Dispensationalists have long argued for a strong commitment to biblical doctrine. They have insisted that this commitment must also include separation from others who have departed from the fundamentals of the faith. This principle has for many years served to maintain a high degree of doctrinal purity in New Testament churches. When the church surrenders this important principle, serious doctrinal consequences will inevitably follow.   In the early 1990s, leaders in the evangelical church decided to cast this principle aside, which has devastating results.

            Beginning in early 1992, fifteen prominent Roman Catholic and Evangelical leaders who were concerned with the inroads of secularism began to meet together regularly to discuss the situation. One of the suggestions that came out of these meetings was for Catholics and Evangelicals to unite together in resisting these secular advances of society. A document outlining their vision for unity, entitled Evangelical and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium  was drafted by Richard John Neuhaus, a Roman Catholic leader and editor of the magazine First Things. This document was formulated and endorsed by a large number of well known evangelical leaders such as Charles Colson, the late Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade, Reformed Theologian J.I. Packer, and Pat Robertson of the television show, The 700 Club.

            Usually, when Christians unite with those holding unorthodox views, it is not long before the Christian begins to sacrifice and compromise fundamental and important biblical doctrines. Before the ink was dry on the document called Evangelicals and Catholics Together, the Evangelicals had compromised on the most important doctrine of the last five hundred years of church history, the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Why did evangelical leaders endorse such a document? Was it that they now agreed with Roman Catholic Theology? This may be partly true. Was their signing a result of careful Bible study? This is unlikely. The principle reason they signed this ECT document was that they wanted to marshal more forces to re-Christianise North America . The church which has the largest resources and the most political force is the Roman Catholic Church. Reformed theologian J. I. Packer writes:

North American culture generally has lost its former knowledge of what it means to revere God, and hence it has lost its values and standards, its shared purposes, its focused hopes...so that it drifts blindly along materialistic, hedonistic, and nihilistic channels. Again, it is the theological conservationists, and they alone – mainly, Roman Catholics and the more established evangelicals – who have the resources for the rebuilding of these ruins, and their domestic differences about salvation and the church should not hinder them from joint action in seeking to re-Christianise the North American milieu.

            Packer writes that “domestic differences about salvation should not hinder us from joint action” with Roman Catholics, as if these differences were minor, insignificant, and trivial. The doctrine at stake here is justification by faith alone. It is the doctrine of which Martin Luther proclaimed, “The first and chief article of the faith on which the church stands or falls!” C. H. Spurgeon once said, “Justification by faith alone is not an arm of Christian theology but the heart of it!”

            Right doctrinal teaching and wrong doctrinal teaching will both reap lasting consequences. How has this emphasis affected the doctrinal thinking of the evangelical church as a whole? Christian journalist Edward Plowman reports in World magazine that in an informal survey of the attendees of the 1998 National Religious Broadcasters Convention, of those who responded, 92% agreed with the statement: “Justification is the process by which I am made holy by God's Spirit.” Unfortunately, this statement is a summary of the Roman Catholic position on the doctrine of justification. Biblical justification is the act of God where he graciously declares individuals righteous through faith alone in the finished work of Christ on the cross of Calvary . The ECT controversy serves to illustrate that the Dispensational position of separating from those who hold serious doctrinal error is essential to the ongoing spiritual health of the church. The failure to take this truth seriously will result in grave consequences for the body of Christ.

By David Dunlap. The Glory of the Ages