Why does this teaching matter?
Mitchell is naming a real imbalance, and Scripture backs the diagnosis. The apostolic gospel never separated the love of God from His judgement: Paul preached the kindness of God and the severity of God in the same breath, and grounded his evangelism in a fixed day of reckoning. A message that keeps the comfort and drops the warning is not a kinder gospel — it is a partial one, and a partial gospel leaves people unprepared for the thing they most need to be prepared for. The caution to keep alongside it is that judgement must be preached the way Scripture preaches it — in order to bring people to repentance, not to bludgeon them, and never as a lever for the preacher's own authority.
What did Philip Anthony Mitchell teach?
"I see a Christianity that is dishonourable to the Lord, and one that has lost reverence and fear of God. I see a saturation, a preaching of love and grace, and not enough preaching about wrath and judgement and hellfire."
Speaker: Philip Anthony Mitchell
Source: Premier Christianity interview, 29 January 2026
What does Scripture confirm?
Acts 17:30-31
"Truly, these times of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent, because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead."
— NKJV
Paul's sermon to a pagan audience does not end at God's kindness. The command to repent is grounded in an appointed day of judgement — the coming judgement is the reason repentance is urgent, not an optional addendum for hardened listeners.
Hebrews 12:28-29
"Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us have grace, by which we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear. For our God is a consuming fire."
— NKJV
Grace and godly fear are not rivals here — grace is the means by which reverence becomes possible. A Christianity that has lost the fear of God has not grown more gracious; it has lost the very thing grace was given to produce.
Romans 11:22
"Therefore consider the goodness and severity of God: on those who fell, severity; but toward you, goodness, if you continue in His goodness. Otherwise you also will be cut off."
— NKJV
Paul commands the church to hold both attributes in view at once. Preaching that presents only goodness is not merely incomplete — it disobeys an explicit instruction about how God is to be considered.
2 Corinthians 5:11
"Knowing, therefore, the terror of the Lord, we persuade men; but we are well known to God, and I also trust are well known in your consciences."
— NKJV
The terror of the Lord is Paul's stated motive for evangelism. Remove it and the urgency of the Great Commission has no engine — which is precisely the connection Mitchell draws in his own preaching.
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