Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream

With this chapter, Platt moves from questions of wealth and poverty and back to his other main point in Radical: the necessity of spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ and making disciples on a global scale. One of the dangers inherent in American culture, he contends, is the way people tend to move from an affirmation of the equality of people to an affirmation of the equality of ideas. If all ideas are valid, then all ways of reaching God are also valid, in which case Christian evangelism is no longer necessary. But such an assumption goes against the clear teaching of Scripture.

Platt uses the apostle Paul’s progression of ideas in the book of Romans to make his case, arguing for seven clear biblical principles that leave no room for a universalist approach. First, Paul contends that all people already have an inherent knowledge of God from the natural revelation of the world around them. Second, despite this knowledge, all people reject God and choose to indulge in sin instead. Third, because of their sin, all people stand guilty before the presence of God. This leads to the fourth principle in Romans, which is that all people are condemned before God because of their transgressions.