Trans- what?

When talking about the saving of a soul we must trust God to do this His way and not come up with some doctrine of our own. Tony Evans (whom I love to hear preach) in his book (which I have in my office, have read and like, not this part) “Totally Saved” makes up a doctrine to fit his sotieriology.
He calls it transdispensationalism.









Here is Tony Evans quote from “Totally Saved”:
“Everybody is saved through Christ, even those who lived before Jesus came, because in the mind and heart of God, Jesus was already sacrificed to pay for sin before the world was ever created (see Revelation 13:8). So a person can be saved without knowing Jesus’ name, but not without Jesus’ provision for sin.
In the case of a person who never hears the gospel and never knows the name of Jesus, but who responds to the light he has, God treats that person like an Old Testament saint, if you will. That is, if the person trusts in what God has revealed, God deals with that person based on the knowledge he has, not the information he never received. I call this transdispensationalism.God judges that person based on his faith in the light he has received. And as in the case of Abraham, God will retroactively count this person as righteous by applying the death of Christ from the dispensation of grace.”



Here is John MacArthur’s Answer

Yes, the question about—I did make reference to the phrase, “transdispensationalism,” almost sort of throwing it away; at the same time, I know it provoked some discussion and thought. It is a term that, to my knowledge, has only been used by one person, and that person is Tony Evans in a book entitled Totally Saved. That book came out, I think, in the year 2002; it was published by Moody Press. It is a book that endeavors to give a very, very simple and basic understanding of salvation.

At the end of the book, there is a chapter in which the question comes up about people who have never heard the gospel. And, in that section, Tony writes that people who never hear the gospel, if they will accept whatever light they have, God will acknowledge that as sufficient for their salvation. That, in itself, is a—that is a departure from historic Christian gospel. We would say that if someone lives up to the light they have, then the Lord, who is not limited in His capacity to deliver the truth, will bring the full light—and that no one could ever be saved apart from Christ.

This is more of the thing that Tony Campollo says, that people are being saved by Jesus who don’t even know there is a Jesus. This is that “wider mercy” view as it’s called. This is also under what has been termed “natural theology”: that natural theology will lead someone to God, and if the person doesn’t have access to the gospel, then God’s not going to hold them responsible for what they don’t know.

And that’s essentially the argument of this book, that in the world, there are going to be people who never hear the gospel, and they are not going to reject the light they have. They’re going to accept the light they have, and God will count that as sufficient to save them.

And then comes the interesting comment that He does this by transdispensationalizing them. That is, treating them as if they were living in another dispensation. Obviously, there is no biblical defense for that, and none is attempted in the book—none. There isn’t even a verse to defend that. (end quote)

Why is it in this rush to defend God when it comes to sotieriology, do we feel we must say more than the Bible says.