Is “Saving People From Their Sins” the Ultimate Mission of the Church? A Repudiation of “Reformed” Rev. Chrissy Gordon

R2K “Minister”
Quote from 2023

1.) Could anybody tell me what is wrong with toughness and humor (pugnacity and jocularity) being the type of Christianity one lives? Is this a case where people like DeYoung and Gordon are offended by having a sense of humor? Clearly, no one will be accusing DeYoung and Gordon of having the toughness required in order to be accused of being “pugnacious.”

2.) The Reformed have always believed that “saving people from their sins” is only the means to a greater end. It is the Lutherans, historically, who believed that “saving people from their sins” was the end of the message of the Gospel. Contrary to Lutherans, the Reformed always held that “saving people from their sins” was only a means to the higher end of a people determined to live for the glory of God. One of those ways people live for the glory of God is the cultural transformation that is the product of saved people seeking to live for the glory of God.

“Perhaps most striking is the difference in emphasis on justification between Luther and Lutheranism on the hand and Reformed theology on the other. For the former, justification is central to the whole of theology. It is the doctrine by which the church stands or falls. It functions as a kind of critical methodological tool by which any aspect of theology, or theology as a whole is to be judged….However, there is hardly an instance in Reformed theology placing justification in the center. Not that Reformed theology opposed justification by faith alone, or salvation by pure grace. On the contrary, they saw salvation in its entirety as a display of the sovereign and free mercy of God. The explanation lay in the fact that, for Reformed theology, everything took place to advance the glory of God. Thus the chief purpose of theology and of the whole of life was not the rescue of humanity but the glory of God. The focus was theocentric rather than soteriological.”

Robert Letham
The Work of Christ – p. 189-190

Another way to put the differences between Lutheranism (what Gordon is trying to sell) and Reformed worldviews is that for Lutheranism salvation is for man and terminates on man, individually considered while for Reformed thought salvation is for God and serves the terminating end of a renewed cosmos dripping and saturated with God’s glory. For Lutheranism the teleology is man atoned for, whereas for Reformed thought the teleology includes but doesn’t end with man atoned for. For Reformed thought the teleology is the atonement as well as all the totality of corresponding and inevitable consequences that the atonement brings upon men who have been atoned for. Atonement for individual men is not the end product of Christ’s work. Atonement is the beginning and creating point of enlisting men into the cause of cosmic renewal for the glory of God. Men are not atoned for and saved for the sake of being atoned for and saved. Men are atoned for and saved to be put on a mission to take captive every thought and take dominion over every crevice of the cosmos to make all thoughts and all crevices obedient to King Christ. In Reformed thought, classical Lutheran thought is provincial and anthropocentric and is far to horizontally circumscribed and vertically nugatory.

Whatever Gordon is expressing here (I think it is Lutheranism) this is not the way the Reformed have thought over the centuries.

In other words… Rev. Gordon is just flat out in error here. However, nobody is surprised by Rev. Gordon and error going together like peas and carrots.