by Grayson Gilbert
If you haven’t yet heard, a recent survey revealed that the majority of professing Christians do not believe that salvation is by grace through faith alone. While it might be alarming to some, it ought not to be a shock to us that the majority of professing Christians don’t know the gospel. Don’t misunderstand me to be saying this is inconsequential. It isn’t. It’s disastrous and will prove to have eternal consequences on a rather large group of people who have little to no concept of what the gospel actually teaches about the fundamental nature of mankind, the problem of sin and judgment, and yet how this problem is also resolved in the person and work of Jesus Christ. That is profoundly significant. What I am saying is though is that we ought not be shocked by this, mainly because this hasn’t been something hidden from plain sight. Everything we have been seeing in terms of the large, incredibly divisive in-house debates in Evangelicalism is a microcosm of this reality. What we are dealing with, in a nutshell, is a worldview competition, with the secular worldview emerging as the dominate one.
Part of this is a discipleship issue, no doubt. Shallow, emotionally-laden Christian thinking has dominated the vast majority of space in Western Evangelicalism. It didn’t take terribly long for me to realize this even as a new Christian. I remember going to a conference for college students—I had been a recent convert out of a long-standing atheism—and the gentleman who ran Campus Crusades invited me to come along because he felt it would be helpful to me. I politely refused due to costs, but he called my bluff by saying they’d had a spot that opened up so that I could come free of charge. Of course I could no longer politely decline, so I went.