Having recently listened to a sermon by Sonny Hernandez, a past contributor to Sword and Shield, I was struck by the similarities between the lordship-salvation controversy in the evangelical Arminian churches of our day and the controversy that resulted in the birth of the Reformed Protestant Churches. In his sermon Hernandez quotes mostly from The Gospel According to Jesus, a book written by John F. MacArthur that was originally published in 1988, which appears to be the textbook for the doctrine of lordship salvation.

In response to The Gospel According to Jesus, Zane C. Hodges wrote a book titled Absolutely Free: A Biblical Reply to Lordship Salvation. Before I address the theology espoused in each book, I remind the reader that neither MacArthur nor Hodges, who has since died, can rightly be characterized as a minister of the gospel. While Hodges was much more hostile toward the gospel and held a particular disdain for what he called “Dortian Calvinism,” MacArthur is likely more dangerous. MacArthur claims Calvinism, while at the same time he denies the power of God in salvation and inserts man’s works into salvation, specifically man’s work of “accepting Christ.”

Lordship salvation arose as a response to “easy-believism.” MacArthur contends that

the gospel in vogue today holds forth a false hope to sinners. It promises them they can have eternal life yet continue to live in rebellion against God. Indeed, it encourages people to claim Jesus as Savior yet defer until later the commitment to obey him as Lord…By separating faith from faithfulness, it teaches that intellectual assent is as valid as wholehearted obedience to the truth.

Thus the good news of Christ has given way to the bad news of an insidious easy-believism that makes no moral demands on the lives of sinners.¹

The effect of this “easy-believism” is described by MacArthur when he states,

The cheap grace and pseudo faith of a distorted gospel are ruining the purity of the church. The softening of the New Testament message has brought with it a putrefying inclusivism that in effect sees almost any kind of positive response to Jesus as tantamount to saving faith.²

By quoting some statements of the antinomian-Arminian theologians of the evangelistic movement, MacArthur makes the case that a response to the gospel is necessary for salvation. He quotes from R. B. Thieme’s The Pursuit of Happiness:

It is possible, even probable, that when a believer falls for certain types of philosophy, if he is a logical thinker, he will become an “unbelieving believer.” Yet believers who become agnostics are still saved; they are still born again. You can even become an atheist; but if you once accept Christ as savior, you cannot lose your salvation, even though you deny God.³

The above quotations and examples, as well as our own personal experiences, can lead us to trust that a lack of holiness is a real problem in evangelical churches. This same problem is present in the Protestant Reformed Churches (PRC) and was often given as the justification for the doctrinal departures by Rev. David Overway and the consistory of Hope Protestant Reformed Church. After the 2018 decision of the Protestant Reformed synod and by the sudden “repentance” of the officebearers of Classis East and of Hope’s consistory, these men finally acknowledged that Overway had in fact displaced the perfect work of Christ and had given works a place in salvation, but these men often justified Reverend Overway by saying that he was “concerned with the holy life of the church.”

When I was a member of the Protestant Reformed Churches, the problem that MacArthur describes as “easy-believism” was present in the denomination. A man could be a member of a labor union, join a Protestant Reformed church, and the only thing he had to give up was his union card. He could maintain friendly relationships with his family and friends in the union and never had to condemn their sins or lose father, mother, sisters, brethren, or children for Christ’s sake. Men and women could date whomever they wanted, as long as the future spouse would make confession of faith, usually a month before the wedding just to avoid making a commitment to the truth before it was required. A man could join the Protestant Reformed Churches from the United Reformed Churches, and the only thing he had to change was which building contained the pew he warmed every Sunday. At family visitation the elders were sure to encourage you that you were, in fact, suffering for the gospel’s sake if sometimes your coworkers made jokes at your expense or thought you were strange because of your practices.

In the Reformed Protestant Churches, we are tempted to believe that we do not have to give up our unbelieving families, our unbelieving friends, and our places in the world. We can continue to go on vacation with them. We can continue to have them at our houses, to fellowship, and to carefully tiptoe around the doctrinal issues that separate us. Almost nothing is easier for us than denying the antithesis, either by words or actions. The false solution to “easy-believism” we also find familiar. All that is needed is to give works a place in salvation.

In MacArthur’s case, he sets his sights squarely on the assurance of the believer. He writes,

Professing Christians utterly lacking the fruit of true righteousness will find no biblical basis for assurance of salvation…

Genuine assurance comes from seeing the Holy Spirit’s transforming work in one’s life, not from clinging to the memory of some experience.⁴

But just as with the ministers in the Protestant Reformed Churches, God did not leave himself without a witness. Just as God forced Nebuchadnezzar to acknowledge God as God, God forced MacArthur to acknowledge Christ’s work as the only ground and foundation of salvation. For example, in speaking of Christ’s words, “It is finished,” MacArthur writes,

Here it is appropriate to add a crucial footnote: When Jesus said, “It is finished,” he meant it. Nothing can be added to what he did. Many people believe they must supplement his work with good deeds of their own. They believe they must facilitate their own redemption through baptism, other sacraments and religious rituals, benevolent deeds, or whatever else they can accomplish through their own efforts. But no works of human righteousness can expand on what Jesus accomplished for us. “He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy” (Titus 3:5). The beginning and the end of our salvation was consummated by Jesus Christ, and we can contribute nothing.⁵

The problem with MacArthur’s solution is that he is entirely devoid of the gospel. We can see this from his definition of the gospel: “The message is simply that God graciously saves repentant sinners who come to him in faith.”⁶ By conditioning salvation upon repentance, MacArthur seeks to scare people into living godly lives and a lives of repentance. In fact, this is the entire premise of MacArthur’s book. Salvation is only for those who not only accept Christ as their savior but who also consciously make him Lord in their lives. MacArthur looks over a church that is void of fruit, and his solution is not to bring Christ, the vine that makes his branches fruitful; but MacArthur’s solution is to try to scare, threaten, and convince the dead branches to bring forth fruit.

In response to MacArthur’s The Gospel According to Jesus, Zane C. Hodges wrote Absolutely Free: A Biblical Response to Lordship Salvation. I had anticipated that Hodges’ book would be better than The Gospel According to Jesus. Although comparing the two books can be likened to determining which of two pit latrines smells less offensive, I have come to the conclusion that Hodges’ book is worse.

Hodges begins with the lament that “instead of recognizing the freeness of God’s saving love, many encumber it with conditions.”⁷ He bemoans the state of the church and the teachers of his day, whom he describes as teaching conditions.

According to them, if a person wonders whether he is a Christian or not, he ought to be told to look for evidence of this in his behavior.

It is dangerous, these teachers assert, to offer someone the assurance that they are accepted with God apart from the issue of obedience. For them, there is no such thing as an unconditional love of God that is not, in some way, performance-related.⁸

Hodges also correctly asserts that “instead of promoting holiness, the doctrine of lordship salvation destroys the very foundation upon which true holiness must be built. By returning to the principles of the law, it has forfeited the spiritual power of grace.”⁹ His analysis of the problem is spot-on:

In the process, the marvelous truth of justification by faith, apart from works, recedes into shadows not unlike those which darkened the days before the Reformation. What replaces this doctrine is a kind of faith/works synthesis which differs only insignificantly from official Roman Catholic dogma.¹⁰

In a particularly poignant observation, Hodges remarks,

What is wrong in lordship thought is that a life of good works is made the basis of assurance, so that the believer’s eyes are distracted from the sufficiency of Christ and His Cross to meet his eternal need. Instead, his eyes are focused on himself. The Reformers understood that there was no assurance in that kind of process at all.¹¹

So how does Hodges’ book earn the title of the more offensive of the two books? All of the statements above were near the end of the first chapter of the book. In the second chapter Hodges writes, “In fact, it is statements like this one [“Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that believeth on me hath everlasting life” (John 6:47)] that show how anxious God is to make His offer of salvation plain.”¹² Hodges looks at a text like John 6:47 and all he can see is an anxious god, trying to make his offer of salvation. Later Hodges states, “The Bible predicates salvation on an act of faith, not on the continuity of faith.”¹³ Elsewhere in his book, Hodges expresses his disdain for the theology that regeneration precedes faith, that Christ died only for the elect, that God loves only the elect, and that those who depart from the faith never had true faith. His book makes clear in many places that Hodges hates the doctrines of Calvinism. Regarding the theology that the believer does good works out of his regenerated heart in thankfulness to God, Hodges writes,

Today there exists in part of the evangelical church a wholly unrealistic view of the nature of Christian experience. According to those who hold this view, effective Christian living is virtually an inevitable result of new birth. But this view is as remote from the Bible as east is remote from the west.

Of course, it is a miraculous truth that at the moment of new birth, the very life of God is imparted to the believer. But like the impartation of physical life itself, spiritual life is not granted in fully developed form. It does not come to us in a prefabricated condition.

On the contrary, regeneration brings with it immense capacities and staggering possibilities. But all these capabilities, come, so to speak, not in their ripened maturity, but in the form of a “seed” which requires cultivation.¹⁴

For Hodges sanctification is not an inevitable result of justification. For Hodges regeneration brings “immense capacities” and “staggering possibilities.” In taking issue with MacArthur’s statement that “obedience is the inevitable manifestation of saving faith,” Hodges must come up with his own basis for the good works that the believer will do. Also, one of Hodges’ problems with lordship salvation is its association with Calvinism.

Frequently (though not always) lordship salvation is combined with a harsh system of thought that denies the reality of God’s love for every single human being. According to this kind of theology, God dooms most men to eternal damnation long before they are born and really gives His Son to die only for the elect.¹⁵

Hodges finally comes to the heart of his false doctrine when he gets to repentance. Hodges’ theology speaks for itself:

Thus, though genuine repentance may precede salvation (as we shall see), it need not do so. And because it is not essential to the saving transaction as such, it is in no sense a condition for that transaction. But the fact still remains that God demands repentance from all and He conditions their fellowship with Him on that.¹⁶

Hodges begins by exposing his low view of repentance, stating that repentance is something that an unregenerated person can do. Hodges is not bold enough to make repentance a condition unto salvation, but he makes it a condition for the experience of one’s salvation. Regarding Christ’s statement in Luke 5:31–32, “They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance,” Hodges explains, “That is what repentance is all about. It is all about the sinner finding spiritual health. It is all about the sinner ‘sitting at the table’—having fellowship—with God.”¹⁷ Hodges even makes repentance the basis upon which God can fellowship with sinful men: “Harmony—fellowship—between a sinful humanity and a forgiving God must always be based on repentance, just as justification must always be based on faith alone.”¹⁸

How does all of this relate to us? As we have seen, this “easy-believism” is a threat to us as long as we are in this flesh. While Hodges mocks MacArthur’s response to “easy-believism” by calling it “hard-believism,” neither one is the correct view. To be sure, the gospel is “impossible-believism,” so that apart from the efficacious call of Christ, drawing us to the gospel, no one has the right nor the ability to believe. We know that believing must spring from faith as its fruit. MacArthur and Hodges view believing (which for them is analogous to accepting Christ) and faith as synonymous and as something that the hearer has to do in his own power. Since neither MacArthur nor Hodges has any idea of what true faith is, neither one can properly explain where the works produced by faith come from. Both men needed to come up with an explanation and a source for the good works that they knew had to be present in the church, and both went to man’s wisdom to find a way to produce those good works. Hodges’ exposition of the lordship salvation advocates’ position is very accurate: they combine law and grace and deny the distinction between the law and the gospel. And that position is not far from us. In 2017 the Protestant Reformed synod took a decision that stated, “Properly done, the preaching of the law is the preaching of the gospel.”¹⁹ And in 2002, in a book review in the Standard Bearer on another book written in response to MacArthur’s The Gospel According to Jesus, Prof. H. Hanko wrote,

Without entering into them in this review, I am troubled by the fact that the book, in its otherwise strong defense of justification by faith alone, makes a false disjunction between law and gospel so that lost from sight is the obvious truth that Scripture considers the law, at least in some sense, to be gospel as well.²⁰

The heresy espoused in the doctrine of lordship salvation has been in the Protestant Reformed Churches, and therefore in us, for some time now. Although God has delivered us from the Protestant Reformed Churches, we must be on guard against the heresy of lordship salvation, as well as the heresies espoused by Hodges in his doctrine of “free grace.” There is no situation in which any benefit of salvation may be hinged upon any work of the believer.

Finally, we can see, as Sword and Shield has previously demonstrated, that the truth of the place of good works in the life of the believer does not lie between two ditches. We do not find truth by threading the theological needle between the false doctrines of Hodges and MacArthur. We can see that both the legalism of MacArthur and Hodges’ denial of sanctification both arise out of the same Arminian error. As at the time of the Synod of Dordt, antinomianism is the charge of the Arminian. Recognizing the bitter fruit of his false doctrine, the heretic blames the truth and charges it as antinomian.

May God preserve the truth of faith as a bond and the proper view of good works in the Reformed Protestant Churches.