Hyper Grace Examined

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A Review of Mystical Union by John Crowder

Hyper Grace—also known as “finished work” theology—has taken root in churches around the world in the last 10 or so years, particularly in charismatic circles. Its closest historical equivalent would be the sinless perfectionism theology of Wesley and the holiness movement, though with several important differences. One the one hand, both movements reject Luther’s teaching of simul justus et peccator (that the believer is both saint and sinner). However, Hyper Grace denies Second Blessing theology and instead asserts that the sinful nature is eradicated at the moment of regeneration.

I will be reviewing the arguments in John Crowder’s Mystical Union as being representative of the Hyper Grace movement. Crowder is one of this teaching’s well-known proponents, and this is his landmark book on the subject. Although I am sure he has expanded somewhat on his ideas in the past 10 years since publishing, the core ideas are all here for examination.

One of Crowder’s self-proclaimed intentions in writing the book is that of dismantling the “Galatian Bewitchment” of the church. This hearkens to Paul’s rebuke of the Galatian church which had returned to the heresy of works-righteousness. Their backsliding is clearly stated in Galatians 3:3—Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?

Crowder, relying primarily on the Unio Mystica passages of Galatians 2, Ephesians 4, and Romans 6, asserts that the Reformers’ separation of Justification and Sanctification is a form of the selfsame Galatian Bewitchment. Rather than having a passive righteousness that is perfect in Christ and an active righteousness that is a work-in-progress throughout the life of the believer, Hyper Grace teaches that you are totally sanctified at the moment of belief—you no longer have a sin nature and cannot be considered a “sinner” in any real sense. Crowder’s goal is to persuade believers to stop viewing themselves as sinners and wallowing in a defeatist mindset. He urges the reader who has been born again to view themselves as holy, sanctified, and even “perfect”.

The Good

While ultimately I must demur from the core tenets and conclusions of Hyper Grace theology, I would first like to explore some of its positive attributes as expressed in the book. In the first place, I agree that an unhealthy defeatist attitude toward sin has a grip on the church. With regularity, sinful behavior is trivialized—if not excused—with trite phrases such as I’m just a sinner saved by grace or nobody’s perfect. In fact, the New Testament does not use this language of believers, whom Paul refers to as “saints”, “the body of Christ”, “the new man”, “the temple of the Holy Spirit”, and more.1 While believers are not said to be sinless or perfectly mature,2 the general disposition of the Christian is righteousness in the mind of the Apostle. This ought to be reflected in our own mindset as well.

Crowder explains, “We’re not saying it is “impossible” for a Christian to sin. But we are saying that you don’t have to sin another day in your life because you are now completely evil free. Living with sin is not your standard. Normative Christianity is sin-free living because you are thoroughly cleansed of evil. You are not a sinner.”3

As one of my former pastors used to say, we never “have” to sin as Christians. While we cannot deny the reality of sin after salvation, I agree that we should not view sinful behavior as the standard of normative Christianity. We must use the same language of ourselves that Scripture uses. Sinning should be the exception, not the rule, once the “old man” has been crucified to Christ and we live according to the Spirit.

Too often, in my opinion, the church has seen the cross as the impetus for forgiveness alone and not of the rebirth. We have been trained to believe—whether implicitly or explicitly—that one who “accepts Jesus into their heart” is now eternally “saved”, but that their practical lives need not necessarily change. Yet the Scriptures speak of the reality of regeneration, of new life, of being born of the Spirit and putting off the old man.4 Additionally, the book of 1 John is filled with marks of the individual who abides in God: love, obedience, dwelling in the light, etc. To this end, I commend Crowder’s earnest effort to reframe our diminished understanding of the power of the cross. Indeed, even on a human level, faith precedes action. And the power of believing strongly in the new birth will go a long way in producing fruits of holiness.

I also give credit for the author’s efforts to dismantle the Galatian Bewitchment of the church. It has been a constant temptation since the beginning of Christianity to return to a form of works-righteousness after the time of repentance and faith. This is one area that even Crowder admits the Reformers excelled in. They had a supreme view of the sovereignty of God in making sinners righteous. They held to a strictly monergistic soteriology—they attributed nothing of their salvation to their own efforts. In my view, this profound reliance on the God who justifies5 must be recovered if we are to maintain peace with God.

Finally, I compliment Crowder on his critiques of the “Charismatic Voodoo” that has infiltrated the church in recent decades. Many have become absorbed in and committed to elaborate formulas to the end of invoking the Holy Spirit, so much so that it has turned into something that looks eerily like witchcraft. For some, if they don’t blow the shofar or anoint with oil in just the right fashion, the Spirit is unlikely to “show up”. These formulas are typically built on good past experiences that are subsequently idolized and canonized, such that the believer is deceived into thinking this is how God always works. Crowder blows this mindset out of the water, emphasizing again God’s sovereign will in displaying His power as He chooses. This self-policing of the charismatic movement is much needed and appreciated.

These compliments being said, I must reject the final destination of these trajectories that Crowder teaches in Mystical Union, as we shall see.

Critiques

Since the very beginning of Christian writing, great attention has been given to the topic of sin after repentance and salvation. Christian documents as early as the second-century Shepherd of Hermas dealt with this issue directly.6 The Roman Catholic church has developed, over the centuries, systematic prescriptions of penance to deal with the guilt of the believer’s sins. The Reformers, on the other hand, held fast to their doctrine of passive righteousness, but they still exhorted believers to live a constant life of repentance, in light of the sins that the Christian inevitably commits after regeneration.

Crowder takes a different approach than either of these: He claims that, once you have been reborn, the sin nature no longer exists:

“The truth is that you do not have to kill off or fight those negative emotions or sinful appetites. The truth is that the old appetites have already died. Stop trying to shadowbox something that doesn’t exist. Agree with the truth, that you are a new creation. You don’t make yourself new. Stop striving. Rest in the reality that the old you is dead and powerless. It was nailed to the tree.”7

For Crowder, sin from a believer is redefined as “a momentary lapse in judgment”, and the solution is not to confess your sins to the Lord and ask forgiveness. Rather, the solution is to realize your way into holiness, simply “[b]e who you really are” and go along your way.8 This is the point at which the weaknesses of Crowder’s paradigm start to show. This praxis of virtually dismissing sin rather than gravely recognizing and confessing it stands completely out of touch with both church history and everyday experience. It even calls into question whether someone holding to this theology could legitimately pray the Lord’s Prayer (Forgive us our debts).

Crowder goes on to deny the need to please God or seek God, as we are already pleasing to God and have already found him through the work of the cross. In the first place, such a teaching struggles to make sense of Paul’s many exhortations for the Christian life, in particular his command to “try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord”.9 Further, much if not most of the Psalter—which has been a guide for Christian prayer from the very beginning—would have to be discarded, as it contains prayer after prayer of the writer’s earnest attempts to seek the Lord. And the book is filled with lamentations for those seasons of the Lord withdrawing his presence. Such prayers would be reduced to a mere historical curiosity and could not be prayed by us or used to understand our own experiences of prayer.

Perhaps one of the biggest faux pas committed by Crowder is his simplistic reduction of the term “sanctification” in the New Testament to refer to complete practical holiness. The Reformers taught a concept of sanctification more akin to a sliding scale, wherein the believer becomes more practically holy as the Lord works in his or her life. Crowder asserts a more binary paradigm, wherein sanctification comes to mean 100% moral perfection at the time of faith and salvation.10

It is true that several New Testament uses of the word sanctification refer to a past-tense event when speaking of believers.11 The base definition of the word refers to “setting apart” and may be applied to a number of things. However, Crowder reads his own very specific definition into the word as it appears in Scripture. Whereas sanctification may in some cases refer to the Holy Spirit’s setting apart of believers for ultimate salvation12 or, alternatively, separation from the fleshly ways of the Gentiles,13 Crowder flattens out the term in every passage to mean the complete eradication of any sin nature in the believer.

The Reformers were clearly aware of the various referents of the term sanctification in Scripture, but their own use of the word as a theological category was very specific: the gradual progress of practical morality in the life of the believer, empowered by the work of the Holy Spirit. In his attempt to dismantle this doctrine of progressive sanctification, Crowder points out that the term sanctification is used in a past-tense sense with regard to believers, and he uses this fact to claim that he has debunked hundreds of years of teaching on the subject. In reality, he is flattening all nuances of the Scriptural word into one idiosyncratic definition, and he is conflating the Reformers’ theological category with any and every use of the word in the New Testament. This methodology simply has no leg to stand on.

In the end, the paradigm that Crowder is selling must, of necessity, introduce its own form of confession and repentance, though under different terminology. Sprinkled here and there throughout the book in small asides, Crowder disclaims that it’s not “impossible” for the believer to sin, and he speaks of what to do when you have the aforementioned “momentary lapse of judgment”. Instead of admitting your sins in prayer, asking for power to overcome temptations in the future, the “finished work” believer is exhorted to realize that such behavior is not who he or she really is. One must realize that they are holy, and by doing so he or she will act in holiness in the future. Instead of growing more practically holy, we are growing more mature. This is Crowder’s understanding of “renewing the mind”. No confession or repentance is necessary. In fact, such would be an insult to the finished work of Christ! Yet this process of “realization” and self-affirmation after instances of sinning becomes its own version of the “penance” that Crowder derides so vehemently. So we end up back at square one, and now we are perhaps worse off, as we are no longer able to take comfort in the many Scriptural prayers of repentance, which are solely to be employed by unbelievers—and only once!

Conclusion

While I appreciate some of the emphases that Crowder is seeking to restore to the church’s mindset, I am forced to reject his main thesis. His case from Scripture is rather weak and requires cherry picking both verses and translations, failing to account for New Testament exhortations of right living. Beyond that, his teaching is simply out of touch with personal experience, and intuition alone is nearly enough to reject it. In this book, we are asked to throw away nearly every teaching on the subject from the first century up until today. Of course he makes the same claim as the sixteenth-century Reformers—that he is simply recovering a teaching that had been lost. Yet unlike the Reformers, he fails to substantiate his teaching from Scripture.

For those interested in further discussion of the topic, Michael L. Brown, Ph.D. has published a well-researched book on the topic.

  1. I tend to agree with Crowder’s take on Romans 7—that Paul’s self-description in the passage is of his life prior to regeneration.
  2. See Paul’s comment that they are “foolish” in Galatians 3:1 (translated “idiots” in some renderings).
  3. Crowder, John. Mystical Union. Santa Cruz, CA: Sons of Thunder Ministries & Publications, 2010. Kindle Edition. Kindle Location 413.
  4. See John 3, Ephesians 4. All Scripture quotations are taken from the English Standard Version.
  5. Romans 4:5.
  6. See especially Shepherd of Hermas 31:6, “But I say unto you,” saith he, “if after this great and holy calling any one, being tempted of the devil, shall commit sin, he hath only one (opportunity of) repentance. But if he sin off-hand and repent, repentance is unprofitable for such a man; for he shall live with difficulty.”
  7. Mystical Union. Kindle Location 397.
  8. Ibid. Kindle Location 596.
  9. Ephesians 5:10.
  10. It is fair to say that Crowder would bifurcate “moral perfection” from “complete maturity”. For him, the former is attained at salvation, while the latter is a growth process.
  11. E.g. 1 Corinthians 1:2; 6:11; Acts 26:18.
  12. Perhaps 1 Corinthians 1:2 would be a good example.
  13. E.g. 1 Thessalonians 4:3-5.