2.1 The State of Faith in America
_______________________
5. In the Parable of the Soils, Jesus talks about four different kinds of soil that the word can fall on (Mark 4). Some seed is immediately snatched by birds -- the word of the gopel goes in one ear and out the other. Then there is rocky soil. The wheat springs up immediately but lacks depth and is scorched by the sun. The seed that falls among weeds is choked by the cares of life. Finally, some seed falls on good soil and not only grows but multiplies.
It's fairly obvious that not everyone who "comes in the door" of the church ends up in the kingdom. Different Christian traditions deal with this phenomenon differently. A Calvinist might say such a person was never truly a believer to begin with. My own tradition can take the text pretty much like it is -- some people start off in Christian faith but do not endure to the end.
I already mentioned 1 Corinthians 9:24-27, where Paul suggests that even he might not make it into the kingdom if he does not continue disciplining himself as a spiritual "athlete." Hebrews presents the starkest imagery of this sort in the New Testament. Hebrews 6 suggests not only that it's possible to fall away, but that one cannot return if one does (6:3-6). Such a person is like a field that, despite constant watering, only yields thorns and thistels (6:7-8).
However one wants to process this phenomenon theologically, the long and the short of it is that not everyone who gets baptized will end up in the kingdom of God. We see this happen in Acts 8, where many Samaritans are baptized, but they have not yet been truly saved (8:4-25). One of them, Simon the sorceror, is remembered in Christian history as the earliest heretic of Christianity.
6. In America, Baptists are the largest Protestant group, and they have had enormous influence on American Christianity. Every tradition has its potential weaknesses, and the greatest danger from the Baptistic influences on Christianity is what I might call "dunk and run." The majority of Baptists in America believe in "eternal security" or "once saved, always saved." It's the belief that, if you get truly saved, you will make it to heaven no matter what.
In a popular form, it can reduce to "Read the prayer on this card and you'll make it to heaven no matter what you do." This is not official Baptist belief, but it's how the doctrine can play out on a local level. The result has sometimes been an emphasis on baptism in American Christianity without nearly as much attention to what comes afterward.
This flavor has made its way into the culture of the American megachurch. Although many such churches call themselves non-denominational, many are functionally Baptist or Baptist with a charismatic twist. [8] Of late, we have seen more and more "baptisms on the spot" in these churches. Appealing to the book of Acts, they bring out the tubs and baptize people right there on the stage, sometimes with little or no preparation.
The danger has always been that there would be no follow up. This was an early critique of Billy Graham's crusades. Many people came forward to give their lives to Christ, but initially there was no system in place to get these individuals into the ongoing discipleship of a church. Thankfully, in the later decades of his crusades, a structure of follow-up by various area churches was put in place. [9]
Similarly, most mega-churches today have created systems to try to get the newly baptized into small groups. Still, it is hard not to get the impression that these streams of American Christianity are "front heavy" with inconsistent follow up. The danger is that someone who gets baptized might think they are fully cooked and that they need not worry too much about their walk with the Lord thereafter.
7. Paul himself ran into the problem of getting baptism out of perspective with the Corinthian church. A man named Apollos had followed him to Corinth. Because he had formerly been a follower of John the Baptist, baptism apparently played a more significant role in his teaching than it did for Paul. Paul is frustrated enough that he said he was glad he only baptized a handful of people there (1 Cor. 1:14-17).
Why? Because they were getting things out of focus. At Corinth, they had come to view who baptized them as a matter of prestige. They missed the point of baptism. It represented the cleansing of their past sins and their inclusion into the body of Christ. It was a beginning, not an end point.
One danger with the current climate of Christianity in America is that we focus so much on getting people wet that we miss the long haul of faith, which is actually themore crucial part in the end. We don't want to miss "running with patience the race that is set before us" (Heb. 12:1-2). Because it is not starting the race that ultimately matters. It is finishing it. To use an illustration from the book of Hebrews, all of Israel started off the journey in the wilderness. But they did not make it to the Promised Land (Heb. 3:16-19).
The danger of evangelical "conversionism" has long been a lack of discipleship. This is one area where John Wesley excelled, one of the earliest evangelicals in the 1700s. His rigorous system of discipleship made sure that a new believer did not simply evaporate away. George Whitefield, another evangelical of that day, once remarked that those who had been saved under his preaching were a rope of sand in contrast to those saved under Wesley. He had no system for discipleship.
[7] "Eternal security" is actually a mutation of two quite distinct theologies. Its base is Calvinism, which holds logically that if you are predestined, then you will endure into the kingdom. But Baptist belief mixed this idea with the later idea of the "assurance of salvation." This is the quite distinct tradition that you can know now whether you have truly become a child of God. Mix the two together and you have a theological Frankenstein: 1) if you know you are saved now then 2) you know you will make it to the end.
[8] Even the Assemblies of God church, which is one of the largest denominations in America, could be said to have the flavor of a Baptist church with tongues and other spiritual gifts added in.
[9] Bill Hybels also lamented this about his legacy at Willow Creek.
_______________________
1. What is Evangelicalism?
No comments:
Post a Comment