The false teaching of hypergrace comes with a warped fallacious psychology. At best, it is pop psychology peppered with pep talk half-truths. But more often than not, it is based not on evidence but on fallacies, ridden with straw-man arguments and distracting fireworks.
One specific area of concern is hypergrace’s great avoidance pseudo-theology that spews forth a corresponding great avoidance pseudo-psychology. Let me explain.
First, this false psychology claims that the moral law of God causes our sense of condemnation that leads to death, now and hereafter. This is completely false and unbiblical. The real cause of death is sin in us, not the law. The law, like a mirror, exposes our sin and its corollary sinful behaviours. Upon being exposed, we feel condemned due to battered pride (itself a sin) but in Christ we can feel convicted rather than condemned—convicted with new energy to turn away from sin and turn towards God in repentance. There is no avoidance of the fact of our sin and no avoidance of God’s great grace and mercy. This is psychologically healthier than avoiding the fact of sin and shifting blame onto the perfect law of God. That would be a lie. Blaming the problem on God’s law is convenient but blasphemous.
Secondly, hypergrace pseudo-psychology arouses hyped-up expectancies about life that predisposes the psyche to want and expect only pleasant ‘feel-good’ after-effects—health, wealth, business success, babies, sales booms, reverse ageing, worldly breakthroughs and the like. Whether one forms concrete images of their desired outcomes in life (reminiscent of the new-age law of attraction) or not, there is no doubt that a network of expectancies are planted in the psyche that gears it towards pleasure and comfort. Such expectancies are tied to resistance to bad news, perceived ‘negative’ words, and unpleasant occurrences of any kind. Fear reigns, though hidden in the shadows.
When negative events like pain or loss occur or when someone speaks negative news or reports, a vehement aversion to such events or reports arises. Defensive against anything that could challenge one’s hyped-up expectancies, one avoids at all costs the reality of pain, loss, failure, despair, despondency, anxiety, fear, suffering, trial, tribulation, persecution and the like. One defensively rationalises it away and indulges in mindless positive confessions just to wipe away all negativity. Anyone that manifests such negative conditions are necessarily judged negatively and avoided in a feat of escapism. Suffering is rationalised away to fit their warped avoidance pseudo-theology. What is this but a form of denialism and projection of one’s fears?
In short, hypergrace does not offer a healthy evidence-based approach to psychology. Rather, it is avoidant and denialist, unbiblical and damaging. It seeks to avoid negative emotions and adverse experiences, fearful of open contact with the moment and unable to accept things as they are. Obsessive positive confessions and reactive adversity avoidance make for a brittle unhinged psychology that pretends to be healthy but is actually less than whole. When chronic and unrepented for, this hypergrace warped psychology may lead one to eternal destruction of the soul that has become bereft of Christ and the biblical principles He teaches. Let us not be deceived.
