been talking about last night and this morning, Do you think it's even plausible that 70% of the people who live in this country are true Christians? I don't doubt that they've made a profession, but I seriously doubt that they're saved. Because why? Because you expect to see some fruit from that. And if it's the case that someone can say he's had a conversion, and yet there is no change either in what he believes or in what he does, then we start to think that perhaps that was a false conversion. False assurance. Those who have made that profession may be left with a false assurance of their belief. And I'd be willing to bet if you haven't experienced this yourself, you know those who are in your circle of friends or family who have made a profession and will defend themselves as having made a profession, but they don't show any real signs of conversion. There ends up being a heavy emphasis on evangelistic ministry rather than discipleship. If you think in terms of the Christian life as a race, we're putting most of the emphasis right at the starting line, getting somebody started by their conversion. But once that conversion has taken place, we put that in our church's statistics of conversions, and then what happens to them after that is of little or no concern to us. Whereas the Bible speaks mostly in terms of discipleship. that we are bringing people up in the knowledge of the faith and when and where and how conversion happens we may never know, but the emphasis is on discipleship and not on that decision for conversion. The problem of course is that those who are converted may end up being subsequently starved We talked about that when we were looking at Amos last night, that we are suffering from a famine of the Word of God. We are not discipling those who are Christians. And the last thing in my short list of Pelagian difficulties here is that it gives reason for man to boast. It has to be the case that the one who chooses is a little better than the one who doesn't. And if man's choice is decisive, then come on, he deserves a little bit of credit. Now the Arminian may say, hang on a minute, we're not saying that man contributes much to his salvation. God has to do just about everything, 99%. Billy Graham used to say 99%. I'll say 99.99999 and you can run it out as far as you want to. So in your humility you can say that my contribution is just .00000001, just a tiny, tiny little contribution. And the critic might say, so I understand your contribution is very small. You don't deserve a lot of credit based on your contribution. But sir, I can't help noticing one thing, and that is that your tiny contribution is determinative of all of it. That your tiny little contribution can wipe out everything that God has done on your behalf. So, no matter how small you may try to make it, by doing that you end up essentially saying that it's still your decision. And then when it comes to the issue of sovereignty, that you're the one who decides and God is just going to have to wait for you to decide. It's a terrible problem. We end up with a God who is not sovereign. And we also end up with a God who's not immutable. Because He may have had a plan for you to be saved from eternity, but His plan stands or falls on your decision. He can always be overruled by His creatures. And I've said this before, that God cannot create anything that somehow controls Him. It's the idea that God can't make a rock that's so big that he can't move it. God can't make a creature that somehow, at the end of the day, is decisive compared to him, that has some control over him. God has absolute control over everything in his creation. And here I'll leave you with one one more encouraging little thought, that politically, Pelagianism is a pathway to tyranny. In other words, if we start with the belief that man is perfectible, then he might need a little bit of help from the state. But we know that if man does not have spiritual life, He's only going to be restrained by a superior force. The world is never short of utopians. There are many who are scheming, even as we speak, of trying to usher in that brave new world. But it's never going to happen because man is fallen. Man is not perfectible. It's not a question of him getting a little bit of help from the state, a little bit of encouragement so that he achieves his best. To go back to the Star Trek analogy, you wonder how it is that everybody on the Enterprise seems to get along with each other, that they have somehow moved past being at war on planet Earth. They've all banded together and even gotten together with a few other alien races and are now jetting around the universe looking for new life forms. And the funny thing is, they're always having to fight against somebody. Where is this utopian peace that we're all dreaming about? I think it's particularly funny, the idea that by the time of Star Trek, they've eliminated money. There's no longer a financial incentive for anything, a cost or an incentive. So everybody is busy self-actualizing and reaching their ideal condition. It's silly, but those ideas are all around us. Now I had an interesting observation as I'm thinking through the issue of identity politics. We've talked about how in the absence of a proper understanding of man made in the image of God, that we're trying to find some identity, some basis for identity to latch onto and that we typically are looking for that in terms of some kind of group association. But an interesting observation came to me as I'm looking through this and thinking, What we're dealing with here, even with Pelagianism, is a kind of identity politics. What do I mean by that? You're saying that because you have been saved, you've made a decision and you've been saved, that even if there is no real evidence to believe that you are truly saved, you're asking other people and especially other Christians to relate to you as if you're a Christian when you're not. And then as I think about this, I have to ask myself, well, that goes back a long way. How far back does that go? And I suspect that it goes back at least to the middle of the 20th century. We didn't become a post-Christian nation overnight, but how is it that more and more people Or how is it that we have gotten to a point where there is less and less proof of our Christianity? It's not something that happened overnight, but something that probably goes back a long way. If we think about how liberalism was beginning to affect the churches by the middle of the 20th century, then I think there's reason to suggest that even by that point in time, what would be the generation of my parents, that there was an expectation that you are associated with the church, even if you're not truly converted, that there was a social benefit to being part of the church. And that is certainly changing. We're shifting away from that to where I suspect within the next generation, there's going to be a pretty high cost associated with identifying with the church. Pelagianism gives us what we could call a self-referencing or self-authenticating kind of Christianity. In other words, testing is off limits. You can ask me if I'm a Christian and I'll say yes, but you don't get to ask me anything else, and you don't get to test that. It's based often on a lot of ritual or emotion or imagination and even unreason. We see men like Andy Stanley who will give comfort to sinners with lies that leave them under the wrath of God by telling them that God loves them just the way they are. And Jeremiah tells us that both the prophet and the sinner will be judged. So there's a kind of affirmative theology in the church, the idea that the Bible is not there to instruct us or to correct us, but to give some approval to whatever false doctrines and whatever behaviors I want to engage in. And I think this is a consequence of living in a society that, first of all, demands tolerance. And then it's going to demand affirmation. That's the new buzzword. And if we're connecting those dots to see where they lead, then what's going to be next? And the answer is going to be conformity. There's a time to disagree and then there's going to be a time when there will be a price to disagreeing. Some concluding thoughts. How does Pelagianism shut us off from the true gospel? Lagianism cuts us off from the true gospel because it closes us up in a false gospel of works righteousness. And as long as we continue to think that we're contributing something to salvation, we are still lost in sin. We are still under the judgment of the law. The warning in the law is that if you're going to be saved by the law, you have to keep all of it, all the time, perfectly. And you can't do that. I might call Pelagianism a fortress of lies. And the one who's barricaded in that fortress doesn't realize he's barricaded himself inside walls of destruction. He thinks that he's been freed from the law, but he's really made himself a captive. We have to drive men back to the Bible. and we have to drive men back to the gospel because that is the only thing that we have in our arsenal that can break down those walls. The challenge, of course, is for teachers and preachers to faithfully preach the gospel. We have to cut through the noise of lots of false prophets. Andy Stanley is a good example, someone who has a very wide following, a very great influence. but the gospel is powerful enough to do that. I'll conclude our afternoon session here with another quote from R.C. Sproul. He says, the semi-Pelagian doctrine of free will prevalent in the evangelical world today is a pagan view that denies the captivity of the human heart to sin. It underestimates the stranglehold that sin has upon us. So let us preach the gospel and by the gospel to be freed from the tyranny of the law. We'll conclude this afternoon with 119L.