Entries Tagged 'Theology' ↓

Bought this for Zoë on Tuesday from babyGap.

Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal. It’s a cute dress, summer is approaching, and it’s usually not a noteworthy thing for parents to buy new clothes for their kids On this trip, though, I went in there specifically looking for a pretty white dress.

For her baptism.
(And no, she has not yet made what I’d call a “credible profession” of faith in Christ.)

Buying it freaked me out a little bit. Even though Amy and I have studied and prayed through this and have come to agree that the children of believers should be baptized, it’s still a bit weird that we’re actually going through with it. Kinda like the feeling I got when I first put on my suit on my wedding day.

More on this later.

[By the way: no way was I about to get her one of those crazy ornate wedding-dress-like baptismal gowns that we often see -- check out this page for examples of what I'm talking about. No way. One -- EXPENSIVE, especially for a one-time event. Two -- we wanted something that she'd be able to wear again throughout the summer. Three -- it'd just look strange in our church, I think.]

A scenario to consider:

• A particular evangelical church is in the plateauing/declining stage.
• Said church hires young, handsome, dynamic new pastor.
• Said pastor preaches a sermon to his new flock on the assurance of salvation.
• Said sermon has as one point (among others) that to be assured of salvation, one must be able to point back to a particular moment in time when he “asked Jesus into his heart”.
• A woman who’s been a member and leader in the church for years is shaken by this point, as she can’t remember a definitive moment that she came to believe. She proceeds to pray the “Sinner’s Prayer” right there as the pastor preaches.
• She informs the pastor after the service that she had done this, and a few weeks later, she’s baptized.
• A few weeks after her baptism, the woman is informed by the church’s elders that, after meeting about the matter, they’ve decided that it would be best to remove her as Head Deaconess (and from the deaconesses altogether), because she’s a “new Christian”.
• She is more than a little put off by this decision and withdraws almost completely from the church.

This actually happened recently at a church around here (and before anyone starts wondering, no, not my church). This scenario probably plays out at least monthly in countless evangelical churches, honestly. I was bothered when I heard about it — horrified and disappointed, actually. It’s never made sense to me that so many otherwise solid churches teach that one’s salvation can be judged by whether or not one has prayed a particular prayer (and remembers it). Scripture teaches that faith in Christ is a gift given by God (”I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules” - Ezek. 36:26-27), without regard to whether someone has prayed a prayer, signed a card, raised a hand, or has responded to an “altar call”, and without regard to how “good” someone has been. Assurance doesn’t come from any of these things. A better question would be “do you believe at this moment? Do you trust and treasure Jesus now?”

Back to this (now former) deaconess at this church for a moment.  Let’s entertain the notion that the elders are technically right in removing her from her position of leadership.  Scripture does indeed warn again giving positions of office in the church to new converts.  Let’s say that she really was a new convert who’d previously had no real faith in Christ.  Fine.  Why, then, has she been a member of your church for the past ten years?  What did you miss in the membership interview process?  The whole “credible profession of faith” thing, maybe?  That’s kind of important.  Or did she give a credible profession, and now you think that she was just full of crap (or “mistaken”)?

(I find it much more likely that she did indeed already have saving faith in Christ and that she just had no remembrance of exactly when that began.  As it stands, the church has lost a valuable leader and her faith is shaken, probably unnecessarily.)

Now, don’t get me wrong; there can be great value in remembering a time and place that you first consciously trusted Christ. Great value.  As a matter of fact, I remember my own “moment” like that . . . I was six years old. It was a hot summer night in Mobile, Alabama, and I was on my grandfather’s front porch with my Dad and my Aunt Lily. They talked to me about Jesus, about how everyone needs him and that being a “good boy” isn’t enough, and asked if I wanted to be “saved”. I said yes and we prayed together (actually, I think my Dad did all the praying). I was happy to be headed to Heaven, and spent the rest of the night trash-talking the Devil and shooting him with pretend Jesus Ice Beams from my newly justified fingertips. It’s a precious memory for me, and God used that time to draw me to him.

What I’m saying is that the occurrence of such a moment (or its remembrance) isn’t a ground for reconciliation to God. While it may encourage some believers if they can look back on such a moment (as it does me), binding someone’s conscience by making it a litmus test is wrong and baseless. Not only that, but I can’t even enumerate the number of people I’ve heard say “well, I know I’m going to Heaven because I prayed a prayer/went forward/signed a card when I was little!”

Pastors . . . teachers . . . Christians: stop believing this lie. Then, stop lying to others. You’re spooking many true believers and damaging their faith, and you may be giving false assurance to people who actually don’t believe anything.  Just preach Christ and him crucified.  He’ll draw those who he will, when he will, and he may not do it with a “Sinner’s Prayer” or an altar call.  It’s okay.  Really.  Jesus isn’t a formula.

At a small group meeting, somewhere in Middle America . . .

Nerd 1: There are some theologians whose names you can’t even mention in some circles as being worth listening to without having eyebrows raised at you. Mention their names as cuss words, maybe . . .

Nerd 2: Yeah . . . I think you’re Wright about that.

Nerd 3: I dunno, I think you’re N. T. Wrong.

Nerd 1: Well . . . how about we look at this text to try to get some New Perspective on things.

Nerds 1-3: *snickering*

Everyone else: *uncomfortably looking around*

Amy and I went out to dinner last weekend, enjoying a nice “night off” from being parents (Zoë was spending the night with Amy’s mom). At some point during our conversation, I said “sooooo, what would you say if I told you that I’ve been thinking about having Z baptized?” She asked why, and I went into the best basic explanation of covenant theology that I could muster with half a glass of wine in me (it might’ve actually been better than it would’ve been without the wine). After I was done, I asked what she thought. She paused, and then to my utter shock, she said “I think that we should do it”. I’m not even convinced yet, but I suppose my explanation was fair, since it at least helped to convince her. The fact that we both grew up in churches that were predominately dispensational in their theology — standing in direct contrast to covenantal thinking — it’s a pretty big leap for either of us to even consider infant (or in this case, toddler) baptism. A firm decision still hasn’t been made, but the fact that Amy’s already on board has made me feel better about things.

A few days later, she mentioned to her mom and grandparents that we’re thinking (just thinking) about it. The idea was met with some expected eyebrow-raising and skeptical questions, but her grandma gave us some real gems . . .

“Why would you wanna do that? That’s stupid!”
(Okay, guess you’re not coming if we decide to do this.)

“She won’t remember it! What about when her friends at your mother’s church are being baptized ‘for real’? She’ll want to do it then.”
(Sorry, I don’t think that we’d approve of her going through something as weighty and sacred as baptism just because “everybody’s doing it”.)

“Well, that’s okay. We’ll have her baptized ‘for real’ at our church when she’s old enough to decide for herself.”
(HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! *ahem* Sorry. . . sorry. Now, as I was saying . . . HAHAHAHAHA!!!! *pointing*)

Gotta love the respect we’re shown for our parental decision-making.

Anyway . . . like I said, there’s been no firm decision made yet. I need to be honest with myself about this whole thing. Will we be doing this because we really believe that we’re obeying Scripture by doing so, or will it be just because we’re members of a Presbyterian church now, and well . . . “everybody’s doing it”? How much of this is motivated by the fact that I want to be an elder in this church in a few months (which, by the way, I think is a legitimate motivation . . . just not a legitimate primary motivation)? How much is now wanting to annoy my grandmother-in-law?!

Pray for us.

We’re thinking of having Zoë baptized.

*ducks bottles, tomatoes, and various other objects being thrown by my Baptist friends and readers*

EthicsDaily reports that Southern Baptist Convention president Frank Page argued for women’s ordination in his 1980 Ph.D dissertation. He has long since changed his view to a more complementarian one, believing that the office of pastor is scripturally reserved for men only.

So my question is this . . . who cares what he wrote 26 years ago? Do the egalitarians consider this some sort of “a-ha, you’re outed” moment?

Hey, EthicsDaily . . . 20-some-odd years ago, I believed in the Tooth Fairy. Write a story on that.

Tags: Southern Baptist Convention, SBC, EthicsDaily, Frank Page, completmentarianism, egalitarianism, gender roles, female ordination

My friend Stephanie believes that the foment of controversy over the Doctrines of Grace will eventually split the Southern Baptist Convention, possibly within the next ten years.

What do you think?

The United Church of Christ is at it again.

Unsatisfied to rest upon the “Bouncer” ad that garnered so much attention a little over a year ago, they’ve returned with a new ad designed to highlight that church’s “inclusiveness”. The commercial is set in a church. One by one, certain parishioners are ejected, fighter-jet style, from their pews: a black woman, a gay couple, a man of Middle Eastern descent, and a man with a walker. This admittedly humorous sequence is then followed by these words: “God doesn’t reject people. Neither do we.” Of course, the implication is that some churches . . . those mean, nasty, theologically conservative churches . . . will shut you our unless you’re a) white, b) male, c) heterosexual, and d) able-bodied. To accompany the ad, the church has created a new site called RejectionHurts.com as a place for those who have felt like church outcasts to share their stories. Like the “Bouncer” ad of late 2004, the new one has been rejected for air by the Big Four over-the-air networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox), though it will air on some cable networks.

Now, allow me to tip my hand. Anyone who knows me well and/or has had theological conversations with me knows that very little gets under my skin worse than liberal “Christian” theology, of which the UCC (as a whole . . . there are exceptions) is a stalwart. I believe that liberal theology undermines the Word of God and the Gospel of Christ in a myriad of ways, including . . .
- replacing talk of personal sin and responsibility with that of only corporate or national sin and responsibility
- replacing the need for personal belief, repentance, and sanctification with the need for acts of “social justice”
- treating Scripture as if it can be invalidated by some “new thing” that God is supposedly saying
- treating the words of Jesus as if they are more “God’s Word” than the rest of Scripture (thereby accepting His words as the only authoritative ones in the Bible)
- calling evil “good” and good “evil”, as warned against in Isaiah 5.

I truly abhor liberal theology and believe that those who preach it are not only marching slowly towards Hell themselves, but leading hundreds of thousands along that same path. I pray that those who espouse it will repent and return to Him that they claim as their Lord. That said, I think that the UCC’s marketing gurus are brilliant with these advertising campaigns that they know (and likely hope) will be rejected by network TV. The controversy generates free repeated airings for the ad on news broadcasts who report on the story, gets people to visit their website, and subsequently, their churches. Brilliant, I say! I might consider myself an accessory for linking and even talking about this issue (though I’m not “reporting” objectively like CNN would . . . I’m voicing opposition).

Back to the ad’s content . . . I find it dishonest, in that (like last year’s ad) it implicitly attacks other church groups as somehow less “open” or “inclusive”. Sure, the official word from the church is that “[i]t does not mean to suggest that other churches reject people and that we have not”, the connotation is just that, and that’s what people who see the ad will pick up. While there are certainly tragic incidents where churches or denominations sinfully shutter their doors or consciously fail to minister to certain types of people (see the RejectionHurts site for some examples), those cases are fewer and farther between than the ad would like to imply. When it comes down to it, it seems, what the UCC really wants people to know that they strive to include everyone, regardless of their race, gender, class, or biblically condemned lifestyle, in the “full life and participation” of their church. This not only means that they want people of all stripes to come and hear their message, but that they’ll ordain women as pastors* and unabashedly invite unrepentant sinners to partake in church membership, the Lord’s Supper, and ordained leadership. If this is what “inclusion” looks like, I’ll have no part in that. Give me a church that DOES invite sinners and the disenfranchised in the doors and that invites them to be loved, forgiven, and changed by Christ . . . not one that coddles sin and refutes clear Biblical teaching.

So how about the ad’s tagline, which I’ve chosen as the title for this entry: “God doesn’t reject people” . . . I beg to differ. The Bible is replete with God’s rejection of certain people and certain people groups for a number of reasons. The bottom line today is this: He rejects those who reject Him. Turning toward and embracing one’s sin without repentance is a rejection of Christ, and the fact that an apostate church tells you otherwise means very little.

*By the way, so no one freaks out on me and calls me a misogynist or a sexist or whatnot . . . I do not find women to be inferior to men in any way. Quite the opposite, actually. Still, I am a complementarian when it comes to gender, and that includes church life. I believe that scripture limits the church office of pastor/elder to qualified men, according to 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1. I honestly would like to believe otherwise at times, but the witness of scripture and the Church will not allow me to. I’ve heard some arguments from the other side, but none of them have yet been academically, scripturally, or historically compelling enough.

(HT: WesleyDaily and Chuck Currie)

tags: United Church of Christ, UCC, StillSpeaking, media, liberal theology, liberal Christianity

Just finished The Radical Reformission yesterday and I’d like to share a couple of things that hit home as I read.

On sectarianism (fundamentalism) . . .

To let go of culture is fundamentalist sectarianism. Sectarianism is the huddling up of God’s people to enjoy eachother and Jesus without caring about anyone who is lost and dying outside of Christ. To justify themselves, sectarians will often quote 1 Thessalonians 5:22 from the King James Version, which poorly translates this verse to say that we are to avoid every appearance of evil, when the text actually says that we should avoid every kind of evil, which is a different matter altogether. Sectarianism inevitably leads to irrelevance and is unfaithful to Jesus’ prayer that we not leave this sick and dying world that does not know him.

While sectarians may cling to the gospel for their personal piety, they hide their light undera bushel. And so the story of Jesus stays at home with my family, with my church, and with my Christian friends because for us salvation is a place to end and not a place to begin. Eventually, sectarians become so dated and removed from people in the world that their churches are little more than museums dedicated to the past, with dumb reader boards outside that sound like silly telegraphs from an alien planet.

Conversely, on syncretism (theological liberalism) . . .

To let go of the gospel is liberal syncretism, which also leads to irrelevance. How? By rarely, if ever, speaking of sin and repentance in personal and not just institutional and systemic terms. Syncretism simply baptizes unscriptural beliefs in the name of limp-wristed relevance, social progress, being nice, and making a good nonjudgmental impression. Syncretism inevitably dissolves into a universalism in which God loves everyone, and will forgive everyone’s sins and take everyone to heaven because he simply lacks the courage to judge anyone. Eventually, syncretists become less distinctively Christian in favor of an inoffensive spiritual mush. Visiting syncretistic churches is like entering a mutual admiration society in which people pat eachother on the back for having a social conscience and nod in agreement through sermons that sound like sappy greeting cards strung together to make us feel like we just got a divine backrub while doing aromatherapy, drinking herbal tea, and listening to taped sounds of running water.

(post-post note: This is long and rambly and vainly autobiographical. Just the way blogs should be.)

I’m a baptist stuck in a presbyterian (church) body, and that’s okay. God put me here.

I’ve been doing some thinking about the fact that my family and I will soon be joining a Presbyterian church, and how that fits in with my self-identification as a “reformed baptist” (and if it even matters). Through high school and especially in college, I was one of those adamant “just a Christian”-type Christians, valiantly refusing to be shackled to a denominational label. Why, then, did being a “baptist” suddenly matter so much to me? Do I really care that much about congregational governance? How much study have I really put into baptism?

I grew up going to Christian & Missionary Alliance churches. The Alliance is a very missions-oriented denomination that leans slightly toward an Arminian and dispensationalist mindset (though they’re officially neither), has a credobaptistic understanding of baptism, and a Zwinglian view of the Lord’s Supper. (Ironically enough, it was founded by a renowned Presbyterian minister named A. B. Simpson.) Despite my non-denominational lip service, I internally thought that I was going to be a lifetime C&MA guy. I loved (and still love) their committment to the Great Commission.

After I moved to Jackson, TN in 2002, Amy and I (before we were married) decided to look for a church after months and months of utter heathenry. Since she grew up in the C&MA as well, we naturally looked for an Alliance church first. The closest one was over an hour away in Memphis, though, so that idea quickly went by the wayside. We searched for a few weeks and settled on a church affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention . . . not a difficult thing to find, since the city was home to Union, one of the nation’s fastest growing Baptist universities (where Amy was a student). The church we started attending, and eventually joined after we married, had some of the SBC’s most prominent scholars as pastors. We were growing in our faith, experiencing better “community” than we ever had, and being taught truth by some of the best around. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had a growing affinity for Baptist identity and history. At the same time, I was being introduced to reformed theology; its fidelity to Scripture opened my eyes to truths I’d never even considered. I was reading the Bible in a new way, hearing sermons with new ears, and praying with renewed fervor, and communing with Jesus in a way I hadn’t in years.

Fast-forward to 2005: our world had been turned upside-down by unemployment, forcing a move to Columbus, Ohio. As a couple, the first thing on our agenda toward again finding stability was to quickly find a good church to commit to. Along with the base requirements of believing and teaching the Bible, I wanted to find a church that believed and taught the reformed doctrines of grace (or that was at least reformed-friendly). After months of conversation, prayer, and visits here and there — some good, some bad — we settled on an urban church plant of the Presbyterian Church in America. We quickly fell in love with the liturgy, the people, and the vision of this church. I knew the entire time that our joining a presbyterian church was a possibility, as presbyterianism is largely an across-the-board reformed movement. I also knew that if such a thing happened, I’d end up having issues with the big pillar of reformed theology that I hadn’t yet come to agree with: infant baptism. As time went on, the long-dormant call to ministry that I first sensed in high school crept back, and the opportunity to do seminary-level education through the PCA arose . . . but I felt a tinge of betrayal toward the baptist heritage that I’d assumed during the last few years.

After letting that guilt eat at me for a while, I just last week realized something that I’d known all along . . . my committment is to Christ, not to the Southern Baptist Convention, not to congregational government, not to credobaptism. The main reason I’d become so committed to those things was convenience and proximity to all things SBC; not earnest study of scripture, prayer, and reasoning. Realizing this was like the clichéd “weight lifting from my shoulders”. Serving and learning and possibly pursuing ministry in the PCA was something I could freely do now without hiding from all of my baptist friends or qualifying everything with “but I dunno about the whole baby-sprinkling thing”. I mean, I still don’t know about it, but I can also honestly say that I equally don’t know if it should be withheld from the children of believers either. What had been almost a shameful thing has become a freedom to learn and explore.

So, I remain teachable. For now, I’ll call myself a “credobaptistic Presbyterian” and struggle with the issue in due time. Maybe I’ll continue to insist on believers-only immersion; maybe I’ll become a covenantal paedobaptist. I don’t know, and right now, it’s not a concern. I just want to serve Christ and his church, and now without the **BAPTISM** weight on my brain, I can more readily do so.

If you made it all the way through that, congrats. Worst. writing. evar.