An encouraging conversation

I had sent an email of relative distress to Dr. R. He gave me a short reply because he has been quite busy lately, but, we talked on the phone yesterday afternoon between snow bursts when he was actually at the Seminary. It was personally, very encouraging.

I asked him a question of where the free grace movement is today. He answers this question by going back to the very beginning -- of his own life. It takes a while to listen to, but, every time he tells it he shares different details than the time before and I am able to get a better sense of all he has seen and done and learned. He seems to know the history and pastors of every church of influence in evangelical America in the last fifty years. He has worked with so many notable people. It's rather amazing to listen to these things.

What I would love to do is capture his voice on audio, and transcribe it. The more I listen to him the more I realize how little I know. I truly do know little. If there is one thing I might know, it is a discernment of what's out there...? (Sharing one's faith with LDS people makes you ask a lot of questions about your entire system of beliefs.) I have also tested many of the most popular errors in conservative biblical Christianity. I wrote briefly of this in a post which I took down earlier this week. Let me share that paragraph again here:

If you take a tour of most of conservative evangelical Christianity, you'll find a common doctrine that people are saved by faith alone in Christ alone. So: does the "free grace" movement exclusively own the burden which Galatians depicts? No. It belongs to everyone of course. I confess, I do not know of any other movement committed to defending both justification and sanctification, though. Take that same tour of conservative evangelical Christianity and you will discover there is conversely a great variety and confusion over sanctification: this is no where nailed down for believers like us.

If we move just a little to the left or right in conservative evangelical Christianity, we end up with deviations of sorts, on the gospel of salvation. You can have your pick, your combination, your preference: the pentecostal version of how to be saved; the church of christ version of how to be saved; or the lordship theology (hyper-calvinism) version of how to be saved. They are all "faith in Jesus, & also works." Beyond these? Everything else is certainly an abandonment of faith alone in Christ; liberal protestantism, catholicism, and works-based non-mainstream movements (commonly termed "cults").

I suppose this really is not any kind of accomplishment to have learned this. But it was enough for me to gain confirmation on a variety of my observations again and again while listening to him. How unprecedented and brave, free grace theology is attempting to be. In fact, I have heard him recommend an option of being a "Zero-point Calvinist," meaning we just don't need an acrostic at all to explain our faith, do we? We have the bible and that is all we ever needed.

This is simply brilliance way overdue.