Jesus Saviour and the Evil of Hawking Him
Hoeksema critiques the prevalent practice of sensationalized evangelicalism and emotional mass evangelism, which he argues degrades the gospel by presenting salvation as a commodity dependent on human choice rather than God's sovereign grace. This polemic defends Reformed preaching standards against what Hoeksema sees as the theological and pastoral dangers of revivalism and the 'salvation-huckstering' methods of popular evangelists.
Among the evil tendencies of our age that are destructive to the church of Christ and subversive of sound doctrine, I consider the rapidly growing practice of hawking Jesus and the spiritual blessings of salvation one of the most sinister. Salvation-hucksters, pretending to be profoundly concerned with the salvation of sinners, traverse our land, know how to draw the masses in gigantic evangelistic or revival meetings by their emotional preaching, frequently of the coarser type, and, instead of...