Orland Evangelical Free Church | Do I Have To Accept Jesus As Lord?

Before the resurgence of Calvinist theology in the 1990s, there was the fight over "Lordship salvation". The debate in the late 1980s was sparked by John MacArthur's book, The Gospel According to Jesus, which put a species of dispensationalism in its crosshairs.

That species was represented by, among others, Charles Ryrie. He held the view that a Christian can remain carnal, persisting in open sin but yet saved on the basis of his prayer of faith. MacArthur said no such category exists: there are the saved who follow Jesus and the unsaved.

Controversies are often hard to follow. Disagreements evolve in narrow genealogies, within which they are explosive and outside of which they are gibberish.

So within the family of Soviet communism there were fratricidal lines of descent from Stalin and Trotsky, and few can now explain what the argument was about - but it was heated enough for Trotsky to get an axe in his head.

Within the family of classical musicians there is a debate about how long half-notes should be held when playing Bach. Among tax-cutting Republicans, there's a debate about whether to slash income tax rates or investment rates.

What we should've had in the Lordship salvation controversy was a dust-up among dispensationalists over a single plank in their baroque platform. The fight could have been observed with amused detachment by Bible-believing Presbyterians who have no such problems.

Why then did the controversy rage across evangelicalism?

Because the idea of the carnal Christian is attractive. A generalized version of the doctrine, liberated from Ryrie's qualifications, became that you could get your ticket to heaven punched and then live however you wanted. It appealed to a culture that wanted spiritual life without duties. It also empowered churches to gain numerical growth with less spiritual work.

Across the evangelical spectrum people knew pastors who promised eternal security solely on the basis of the sinner's prayer.

In this context, the Lordship salvation controversy was not about part of a theological system but about an ethos, an attitude that hangs in the air like gas. When MacArthur sparked a narrow theological debate, all evangelicalism exploded.

The question of whether you have to "accept Jesus as Lord" is nonsensical. Jesus is Lord and no one can have fellowship with him as anything else. He offers forgiveness freely, but from a throne. He does so to secure the loyalty of repentant rebels (Revelation 5.9-10).

But evangelicals took the question seriously because non-doctrinal preaching had given people a get out of jail free card. Many pastors had been free-associating verses in the pulpit, preaching borrowed or plagiarized material, and showing movie clips instead of expounding texts. They had created a culture of loose, populist improvisation with the Bible in which the wisdom of making distinctions was mocked.

So very few understood MacArthur's argument enough to engage beyond sloganeering. A treatise was in dialogue with a pile of bumper stickers.

And all these years later, though the controversies change, there is no sign of a turn-around.