Who the Church Calls a "Christian" Speaks Volumes

Lloyd-Jones then cited two men who were called "great Christians" in Great Britain and around the world in his era fifty years ago — one an agnostic and the other a social-gospel liberal — and what this said about the degree to which even Evangelicals were losing their grasp of the central doctrine of salvation through justification by faith alone. First he spoke of Gilbert Murray (1866-1957), a British classical scholar, intellectual, and humanist who was a delegate to the League of Nations and a leading figure in the Liberal party:

Now, I may be mistaken, but as I see the contemporary situation, the greatest battle of all, perhaps, at the moment is the battle for justification by faith only. ‘Works’ have come back! I was reading a religious newspaper a fortnight ago which carried the words ‘Saint Gilbert’ as a heading to a paragraph. The writer of the paragraph was of the opinion that this man whose Christian name was Gilbert was undoubtedly a saint and we must accord him the name and the dignity of a saint. Then he went on to say this: ‘Of course I know that in actual practice he called himself a rationalistic agnostic.’ Though this man Gilbert called himself a rationalistic agnostic, a so-called Christian paper says that nevertheless he was a saint. And they justified their assertion on the basis of his life: he was a good man, he was a noble man, he had high and exalted ideals, he gave much of his life to the propagation of the League of Nations union, and to uplift the human race, he tried to put an end to war, he made protests against war; therefore, the argument goes, though he denied the being of God, though he did not regard the Bible as the Word of God, though he did not believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, nevertheless, he was a saint. What makes a man a saint? Oh, his works, his life!

He then spoke of Evangelical attitudes toward Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), a liberal theologian who did not even believe in the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture, much less in Christ's atonement for sin:

We are confronted again by a generation that no longer believes in justification by faith-only. We are told that ‘the greatest Christian’ of this century is a man whose belief in the deity of Christ, to put it at its mildest, was very doubtful, who certainly did not believe in the atonement, whose creed seemed to be what he calls ‘reverence for life’ — yet we are told that he is the greatest saint and Christian of the twentieth century! Look at his life, they say, look what he has done; he gave up a great profession and he has gone out to Central Africa, look what he has suffered, look what he has given up, he might be wealthy, he might be prosperous, but he is living like Christ, he is imitating Christ, he has done what Christ has done! You see, it does not matter what you believe. According to this teaching, it is the life that makes a man a Christian. If you live a good life, if you live a life of sacrifice, if you try to uplift the race, if you try to imitate Christ, you are a Christian, though you deny the deity of Christ, though you deny His atonement, though you deny the miraculous and the supernatural, the resurrection and many other things, nevertheless you are a great Christian and a great saint!

Lloyd-Jones then spoke of the contrasting courage and conviction of the Reformers, based on the Word of God, not the opinions of sinful man:

My friends, John Knox and other men risked their lives, day after day, just to deny such teaching and to assert that a man is justified by faith alone without works, that a man is saved not by what he does but by the grace of God, that God justifies the ungodly, that God reconciles sinners unto Himself. lt is all of God and none of man, and works must not be allowed to intrude themselves at any point or in any shape or form. The battle for justification by faith only is on again! And if this meeting and these celebrations do nothing else, I trust that they will lead us to a rediscovery of the absolute centrality of the doctrine of justification by faith only.

The Battle Over Justification Has Intensified

In the ensuing five decades since Lloyd-Jones spoke, the battle over the doctrine of justification by faith alone has intensified. Un-Scriptural revision and even open denial of the doctrine of justification by faith alone began to creep into reputedly conservative seminaries in the 1960s and 1970s, and began to bear its evil fruit in largely unsuspecting local churches in the 1980s and 1990s.

In 1992 leading Evangelical spokesmen such as Chuck Colson, Bill Bright, and Pat Robertson, and Reformed leaders such as J. I. Packer and John White signed or endorsed the Evangelicals and Catholics Together document. In 1997 a long list of Evangelicals signed the joint Evangelical-Catholic Gift of Salvation document, a followup to ECT that  attempted to paper over Catholic-Protestant differences on the central doctrine of justification by faith alone. Among the Evangelical signers were Colson, Bright, and Packer; Harold O. J. Brown of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School; Os Guinness; Max Lucado; and Mark Noll of Wheaton College.

By the 1990s and 2000s men trained in reputedly conservative seminaries were now in Evangelical and Reformed pulpits, preaching justification by faith plus works. Evangelical leaders like Billy Graham and his son Franklin, and Reformed leaders like PCA minister and Westminster Theological Seminary president Peter Lillback, were speaking of the "Christian faith" of Pope John Paul II. The Orthodox Presbyterian Church, the Presbyterian Church in America, and other reputedly conservative churches were deeply infected with the cancer of justification by faith plus works. The OPC and PCA had both produced ineffectual study reports on the issue, and had failed to deal with it in judicial cases that were brought through the courts of the church, in which the issues were clear.

Needed: A New Generation of Protestants

As we approach the second decade of the new millennium, the spiritual battle continues. Here and there, God has raised up men and churches that have taken a firm stand for the centrality of salvation by grace alone, and justification by faith alone, through the person and finished work of Jesus Christ alone. True Christians must carry the battle forward. As Dr. James White says, true Christians must learn once again what it means to be a genuine Protestant:

It is my firm conviction that “Protestant” means absolutely, positively nothing unless the one wearing the term believes, breathes, lives, and loves the uncompromised, offensive-to-the-natural-man message of justification by God’s free grace by faith in Jesus Christ alone. As the term has become institutionalized, it has lost its meaning. In the vast majority of instances today a Protestant has no idea what the word itself denotes, what the historical background behind it was, nor why he should really care. And a label that has been divorced from its significance no longer functions in a meaningful fashion. We need a Reformation in our day that will again draw the line clearly between those who embrace the gospel of God’s grace in Christ and those who do not. And how one answers the question “How is a man made right with God?” determines whether one embraces that Gospel or not.[2]