An Open-Handed Gospel

We have to decide whether we have a stingy or a generous God.
Richard J. Mouw
4/03/2008

Excerpt:
"In a speech I heard several years ago, the Japanese-American theologian Kosuke Koyama put it nicely: We all have to decide, he said, whether we have a generous God or a stingy God. And the truth is that we evangelicals often give the impression that we have decided to be a spiritually stingy people. A recent Barna Group survey, for example, offers evidence that many young people in the larger society think of evangelicals primarily as "judgmental" types, hostile toward folks in other religions and mean-spirited in our attitudes about homosexuality. Even many young evangelicals share some of these assessments of the older generation. A leader at an evangelical college said it this way: "A lot of our students worry about typical evangelical attitudes toward people who have different belief systems and lifestyles. It's not that they don't take the Bible's teachings seriously. It's just that they have gotten to know Muslims and gays, and they are embarrassed by the harsh spirit toward such folks that they see in the older generation. If we don't do something about this negative image soon, we could easily lose them for the evangelical cause."

Nothing here justifies our capitulating to moral relativism or retreating from the insistence that salvation is found in Jesus Christ alone. We must resist those errors with all of our being. An understanding of divine generosity that inhibits us from calling sinners to bring the burden of their sin and guilt to Calvary is a denial of the gospel.

A number of years ago, I wrote a book on the subject of Christian civility. I was inspired to do so by a delightful line in one of Martin Marty's books. People today who are civil, Marty observed, often don't have very strong convictions. And people who have strong convictions often are not very civil. What we need, he said, is convicted civility."
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