A Time to Laugh

See — I think the whole thing comes down to two completely contrasting stories: the one I heard in Fundamentalism and the one I’m hearing now.

Let’s say your (general “you”) soul is like a house.

In fundamentalism, at salvation, you invite Jesus into your house, and He offers to clean up here and there — paint a few walls, steam clean the carpets, fix the leaky toilet. When He’s done helping out, He sits in the formal dining room and waits for you to join Him. “Tick-tock, tick-tock,” the grandfather clock is the loudest thing in that room. You bring Him a couple of meals, and you both talk awkwardly about a devotional you just read. He’s very polite — excruciatingly so — and you just feel stiff. And you hate sitting in those creaky dining room chairs.

In the mean time, Satan is having a rousing party in the rumpus room. See — when Jesus came into your house/soul, He didn’t kick Satan out. He just moved Himself in. Satan’s still there, still tempting you, still making loud fun in the next room.

And at every moment of the day, you must choose: will you sit in the formal dining room talking politely with your Savior or will you go to the rave party in the basement with the Enemy? Sheer will is the only thing that stands between you and your eternal damnation. As your aging senses grow dim and your bones ache more, you are more likely to just stay put in that dining room while you self-righteously rant about those young whipper-snappers who are tempted to party.

And then you die and go to that Great Formal Dining Room in the sky. Your conscience (like your bones) actually grows weaker with maturity. There’s little “progressive” about it.

But that’s not what I’m hearing in my new life. If your soul is a house, this is the way the story goes here:

Before salvation, Satan is your soul’s slumlord. He is a tyrant, and you’re miserable, but you really don’t know any different. Jesus bursts in — He breaks the door down even — and kicks him to the curb. He completely renovates your home — an Extreme Makeover (Soul Edition). He knocks out walls. He yanks up moldy carpet and puts in hardwood. He burns the lice-infested bedding. He fills your fridge. Everything is new again.

Now, Satan does still hang around and peer into your windows. And when you sin — and you will — it’s because you’re acting like Satan is still your slumlord. Progressively, you see Whose you are. And you grow more and more comfortable in your transformed digs. It feels more and more like home. You actually get stronger and you discover that you actually dance more.

If that doesn’t work for you, let’s try this one. Let’s say salvation is like a meal.

In fundamentalism, you sit down to eat. Prior to salvation, you only had one thing on the menu — a McDonald’s Value Meal. But at salvation, you invite Jesus to the pot luck, and He doubles the menu choices. So at every meal, Satan sits at one end of the table and Jesus at the other. Satan has his usual meal to offer you — McDonald’s Double-Quarter Pounder with Cheese, large fries, and a chocolate shake. Jesus brought a very healthy but unpalatable glass of kale juice with two raw eggs and soft tofu. Which are you going to choose? You’ve grown up on a diet of McD’s, but you know the Other is better for you. You must choose! At every meal!! Are you going to eat the right thing or damn your soul’s arteries to Hell? Eventually when you lose your teeth and taste buds, you find the kale smoothie actually easier to eat, and so you assume you’ve arrived in your weakened state and you shake your pious head at those who still steal the devil fries.

Outside fundamentalism, however, there’s still a meal, but it’s vastly different. I found this in Bob George’s Classic Christianity, by the way, which first startled me with the difference years ago. Before salvation, Jesus finds us dumpster diving. We’re accustomed to only the shadows of good food — the twisted and rotting perversion of the ideal meal. Jesus drags us out of the dumpster, kicking and screaming. We like our good ol’ prolific garbage source! He cleans us up, dresses us, and sits us down in front of a feast. A feast! Think Babette! And you’re a little timid at first. “What exactly is this that I’m eating?”

Sure — sometimes Jesus find us licking out sin’s compost bucket. We have a taste for garbage! And Jesus yanks us out again, wipes our mouth, and helps us back to the feast. Gradually we learn how to enjoy the complex flavors in His cuisine. We also learn that we need the nurture that the food gives us.

And really? It’s all an just appetizer for our upcoming Marriage Supper.

versus

Which is it? Which best pictures the Kingdom of God?

I’ve talked about eschatology qua eschatology in an earlier post, so there’s no need to re-hash that here. As much as dispensationalists — or especially those dispie-lite sorts who call themselves “progressive” or “historic premill” –  insist that the view of The End doesn’t influence the rest of their theological system, that’s bogus. Of course it does.

In fact, it’s a dispie habit to slice-n-dice the Scripture: “this is for that; that’s not for this.” So that the “new dispies” sentimentally and politically (try to) slice off their view of The Future from their view of The Present isn’t a surprise.

Just look at these two representative anecdotes from the last month. Kevin Bauder, a prominent voice in my previous life, limits the goodness of the Good News. Bob Lupton, writing in my current denomination’s magazine, imagines how big It could blossom. The irony of this initial comparison is enough to make me spit coffee on my Eee PC. Pre-mills usually (though not always) reject that most frustrating petal on the Calvinist TULIP — Limited Atonement — as too . . . well, limiting. But uh . . . look who’s doing the limiting and who’s doing the expanding here. The one assumes its his job to draw lines around God’s Good News; the other just trusts God and gets going.

Bauder doubts the validity of an “enlarged gospel.” Lupton doesn’t waste time doubting because he’s too busy building. Bauder says:

The mechanism through which this heavenly arrival is supposed to occur is the Kingdom of God. According to the theory, the Kingdom is already present in the world, particularly among the people of God. Therefore, the main business of God’s people is to put the Kingdom on display by modeling emotional wholeness, social justice, and environmental concern.To be clear, those who incorporate social elements into the gospel do not necessarily deny that personal sin has condemned individuals. Nor do they necessarily deny that the gospel includes the element of personal redemption through the propitiatory death of Jesus. What they do, however, is to place their emphasis upon the psychological, social, or ecological dimensions of the gospel. The effect of this shift is to diminish the importance of personal sin and personal redemption. Some of the more extreme advocates of the both/and gospel display a profound reluctance to engage in personal evangelism, substituting social engagement for direct proclamation.

And Lupton:

The people of the kingdom have a unique mandate to care for the needs of the vulnerable and the voiceless. Our scriptures are quite clear about this. It has been from antiquity both our birthright and our responsibility. We cannot rightly take joy in the rebirth of the city if no provision is being made to include the poor as co-participants. It will not be enough to offer food baskets at Christmas to migrating masses of needy people who are being driven by market forces away from the vital services of the city. Nor will our well-intentioned programs and ministries suffice for those being scattered to unwelcoming edge cities. We must be more intelligent than this. More strategic.

While we remain committed to fulfilling the Great Commission, there is a prior command the followers of Christ are called to – the Great Command. Loving God and its inseparable companion – loving neighbor – form the bedrock of our faith. All the Law and Prophets are built upon this foundation. The prophet Micah captured its essence: “He has told you, oh man, what is good and what the Lord requires of you, that you do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8).

Bauder hyper-focuses on I Cor 15 as the single real Gospel Text, but Lupton sees the Gospel in the Old Testament and New, in Christ’s words and Paul’s. Bauder is talking about “them,” while Lupton is talking about “us.” Bauder thinks he’s convincing his opponents to join him, but Lupton is inspiring us all to get to work.

What’s weird is that after reading Bauder’s article, I feel tired and sad. After reading Lupton’s, I feel like I’ve caught a glimpse of Jesus. And He’s not (just) a cool dude with a soul patch, playing a mandolin in a coffee house with the urban gentry. Nor is He (necessarily) carrying a large study Bible while wearing a navy suit and red power tie at a denominational convention. No, I see Jesus as actually in my little lower-middle-class McSuburb with its growing ethnically diverse population, wearing cargo shorts and mock Crocs while pushing a kindergartner on his training-wheeled bike. I see Him here.

On our way out of fundamentalism, a dear friend was (patiently) listening to my blatherings. I said, “But so-n-so said that just because you’re dispensationalist in your eschatology doesn’t mean you have to be dispensationalist in your soteriology.” She, an M.Div. from Westminster, responded with, “Of course it does! It’s all the same hermeneutic. And it’s all the same Story. The way God saves you is the way God saves the world!”

Huh. I had never heard it that way before. But now every time I pick up the Bible and read anything — even the Old Testament prophets who are often so dismissed in fundamentalism (or reserved for those elite few who can count to 2.5 x 365.25) — I see that same single Story. I see Jesus.

Where has He been?

The Manchurian Candidate was brainwashed to respond to the Queen of Diamonds — whatever he heard after seeing that card he would do without hesitation and then completely forget his actions.

His own loyalties, his own moral boundaries, his own personality, his entire sense of self was subsumed when he saw that card.

It wasn’t the card that was the problem, of course. The tyrannous ideology and the inhumane method was the problem. The complete subjugation of the self was the problem. The card was just the tool.

Or the problem was turning a human being into a mere tool, the simple agency of the tragic drama of a cold war.

The word “surrender” is my Queen of Diamonds. And I know it. “Surrender” in my previous life is vaulted as the chief ideal. When you read everything as a fight between Great and Angry God and little ol’ you, “surrender” is the natural trajectory. Just giving-up makes perfect sense.

So when I hear “surrender” in sermons or in books, I cringe. And I hate that I cringe. Grant and I have even realized separately and then admitted together that, as Grant says, “It must not mean what we think it means. It can’t. There’s something we don’t get.”

I’ve actually put-off writing this post for months because I still don’t know kinesthetically what “surrender” means. Maybe you can see it better than I.

Here’s how VanVonderen in his most recent book Soul Repair puts it. I think he addresses my uneasiness as well as the term’s healthy function (you can see my notes in the margin there):

It sounds like VanVonderen is telling us to give up our own attempts at moralism — at going “our own way” through our human rules. Thots?

I think the biggest difference is Who you’re “surrendering” to: your Heavenly Father or a mob boss? Your Abba Father isn’t trying to conquer you. He’s already sovereign and He already redeemed you. While a mob boss is worried about his own tenuous power and saving face before his enemies, a daddy doesn’t think in terms of power. At all.

I still don’t like the term “surrender” (as a rhetorician) because of the heavy military connotations. But plugging it into a God as Heavenly Father metaphor, I can see the point.

I think.

Okay. I’m a weeper. Yeah, that’s me. So if you hear sobbing in church, it’s most likely me.

Sorry about that.

I did it again this past Palm Sunday.

Growing up, we never really did anything for Palm Sunday. I heard the story of the Triumphal Entry, of course. I remember seeing all the Catholics (well, they might have been Lutherans or Methodists or even — eegads! — Presbyterians, for that matter. But to my Baptist eyes, they were all Catholics.) at the Beefcarver for lunch that Sunday, and they all had their little label-pin palm frond. My dear mom explained the custom to me. It was as mysterious as the ashes on the forehead a few weeks before.

But this past Palm Sunday — my first one really outside fundamentalism — I got it for myself. And I cried for joy.

Because the children led us in worship. They. Led me. To Jesus.

I’ve said it over and over — that one of the biggest reasons for our departure was because of the poor “theology” of the child. I don’t even know if that’s the way I’d say it, but that’s becoming a big phrase for our fellow believers across the pond. The children are treated as lesser. “One anothering” is good for everyone, but the wee. The Gospel counts for you only if you can understand it, otherwise you get Law and Order! Which is really ironic because none of us really understands it, and, in fact, Jesus Himself said that the little ones get it better than we grown-ups do! A dear friend described her similar epiphany when she realized on the mission field that she was kinder to those she was trying to win to Christ than to her own children.

But all that will come later in a larger tome.

When the children entered the sanctuary that Palm Sunday morning waving their palm branches, they sang:

Hosanna, loud hosanna,
the little children sang,
through pillared court and temple
the lovely anthem rang.
To Jesus, who had blessed them
close folded to his breast,
the children sang their praises,
the simplest and the best.

From Olivet they followed
mid an exultant crowd,
the victor palm branch waving,
and chanting clear and loud.
The Lord of earth and heaven
rode on in lowly state,
nor scorned that little children
should on his bidding wait.

“Hosanna in the highest!”
that ancient song we sing,
for Christ is our Redeemer,
the Lord of heaven our King.
O may we ever praise him
with heart and life and voice,
and in his blissful presence
eternally rejoice!

I burst into tears. Jesus welcomed the praise of the forgotten and the less-than. Just like He accepted the extravagant perfume foot wash from a prostitute. Or met the tax-collector after hours. Or talked with the Samaritan woman by her watering hole.

But there it was: a regular ecclesiastical practice as part of the liturgical calendar. Children were included. Children led us to praise Jesus the King.

Look at how Matthew describes events after our King’s entry:

Jesus went straight to the Temple and threw out everyone who had set up shop, buying and selling. He kicked over the tables of loan sharks and the stalls of dove merchants. He quoted this text:

My house was designated a house of prayer;
You have made it a hangout for thieves.

Now there was room for the blind and crippled to get in. They came to Jesus and he healed them.

When the religious leaders saw the outrageous things he was doing, and heard all the children running and shouting through the Temple, “Hosanna to David’s Son!” they were up in arms and took him to task. “Do you hear what these children are saying?”

Jesus said, “Yes, I hear them. And haven’t you read in God’s Word, ‘From the mouths of children and babies I’ll furnish a place of praise’?”

Jesus our Hero-Redeemer comes in on that donkey to the praise of “infants,” kicks out corruption, and makes room for the broken, sin-sick people to get to Him. When the religious leaders scoff at the children, Jesus stops them cold: the kids were fulfilling prophesy!

That’s when I am just sick when I hear more sniping Pharisee than loving King in our talk with and about the children. Just as one example. . . . in Fundamentalism, I heard a preacher insist that he must explain to his preschooler, while she was coloring, that her picture was meaningless to a great and powerful God.

I understand what he was trying to say: that God exists and He’s big. But that’s not what came through. What came through is that we adults, like God, don’t care much for child-like things.

It’s all very pagan, to be honest.

Where did we get this stuff? How easily we  become so egocentric! Augustine would have words for us. He would remind us that actually we adults are “better” sinners than our children because we’re sneakier about it. So it only proves his point that these critiques of children’s egocentrism are so blazenly egotistical.

No, we need a reminder. We need a regular reminder every year of how Christ included children. We need Palm Sunday.

There are times in this recovery process that I feel a little like a Native American dropped in the middle of ol’ England. It’s not that I regret or begrudge my more organically American religious culture. I miss it sometimes. But this newer-to-me world seems so . . . foreign.

We were taking the New Members Class a year ago. I had never taken a New Members class before. I don’t know why exactly.

But the seminarian leading the discussion said:

Remember your Baptism.

Huh? What’s that mean? How?

In (credo) Baptist circles, Baptism is a statement — a public declaration of your commitment to living for Christ. A Coming-Out Party. For some Reformed Baptists, it’s a carrot-on-a-stick. An initiation rite so hard to reach, that once you get there and get in and get wet, you know you’re “in.”

I do remember my baptism. I was six. It was in the Fall. I had practiced in the bathtub for months beforehand with my cat, Charmin, officiating. My mom bought me a pretty little dress with small embroidered flowers on it that was “permapress” or “wash-n-wear” or something so I didn’t have to wear a robe. And she tied my hair up in two skinny pig tails to stay out of my eyes.

I remember walking out. Seeing the crowd. Listening to the pastor. Nodding. And getting wet.

I also remember the doubt that my first grade teacher at Grace Baptist School put in my gut because the next day when I told her about the previous Sunday’s event, I couldn’t articulate exactly what it meant (I was six and I was painfully shy). So I wondered if it took. Since I couldn’t say.

But that kind of remembering is not what the phrase means. With credo-Baptism, baptism is something you do. With pedo-Baptism, baptism is something God does. And that sums up for me why I am a fully converted pedo-Baptist.

The credo sees baptism as an act of obedience. The pedo sees it as a “tattoo” with the Family name. The credo describes Baptism as a recent part of the Church Age. The pedo describes it as a continuation of circumcision. The credo celebrates individual commitment. The pedo celebrates communal involvement. The credo says to God, “I’m yours!” The pedo hears God say, “You’re mine!”

In Fundamentalism soooo many services ended with a hand-raising question:

Do you know beeeyond a shaaaaadow of a doubt [voice quivering] that if you died today, you would go to Heaven?

So after hearing the Word and (hopefully) feeling the Spirit working, doubt was introduced as a test of your justification. You get to the point that you ignore the Stirrings just so you can push past that question.

And, you know, if you catch me on a particularly lousy day, I might not know. Luther didn’t always know. But my doubt doesn’t discount God’s salvation. God’s bigger than my big (negative) feelings.

When Martin Luther told us to “remember your baptism,” he was admitting that doubt was part of being human. It’s not proof that you’re not saved (as we heard in fundamentalism) or proof that you are saved (as the Puritans assumed). It’s proof that you’re a finite creature, tempted to despair by the Great Doubt-Stirrer himself.

Baptism is a comfort to us (I’m sensing a theme), not a test. Luther puts it like this:

If, then, the holy sacrament of baptism is a thing so great, so gracious and full of comfort, we should pay earnest heed to thank God for it ceaselessly, joyfully, and from the heart, and to give Him praise and honor. For I fear that by our thanklessness we have deserved our blindness and become unworthy to behold such grace, though the whole world was, and still is, full of baptism and the grace of God. But we have been led astray in our own anxious works, afterwards in indulgences and such like false comforts, and have thought that we are not to trust God until we are righteous and have made satisfaction for our sin, as though we would buy His grace from Him or pay Him for it. In truth, he who does not see in God’s grace how it bears with him as a sinner, and will make him blessed, and who looks forward only to God’s judgment, ‘that man will never be joyful, in God, and can neither love nor praise Him. But if we hear and firmly believe that He receives us sinners in the covenant of baptism, spares us, and makes us pure from day to day, then our heart must be joyful, and love and praise God. So He says in the Prophet, “I will spare them, as a man spareth his own son.” Wherefore it is needful that we give thanks to the Blessed Majesty, Who shows Himself so gracious and merciful toward us poor condemned worms, and magnify and acknowledge His work.

God loves me and pities me like I love and pity this little punkin standing in here in a pull-up. God has lifted me up, identified me as His Own, and has given me His Name. Just like a Daddy does with his mysterious and other-worldly child placed in his arms. God started it. Just like a Mommy first loves that wrinkly, wriggly bundle before the child ever loves back.

God loved me first, so why wouldn’t I run into His loving open arms? When I doubt that I’m good enough or saved enough, I remember that God’s big enough, merciful enough, and loving enough.

That’s something to remember. For pedos and credos!

During a series on Christ’s parables, we hit eschatology twice. You know eschatology — that big bugaboo that really defines conservative Evangelicalism in the 20th century.

I was born and bred a dispensationalist. Those charts lined the Sunday School classrooms. We had all the  MacArthur and Chafer books at home. Ryrie was a regular author among my college texts. We BJU grads joke that former executive VP Bob Wood’s usual (but still fictional) 3-point outline was:

1. Turn or Burn
2. Singe or Cringe
3. Shake or Bake

Prophecy sermons were a sometimes-favorite (depending on which current event was worrisome). Van Impe lived up the road from us. At age six, I laid awake all night panicking that the USSR was going to attack the US because our Whirly-Bird teacher claimed it would happen any day. A Thief in the Night terrorized my dear brother too.

I threw away my dispensationalism, however, in a truck stop trash can somewhere between here and Missouri two years ago. We had been reading LaHaye’s Left Behind series in the car. This is our cheap version of audio books — I read books out loud to Grant while he drives.

The Left Behind books were some of our favorites. Not because we thought of them as terrific literature (I always joked that they are about in the same intellectual strata as The Munsters), but because I did a goooood Antichrist impression. My Carpathia voice was da bomb!

Really. The books are dumb. Really, really dumb. The female characters are all two-dimensional, all the “good guy” conservative Evangelicals are rich and tech-savvy Hummer-owners (puhleeeze!), and every ethnic stereotype gets exploited. Yawn!

But the end infuriated me. Christ has returned. He’s standing right there fellowshipping with the Tribulation Saints. He’s right there in front of them. And what does LaHaye have the characters do? They whisper to each other and say, “I wonder what he’s going to do next?” and they scurry off to their commentaries to find out.

I. am. not. kidding.

It was a light-bulb moment for me. The Word Himself is completely present in the flesh, and the protagonists want to know his next move? They run off to the 10th generation copy (a commentary) to find out?! What?

It all hit me. Dispensationalism is more about knowing the future before anyone else does. The rune-casting within the hyper-literal hermeneutic makes the few who can figure out the mystery significant. No preacher gets voted off in Dispensationalist Survivor! Knowing-it-all is the highest virtue. That’s why LaHaye’s fictional ending makes sense within the dispie ethic: Sure, sure — we’re relieved the battle is over, Jesus. Thanks bunches! But we just want to have a leg-up on these Sign-of-the-Beast-wearing bullies you used to pounce on us. Give us a minute here while we look up your return in Walvoord’s index. Let’s see, let’s see . . .  page 34. I wonder what 7 + 3.5 + 365 + 10.5 + pi equals? . . . Rayford, get the Strong’s, would ya? . . .  Where’d I put my Scofield?”

Finally seeing it as more about knowing than loving, more for the few than the many, more about the being right than being kind, more about the charts than the Sermon on the Mount, more about men than Jesus, I literally chucked the last novel in the can along with Gavin’s stinky diaper. I was done.

But I still get a sick lump in the pit of my gut when the usual dispie Texts come up in a sermon series. I feel the threat coming — the one that kept me up all night after Whirly-Birds. That I’m not ready, that I’m not good enough, that I’m going to be Left Behind. “I wish we’d all been ready. . . .”

But that’s not what he said. That sermon about usual end-times Parable of the Ten Virgins ended this way:

What keeps this from being a Turn-or-Burn message? Because that’s the way this would normally be preached. . . . I am not saying, “Because Jesus is coming back, go get right.” You know, it’s not a threat. That’s how it’s usually preached. “Jesus is coming back, and so you’d better get right. Jesus is coming back, and so you’d better shape up.  Jesus is coming back, so you’d better. . . .” It’s not a threat. Jesus’s return is not a threat. It’s a blessing! It’s something that we should take and say, “Oh God, hasten the day! Hasten the day!! When our faith should be made sight and our prayers should be made praise. Lord, hasten that day!” It’s not a Turn-or-Burn message because I’m not saying, “Go get cleaned up.” I’m not saying, “Go buy oil.” I’m saying, “Go find Christ. Go find Christ! Go find the Groom. Go find a relationship with the Groom.” So that whenever He returns, you can say, “I was waiting. I was waiting for you!”

What? The Ending doesn’t make me want to crawl under a rock? You’re not going to try to guilt me into a particular culturally safe kind of behavior?

Fundamentalism (i.e. dispensationalism. I still don’t see much difference) really gets it all backwards. They make love a duty instead of a joy. They make a blessing into a threat. They make Christ’s finest sermon irrelevant for the Church Age. They turn a relationship into a religion.

A blessing and a comfort! Wow!! It really is the Good News!

So I do know this — that the grace that justifies is the same grace that sanctifies. I know that much in my head.

But understanding what that really means takes me a lot longer. I need to hear it over and over and over. In different ways. Lots of different ways.

And it still surprises me.

So that’s what our pastor brought to a fine point when he said:

We didn’t merit salvation at the beginning, so we can’t keep it through our merit either.

Oooooh! Yeah!! You’re right!!!! Then what’s with the guilt trip I’ve been on for a couple of decades?

What they say in fundamentalism is that if they don’t preach “standards” or “rules” or “responsibilities” or “duty,” there’ll be chaos. That we’re all bent toward lawlessness, right? It’s the natural course of events. So we must fight lawlessness! We need rules! We need authority!!

But in the spectrum between hypernomianism (legalism) and antinomianism (lawlessness), true Christianity lies closer to the antinomian side than its opposite (because we have a natural bent toward legalism too!!). We’re supposed to be more Anne Hutchinson than John Winthrop. More hippie than Hitler. More play-at-home-mommy than prison matron.

But don’t take my word for it. Take Martyn Lloyd-Jones‘:

There is a sense in which the doctrine of justification by faith only is a very dangerous doctrine; dangerous, I mean, in the sense that it can be misunderstood. It exposes a man to this particular charge. People listening to it may say, “Ah, there is a man who does not encourage us to live a good life, he seems to say that there is no value in our works, he says that ‘all our righteousness are as filthy rags.’ Therefore what he is saying is that it does not matter what you do, sin as much as you like.” . . . There is thus clearly a sense in which the message of “justification by faith only” can be dangerous, and likewise with the message that salvation is entirely of grace. . . . I say therefore that if our preaching does not expose us to that charge and to that misunderstanding, it is because we are not really preaching the gospel.

Steve Brown teases us toward understanding the same sanctifying grace by giving away “3 free sins” and by talking about our scandalous freedom in Christ. He states it like this:

Now hear something very important: while the apostle Paul was not antinomian, he was very close to it. Just so, while the Reformation leaders were not antinomian, they were very close to it. Also, while the Christian faith is by no means antinomian, it is very close to it.

What’s the point? Paul would never have had to write a defense of his teaching on freedom if he had not been very close to heresy. Martin Luther would never have had to come back from Wartburg (where he was in hiding) to straighten out the libertarians in Wittenberg if his teaching had not at least implied something close to what they were doing. The Christian faith would not have had to deal with the heresy of antinomianism unless there was something in it which seemed to imply that particular heresy.

That brings me to a syllogism with two premises and a conclusion. Premise: The real Christian faith is close to antinomianism. Premise: A lot of modern day Christianity is not at all close to antinomianism. Conclusion: A lot of modern day Christianity is not real Christianity.

And I never heard that in fundamentalism. Not anywhere. Not ever.

From the moment we stepped into other-than-fundamental churches, we’ve heard about grace. Not just grace at justification that saves us from hell fire, but grace at sanctification that keeps us close to God and growing in Him. A grace that is not earned — like a boss who passes out merit badges for my meeting quotas — but is lavishly and consistently given. It’s part of the all-things-new atmosphere — life-sustaining, nurturing, and satisfying. It’s that God-as-Loving-Father metaphor that dominates a grace-focused soteriology. But I’ve talked about all that before.

So it was in that spirit that our pastor quoted Steve Brown:

The greatest cause for our not getting better is our obsession with not getting better. There is a better way of getting better than trying harder. Sanctification becomes a reality in those believers who don’t obsess over their own sanctification. Holiness hardly ever becomes a reality until we care more about Jesus than about holiness (53).

Brown channels Luther when he defines sanctification as “getting used to being forgiven” since “people who are forgiven, generally get better . . . but they never get better enough to earn God’s love and grace.”

There’s more, of course. Lots more. And it’s so different. Before I heard sermons on “How to Get God’s Grace:”

Stubborn people have no grace. . . . God says, “if you wanna go down My path, I will give you all the grace you need. But if you wanna go down your path, I’ll let you go down that path. I will take away all the desire to do My will. I will take away all the power to do my will. And furthermore, while you’re going down that path, I’m gonna shoot at you! I will give grace only to the humble.”

Which, I’m discovering, is a page taken right out of Bill Gothard’s playbook (i.e. “The Umbrella of Protection,” “Circle of Blessing.”). Almost word-for-word. And from other moralistic legalists throughout the centuries. It’s our natural bent to think we can do this on our own and that God’s evil and tyrannical and vicious and limited by some arbitrary “umbrella” or “circle.”

But God’s not shooting at us. He’s carrying us. He’s not a mob boss or a prison guard. He’s our Daddy.

It was our first elder ordination. I knew the man being ordained. His little girl. And his wife. I don’t want to gush too much because I might embarrass her (she reads here occasionally), but she is the “salt of the Earth” kind of person. The kind of friend you hope to find in a new church. I’ve only known her for a few months, but I’m really thankful for her. She’s a gem.

So I felt invested in this ordination. I listened closer. And the pastor explained:

The elders are here to protect you from me.

Excuse me? Did he just say that himself or was I thinking it that loudly?

I mean, I know that in my head. But I’ve never heard any pastor admit it plainly and from the pulpit.

There are no more tired people than the regular lay people in independent fundamental Baptist(ic) churches. Tired of the sham leadership, tired of not being heard, tired of the flat-out abuse. It’s a total mess. It’s intended to be congregational polity — that’s the heart of the American Baptist tradition — but it’s developed into a rank feudalism. American Baptists used to be the stinkers who challenged corruption, but that’s pretty rare today. So that instead of hearing about an ecclesiastical checks and balances, all Baptists might hear from the pulpit, “Submit to your pastor! He’s your authority!”

Then I read about Presbyterian polity. That it’s not congregational or episcopal. It’s not a group of people leading like a democracy or a single leader like a monarchy or patriarchy. It’s a representative democracy.

Yeah, you read that right. Our founders modeled the American government after the Scottish Presbyterians.

Now I know enough about the American representative democracy to know that it’s pretty resilient. Randy Balmer argues that the first amendment’s “separation” clause puts James Madison’s “faction” fears to rest by containing zealotry within the (private) religious sphere. Now, if that’s true, could the same be argued for the Presbies? Is their ecclesiology more robust because it contains enthusiasm in another sphere? The political sphere perhaps? Do we end up with a dueling spheres? Both strong, both weathered, both fairly resistant to change?

Maybe. I don’t know. But I like being in a church body that’s built with some seismic resistance. It’s good for the laypeople. It’s good for the elders. It’s good for the Faith.

Maybe you know the story of Scotland’s most famous hero of the Faith, John Knox. I didn’t. All I know about Scotland came from Lucy Ricardo’s visit in 1956 and our West Highland Terrier.

The guy was a stinker! He was a Catholic priest, a lawyer, a teacher, and George Wishart’s body guard who led Knox to convert to Protestantism. He spoke out against all things Catholic — Mass, Purgatory, Mary. You name it, he ranted against it. He got into such trouble that he was exiled to the galley of a French ship, hopped to Frankfurt, and eventually fled to Geneva with Calvin himself.

Mind you — Knox made Calvin look like a diplomat. Knox’s pamphlet against female sovereigns — The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women — was too extreme for Calvin’s taste and was, in the end, even according to sympathetic historians, a “tactical error.” He was too bifurcated in his thinking, aligning all things Catholic with all things feminine and all things Protestant with all things masculine. He got too caught up in his own argumentation.

Knox ended up being one of the few countryman who wasn’t charmed by Mary Queen of Scots’ feminine wiles. When he spoke out against her betrothal to Don Carlos, she called him to Holyrood to essentially ask him: “Who do you think you are?” His response, in sum, was: “Nobody but a guy who must warn about dangers ahead.” Some contend that modern democracy was born right then and there when an ordinary stinker stood up to the seductive Sovereign! When she started to cry, he responded: “Madam, in God’s presence I speak: I never delighted in the weeping of any of God’s creatures; yea I can scarcely well abide the tears of my own boys whom my own hand corrects, much less can I rejoice in your Majesty’s weeping.”

He was a plain-spoken dissident. A bigger rabblerouser than Calvin, and the grandfather to all of Machen’s Warrior Children. And while fundamentalism might claim this Scottish stinker as its own, in reality it replicates more Samuel Rutherford and his intolerance than Knox and his fire. Being a stinker without tolerating opposing stinkers ends up being nothing more than narcissism.

So these Presbyterians don’t fear disagreement. When we were taking the “New Members Class,” for instance, the pastoral staff member explained:

You don’t have to agree with Calvinism here. Not at all. But you should know what our perspective is and what you’ll hear from the pulpit and in the Sunday School classes.

And Grant and I did another double-take. What? We can disagree? In fundamentalism when dissent is even suggested, the passive-aggressive  and dysfunctional answer is “Why would you want to be here if you don’t agree with us?” Or “Sure you can disagree, but just don’t mention it.” Some covert fundies even insist that all members agree with bylaws and doctrinal statements before joining and label dissidents as “sinning through questioning.” But outside fundamentalism, it’s a big tent with dispensationalists and postmills and amills all worshipping together. There are Democrats and Republicans. Pedobaptists and credobaptists. Homeschoolers and public schoolers and private schoolers. American-born and foreign-born. Upper- and working-class. We’re all there.

So with John Knox as the founder of our polity, dissent isn’t just patriotic. It’s positively Presbyterian!

Let kings fear, let them tremble, because there is judgment coming if they do not do what is right.

John Knox