Tag: Essay

For a job application I’m filling out right now to teach at a Christian school, I’ve been asked to share my testimony “including approximate date of conversion,” and it occurred to me that I’ve never actually shared the story of the beginning of my Christian walk on this site.

Frankly, I have ambivalent feelings about the term “conversion,” not because I’ve never had one, but because I believe I’ve had at least two. When I was about five years old, I remember coming out of church in early spring and praying to God that he would “make me a Christian.” (Apparently, I had been asking lots of questions the preceding few weeks – questions along the line of how the preacher managed to stay dry in his suit while baptizing people.) When I prayed, the image came to my mind of a poorly drawn stick figure, and I had a sense that my prayer was…insufficient. But the following Sunday, as my parents got ready for church, I echoed the sinner’s prayer after a preacher on TV. I immediately ran to my mother and announced that I was now a Christian. I was baptized a few weeks later. This would have been around 1983.

You may have some doubts about the authenticity of my “conversion” in such as simplified format, so early in my life. “Where’s the heart-felt repentance?” you may say. I started asking the same thing about a year later. I remember being at school, back behind a pre-fab classroom, with a group of boys, boasting. Oddly enough, however, we weren’t comparing the normal attributes that young boys are prone to demonstrate. Instead, we were each bragging about how young we were when we got saved. The assumption seemed to be that the younger you were when you became a Christian the more innately holy you must have already been, to come to Christ so quickly. I have no idea, I only remember bragging.

That next Sunday, there was a guest speaker at our church who preached a powerful evangelistic message. The gist of the message was that you might *not* be saved, though you had repented, if you had come to Christ for the wrong reason. What if, for instance, you had become a Christian simply for the sake of status or reputation? I was cut to the heart. My very words from the pulpit against me. When the time came for the altar call, I swore to be the first to rise. Eyes blurred with tears, I hurried toward the steps, to grab hold of the horns of the altar, as it were. I wanted to be a Christian, and not one in name only!

As I knelt and prayed, I waited for the pastor or a deacon to come and talk with me. Instead, my mother came. I poured out the secrets of my hear to her, and asked how I could know that I was saved, and that I hadn’t merely “prayed with wrong motives.” I don’t believe she actually showed me the verse in Romans 8 that says, “The Spirit himself bears witness,” but she told me she believed that the Holy Spirit would confirm my state before God if I asked him to. So I did. I prayed, and received a confidence that God looked on me and saw a Christian.

Nevertheless, upon conversion, I immediately became a perfect hoodlum. My life was not marked by a desire to live out the gospel. When I was 9, my parents moved, and I was placed in an exceptional Christian school, where I learned (among other things) that my hurtful, self-centered way of behaving was not the best tool for winning friends. Over the next year and a half, I worked on reforming my manners, and succeeded in making myself a very nice, attractive boy. My reform efforts were so successful that, while I had been wildly unpopular in that school, when we moved again and joined a new church, I found I had discovered all the secrets I needed to “win friends and influence people.” I had become very good at making myself liked. However, in all this my heart was not converted. Continue reading “Testimony”

Recently, I taught the World’s Shortest Church History Lesson to the kids in my Sunday school. What I tried to accomplish in one hour was to trace the three ways people have tried to established religious authority since the Reformation. That’s a Big Undertaking, I know, and it requires a lot of simplification, but here’s what I came up with:

The three bases for religious authority that people usually appeal to are: 1) Tradition, 2) Scripture, and 3) Nature (or “science”). From three very different foundations, you get three very different kinds of movements: If your primary basis for controlling what you believe and the way you do church is Tradition, what you end up with is Fundamentalism (if it’s good enough for grandpa, it’s good enough for me). If your primary basis for controlling what you believe and the way you do church is Scripture, then what you end up with is Evangelicalism (Evangelical – meaning “gospel based” since the number one thing you can derive from scripture is the gospel – everything else is extra). Interestingly, in Germany, the Lutheran church has always called itself the Evangelical church. Last, if your primary basis for controlling what you believe and how you do church is Nature, or “science,” what you end up with is something you might call “modernism” or “liberalism.”

The odd thing is what happens when you look at how these kinds of ideas have played out in the last 500 years. Continue reading “World’s Shortest Church History Lesson”

I may be getting my facts mixed up, but in his best-selling book Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond describes the history and fare of several people groups located in the South Pacific. At least in that book, theirs is the story of non-ascendancy in the face of the continuous, precipitous rise of Western, continental nations. To summarize a 300 page award-winning book in only a few words, they were destined to be conquered because they were isolated. As these islands were settled, they arose to precisely the level of density that the land could support, a level too low to develop specialization, on islands too isolated to acquire technologies in the normal interactions of men. Their first contact with foreigners inevitably came in the form of invaders with vastly superior armaments.

The odd thing about these islands though, is that it was rarely as simple a situation as one nation per island. Sometimes a nation would consist of one island, but it was just as likely to be several kingdoms on a single large island, or an “empire” reaching across an archipelago. This strikes me as remarkably similar to the churches I grew up in. Continue reading “Island Nations”

Or: A Few Thoughts on Infant Baptism

Disclaimer: I am not, nor have I ever been a practitioner of infant baptism. I have never baptized anybody. I was raised in the rural parts of Southwest Oklahoma, first among Southern Baptist churches, and finally among non-denominational charismatic churches. To my knowledge, there are no pedobaptists of any stripe in Southwest Oklahoma. Quite frankly, the very idea of infant baptism gives me the heebie-jeebies.
Nevertheless:

1. Infant baptism is the practice of the ancient church.

   There are no denominations that trace their origins to before the Protestant Reformation, either “Orthodox” or “Catholic,” and which also practice credal baptism.

2. If infant baptism was an early innovation that differed from the practice of the apostles, it occurred so early and so quietly that there is no record of it whatsoever in church history.

   If differences between between credal and infant baptism have caused such difficulties in our time, surely they would have caused a stir in an era that was willing to commit murder over a difference of one word in the doctrine of the Trinity. Yet there is no record of such a fight.

3. If infant baptism is unscriptural, so also are the use musical instruments and art of any kind in worship.

   The modern practice of credal baptism stems from a radical application of Zwingli’s “regluative principle,” which says that only those practices which are specifically prescribed by scripture may be allowed in the church. It is on the basis of this principle that Zwingli banned art and music from his church’s worship. The Anabaptists were those who insisted Zwingli had not gone far enough, and wished to also ban infant baptism on the basis that it wasn’t clearly prescribed by scripture. Since there is marginally more support in scripture for infant baptism than for art and music, those who use these things in worship should not argue that infant baptism isn’t mentioned in scripture. Else, those who argue against infant baptism should also argue against art and music.

4. Credal baptism attempts to do the work of God by removing all the tares from the field before the harvest.

   The effect, and usually the intent, of credal baptism is to ensure that the church is composed entirely of believers whose salvation is assured. Yet Jesus compared the church to a field in which an enemy had sowed tares in with the wheat. Credal baptism, then, is an effort to “weed out” the tares. This is a futile effort (there are always tares), and potentially harmful: Jesus himself said that removing the tares before the harvest could destroy some of the wheat.

5. Baby dedications are either infant baptism in disguise, or an unscriptural sacrament

   Among churches which practice believer’s baptism, a new practice has arisen, which has all the effects of a sacrament: A newborn infant is taken before the church and blessed by the elders. Sometimes the child is annointed with oil; always they are prayed for. Often the congregation is invoked to support the child’s Christian development. The only discernable difference between this practice and that of infant baptism is the presence of water.

   If baby dedication is a form of baptism, then these churches are guilty of performing two baptisms, and possibly creating a church within the church. If it is not a form of baptism, then they have created a new sacrament to replace infant baptism, and which has no support in scripture.

As I said in the title, these things *almost* persuade me to become a pedobaptist. There are other arguments in support of credo-baptism that are persuasive for me – particularly the fact that Jesus based his baptism on John’s, which was clearly performed on those who were themselves repenting, and also Paul’s comments on Christians and circumcision.

Nevertheless, the strongest motivating factor for me is tradition: baptism upon confession is the system that I grew up with and which I have known my whole life. I can’t imagine offending all my friends and family over this issue. But this is a pitiful appeal on an issue where the opposition has a **much** stronger tradition.

If tradition is my strongest point, then there is little doubt that if I had lived in Luther’s time, I would have been a pedobaptist.

As I recover from my ill-advised attempt at in-school employment, I’m sprinting through a book for class called Living the Story by R. Paul Stevens & Michael Green. It’s not bad as devotionally oriented books go (though I wouldn’t have picked it out for myself – I’ve gone over a lot of their points before), and it actually very interesting insights, particularly on the Wisdom books of the bible.

But I wanted to pull out something on Revelation that I seem to be coming across a lot lately: it’s this description of the Revelation of John as being a product of John’s imagination.

I’m not really sure what to make of it. The idea seems to stem from the fact that Revelation falls clearly within the apocolyptic genre that was popular in the classical age, a genre that is particularly inaccessible to modern readers. So to make it easier to understand, we play up the fact that this kind of literature was particularly accessible in the era in which it was written, and that these kinds of images were common to the age. Fine so far. But then we start talking about sanctified imagination, and things start to get a bit blurry. Continue reading “Revelation – Or Isn’t It?”

When I was in the business of looking for a wife (what the unsophisticated might call “dating), my methods were a little bit different from what you might expect. Usually, I think, a man figures that the hard part is getting and keeping the girl’s attention. So he tracks a girl down whom he thinks is pretty and with whom he has a few interests in common, and sets about trying to impress her, and keeping her impressed. Honestly, I looked at my character, and figured that I was sufficiently malleable, that I was sufficiently good an actor, or even a liar, that I could probably get and keep the attention of any girl in the world, at least for a little while.

But from the very beginning, I wasn’t looking for a really good date, or a few weeks of happiness. I was looking for a **wife**. So I asked myself, if every woman in the world was at least a potential spouse, how do I pick the *right* one? And so I set about thinning out my options. (Apparently, I was *very* successful, for Valerie and I are far and away a better match for each other than anyone ever could have dreamed. But I credit that to God’s mercy more than my machinations. Nevertheless…)

In my process of “thinning out the options,” I had two powerful weapons in my arsenal. Continue reading “On Children”

A few days ago, Joe Carter mentioned something in passing that set me to thinking. He said that there was a growing sentiment that Jesus, contrary to what we’ve been used to thinking, was more of a rabbi than a carpenter. And that’s set me to thinking. I’d been hearing these rumors for a while: Jesus the rabbi. But I’d taken it to be just another shift in emphasis in the flow of what people are talking about. I hadn’t realized that people were taking it in as an either/or sort of question. Was Jesus a carpenter or a Rabbi?

Here’s how this works: as Jesus entered into that 3 year period of public ministry, we tend to think of him as some kind of itinerant preacher circa the 19th century Methodist evangelist. But that’s our paradigm of a traveling minister. They didn’t have those in the 1st century A.D. What they did have, at least in Israel, was the itinerant rabbi. So when Jesus walked the dusty streets of Galilee and the decapolis, he settled into the mold of what people knew: the rabbi. Which is why you frequently hear people addressing him as ‘teacher’ or, ‘rabbi.’ And Jesus accepts this form of address without hesitation.

This is fine so far as it goes, with one caveat: The one truly remarkable thing about Jesus’ ministry, at least from the perspective of “Jesus as rabbi” was the fact that he had no formal education. Continue reading “The Rabbi and the Yoke”