The Ol' Memory Works Slow, It Does

After the comments-exchange I had with Russ yesterday, I knew that the whole thing reminded me of something, but it took me a few minutes to remember exactly what. It is this passage from Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God, which expresses quite well what I think about the whole issue of God's sovereignty in salvation and what Christians believe about it. Here 'tis, for those interested. Emphasis, where present, is mine and in bold:

Nor...am I going to spend time proving to you the particular truth that God is sovereign in salvation. For that, too, you believe already. Two facts show this. In the first place, you give God thanks for your conversion. Now why do you do that? Because you know in your heart that God was entirely responsible for it. You did not save yourself; He saved you. Your thanksgiving is itself an acknowledgement that your conversion was not your own work, but His work. You do not put it down to chance or accident that you came under Christian influence when you did. You do not put it down to chance or accident that you attended a Christian church, that you heard the Christian gospel, that you had Christian friends and, perhaps, a Christian home, that the Bible fell into your hands, that you saw your need of Christ and came to trust Him as your Saviour. You do not attribute your repenting and believing to your own wisdom, or prudence, or sound judgment, or good sense. Perhaps, in the days when you were seeking Christ, you laboured and strove hard, read and pondered much, but all that outlay of effort did not make your conversion your own work. Your act of faith when you closed with Christ was yours in the sense that it was you who performed it; but that does not mean that you saved yourself. In fact, it never occurs to you to suppose that you saved yourself.

As you look back , you take to yourself the blame for your past blindness and indifference and obstinacy and evasiveness in face of the gospel message; but you do not pat yourself on the back for having been at length mastered by the insistent Christ. You would never dream of dividing the credit for your salvation between God and yourself. You have never for one moment supposed that the decisive contribution to your salvation was yours and not God's. You have never told God that, while you are grateful for the means and opportunities of grace that He gave you, you realize that you have to thank, not Him, but yourself for the fact that you responded to His call. Your heart revolts at the very thought of talking to God in such terms. In fact, you thank Him no less sincerely for the gift of faith and repentance than for the gift of a Christ to trust and turn to. This is the way in which, since you became a Christian, your heart has always led you. You give God all the glory for all that your salvation involved, and you know that it would be blasphemy if you refused to thank Him for bringing you to faith. Thus, in the way that you think of your conversion and give thanks for your conversion, you acknowledge the sovereignty of divine grace. And every other Christian in the world does the same.

It is instructive in this connection to ponder Charles Simeon's account of his conversation with John Wesley on Dec. 20th, 1784 (the date is given in Wesley's Journal): '"Sir, I understand that you are called an Arminian; and I have been sometimes called a Calvinist; and therefore I suppose we are to draw daggers. But before I consent to begin the combat, with your permission I will ask you a few questions...Pray, Sir, do you feel yourself a depraved creature, so depraved that you would never have thought of turning to God, if God had not first put it into your heart?" "Yes," says the veteran, "I do indeed." "And do you utterly despair of recommending yourself to God by anything you can do; and look for salvation solely through the blood and righteousness of Christ?" "Yes, solely through Christ." "But, Sir, supposing you were at first saved by Christ, are you not somehow or other to save yourself afterwards by your own works?" "No, I must be saved by Christ from first to last" "Allowing, then, that you were first turned by the grace of God, are you not in some way or other to keep yourself by your own power?" "No." "What, then, are you to be upheld every hour and every moment by God, as much as an infant in its mother's arms?" "Yes, altogether." "And is all your hope in the grace and mercy of God to preserve you unto His heavenly kingdom?" "Yes, I have no hope but in Him." "Then, Sir, with your leave I will put up my dagger again; for this is all my Calvinism; this is my election, my justification by faith, my final perseverance: It is in substance all that I hold, and as I hold it; and therefore, if you please, instead of searching out terms and phrases to be a ground of contention between us, we will cordially unite in those things wherein we agree."

Couldn't a-said it no better m'se'f...except that I would add that it is also all my predestination, all my the-will-is-not-free.

An' that's 'bout all I have to say 'bout that.

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But it is not all that might be said. I have had way too much time on my hands today. It has not even been realistic for me to try to figure out exactly why my Bronco II isn't running well enough to drive. Maybe tomorrow. But I was poking around and found something very similar to the above material, only from C.H. Spurgeon. Here's the quote:

You have heard a great many Arminian sermons, I dare say; but you never heard an Arminian prayer—for the saints in prayer appear as one in word, and deed and mind. An Arminian on his knees would pray desperately like a Calvinist. He cannot pray about free will: there is no room for it. Fancy him praying,

Lord, I thank thee I am not like those poor presumptuous Calvinists. Lord, I was born with a glorious free-will; I was born with power by which I can turn to thee of myself; I have improved my grace. If everybody had done the same with their grace that 1 have, they might all have been saved. Lord, I know thou dost not make us willing if we are not willing ourselves. Thou givest grace to everybody; some do not improve it, but l do. There are many that wilI go to hell as much bought with the blood of Christ as I was; they had as much of the Holy Ghost given to them; they had as good a chance, and were as much blessed as l am. It was not thy grace that made us to differ; I know it did a great deal, still I turned the point; I made use of what was given me, and others did not—that is the difference between me and them.

That is a prayer for the devil, for nobody else would offer such a prayer as that. Ah! when they are preaching and talking very slowly, there may be wrong doctrine; but when they come to pray, the true thing slips out; they cannot help it. If a man talks very slowly, he may speak in a fine manner; but when he comes to talk fast, the old brogue of his country, where he was born, slips out. I ask you again, did you ever meet a Christian man who said, “I came to Christ without the power of the Spirit?” If you ever did meet such a man, you need have no hesitation in saying, “My dear sir, I quite believe it—and I believe you went away again without the power of the Spirit, and that you know nothing about the matter, and are in the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity.” Do I hear one Christian man saying, “I sought Jesus before he sought me; I went to the Spirit, and the Spirit did not come to me?” No, beloved; We are obliged, each one of us, to put our hands to our hearts, and say—

“Grace taught my soul to pray,
And made my eyes o’erflow;
‘Twas grace that kept me to this day,
And will not let me go.”

Is there one here—a solitary one—man or woman, young or old, who can say, “I sought God before he sought me?”No; even you who are a little Arminian, will Sing —

“O yes! I do love Jesus—
Because he first loved me”

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Why I Choose to Remain a Southern Baptist

I have heard some of the oddest things while I've been a Southern Baptist. Most of them revolve around little cultural accretions that cling like barnacles to the actual contents of Scripture. More than a few times I've been absolutely gobsmacked by someone's insistence on something that is not merely a non-essential, but is flatly not to be found within the pages of Scripture. When challenged on such things, Southern Baptists (especially preachers) will claim to have found "a principle" in scripture, or they will appeal to "Baptist history," or "the majority of Southern Baptists." It's weird. We sometimes seem to hold one another more accountable for things that are not actually sins than we do for real sins. There are times that looking at how much time we invest in trivialities that are simply unaddressed in Scripture, I have almost felt the desire for heavy persecution to come along, just to help us focus. I have felt not unlike Frodo, when he said in The Lord of the Rings:

I should like to save the Shire, if I could--though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt than an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them.

We have a preferred eschatology (which I lean toward, by the way), the questioning of which often seems to elicit much the same reaction as would questioning the reality of Christ's resurrection.

I have heard people preach--or at least write--on the necessity of wearing a coat and tie to services, on the grounds that you'd dress your best to meet the boss, wouldn't you? Never a scrap of Scriptural support for this idea, mind you, but that doesn't stop people from teaching it.

Another oddball thing I've heard is the stunningly absurd, yet fairly typical, Southern Baptist position that drinking per se--that is, having a drink but not getting drunk--is not a sin, but God forbid anyone should actually have a drink! You can see this attitude displayed in fine form in the comments thread here. The same thing goes for smoking. Oddly, no one in the Southern Baptist Convention talks about gluttony and obesity, though. Or maybe it's not so odd. Too many grossly fat preachers.

One of the most common oddball things you'll hear in the Southern Baptist Convention is that God requires Christians to tithe. I say that it's oddball because you will search the Bible from cover to cover without finding one command for Christians to tithe. Oh, you'll find plenty of commands for them to give generously and joyously, but never a command for any specific amount. This is one of those areas, though, where preachers will tell you they've found an applicable "principle" in Scripture. Not a command, but a principle. Kind of like the way the Supreme Court found a "right to privacy" in the "emanations and penumbras" of the Constitution.

I've heard that no Christian should read the Harry Potter books. I can understand that one, to a degree. I had heard--can't recall where--that those books stimulated an interest in real witchcraft. However, I have the advantage of actually having known witches as personal friends and doing at least a little research into their beliefs (an excellent book on the subject, written from an educated Christian point of view, is Craig S. Hawkins' Witchcraft: Exploring the World of Wicca), and when we started actually looking into the Harry Potter books instead of just taking someone else's word for it, I was quick to see that the "witchcraft" in the Potter books bears no resemblance whatever to the real thing. What's amazing to me is not just that so few others in the Southern Baptist Convention--at least that I know--have done the small amount of personal investigation necessary to find this out, but that so many of them have the audacity to compare reading the things with, say, adultery.

I'm not kidding about that. Someone in our household once actually heard a conversation along these lines:

"How do you know the Potter books are bad, if you've never read one of them?"

"Oh, do I need to experience adultery in order to know it's bad?"

Well, of course you don't, for at least one simple reason: there is actually Biblical instruction on the subject of adultery.

Then there's our oddball insistence on teaching the children's Sunday School lessons to our adults (we just use bigger words). This has been so bad for so long that we now have adults that react to being asked anything but multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank questions as though they've been whacked with a red-hot poker. We do this on the grounds--as far as I've been told, anyway--that we want to avoid having the classes so "advanced" that a new person would feel uncomfortable in them.

Got news for y'all: We hardly ever have any new people in our classes. That's the least of our problems, okay? And trust me on this, it's not because our Sunday School material is too complex for them, either.

I've noticed that a lot of Southern Baptists don't react so well to being told that, either.

Then there are the oddball things that we do, like maintaining programs and entities long after they have ceased to achieve the things they were intended to achieve or to have any relevance to any situation currently existing.

There are other things, things that are so "hot" that I can't talk about them without possibly getting other people into trouble.

So why, I was asked recently, if I disagree with so many common Southern Baptist positions and programs, do I continue to remain a Southern Baptist? Wouldn't it be more honest to go somewhere else?

My answer is no, and this is why I choose to remain a Southern Baptist:

1) In the main, Southern Baptists continue to get the gospel right. Though I am sure that most Southern Baptists would not know the differences between a five-pointer, a four-pointer, and an Arminian if they collectively bled to death on their church steps, I have ample reason to believe that most Southern Baptists believe that salvation is to be found by faith alone in Christ alone, by grace alone, and they would never dream of thinking that man, in any way, can claim even the teensiest bit of credit for it.

2) Southern Baptists generally maintain a high view of Scripture, generally holding to inerrancy and infallibility.

3) Southern Baptists fund the mightiest missionary force on the globe.

4) Southern Baptists know how, when, and why to baptize.

5) There ain't no cookin' like Southern Baptist cookin'.

6) The oddball positions alluded to above generally have the proverbial snowball's chance of actually making it into the closest thing we have to an official, Convention-wide doctrinal statement, the Baptist Faith and Message. Southern Baptists are so independent-minded that the odds of enough of them agreeing on any one point to successfully hold someone accountable for any one of those oddball positions are slim indeed.

7) You will generally find the same sorts of problems in other denominations, so why bother to jump from the frying pan into the fire?

8) Calvinism is on the rise in the Southern Baptist Convention. The Conservative Resurgence has borne unexpected fruit in this regard. As more and more Southern Baptists have gone to seminary and been told to pay attention to Scripture as the authoritative rule for faith and practice, they have not unnaturally concluded that God is sovereign in salvation and that He not only knows the future, He has determined the future. The day may be coming when the Southern Baptist Convention will once again be a solidly Calvinist body.

9) Most Southern Baptists are Red-Staters. Not that they're all Southerners, but they mostly ain't Yankees. I don't really have to explain this one, do I?

10) My Southern Baptist woman!

No, I may read Presbyterians, Lutherans, and even a few Anglicans, but I ain't a-goin' nowhere. The Southern Baptist Convention is stuck with me.

Book Review: By His Grace and For His Glory

Sometimes it seems that Calvinism, and Calvinists, are in such disrepute in the Southern Baptist Convention--some might say in the larger Evangelical world--that one might reasonably conclude that Calvinism was some sort of New Age cult being surreptitiously foisted off on Southern Baptists by evil men of the worst sort. From the time I was brought to Christ under the preaching of a man who said--at considerable volume--that five-point Calvinism was a "doctrine of the devil" until recently, when a Southern Baptist seminary president tried to prune all the Calvinist professors from his faculty, it has been made abundantly clear that much of the Convention views Calvinism with the same sort of disdain with which one might regard an unsightly pimple on a hog's rear.

Indeed, Calvinism is in such disrepute in some quarters of the Convention that one might wholly despair of finding any Baptist church teaching it in any given city or town. It would not, for example, be a surprise to me to find that if a small town had only two or three Baptist churches, they were all opposed to Calvinism. Of course, it is also true that it would not surprise me to find that most of the members of such hypothetical churches had never heard of Calvinism or the TULIP acronym in the first place.

Has it always been this way? Have Baptists always--speaking generally--rejected the doctrines of grace? In By His Grace and for His Glory: A Historical, Theological, and Practical Study of the Doctrines of Grace in Baptist Life, Dr. Thomas J. Nettles sets out to prove his thesis

...that Calvinism, popularly called the Doctrines of Grace, prevailed in the most influential and enduring arenas of Baptist denominational life until the end of the second decade of the twentieth century.

It is a substantial work--somewhat over four hundred pages. The introduction alone runs on for forty pages. Nor is it easy going. By that, I do not mean that it is incomprehensible or understandable only by theological professionals. I mean only that it is not a book you can skim. Your full attention is required, but if you are willing to give it, you will find yourself thoroughly rewarded.

"Landmark" Baptist historians will take issue with some of Dr. Nettles' history, for he dates Baptist history as beginning with Smyth and Helwys in the early seventeenth century, as do most historians--and as do I. I promise, I will get around to dealing with The Trail of Blood stuff eventually, but for now, whether you agree with Nettles' starting point or not, you can at least evaluate his argument as it dates back to the seventeenth century, certainly preceding the birth of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Smyth and Helwys were not themselves Calvinists, but by 1644, Calvinistic--or Particular--Baptists were numerous enough to produce the First London Confession. It is a solidly Calvinist document, stating specifically in one part, emphasis mine,

...and touching his creature man God had in Christ before the foundation of the world according to the good pleasure of his will foreordained some men to eternal life through Jesus Christ to the praise and glory of his grace leaving the rest in their sin to their just condemnation to the praise of his justice.

And in another part,

...faith is ordinarily begot by the preaching of the gospel or word of Christ without respect to any power or capacity in the creature but it is wholly passive being dead in sins and trespasses, doth believe, and is converted by no less power, than that which raised Christ from the dead.

Amid much other solidly Calvinistic thought.

Some few years later, Baptists produced the Second London Confession, which closely followed the famously Calvinistic Westminster Confession of Faith, at least in matters touching on predestination and salvation. From there, Nettles
traces Calvinism in Baptist life through the life, teaching, and ministry of Benjamin Keach, John Bunyan, John Gill, and Andrew Fuller, all Englishmen, and all influential throughout the Baptist world of the time--including the North American continent.

I found the section on Dr. Gill particularly interesting. Gill is often accused of being a hyper-Calvinist, but Nettles defends him from the charge, and I think he is successful.

I did find it somewhat disappointing that Dr. Nettles dealt so little with C.H. Spurgeon, the "Prince of Preachers" and one of the best-known Calvinists in Baptist history. However, since Dr. Nettles' focus is principally on the Southern Baptist Convention, I suppose it is understandable that he chose not to dwell on Spurgeon.

In North America, Nettles proves that such Baptist luminaries as Isaac Backus, John Leland, Luther Rice, the famous missionary Adoniram Judson, Francis Wayland, and David Benedict all supported and taught Calvinist doctrine. Then, dealing specifically with the birth of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845, he shows that W.B. Johnson, president of the Southern Baptist Convention (hereafter "SBC") from 1845-1851 was a bold Calvinist; so was R.B.C. Howell, SBC president from 1851-1859; so also was Richard Fuller, SBC president from 1859-1863. Nettles shows--at some length--that J.L. Dagg was a staunch Calvinist, and I found out something at that point: the SBC has made use of catechisms.

In 1879...the SBC passed a resolution asking John L. Dagg to write a catechism for the instruction of children and servants. This action stands as firm testimony to the confidence Southern Baptists had in the theological position of Dagg, in that they were willing to submit the religious impressions of their children to his hands.

Why do we not, in the modern SBC, use catechisms? They are obviously not a strictly Catholic or Lutheran device, and I wonder if some of the theological ignorance rampant throughout our convention might not be remedied through their use.

Then there was P.H. Mell, a friend of Dagg's and president of the SBC some fourteen times, and also a firm Calvinist.

Moving on from there, we find that

The first seminary in Southern Baptist life rested on a Calvinistic foundation. In fact, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in the eyes of its founders, constituted a bulwark against the gradual encroachments of the Arminian fox into the Southern Baptist vineyard. The seminary's four faculty members, Boyce, Broadus, Manly, Jr., and Williams, as well as its most ardent promoter, Basil Manly, Sr., shared a common and aggressive commitment to the Doctrines of Grace.

Many other Southern Baptist notables are examined, and the slow, thorough decline of Calvinist thought in the SBC outlined and explained, and possibly linked to the treatment of the new (in the 1920s) Cooperative Program as being more important than the doctrine underlying it.

There is no doubt after reading the first section that Dr. Nettles has proved that a thoroughly Calvinistic history undergirds the SBC; the second section of the book sets out to expound the doctrines of grace, with a view to proving their worth and that the SBC ought to return to them. Unconditional Election, Depravity and Effectual Calling, Limited Atonement, Perseverance of the Saints, and the Doctrine of Assurance are all thoroughly explained and dealt with from a historic SBC perspective.

The last two chapters of the book deal with Liberty of Conscience and World Missions and Bold Evangelism--the last of particular interest because of Nettles' exploration of the weaknesses of modern, man-centered evangelistic techniques and approaches.

No doubt many of my readers will find their eyes glazing over at the very thought of pursuing what they consider to be theological obscurities for the length of 428 pages. But for those interested in the subject, particularly those Southern Baptists with questions and concerns about their history and theological heritage, you really cannot do better than this book. I'd go so far as to say that you cannot properly understand SBC history and theology without this book. Since I originally wrote this review, Dr. Nettles has produced a revised version.