The Free Grace Alliance

Br Dr. Fred Lybrand Let's have a discussion. So, Rob Bell writes a book called "Love Wins" and it is basically all about heaven and hell with a final conclusion that Love wins out; God's love will ultimately persuade everyone to embrace Him and His heaven.  It sounds like universalism, but Bell and others are also denying it.  You can call it what you want, but if everyone gets in, then salvation is clearly 'universal' (hence the name). Of course this is unabashedly anti-scriptural (nice interview here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Vg-qgmJ7nzA ), but what is behind his conclusion?  Cynically we could speak in terms of fame and fortune as motivating Bell to depart from the historic / biblical Christian faith.  I, however, think there is a far more simple way to think about it theologically.  Bell has just imposed a hierarchy on the attributes of God.  The net result is that Bell has taken grace (he says love, but a loving

Have you ever thought of preaching the message of God’s grace in terms of the probabilities and consequences that you’re right? Most of us are at least passingly familiar with Pascal’s Wager , a logical premise by which it was sought to say that the only reasonable course was to worship God because it had no negative consequences and only possible positive consequences.  While there are certainly deficiencies in the argument, it nevertheless has some merits. I was having a discussion with a student earlier this semester where this idea came floating into my mind.  My student had a friend who said, in effect, that if Reformed theology (i.e. Lordship salvation) leads people to be scared or lack assurance, then hey at least they are saved.  This got me thinking about the relative merits and dangers of preaching Free Grace versus preaching Lordship salvation.  This is not to debate the relative merits of the positions, but merely to look at the relative risks and dangers of each. Thi

                                                                                                                                           March, 2011 Dear FGA members and friends, One of the most strategic philosophies of the Free Grace movement over the years has been the tactic of focusing and grounding the issue of grace theology on a proper exegesis of individual passages in the Bible. We are all too aware of the danger of grounding our views in the man-made systems of theology. For even the best of them, although attempting to be coherent, consistent and comprehensive, at times fail due to allegiances formed by a prior commitment to a system that has as its foundation  a system of theology that is less than biblically based. This being the case, it is imperative that we make sure that we not only continue this foundation, but that we also make sure the next generation is able to not only engage in proper theological reflection and articulation, but even more so that they are able