THE FRIGHTENING ATTITUDE OF THE EVANGELICAL CHURCH TOWARDS GENUINELY GOOD NON-CHRISTIANS

The world is full of genuinely good people who would not call themselves Christians or ‘religious’. Yet what they do have in common with genuine Christians is that they also live a similar life-style of costly self sacrifice and loving service to human kind (and/or the environment) and their lives are characterised by consistent ‘good fruit’. In fact such people show exactly the same ‘fruit’ that good Christians display. Some, indeed, may show a lot more fruit a lot more consistently than some Christians ever do!

Yet tragically, when confronted with people like this (and remember, this world is full of them), the official evangelical position is that the genuinely good things done by non-Christians, even when they are identical to those done by Christians, can never ever be seen as the sort of ‘good fruit’ that Jesus speaks about in Matthew 7. On this logic they refuse to class such people as the ‘good trees’ whom Jesus obviously regarded as true disciples. In fact evangelicals will claim that such goodnesses cut absolutely no ice whatsoever with God, are at best mere humanistic good works, and can therefore never be that which establishes a ‘saving’ relationship with God.

Even worse, many will say that God actually despises the good things non-Christians do! To support this shocking view, they will, totally out of context, quote Isaiah 64.4, saying that God regards unbelievers’ good deeds as nothing but ‘polluted used menstrual rags’. Note, it is only the ‘unbelievers’ whose good deeds are despised. Christians, if they do identical good things, are said to be displaying a wonderful example of the love of Christ!

Lest it be thought that I am exaggerating this issue I share the following conversation. In a recent discussion on precisely this issue, an otherwise very caring and likeable evangelical man in his late twenties came out with these exact words to try and counter what I was saying about the often profound self-effacing goodnesses of non-Christian people. “Oh, sorry,” he exclaimed, “these people aren’t the ‘good trees’ that Jesus spoke about, and they can’t be producing ‘good fruit’. Their good works are just ‘humanistic good works’.”

How did this tragic understanding arise?

The short answer is that it came about through inadequate evangelical biblical scholarship. (For another most important slant on the reasons behind this understanding, read carefully the article on The Broadness of Salvation.)
This evangelical view is based largely on:
1. A mistaken interpretation of Paul’s words in Ephesians 2.8-9.
2. A mistaken understanding of the fundamental purpose and nature of Christ’s work on the cross, and therefore
3. A mistaken understanding of the ‘new covenant’.

1. Misunderstanding Paul’s words in Ephesians
Paul writes in Ephesians 2.9-10, “For it is by grace that you are saved through faith, this is not of yourself but is the gift of God. Not by works, least any man should boast. For we are God’s workmanship recreated in Christ that we may do good works which God had prepared in advance for us to do.”

Over the centuries evangelicals have interpreted these ‘works’ that can’t save us as ‘good works’, that is acts of love, generosity and compassion, despite the fact that in 2.9 Paul does not insert the word ‘good’ in front of ‘works’ at all.

Throughout Paul’s letters, on virtually every occasion when he wants to refer to works of compassion and goodness, he uses the term ‘good works’. This precise point is emphasised even more by Paul’s very next words when, in 2.10, and referring directly to acts of loving compassion, he uses his usual term ‘good works’. To interpret ‘works’ in 2.9, as evangelicals do, to mean ‘any form of human goodness’ is seriously flawed, especially when the meaning of what Paul is trying to say is painfully obvious.

What were these ‘works’ that cannot save you? It is clear that when, in this context, Paul uses the word ‘works’ he is referring to the ‘works’ of the Jewish purity law, not to ‘good works’, an error perpetuated for hundreds of years from evangelical pulpits. Even the conservative evangelical Bible translation, the Amplified Bible, supports this view when it translates the first part of 2.9 as, “Not because of works [not the fulfilment of the law’s demands]…..”

This is made even more obvious when we consider the following:

a) Paul’s great obsession and contribution to Christian doctrine, and the subject that dominated most of his letters, was precisely the futility of the Jewish sacrificial and purity laws to forgive sin and bring about a real relationship with God.

b) The church at Ephesus, like most of the churches of this area, was made up in part of Jewish converts to Christianity.

Paul had spent three months arguing in the synagogue at Ephesus. When he was finally kicked out he would, undoubtedly, have taken his many Jewish converts with him. He was to spend another two years in Ephesus. During that time he would make many more converts from among the sizable Jewish population. They would become part of the Ephesian church. (See Acts 19.) In Ephesus, as in all of the churches with Jewish converts, the whole issue of what, if any, place Jewish purity laws had in the Christian scheme of salvation was a hot topic and an ongoing issue of debate and controversy. In the light of this, to imagine that Paul would have used such an obvious Jewish ‘code’ word as ‘works’ and not meant by it ‘the works of the law’ is inconceivable. Therefore, to claim as evangelicals try to do that the word ‘works’ in this passage refers to ‘works of goodness’ is, at best, bad scholarship, at worst, quite unbelievable.