What is the Free Grace movement?
Question 7068
The Free Grace movement is a strand of evangelical theology arguing that saving faith consists simply in believing God’s promise of eternal life to the one who trusts in Christ, with repentance, commitment to discipleship, and acknowledgment of Christ’s lordship all understood as belonging to sanctification rather than to justification. It is not a fringe position; it has attracted serious scholars and generated a substantial body of theological literature. It also raises questions that go to the heart of what the gospel is.
The Movement’s Origins and Key Figures
The Free Grace position has antecedents in various streams of evangelical thought, but its most developed form emerged significantly through the work of Zane Hodges, a long-serving Dallas Theological Seminary professor whose 1989 book Absolutely Free made the case at length. The Grace Evangelical Society, founded in the mid-1980s, has since carried the position forward through its journal and publications. The movement has sometimes claimed Charles Ryrie as a sympathetic figure, and while Ryrie’s concern to protect grace from additions was genuine, his own position was more measured than Hodges’, and he expressed reservations about some of the movement’s further conclusions.
Hodges’ driving concern was that the evangelical tradition had drifted into requiring conditions for salvation beyond simple faith in Christ’s promise. His reading of John’s Gospel, particularly texts like John 3:16 and John 6:47, emphasised the radical simplicity of the faith response: “whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” Any addition to that, Hodges argued, was an addition to the gospel itself.
What Free Grace Teaches
In its stricter form, the Free Grace position holds that repentance is not a component of saving faith but a call to changed living addressed to those who are already believers. Passages that connect repentance with salvation are read as referring either to a post-conversion call to discipleship or to a change of mind about Jesus specifically, not a turning from sin. The lordship of Jesus is similarly separated from saving faith: a person receives Jesus as Saviour without any commitment to or acknowledgment of His lordship, with that relationship potentially developing later.
The movement also draws a sharp distinction between what it calls “the saving message” and discipleship teaching. The saving message is simply the promise of eternal life to the one who believes; discipleship teaching about following Christ, bearing fruit, and counting the cost is addressed to those who are already saved. Luke 14:25-33, where Jesus speaks of counting the cost of following Him, is read as a call to discipleship rather than an evangelistic call, and is therefore excluded from the basic gospel presentation.
What Free Grace Gets Right
The movement’s concern to protect grace from human additions is genuinely important and worth taking seriously. Sola fide is not negotiable. Salvation is by grace through faith and not of works (Ephesians 2:8-9), and any presentation of the gospel that makes salvation dependent on the quality of a person’s surrender, the sincerity of their repentance, or the completeness of their consecration has departed from what Paul proclaimed. The Galatian churches were in serious error, and Paul’s response left no room for ambiguity. Any addition to faith alone in Christ alone as the condition for justification is a different gospel.
Free Grace scholars are also right that the “carnal Christian” is a genuine category in the New Testament. Paul’s Corinthian correspondence addresses believers behaving in deeply unspiritual ways, and Paul still regards them as believers. The assumption that genuine salvation always produces obvious, immediate, and visible fruit fails to account for the genuine complexity of Christian experience and can produce a form of assurance grounded in performance rather than in Christ.
Where Free Grace Goes Wrong
The difficulty with the Free Grace position is that it requires the New Testament’s consistent call to repentance to be read in ways that are exegetically very difficult to sustain. Acts 17:30 states plainly: “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.” This is not addressed to believers about their post-conversion life; it is addressed to the Athenians who have never encountered the gospel. Acts 20:21 describes Paul’s entire ministry as “testifying both to Jews and to Greeks of repentance toward God and of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.” Repentance and faith appear together in Paul’s own summary of what he proclaimed.
Luke 13:3 and 13:5 are equally direct: “unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” The word is metanoeo, a genuine change of mind and direction. These texts are not naturally read as post-conversion calls to discipleship; they are addressed to people who are not yet in a right relationship with God.
The stricter Free Grace position also runs into considerable difficulties with 1 John, which was written specifically “so that you may know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5:13) and which provides a series of evidences for that assurance. The person who walks in the light, loves fellow believers, and keeps God’s commandments has genuine evidence of new birth. The person who claims to know God but consistently shows none of these things is, in John’s stark terms, a liar (1 John 2:4). Free Grace readings that restrict 1 John’s tests to questions of discipleship rather than salvation struggle against the plain intention of the letter.
Perhaps the most serious pastoral concern is what happens when the “carnal Christian” category is pushed to its logical end. If a professing believer can show no evidence of spiritual life, no love for God or fellow believers, and no movement in the direction of obedience throughout their entire life, and still be regarded as genuinely saved on the basis of a past moment of assent, the category “genuine believer” has been stretched to the point where it is no longer meaningful in the way the New Testament uses it.
So, now what?
Grace is genuinely free: it cannot be earned, it does not depend on the quality of one’s repentance, and it is not measured by subsequent performance. But genuine faith in the New Testament is more than bare assent to a promise; it is genuine personal trust in Christ that involves a real turning of the will and produces real evidence of new life. Protecting grace from works does not require emptying faith of its genuine content. Titus 2:11-12 holds it together precisely: “the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age.”
“For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions.” Titus 2:11-12
Bibliography
- Hodges, Zane C. Absolutely Free: A Biblical Reply to Lordship Salvation. Dallas: Redencion Viva, 1989.
- MacArthur, John F. The Gospel According to Jesus. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988.
- Ryrie, Charles C. Balancing the Christian Life. Chicago: Moody Press, 1969.
- Pinson, J. Matthew, ed. Four Views on Eternal Security. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002.
