What is the Free Grace movement?

Question 07068

The Free Grace movement is a loose body of teachers who insist that salvation is received by faith alone, entirely apart from works, commitment or any promise of future obedience. It came into focus in the 1980s as a reaction against Lordship salvation, and it contains a great deal I agree with alongside some things I would want to argue with strongly.

Because the label covers rather different people, a fair assessment has to distinguish between them. Charles Ryrie and Zane Hodges are both counted in the Free Grace movement and they do not say the same thing.

Where the Free Grace movement came from

The immediate trigger was John MacArthur’s The Gospel According to Jesus in 1988, which argued that saving faith necessarily includes submission to Jesus as Lord. The response came from two directions: Zane Hodges at Dallas Theological Seminary, and Charles Ryrie, whose So Great Salvation appeared the following year.

Hodges went on to found what became the Grace Evangelical Society, and that body has carried the more radical wing of the Free Grace movement ever since. Ryrie, by contrast, never joined a society or led a campaign, and his position is considerably more moderate.

The dispensational background matters. Both men worked within a tradition that had always been careful to distinguish salvation from discipleship and standing from reward, and their objection to Lordship teaching grew naturally out of that soil rather than being invented for the occasion.

I have set out the other side of the argument in the article on Lordship salvation, and reading the two together will give a fuller picture than either alone.

What the Free Grace movement gets right

It is right that salvation is by faith apart from works. Ephesians 2:8-9 says exactly that, and any teaching which quietly reintroduces performance as a condition has abandoned the gospel however orthodox it sounds elsewhere.

It is right that assurance belongs to the believer as a present possession. 1 John 5:13 says these things are written “that you may know that you have eternal life,” and a doctrine that leaves Christians permanently uncertain has failed a plain apostolic aim.

It is right to distinguish salvation from discipleship. Every believer should be a disciple, and plenty are poor ones. The New Testament is full of Christians being urged to become in practice what they already are in position, which would make little sense if the two were identical.

And it is right that the security of the believer rests on God rather than on us. On these four points the Free Grace movement is defending something worth defending, and I stand with it.

It is also worth noting that the Free Grace movement is not a denomination and has no shared confession. It is a tendency running through several seminaries, societies and independent churches, and people who would never sit on the same platform are filed under the same label by their critics.

That makes generalisation risky. Some within the Free Grace movement are careful, pastoral and thoroughly biblical. Others have followed the logic of their position into places I would not go, and lumping them together does an injustice to the first group.

Where I part company

My difficulty is with the radical wing, and specifically with what became known as the crossless gospel. Some within the Grace Evangelical Society came to argue that a person need not believe in the deity of Jesus, His death for sin or His resurrection in order to be saved, so long as they believe He guarantees eternal life.

I regard that as a serious error. 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 defines the gospel as “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day,” and Paul says this is the message “by which you are being saved.” Remove the content and you have not simplified faith; you have emptied it.

Faith has an object, and the object has to be the real Jesus. Trusting a name attached to a promise, without any understanding of who He is or what He did, is not the saving faith of the New Testament. I have set out what saving faith actually involves in the article on faith.

It should be said that this is a minority position within the Free Grace movement and that many within it have rejected it firmly. Ryrie never held anything like it, and it would be unfair to lay it at the door of everyone who uses the label.

The question of repentance

A second area of disagreement concerns repentance. Some in the Free Grace movement have argued that repentance has no place in the gospel invitation at all, on the grounds that including it makes salvation conditional on a work.

I understand the concern and I do not accept the conclusion. Paul summarised his whole ministry in Acts 20:21 as testifying “of repentance toward God and of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ,” and Jesus opened His preaching with “repent and believe in the gospel.”

The way through is to see repentance as the directional aspect of faith rather than a separate prior condition. Turning to God is turning from something else, and the two words describe one movement. That preserves both the freeness of grace and the apostolic vocabulary, and I have worked it out in the article on faith and repentance.

Removing repentance to protect grace is a cure that damages the patient. Grace does not need protecting from words the apostles used.

There is a further practical worry. Where repentance is dropped entirely, the gospel can be presented as information to be accepted rather than a call to be answered, and the person hearing it never quite understands that anything is being asked of them at all.

That is not what most within the Free Grace movement intend, and it is often what happens in practice when their emphasis is passed down to a preacher without their carefulness.

The question of fruit

A third disagreement concerns whether a genuine believer must show any fruit at all. The stronger Free Grace position holds that a person may be saved and show no evidence whatsoever for the whole of their life, and that assurance should be entirely independent of any examination of the life.

I would put it differently. Fruit is expected, and its degree varies enormously with yieldedness, teaching, temperament and circumstance. A carnal Christian is a real category, and 1 Corinthians 3 describes one. But a total and permanent absence of any evidence over decades does raise an honest question about whether conversion ever occurred.

That is a diagnostic question rather than a condition, and the distinction matters. I am not saying fruit keeps you saved. I am saying that a new nature normally shows itself somehow, and that a complete absence of any sign is worth taking seriously rather than explaining away.

John clearly thought so, since the whole of his first letter is a series of tests offered to believers for exactly this purpose. He offers them as reassurance rather than as terror, which is how I would want to use them too.

Assessing the movement fairly

So my own position sits inside the wider Free Grace movement in its moderate form and outside its radical wing. Salvation is by grace through faith alone, assurance is available now, discipleship is distinct from salvation, and the believer is eternally secure on the faithfulness of God.

At the same time, saving faith is trust in the real Jesus who died and rose, repentance belongs in the apostolic invitation, and a life wholly untouched by God is a reasonable thing to ask questions about. None of those qualifications reintroduces works, and all three are plainly in the text.

The debate has generated a good deal of heat, and some of the strongest language on both sides has come from people who agree on far more than they disagree about. The NET Bible notes on 1 John 5 are a good place to see how carefully the assurance passages have to be handled.

So, now what?

If a teacher tells you that you must promise obedience before God will forgive you, do not accept it. That is not the gospel, and the Free Grace movement is right to have resisted it.

If a teacher tells you that you can be certain of heaven without ever having understood who Jesus is or what He did, do not accept that either. Faith needs an object, and the object is a Person who died and rose. What exactly are you trusting in?

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.

1 Corinthians 15:3-4, ESV

Hold the two halves together and you will be safe. Grace is genuinely free, and the Jesus it is free through is the real one.