Does Jesus + Nothing = Everything?

By David P. Murray

Tullian Tchividjian. Jesus + Nothing = Everything. Wheaton: Crossway, 2011.

Great title (wish I’d thought of it).

Great writer (wish I had Tullian’s talent).

Great quotables (wish I could remember them all).

But also great confusion (and I wish I didn’t have to say that).

I benefitted from reading Jesus + Nothing = Everything. Tullian Tchividjian writes beautifully about Christ’s sufficiency, and is especially skillful at exposing legalism and explaining justification. Each time I read the book, I was brought to a new love for Christ and a new appropriation of and appreciation for justification.

Tullian also models how to apply the gospel to very painful life situations—not just to the beginning of spiritual life, but to all of life. He’s amazingly honest about his own character flaws and personal failings, but that does allow him to demonstrate the way the gospel relates to his life and transforms it. I hope I can model that transparency a bit better in my own life and ministry. It probably comes easier to a surfer than a Scot!

I also benefitted from Tullian’s emphasis on the need to found sanctification on justification, the need to base daily growth on the daily preaching of the gospel to oneself. Too often we separate these, and I’ve been guilty of this at times as well. So, thank you, Tullian. These are not small achievements. You’ve done the church a great service.

And let me say that I also love Tullian’s enthusiasm for Christ. Although I will express some concerns about this book, I do believe that most people who read the book will catch Tullian’s infectious gospel enthusiasm and be the better for it. I know I did and am.

However, I’m concerned about three confusions at the heart of Tullian’s book.

• The confusion between justification and sanctification
• The confusion between personal experience and universal experience
• The confusion between standing with God and enjoyment of God

The Confusion Between Justification And Sanctification

I do believe there is a fundamental confusion in this book between justification and sanctification. More specifically, the confusion is between justification and the outworking of sanctification (not the basis or beginnings of it). I doubt anyone could do a better job of explaining justification and its benefits than Tullian. Also, as I’ve said above, Tullian is very clear on the need to found or base sanctification on justification. Instead of beginning with “I resolve…,” we must begin by igniting the rocket fuel of justification. However, it’s when Tullian lifts off the rocket launcher and into the realm of what sanctification looks like in ordinary everyday life that confusion begins to arise.

Maybe I can sum up my concerns by highlighting a phrase in the Shorter Catechism’s unrivalled definition of sanctification (which I would imagine Tullian’s church also adheres to). “Sanctification is the work of God’s free grace, whereby we are renewed in the whole man, after the image of God, and are enabled more and more to die unto sin, and live unto righteousness.” The work of God’s free grace in us enables us to die to sin and live to righteousness. In contrast to justification, which is accomplished for us with no reference to what we’ve done or not done, sanctification involves our not doing certain things and doing certain things, all by God’s enabling grace.

The problem in Tullian’s book is that he keeps sliding from sanctification to justification. For example, here he is writing about a wrong view of sanctification, but ends up saying things that are only true about justification.

I used to think that growing as a Christian meant I had to somehow go out and obtain the qualities and attitudes I was lacking. To really mature, I needed to find a way to get more joy, more patience, more faithfulness, and so on. Then I came to the shattering realization that this isn’t what the Bible teaches, and it isn’t the gospel. What the Bible teaches is that we mature as we come to a greater realization of what we already have in Christ. The gospel, in fact, transforms us precisely because it’s not itself a message about our internal transformation but about Christ’s external substitution. We desperately need an advocate, mediator, and friend. But what we need most is a substitute—someone who has done for us and secured for us what we could never do and secure for ourselves. (94) [1]

I agree that the gospel is certainly a message about Christ’s external substitution. But it does not stop there. The gospel is also a message about internal transformation (a major part of sanctification). Christ saves us from our sins objectively and subjectively, from the penalty of sin and the presence of sin.

In this next excerpt, Tullian says that Christian growth (sanctification) is looking away from self and looking to Jesus and His performance for us. But is that the whole of sanctification? It’s certainly the essence of justifying faith, and the beginning of sanctifying growth. But it’s not the whole of growth or the sum of sanctification.

The hard work of Christian growth, therefore, is to think less of ourselves and our performance and more of Jesus and his performance for us. Ironically, when we focus mostly on our need to get better, we actually get worse. We become neurotic and self-absorbed. Preoccupation with our effort instead of with God’s effort for us makes us increasingly self-centered and morbidly introspective. (95)

In this next paragraph, the confusing overlapping is even more obvious:

Again, think of it this way: sanctification is the daily hard work of going back to the reality of our justification. It’s going back to the certainty of our objectively secured pardon in Christ and hitting the refresh button a thousand times a day. (95)

If all he is saying is that sanctification begins with our appropriating justification, and is fueled by it, then yes, I agree. But I think he’s going further than that, by suggesting that the totality of sanctification involves going back to our justification. This seems to be confirmed by what he writes in the same context:

Think of what Paul tells us in Philippians 2:12: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” We’ve got work to do—but what exactly is it? Get better? Try harder? Pray more? Get more involved in church? Read the Bible longer? What precisely is Paul exhorting us to do? He goes on to explain: “For it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (v. 13). God works his work in you, which is the work already accomplished by Christ. Our hard work, therefore, means coming to a greater understanding of his work. And so it is that we move further into the gospel, into a deeper, bigger, brighter understanding of all that God has already achieved for us in Christ. (95-96)

Is it correct to say that the “work” that we are called to and that results from God’s work in us, is simply understanding more, believing more, trusting more? This is the core of justification, and the foundation and cement of sanctification, but it’s not the whole of sanctification. It’s not every brick of it.

Here are some further quotes that only heightened my anxiety about Tullian’s emphasis:

Growth in the Christian life is the process of receiving Christ’s “It is finished” into new and deeper parts of our being every day, and it happens as the Holy Spirit daily carries God’s good word of justification into our regions of unbelief—what one writer calls our “unevangelized territories.” (78)

In this definition of growth (sanctification), where is the “being enabled to die to sin, and live to righteousness” as described by the Westminster Catechism? Where is the doing and not doing?

I like to remind myself and others that the only thing you contribute to your salvation and to your sanctification is the sin that makes them necessary. (104)

Contribution to salvation equals nil? Yes. Contribution to sanctification equals nil? No. We are enabled to die to sin and live to righteousness. We are enabled to do and not do. Our (enabled) doing and not doing is part of our sanctification. For example, when Peter protested his love to Jesus, Jesus told him to start feeding his lambs, which involved stopping to do one thing and starting to do another (John 21).

He urgently wants them to see that we’re justified by grace alone, we’re sanctified by grace alone, and we’re glorified by grace alone. (104)

Again, there is a failure to distinguish what “by grace alone” means in each of these doctrinal categories. In justification, by grace alone means we do nothing. In sanctification, it means we are enabled to do/not do many things.

As G. C. Berkouwer wisely remarked, “The heart of sanctification is the life which feeds on justification.” (190)

Yes, the heart of sanctification, but not the whole body of it. In this next quote the heart of sanctification, a good grasp of justification, is again made to stand for the whole of it:

Sanctification consists of the daily realization that in Christ we have died and in Christ we have been raised. Life change happens as the heart daily grasps death and life. Daily reformation is the fruit of daily resurrection. (117)

This quote begins to highlight why my concerns are not merely theoretical. Below, I hope to show that this view of sanctification results in an unusual mix of internal activity and external passivity. There’s huge internal activity involving more understanding and more faith, but virtually nothing about dying to sin and living to righteousness outwardly. Tullian seems to assume that if you put the fuel of justification in the tank, outward sanctification takes place automatically (e.g., “Life change happens as the heart daily grasps death and life”). However, you still have to put your foot on the pedal, your hand on the wheel, and begin to expend some energy to make any spiritual progress.

There are other places in the book where Tullian is much clearer and much more consistent with historic Christian definitions of sanctification. Chapter 10 is probably the best chapter in this regard. But I don’t think you can make up for confusion in such important matters in the majority of the book, by returning to a more accurate explanation in one chapter of it, and in a few other places scattered here and there. I fear Tullian’s commendable desire to re-connect sanctification with justification (a very necessary message) has led him to conflate them, and identify the one with the other. But maybe he’s also fallen into this mistake by making his own experience a rule for others, as we’ll see.

Does Jesus + Nothing = Everything? Yes and no. In justification, yes. In sanctification, no. And if you want to say “yes” to both, you’re going to have to go to great lengths to successfully explain why the sanctification “yes” is not identical to the justification “yes.” I know Tullian’s worthy aim is to exalt justification by making it a vital part of daily sanctification. But by confusing justification with sanctification, we not only risk losing the fullness of sanctification, in the long run I’m afraid that we may lose the doctrine of justification, too.

In the meantime, if you want some clarity on the relationship between justification and sanctification, may I recommend J. C. Ryle’s opening chapters in Holiness (see especially numbers 1 & 2 in Ryle’s Introduction and the differences between justification and sanctification in Chapter 2).

The Confusion Between Personal Experience And Universal Experience

I’m afraid that Tullian may have erred by making his own experience a norm for every Christian, something that we’re all liable to do at times. I’m not engaging in psycho-analysis here, as Tullian puts a lot of personal biography into this book; in some ways it’s what gives the book so much of its energy and appeal. But, it does lead him, I fear, into the trap of mistakenly extrapolating certain general truths from his own personal experience.

Tullian is crystal clear about his besetting sin—the idolatrous desire for human approval and acceptance, his addiction to being liked and praised by men (e.g., 22, 26, 41, 73, 74, etc.). It’s a sin many pastors can identify with, myself included. It’s in this area that the book helped me most, and continues to help me on a daily basis.

If that is our particular besetting sin, then our primary area of sanctification, of Christian growth and maturity, is going to be understanding our identity in Christ and putting our trust in Christ, rather than finding our identity in human praise and acceptance. That’s not going to be just our way of being justified, or just the beginning of our sanctification; it’s also going to be a very large part of our ongoing day-by-day sanctification. Our days will be marked by a massive and constant internal battle: to die to the sins of pleasing man and of striving for human praise on the one hand, and to rest in our Christ-bought identity and live for the glory of God alone on the other hand. But just because the primary spiritual battle for people like Tullian and me may be internal and focused on our identity in Christ, does not mean that it’s going to be the same for other Christians.

For example, if one of my besetting sins is laziness, then yes, I will need to begin with faith in Christ, union with Christ, and my identity as justified in Christ. But I also need to get off the couch, put on my boots, pick up the shovel, and start shoveling the snow. It’s going to involve effort, movement, and pain. There’s some doing and not doing to be done. There’s an external, physical, and muscular dimension to my sanctification. And if I can consciously hold on to my justification as I break my back, then that’s a bonus. For Tullian, sanctification will usually look more like the invisible internal struggle:

I’m not saying the Christian life is effortless; the real question is where are we focusing our efforts? Are we working hard to perform? Or are we working hard to rest in Christ’s performance for us? (168-169)

Or, if my besetting sin is an addiction to work, of course a large part of my sanctification is going to be finding rest in Christ, locating my identity in Him, not in my work. But I also have to turn off the computer at the end of a work day, leave the office, get in the car, go home, leave my phone in my coat, refuse to turn on my computer again, get out the basketball, sweat it out on the driveway with my sons, sit down on the sofa with my wife, and open my ears and mouth, etc. There’s a lot of doing and not doing to be done for sanctification to take place. The hard work involves more than resting in Christ’s performance for me. Again, there is a significant physical effort and struggle involved in my choices.

For Tullian, his sanctification will usually look more like the inner soul-struggle of pages 171-172:

I now understand that Christian growth does not happen by working hard to get something we don’t have. Rather, Christian growth happens by working hard to daily swim in the reality of what we do have. Believing again and again the gospel of God’s free justifying grace every day—and resting in his verdict—is the hard work we’re called to…. I think of it this way: the hard work of Christian growth consists primarily in being daily grasped by the fact that God’s love for us isn’t conditioned by anything we do or don’t do. Sanctification is the hard work of giving up our efforts at self-justification.

This paragraph also illustrates what I hinted at earlier—the rather passive view that sanctification somehow automatically flows from apprehending our justification. In a number of places, Tullian seems to suggest that as we grasp justification, we will somehow instantaneously and automatically get holy.

When we stop narcissistically focusing on our need to get better, that is what it means to get better! When we stop obsessing over our need to improve, that is what it means to improve!… Christian growth is forgetting about yourself! (174-175)

That “spontaneous” and “involuntary” view of sanctification is actually even more explicit in this paragraph:

So, by all means work! But the hard work is not what you think it is—your personal improvement and moral progress. The hard work is washing your hands of you and resting in Christ’s finished work for you, which will inevitably produce personal improvement and moral progress. (175)

Inevitably? Well, it might be if my main problem is thinking too little of Christ and too much of self; any reversal of that is progress. But what if my main problem is being over-critical, or being bad-tempered, or being addicted to pornography? Is there not more hard work there than turning from self and resting in Christ?

The same “passivity” seems to be encouraged in the following quotes:

Lasting behavioral change happens as you grow in your understanding of the gospel, and then as you learn to receive and rest in—at your point of deepest need—everything Jesus secured for you. (179) 

It takes the loving act of our Christian brothers and sisters to remind us every day of the gospel—that everything we need, and everything we look for in things smaller than Jesus, is already ours “in Christ.” When we do this, the “good stuff” rises to the top. (182)

Does behavioral change just “happen” as you believe more? Does the “good stuff” just “rise to the top” as we look to Christ? Maybe we should just relax and rejoice and wait until we get better then. Is that going too far? Not according to Tullian:

The gospel liberates us to be okay with not being okay. We know we’re not—though we try very hard to convince other people we are. But the gospel tells us, “Relax, it is finished.” (120) 

The bottom line is this, Christian: because of Christ’s work on your behalf, God doesn’t dwell on your sin the way you do. So, relax, and rejoice, and you’ll actually start to get better. The irony, of course, is that it’s only when we stop obsessing over our own need to be holy and focus instead on the beauty of Christ’s holiness that we actually become more holy! (184)

At times, Tullian seems to realize that he’s gone too far and rows back with some qualifying statements:

To be sure, we’re called to “mortify the flesh,” “put to death the misdeeds of the body,” “cut off our hand,” and “gouge out our eye” if they cause us to sin—and we need the help of other people to get this done. Sanctification is a community project. (181)

But then after this brief concession, which seems more like an afterthought, the confusing conflation of sanctification and justification returns again.

We’re justified—and sanctified—by grace alone through faith alone in the finished work of Christ alone. (181)

I rejoice in Tullian’s wonderful testimony as to how a new grasp of the doctrine of justification helped him through a terrible crisis in his life, and massively advanced his sanctification. His transparent sharing of that experience has helped my own sanctification as well. However, I do think he errs by implying that his very special personal experience of sanctification is the sum and substance of everybody else’s biblical experience.

The Confusion Between Standing With God And Enjoyment Of God

I fully agree with Tullian that our standing with God cannot be changed. Once I am justified, I will never be any less or more justified. My legal relationship to God cannot get better or worse. My status as an adopted son of God can never be revoked. As Tullian expertly explains, that’s an incredibly empowering truth and must be the root of all sanctification.

However, Tullian does not clearly distinguish between a believer’s standing with God and his experience of God. Let me put it this way: God’s love for the believer never changes, but the believer’s experience of that love can change. God may withdraw the assurance and the daily experience of His Fatherly love because of my disobedience. He loves me no less, but I don’t have His love shed abroad in my heart to the same extent or degree.

Let me illustrate: my wife and I are very happily married. Our status, our legal relationship, has not changed since the day we married over twenty years ago. We are no less or more married now than then. However, our experience of one another’s love has changed over the years. I can’t say we’ve ever had downs. But our ups have varied between above average to very high. Our marital status does not depend on our conduct, but our experience and enjoyment of marital love does.

As I’ve said above, I fear that when it comes to the believer’s relationship with God, that Tullian confuses (1) the believer’s unchangeable and unconditional status as God’s adopted son and (2) the believer’s conditional and therefore changeable experience and enjoyment of God’s fatherly love. Before demonstrating this from Tullian’s book, I’m aware that some might question the validity of this distinction; some may especially dislike the idea that a believer’s experience of God’s love is conditional and changeable. So let me just briefly support that with Scripture. The key verses here are John 14:21, 23. I’ve looked at a range of older and modern commentaries on this text and their unanimous voice is well summarized by John Piper:

Verse 21: “He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me; and he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” So Jesus says that he and his Father in heaven will love us in response to our obedience. 

Similarly, in verse 23 Jesus answers a question, “If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” Again Jesus promises that he and his Father will respond to our obedience with love. 

So the least we can say is that there is a love from God the Father and a love from God the Son that is a response to our keeping the word of Jesus. [2]

Now let me show you how Tullian blurs this important teaching in the following quotations:

Progress in obedience happens only when our hearts realize that God’s love for us does not depend on our progress in obedience. (51)

This may be another way of stating (1), but it is so important to also state: (2) God’s love for us does not depend on our obedience, but if we want believers to enter into the deepest experience and enjoyment of God’s love, then we must encourage them that that is at least partly determined by our progress in loving obedience.

But when it comes to our sanctification, suddenly we become legalists. In the matter of maturing in Christlikeness—and in continuing to please God and find favor with God and acceptance with God—we suppose it’s all about what we have to accomplish ourselves and all the rules and standards and values we need to adhere to. We seem to inherently assume that our performance is what will finally determine whether our relationship with God is good or bad: so much good behavior from us generates so much affection from God; or so much bad behavior from us generates so much anger from God. (98)

I admit that the way Tullian describes the connection between our loving obedience and God responding with loving communion makes it seem very robotic and unattractive. I would certainly not describe it as he does in his decrying of it, and I don’t think his caricature of it fits Jesus’ warm and inviting description of the connection in John 14. However, as we’ve seen, the Bible does link the health and vigor of our relationship with God to our loving obedience.

Legalism insists that my ongoing relationship with God is based on my ability to do good. That approach is always inconsistent with the gospel, and Paul shoots it down in every letter he writes—both through the way he structures those letters and in their content. (101)

Legalism may insist that. But as we’ve seen, so does Christ in certain ways. Again, not as Tullian portrays it here—mechanical, legalistic, cold, self-powered obedience—but rather as Christ commends it in John 14—a loving (enabled) doing, that God responds to with loving indwelling.

Perhaps it’s in this next paragraph that the slide from standing with God to enjoyment of God is most obvious. He starts off by speaking of standing, but goes on to speak of our day-by-day relationship with God.

It means that our standing with God does not depend on our obedience but on Christ’s obedience for us. That’s the good news; the gospel says it’s not what you must do, but what Jesus already did on behalf of sinners. Our standing with God is not based on our ongoing struggle for Jesus but on Jesus’ finished struggle for us. The gospel is good news—wonderful, positive, invigorating, wholesome, nurturing news—precisely because our relationship to God does not depend on our zeal, our efforts, and our generosity, but on Christ’s. That’s what makes the gospel such good news. And it’s not just good news about how we “get in” initially; it’s good news that we go back to every day because we are prone to wander into narcissism (how am I doing? what else do I need to do?). The gospel keeps us fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith. So, the gospel doesn’t just justify us; the truth of the gospel sanctifies us and develops us and matures us. (140)

Jesus fulfilled all of God’s conditions on our behalf so that our relationship with God could be unconditional. Christianity is the only faith system where God both makes the demands and meets them. (142-143)

A paragraph like this really needs to be followed up with an explanation of how our ongoing enjoyment and experience of God’s love is most certainly conditional. Because as it is, it again implies that the health of our ongoing relationship with God has absolutely no connection with our obedience or disobedience.

I know Tullian is trying to get away from the cold mechanical obedience of the legalist trying to earn God’s favor; I’m with him all the way on that one. And I know he’s also anxious to ground the true Christian’s daily walk in the gospel. However, in the process, I fear he is closing down the huge potential of the warm-hearted and loving Christian’s diligence being graciously rewarded with newer and deeper experiences of God’s love. There’s so much more to Christian experience than the rather one-dimensional presentation of it in Tullian’s book. For example, he says:

The Spirit’s continuing subjective work in me consists of his constant, daily driving me back to Christ’s completed objective work for me. (137)

That’s one element of the Spirit’s work in us—and it is a wonderful experience, no question—but the Psalms, John 14:21 and 23, Revelation 3:20, and many other places, invite us to a far wider, deeper, richer, and more soul-satisfying experience of communion with God through His Spirit. There’s a vast amount of Christian literature, not least among the Puritans, that widens the vista of the life of God in the soul of man way beyond this limited view of the Spirit’s subjective work.

As in so many places in this book, remarkably astute and beautifully expressed observations are marred by the omission of tiny words of qualification. For example, in this case, why not write: “Part of the Spirit’s continuing subjective work in me consists of his constant, daily driving me back to Christ’s completed objective work for me.” Without these little but vital words, I’d be reluctant to recommend the book to any but mature Christians who have the discernment to insert these qualifying words themselves. And that’s a huge pity, because the book’s core message so needs to be heard, and heard with the passion and energy that Tullian brings to everything he does.

In summary, does Jesus respond to our obedience with love? Two “No’s” and a “Yes.” No, not in the sense of our love coming first: we love Him because He first loved us (1 John 4:19). No, not in the sense of cold, mechanical, legalistic obedience on our part: we love Him, then keep His commandments (John 14:15, 21, 23). But yes, in the sense that Christ responds to the Christian’s loving obedience with loving indwelling, divine communion, and Trinitarian manifestation. What a powerful motivation to sanctification!

Notes

1. All page numbers are from the Kindle edition of the book. All italics are my emphases.
2. John Piper, “The Test of Authenticity in a New Sanctuary,” DesiringGod.org, September 1991. Accessed October 31, 2012. <http://www.desiringgod.org/resource-library/sermons/the-test-of-authenticity-in-a-new-sanctuary>