as language can declare, that repentance is essential to salvation and that none could be saved apart from
Jesus Explains His Gospel
spoke of "professed preachers of grace who, like the antinomians of old, decry the necessity of repentance lest it seem to invalidate the freedom of grace."2 Dr. Ironside, himself a dispensationalist, denounced the teaching of extreme dispensationalists who taught that repentance was for another age. "Our Lord's solemn words, 'Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish,' are as important today as when first uttered," Ironside wrote. "No dispensational distinctions, important as these are in understanding and interpreting God's ways with man, can alter this truth."3
Even in his day Ironside recognized the dangers of an incipient easybelievism. He wrote:
Shallow preaching that does not grapple with the terrible fact of man's sinfulness and guilt, calling on "all men everywhere to repent," results in shallow conversions; and so we have myriads of glib-tongued professors today who give no evidence of regeneration whatever. Prating of salvation by grace, they manifest no grace in their lives. Loudly declaring they are justifi ed by faith alone, they fail to remember that "faith without works is dead"; and that justifi cation by works before men is not to be ignored as though it were in contradiction to justifi cation by faith before God.4
Nevertheless, many prominent dispensationalists continued to advance the notion that preaching repentance to the unsaved violates the spirit and content of the gospel message. Dr. Lewis Sperry Chafer's Systematic Theology listed repentance as one of "the more common features of human responsibility which are too often erroneously added to the one requirement of faith or belief."5 Chafer noted that the word repentance is not found in the gospel of John and occurs only once in Romans. He pointed out also that in Acts 16:31 Paul did not tell the Philippian jailer to repent. Chafer viewed that silence as an "overwhelming mass of irrefutable evidence [making it] clear that the New Testament does not impose repentance upon the unsaved as a condition of salvation."6
2. Ibid., 11. 3. Ibid., 10. 4. Ibid., 11. 5. Lewis Sperry Chafer, Systematic Th eology (Dallas: Dallas Seminary, 1948), 3:372. 6. Ibid., 376. Th is was a curious conclusion to a section Chafer began by affi rming "as dogmatically . . . as language can declare, that repentance is essential to salvation and that none could be saved apart from repentance" (p. 373). Chafer's apparent self-contradiction turns on his defi nition of repentance: he saw it as simply a change of mind (p. 372), a turning from unbelief to faith. Repentance as he defi ned it has no reference to sin and contrition. He declared that repentance in the context of salvation is nothing more than "a synonym for the word belief" (p. 377). Th us, in Chafer's system, calling people to faith in Christ is the same as preaching repentance. One concludes that Chafer would have preferred to eliminate the word repentance from the gospel presentation altogether and thus avoid the risk of confusing "the glories of grace" in the minds of those who understood repentance as something more than simple faith (p. 378).