VIII Preface

In this manner, the emphasis of all those concepts in which true conversion, grace, and sanctification The author uses these terms to describe the traditional stages of a believer's spiritual life: turning to God, receiving unmerited favor, and being made holy. are described would be lost. And these very doctrines themselves—much like the almost entirely denied doctrine of the vicarious satisfaction of Jesus The theological concept that Jesus suffered as a substitute to satisfy the requirements of divine justice on behalf of humanity.—would, in time, be forgotten.

Whoever, therefore, cannot agree with this trend, and who confesses—either orally or in writing—the immensely great depravity of human nature, the eternal Divinity, and the actual sacrificial death of Jesus, and who takes the words "you must be born again" (or, born from above) in the highest, supernatural, and literal sense, seeking to experience it and commending it to others—that person is viewed with true hostility or, at the very least, with a contemptuous pity.

Indeed, this hostility and this contempt for true worshippers