On Evangelical Babble and Accepting Jesus Into Your Heart

This is the inaugural post in a series on evangelical-babble and pop-theology. These will be short posts on evangelical phrases that need to go, with the primary yardstick being sola scriptura: if the phrase is absent from scripture and its employment disproportionately outweighs the benefit of any good and necessary inference from scripture, it needs to be culled from Christian vocabulary. The grammar we use matters, and the language we use shapes how people think and act.

The first phrase is “Accept Jesus into your heart” and its variants. It should be said up front that no expression like this exists in scripture…