Customized Christianity: Choosing Between Faith and Practice

The following is one of a multi-part response to an article by Jim Burklo entitled "How To Live As a Christian Without Having to Believe the Unbelievable." For an introduction to these thoughts, see Burklo's Bible.
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In reading Burklo's article, one of the first things that became immediately apparent, is that Burklo sees believing creeds, dogmas, and fantastic stories as somehow and to some degree opposed to living like Christ.

Christianity asks you to do very hard things that are supremely worth the effort. Loving your enemies – that often seems impossible. Willingly giving up your power and money and time and influence in order to serve the poor and the sick and the oppressed – that can be downright scary. Having a heart full of pure love in all circumstances – how can we do it? But if we do it, we build heaven on earth. These are things that matter, things Jesus asks us to do. It takes a lifetime of serious spiritual and physical and emotional work to come even close to rising to these challenges.

Compared to them, believing in the factuality of the fantastic stories in the Bible is trivial. And that is exactly why it makes no sense to let such questions matter very much in living a faithful Christian life...Don’t let dogma and doctrine get in the way of practicing Love, who is God. Doctrines can be interesting. They help us understand the origins and background of our religion. But repeating creeds is not the price of admission into Christianity.

Burklo is right to say that repeating creeds isn't the price of admission into Christianity, but there are at least two reasons why, pragmatically, that assertion is meaningless. First, the majority of churches do not use creeds as the terms of admission. The majority of Christians still belong to churches where admission to the faith is managed through baptism, at various ages. A creed may be read during the process, but it is not the central feature of admission into the faith. What's more, they aren't even necessary for continuance in the faith in most denominations. Anyone can walk into the high holy service at an Episcopal church and refuse to say all or part of the creed during the service (and I always refuse to say at least part during my frequent visits) without being asked to leave or denied the Eucharist. In fact, barely over a week ago I was at an Episcopal wedding and the priest made a point of reading what has been in every bulletin at every Episcopal service I've attended: anyone who is baptized is welcome to partake of the Lord's Supper. That has been my experience at a variety of denominations. Some require baptism in their particular sect, but I have never once been asked to recite a creed to determine my status as a Christian. If you walked into a Methodist Church today and they happened to be reciting a creed, you could repeat "watermelon" over and over like a kid who doesn't know the words to a song and not receive so much as a sidelong glance from an usher.

Even if none of that were true, however, the greater pragmatic truth is that the overwhelming majority of Christians accept the overwhelming majority of the creeds, even churches that are non-creedal, even churches that are anti-creedal. The Apostle's Creed does little more than copy and paste statements from the Gospels and Paul. If you can't affirm those truths, with whatever interpretation you want to wash them over with, then you find yourselves on the most extreme margins of what might be considered Christianity.

And having wasted too much time on those considerations, the true flaw in the argument is to suggest that believing a central Christian doctrine or a biblical story might ever impede "practicing Love." Just the opposite, every word of Scripture was canonized precisely because the teachings and stories therein were shown to be conducive to living the Christian life. The church historical has always understood there to be a harmonious relationship between faith and practice, between orthodoxy and orthopraxy. It is a fallacy of modernity, and particularly in our day of emerging Christians, that believing in the Trinity might somehow be contrary to turning the other cheek. The Trinity was not a doctrine arrived at in a void of philosophical speculation. If Burklo would turn to the history he encourages others to study, he would find Trinitarian dogma the result of centuries of struggle against beliefs that were set to gut Christianity, soteriologically, theologically, and, yes, even ethically. Fashionable as Arianism has become once again, the ancients saw in it the potential to utterly distort everything that Jesus had come to offer the world (a trap which I intend to demonstrate later this week Burklo has fallen into). The same, of course, is true of the other dogma which have formed the core of Christianity for lo these many centuries since Chalcedon.

Dogma, particularly those enshrined in the central creeds, was not established to force conformity of belief on "trivial" matters. They were established precisely because the early church realized how far-reaching the effects of wrong belief can be. That is not to say there isn't some validity in moving toward a greater balance. Certainly the doctrines and stories of Scripture exist almost exclusively to shape behavior, but that they exist should be a reminder to us of just how much our behavior needs shaping. Ideological purity, as Orwellian as that term sounds, serves a legitimate ethical and existential function. Who God is, who Christ is, should have a profound effect on what it means to seek God and to be Christlike. If it doesn't, then our faith has become unthinking, non-specific, and worthless. Burklo encourages spiritual disciplines like prayer, but in a doctrinal void, does he know who he is praying to?

Jesus did not come to reveal to us and reconcile us to the idea of a deity but to a particular, engaged, personal God with particular attributes and about whom particular statements are either relatively true or relatively false. Who that God is and how He has chosen to reveal Himself is the content of doctrine. How He has intervened in human history and the human condition is the fantastic biblical narrative. When who God is and what God has done are set in opposition to how God wants us to live, Christianity implodes.

Priest Single-Handedly Boosts Birth Rate

Here is an odd, touching, wonderful story about a prelate who, ironically, takes the imperative to "be fruitful and multiply" very personally. In addition to having perhaps the most adorable picture of a baptism as accompaniment, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports:

The patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church presided over the baptism of hundreds of babies in a Tbilisi cathedral on Sunday as part of an effort credited with helping raise the birth rate in this former Soviet nation.

Patriarch Ilia II has promised to become the godfather of all babies born into Orthodox Christian families who already have two or more children. Since he began the mass baptisms in 2008, he has gained nearly 11,000 godchildren.

Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili has said the patriarch deserves much of the credit for the rising birth rate, which in 2010 was 25 percent higher than in 2005. The number of abortions also declined by nearly 50 percent over the same five-year period.

Parents of the 400 babies baptized by an array of priests Sunday said the patriarch was instrumental in their decision to have a third or fourth child.

J. W. McGarvey: On Baptism

The following is part of an ongoing commentary on J. W. McGarvey's Sermons Delivered in Louisville Kentucky. For an introduction to and table of contents for the series, see Happy Birthday, J. W.
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I have heard people say, "Bro. McGarvey, I would like your preaching better if you would just preach Christ crucified, and not speak of baptism so often. Well, I like to oblige my friends, but I can't go along that way.

While I, along with many of McGarvey's audience, would have preferred less time be dedicated to "that old hackneyed theme" of baptism, McGarvey makes a compelling argument that baptism is a part of the Gospels and, as such, the gospel cannot be preached without it. So, whether excessive or not, McGarvey devotes much of his following month of sermons to baptism, it purpose and proper method. McGarvey correctly notes that the necessity of baptism is not really the primary question; in his day, he insists, "you can not go into any church on earth except that of the Quakers, without being baptized." Whether or not that is technically true, there is great truth in the generalization both in his time and in our own when the overwhelming majority of Christians belong to churches which continue to emphasize baptism ("that is...an ordinance which the church calls baptism") as a rite of conversion and consecration. What is really up for debate is when, how, and why people are to be baptized, a subject which McGarvey treats with all the titillating rhetorical flourish of Common Sense induction:

If my mind were unsettled in regard to baptism, I would take this course:--I would take my own New Testament, and, beginning at the first chapter of Matthew, I would read it all the way through, watching for that word `baptism'; and everywhere I found it, I would examine carefully the passage in which I found it, and learn all I could about it; and when I got through I would put all of this together, and I would make up my mind on the whole subject of baptism that way. Then I would feel sure that it was God teaching me, and that he would approve my decision.

As riveting as it would be to follow McGarvey on this journey on which he dutifully leads his audience, it is perhaps more productive to consider the ways in which his sermons do not conform to our contemporary expectations. The debate surrounding baptism has been raging for centuries; McGarvey points out that it even antedates the Stone-Campbell Movement, shockingly. Yet, in a very real sense controversy surrounding baptism has played a crucial role in defining the Churches of Christ over and against all other denominations, perhaps even more so than other credo-baptist groups like the Baptists. The language which predominated the Church of Christ dogma until very recently is that "baptism is necessary for salvation." Rejection of the truth of this proposition defined all denominations against the truth of the "undenominational" Churches of Christ, and modifications or qualifications of it positioned those within relative to the core orthodox constituency.

McGarvey may or may not have agreed with that phrasing, though I imagine someone specializing in his work could quickly settle the question. Certainly he sees baptism as an essential part of the conversion process, a statement he supposes he makes unanimously with the rest of Christianity. More important, or at least more interesting, than what McGarvey may believe about that language, however, is the fact that he never uses it or any analogous language in his sermon on baptism. Rather than calling it a condition for salvation, he calls it "a most solemn, interesting and precious ordinance...the most solemn and significant ordinance ever appointed by the Lord Jesus Christ." He doesn't speak of it as a salvific work but calls it instead "a sacred and a blessed privileged." One moment he stridently argues, "We can not overestimate the value of it. We can not consent to speak of it as a mere external act." Immediately afterwards he calls it the next best thing to being able to go to Palestine and lie down in the tomb of Jesus. It is a spiritual act of communion with Christ which we are both commanded to do as an act of obedience and privileged to do as an act of worship. Whatever else may be said of it, this is certainly not the mechanistic soteriology which has been the fodder for caricatures of the Stone-Campbell Movement, stereotypes to which the Churches of Christ has lamentably conformed.

Even as McGarvey insists that to try to alienate baptism from conversion is to take a knife to the text of Scripture--and not without substantial merit--the remaining sermons play out a more nuanced view of the nature and efficacy of baptism which is distinct from but not necessarily irreconcilable with many understandings of baptism which continue to prevail. When he retells the story of Paul's conversion, he not so subtly critiques the endless spate of questions which dominate the controversy surrounding baptism:

This [vision of Jesus] caused him to believe, and when he believed, his faith was that which threw him into the agony of repentance. Then, when he heard the word, "Arise, and be baptized, and wash away thy sins, calling on His name," he does not stop to raise any questions. This thing of raising questions about the ordinance of the Lord--why is it necessary to be baptized? Is it absolutely essential to be baptized? Are our sins certainly washed away when we are baptized?--the time to raise such questions as these had not come yet. This was a time of simple faith. Men believed and accepted what the messengers of God said, just as they said it. That is faith. The very moment he heard the command, he arose from his prostrate position and was baptized. Now he is satisfied.

If not on the multitudinous trivialities surrounding baptism, what would McGarvey have us focus on? In the conversion of the Eunuch, McGarvey invites his audience to recast the narrative as if it were happening to them. In doing so he stresses as much the "special providence" at work in conversion and the faith by which he "began to see a great light" as there is on baptism. In all cases, the uniting theme is the "glorious Redeemer dying for the sins of men" and "the promise of the Lord" into which the eunuch is inaugurated. For Cornelius, McGarvey stresses that as great a man as he was on his own, he was insufficient; "he lacked something yet that was to be supplied." What was supplied, through the providence of God and the preaching of Peter, was a completion of Cornelius' faith so that it became an active faith, a faith productive of repentance and obedience.

These themes continue to express themselves in the conversion story of Lydia, and they are themes which ought to critique the way many in the Churches of Christ continue to focus on baptism as a polemical rather than a pastoral goal. First that baptism is not a work exclusively or even substantially of our own doing and that room for providence must be made at every step along the way:

I wonder if God ever does anything like this for you and me. It is the word of the Lord that conveys to our hearts the mind and power and will of heaven; but how did it happen that that particular preacher preached to us? How did he happen to be there, and how did I happen to be there, when my heart was opened? Oh, my friends, if you had an inspired writer, his mind enlightened by Him who sees all things, you might have as strange a story written about yourselves as was recorded about Lydia. I imagine that wherever in the broad earth there is a poor struggling soul, wrapt in darkness and struggling for light, sacrificing self in order to please God, God has an eye on that person; He hears those prayers, and He will over-rule and over-turn and direct, until the truth shall, some way or other, reach that soul.

Second that baptism is not some self-standing, independent rite but primarily the expression of an active, responsive, obedient faith:

Now then, when it is all through, when Lydia and those women accept the truth, and are baptized then and there without delay, showing how willing they were to walk in the way of the Lord, Luke looks back over the journey, the long, weary labor, the doubt and the uncertainty, and he sees it all explained. The Lord was hearing the prayers of these women, and in all of these strange movements He was simply reaching out toward the heart of Lydia and the others, that He might open their hearts to receive and obey the Lord.

And finally that faith along with repentance and baptism as consequences are all Christ-centered. It is Christ alone which may be appropriately said is necessary for salvation:

It was necessary, if Lydia...should be saved, that she should hear of Christ, that she should believe in Him, and that she should come to Him as the mediator between God and men, to obtain the forgiveness of her sins. This she did at once--as soon as she heard the Gospel message.

David Lipscomb on Baptism

In the following excerpt, David Lipscomb is using the a difference in translation between the Common Version and the Revised Version of the Bible to throw light on the question of rebaptism in the Churches of Christ. On the one hand, there were those who believed that unless someone believed that his or her baptism was "for the remission of sin" that a rebaptism was necessary to be in communion with the Churches of Christ. Lipscomb considered this view misguided. He compared it later in the text to believing that a man who misunderstood when he crossed from Tennessee into Kentucky must not really be in Kentucky at all. The argument is that the decision to seek forgiveness in Christ is more central to salvation than a correct understanding of the moment in which that forgiveness is received.

While the question of rebaptism for "conversion" between denominations is not nearly as heated today as it was in Lipscomb's day, the kind of misconceptions about baptism that fueled the rebaptist position are still alive and well in many churches. To that end, Lipscomb's comments are no less crucial than ever for understanding the role of baptism in the plan of salvation. Lipscomb rightly places the emphasis on Christ rather than on baptism, a lesson that is always timely.

David Lipscomb, "The Revised Testament and Rebaptism," (1913):

Baptism is said to be “for the remission of sins” in the Common Version. “John did baptize in the wilderness, and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. ” (Mark 1:4). Luke 3:3 gives the same. Peter told the people: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. ”

In the Revised Version, the expression, “Be baptized [or anything else man can do] for the remission of sins, ” is not found. In that version the participles, prepositions, and other secondary words have been more carefully translated, and the American Revised Version is regarded by those competent to judge, the best version or translation [p. 922] in the language. The Revised Version translates “for the remission of sins, ” in each of these cases, “unto the remission of sins. ” The difference in the meaning is, “for the remission of sins” suggests the idea that the baptism is to pay for remitting the sins as a man pays for a horse. It is giving value received; that we are entitled to if for the service rendered. The human heart is prone to run to this extreme. The proneness to run to this extreme has caused God to especially guard against permitting it in any of his dealings with man. Even Moses, the meekest of men, was uplifted with personal pride, took to himself the honor of giving blessings which belonged only to God and forfeited an entrance in the land of Canaan. (Ex. 17:1) In Deut. 9:4, God through Moses, gives the Jews the terrible warning that he does not give them the land of Canaan on account of their merits, but on account of the wickedness of those he drove out. It is such a sin to assume to merit the blessings God bestows that no encouragement to the position in doubtful translation should be given.

To be baptized into Christ, into the name of Christ, teaches plainly and truly that in entering into Christ we come to and enjoy the remission of sins: because of and by virtue of our entrance and union with Christ, we become children of God. This is the expressive declaration that we are saved by the blood of Christ, and not because we have been baptized for the remission of sins—a selfish end. To be baptized into Christ is an expressive declaration that baptism is the step, the last step a man takes in entering Christ. So when he is baptized, he is entitled to all the privileges of a child of God—to all the blessings that oneness with Christ, our Lord, brings. The only sense in which baptism is “for the remission of sins” is, it is the act appointed by God to test our faith, and the act that puts one into Christ, in whom we enjoy all the blessings and favors of the redeeming and purifying Son of God.

A Confession of Faith Against a Confession of Faith Against Ecumenism

It has perhaps been foolish to try to understand the Orthodox spirit merely by reading Lossky, Meyendorff, and others of their ilk. One could no more correctly grasp the spirit of 18th century congregationalists by studying Jonathan Edwards. Certainly the theologians to whom I gravitate represent a position within the Orthodox Church, even a vocal and prominent position, but they are no means representative of the Orthodox Church universal. There is an equally vocal dissenting group (perhaps even a dissenting majority) that espouse ideas quite opposed to the more temperate positions of many of the Orthodox authors I read. I have encountered these voices more and more, the more I detach myself from the lofty literature appearing in periodicals and collecting dust on the library shelves.

Specifically, I came across a particularly disturbing document recently which seems to have substantial support. A Confession of Faith Against Ecumenism is a vitriolic denouncement of the Orthodox participation in ecumenical dialogues, meetings, and activities. I do not intend to restate the entire document here. Instead, I will give five points which I found especially unsettling, and leave others to be unsettled by the rest should they so choose:

• Straying dangerously close to Donatism, the authors suggest that all the sacraments of the Catholics and Protestants are utterly devoid of grace on the basis of their errors. Curiously, they are willing to accept unity on the grounds of baptism, provided the baptism is a triple-immersion performed by a legitimate priest (which exist only in the Orthodox Church): "One enters the church, however, and becomes Her member, not just with any baptism, but only with the 'one baptism,' that uniformly performed baptism, officiated by Priests who have received the Priesthood of the Church."
  


• So certain are these Orthodox of their own correctness and of the depravity into which the rest of us have sunk, that they refuse to pray with other "Christians," even in private: "As longa s the heterodox continue to remain in their errors, we avoid communion with them, especially in common prayer...not only common officiating and common prayer in the temple of God, but even ordinary prayers in private quarters." I have been blessed in my encounters with the Orthodox never to be confronted with this attitude, but I cannot imagine my response if an Orthodox person refused to pray with me because of the insufficiency of my single-immersion baptism.
  


• The document is surprisingly alarmist, all of it coated with a thick layer of fear-mongering. For example, it is suggested that if we make the audacious suggestion that there are Christians outside the Orthodox Church then we might as well call Buddhists Christians: "This inter-Christian syncretism has no expanded into an inter-religious syncretism, which equates all the religions with the unique knowledge of and reverence for God and a Christ-like way of life--all revealed from on high by Christ."
  
  
• The authors seem to describe to the kind of cold, formal conservatism that so many of the authors I read have vocally rejected: "We maintain, irremovably and without alteration, everything that the Synods and the Fathers have instituted. We accept everything that they accept and condemn everything that they condemn; and we avoid communication with those who innovate in matters of the Faith. We neither add, nor remove, nor alter any teaching." Contrast this attitude--that the Orthodox have held fast without addition or alteration to the historical statements of the Church--to the sentiments of Archimandrite Lazarus Moore: "The true traditionalist is not a person who lives in the past, but one who is open and alert to the voice and activity of the Spirit today…[Tradition] is not the sum of past experience, but a living experience of God’s action today." Equally unnerving is the self-deluded senseof nostalgia that accompanies the formal conservatism. If only we could go back to better times, earlier times..."Up until the beginning of the 20th century, the Church has steadfastly and immutably maintained a dismissive and condemnatory stance towards all heresies..." Sure it has.
  
  
• Perhaps most disturbing of all is how convinced the authors (and signers) of this document are that whatever they say and however they say it may be wrapped in a banner of "tough love." Love, apparently, gives the Orthodox carte blanche to be as hateful as they like, to--in their own words--wage war on the rest of us: "The Church's strict stance toward the heterodox springs from true love and sincere concern for their salvation, and out of Her pastoral care that the faithful be not carried away by heresy...There is such a thing as a good war and a bad peace."

Some, certainly, will not object to some of those points. In particular, I have in mind the readiness of the Churches of Christ to condemn as invalid all baptisms which do not take place by immersion or baptisms of children. (Ironically, members of the Churches of Christ might be pleased to see the Roman Catholic Church blamed in the Confession of Faith for the introduction of instruments into worship.) Of course, there are undoubtedly also things to which others will object that I do not. Which is fine. Just so long as we all find something objectionable in this mess.