Call it a dog whistle, a secret handshake, a shibboleth- it matters not. We all have our ways of communicating which tribe we belong to, all without offending, or even informing, those outside the club. You’re having lunch at work with various forms of professing Christians, all engaged in friendly discussion. The guy from accounting says, “Well, as Machen said, ‘There’s Christianity and then there’s liberalism’” you, if you are Reformed as I am, would have found a friend.
So far- no harm no foul. What happens though when the next guy mentions his firm conviction that volume 8 of the Left Behind series is by far the most faithful to what the Bible says about the end times? Now if I were to ask you, “Did Jesus die for dispensationalists?” you would swiftly affirm that such is true, as would your Machen quoting friend. The problem is that when your dispensational friend spoke his mind you and Machen Boy caught each other’s eyes, despite the heavy rolling all four eyes were going through. Those rolling eyes silently communicated this message- you and I are a higher order of Christian than this poor rube who embraces such a flawed eschatology. Why, he probably thinks he got his eschatology from the book of Revelations.
Now I believe in the sovereignty of God. I believe in the 5 points of Calvinism. My disagreements with the Westminster Standards could fit on a postage stamp. Were I ever a Methodist, my homeboys would have been Martin Lloyd Jones and George Whitefield. That commitment, however, requires that I recognize that I am not justified by being a Calvinist, but by the grace of God, that I am no less depraved than my dispensational brethren, that theological logic ought to burn like fire, and that, in agreement with Whitefield, I don’t think I’ll see that old perfectionist Arminian John Wesley in heaven, because he will be so much closer to the throne of grace than I will be.
I’m Reformed, Reformed enough to know that my closest friends within the kingdom are not those who cheerfully enter the boxing ring to fight in defense of Calvin, but those who woefully enter their prayer closets to cry out for the defense of Christ. I hope this tribe, the ones who get grace, doesn’t have a secret handshake. The moment we pat ourselves on the back as being the crew that “gets grace” is the moment that we demonstrate that we don’t get grace. Thankfully, however, even when we don’t get grace, we do receive it. Just like our cranky brethren, our dispensational brethren, our Wesleyan brethren. Instead I pray we learn to recognize each other this way, by our joy in having received grace, and our swiftness in showing it others.