The Fall is not from the Gospel (Part One: Introduction)

I have been meaning to write this for awhile now. (Perhaps I already have and have just forgotten about it.) Nevertheless, it bears repeating and reiterating. It is something I learned from a failure and a group of pharisees. 

Not long ago the head pastor of a megachurch was involved in an affair. He resigned and took time off to reexamine and realign his life. His name is Tullian Tchividjian , maybe you have heard of him. Anyhow, I would often gobble up whatever he was talking about and writing. I would listen to his sermons or play his books on my e-reader. I was captivated. 

Tchividjian is a crypto-Lutheran. Hiding out among Evangelical Presbyterians, he would sometimes chime in with quotes from Luther and other prominent theologians of this faith tradition. The most important person he cited though was the twentieth century Lutheran theologian Gerhard Forde. (A man whose theology is debated almost as much as how to pronounce his name.) Forde’s claim was that there was no such thing as being against the Law and so you had to rely totally on God’s grace.

And so it was that a Presbyterian mega church pastor led me down the dark road of a much debated Lutheran theologian. But the craziness inside the church didn’t end there. Tchividjian often shared this viewpoint alongside mainstream Evangelical mega-church theology. Needless to say, it didn’t go over very well. After a very public row with Kevin DeYoung, the bridges were officially burned after a somewhat unrelated incident of Evangelicals “protecting one of their own.”

So Tchividjian gathered like-minded people and started his own website. I found his messages there to be exactly what I needed. He spoke of the toughness of grace (something I will discuss in a moment). He fleshed it out in ways that were new and different from what most Evangelicals had been saying. He mentored and was mentored by people grappling with this. Most importantly, I watch how grace could make a proud and self-assured man humble. I watched as someone who did not have intrinsic humility was transformed into a person intoxicated by grace.

Then the bottom dropped out. Tchividjian had always appeared to have a rocky relationship with his wife and the two ended up wounding each other in the deepest way a man and woman can. Much ink has been spilled about the affairs and why they happened. It was wrong and nothing can ever change that. However, I saw Tchividjian’s enemies pounce once again at him and his stance on grace.

I especially remember reading an article written by a fellow Evangelical pointing out that this is the obvious outcome of so-called “hyper-grace.” I do not remember the writer, but I remember how I had to explore on a deeper level all that I had come to understand about this. I wanted to see if the wages of so-called “hyper-grace” was sin. I am saddened to say, that I do not believe so. I am saddened because this means that a good deal of our Evangelical theology is flat-out missing the mark. I want you to join me for a spell as we examine this a little bit. I think it is best to start at the problem. Not just any problem. No. The Problem. Sin.