Is Conversion Essential?

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By way of context, I sometimes refer to myself as a lower-case baptist. I was baptized by my father by full immersion in the baptismal tank at the Evangelical Free Church in Bay City, Michigan.

David Gushee’s captivating account of his own spiritual pilgrimage from Roman Catholicism to the Baptist tradition curiously reverses the pathway of Christine Wassell from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism and, to a somewhat lesser extent, my own journey from evangelicalism to the Episcopal Church. This raises for me a fascinating question about inherited traditions and conversionist spirituality.

One of the real challenges facing people of faith, especially in traditions that expect some sort of dramatic conversion, is passing the faith from one generation to the next. This is illustrated beautifully in Chaim Potok’s novel The Chosen. Reb Saunders wants desperately to pass the mantle of leadership in his Hasidic congregation to his son, Danny. The son is extraordinarily gifted; he can recite recondite passages of the Torah from memory, but he cannot conjure the requisite piety to inherit his father’s role. Following an anguished farewell, Danny leaves the faith of his childhood for an uncertain future in the secular world.

So, for someone fully to inhabit the faith must she convert into a tradition other than the one into which she was born? This question is obviously tied into issues surrounding adolescence and need to differentiate from one’s parents, but it’s also a matter with historical precedents.

The founding generation of the Puritans in New England, for instance, wanted to pass their faith on to their children. One of the requirements for full membership in the church, however, was that candidates for membership stand in the meetinghouse and give an account of their own spiritual pilgrimages.

For the second generation in New England, that task proved nearly impossible because it meant standing in front of their parents and their parents’ peers. This was the cohort who had left family and fortune back in England to make the perilous Atlantic crossing in order to carve a godly commonwealth out of the howling wilderness of Massachusetts, a journey often compared to that undertaken by the Children of Israel. How could this second generation hope to match the spiritual heroism of their parents? (The predicament was compounded by the fact that the founding generation in New England—unlike that in the Chesapeake, for instance—was long-lived. They refused to die!)

The rest of the story is well-known to historians. The second generation defaulted on becoming full members; for the sake of the third generation, the Puritans compromised their religious rigor with the Halfway Covenant of 1662; and by the conclusion of the seventeenth century the entire Puritan experiment had begun to disintegrate.

Some years ago, I embarked on a project to study people in middle age and beyond who had grown up within the evangelical subculture. For various reasons, the project never came to fruition, but my general observation was that those reared in evangelicalism either rejected it entirely or embraced it altogether, often uncritically.

And so I pose the question: Does religious ardor, such as that Mr. Gushee demonstrates for the Baptist tradition, necessarily correlate with conversion?

Privileged to be an Ally with this Baptist Witness

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Holland, Michigan is a city filled with churches. A majority belong to the Reformed or Christian Reformed denominations. But on Douglas Avenue after you turn to head toward Ottawa Beach, there is a large, red-brick church with while pillars bearing the name “Harbor Reformed Baptist Church.” It always struck me as bizarre. Putting “Reformed” and “Baptist” together strikes me as a theological oxymoron. Some things about these two traditions seem to be clearly incompatible, at least in my view.

Most obviously, that begins with understandings of God’s covenant, including how and to whom baptism is extended. I also think that much of the Baptist heritage over-emphasized “free will” in individualistic ways which resonate more with American culture than with the biblical understanding of Christian community. And Baptist polity prizes congregational autonomy in ways that are hard for me to understand every time I read I Corinthians 12 or study the history of the early church.

Of course, I know of some Baptists who proudly embrace Calvinism, whom Gushee recognizes and who have been dissected previously in our Respectful Conversations. They tend to interpret Calvinism in ways that provide an intellectual defense against trends in modern culture, conveniently suiting a partisan politically conservative agenda on social issues. Such a version of Calvinism seems more tactical than theological.

Yet, Gushee’s winsome portrayal of his Baptist experience highlights qualities which should be welcomed by Reformed Christians and enrich our practice of faith. Gushee uses his own life as a powerful testimony to how an encounter with Jesus Christ through sincere faith can convert and transform one’s life. While this is at the heart of Baptist faith, it should be embedded, one way or another, in all Christian traditions.

Reformed Christians should be reminded by Baptists that our abiding theological convictions about the uncontrollable initiative of God’s grace should never diminish our joy whenever an individual makes what he or she describes as a “decision for Christ.” Let the theology of all that, and covenantal understandings, and the full meaning of discipleship be worked out in diverse ways through one’s ongoing pilgrimage of faith.

I’m glad that Gushee is so clear about how the landscape of faith’s meaning and implications in the Baptist world have evolved dramatically from when he first encountered Christ through that Baptist youth group. The understandings of mission and discipleship have deepened significantly. “A social, ethical, and political vision is needed, and not just a personal one,” as Gushee clearly explains. He enumerates with discerning insight how the Baptists in the U.S. have become fractured over those questions, which all was accentuated by the Trump presidency.

The admirable modesty of David Gushee, however, has inhibited him from sharing his own influential role within the Baptist world, within evangelicalism, and in academia. David Gushee is one of the leading voices in the field of Christian Ethics and has served as the President of the Society of Christian Ethics. The 25 books which he’s written or edited have made significant contributions to Christian social thought, following in the tradition of his mentor, Glen Stassen. Gushee has provided leadership within evangelical circles on work against torture, addressing climate change, and more. In sum, David Gushee, as a committed Baptist and faithful disciple of Jesus Christ, has courageously set forth his witness to ethical wisdom and truth on pressing public issues, at times resulting in controversy, but always grounded in his steadfast biblical faith. As one from the Reformed tradition, I thank God for his Baptist example of faithfully following Jesus.

I also find concurrence in the encouragement Gushee finds in the global Baptist world. This highlights how many of the divisions we face within the Christian community in the U.S. are driven more by social, cultural, and political conflicts peculiar to our society rather by historical theological divides. Bringing global perspectives into ecumenical encounters seems indispensable to liberate the American church from its parochial preoccupations.

The other dimension of American Baptist life central to its witness, in my experience, is the Historic Black Baptist Church, represented in denominations like the National Baptist Convention (USA), the National Baptist Convention of America, and others. Leaders such as Dr. William Shaw have had a major impact in ecumenical initiatives, including in the founding of Christian Churches Together (USA). These voices enlarge and enrich the Baptist examples of faithfully following Jesus.

In conclusion, some points of theological incompatibility continue to make my head turn in puzzlement whenever I drive by the Harbor Reformed Baptist Church. Yet, those theological differences while important, are far from central to our faith. As one from the Reformed tradition, I can only applaud how David Gushee lives out a Baptist way of faithfully following Jesus. It’s always a privilege to be an ally with him in a Baptist and Reformed witness to the world.

Moving From The Individual To The Communal

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In Dr. Gushee’s reflection about following Jesus from a Baptist perspective, there were several facets I connected with, as I also identify as Baptist and serve as an executive pastor in a Baptist congregation. More specifically, I see a significant benefit in his statement that to follow Jesus means “reorienting one’s life to serve Christ with everything,” which can lead Jesus followers to understand that churches are not simply individuals but rather “covenanted communities of disciples.” While I strongly agree with such a perspective, I struggle with how to concretize and make real such a proposal. Dr. Gushee offers a wonderful multi-layered approach (social, ethical, political, etc.) for how the Baptist tradition can be reinterpreted to develop disciples of Jesus who aim to love others. But how can such an approach be developed in our hyper-individualized culture where many are often more concerned with their needs than those of their neighbors’?

Dr. Gushee’s emphasis that to follow Jesus means making a life commitment to His way largely defines what it means to follow Jesus in the Black (Baptist) tradition. I have spent my entire life in Black Baptist churches and being a disciple of Jesus has often meant more than a verbal affirmation of a belief in the death, burial, resurrection, and lordship of Jesus Christ. To use Dr. Gushee’s own language within this Black, Christian and (for the purposes of this response) Baptist context, following Jesus is “demanding, open-ended, and lifelong,” and one “never arrive[s]” but is always on the way with more learning and growing to do. There is never a moment in the Black Church tradition in which one declares she has figured out fully what it means to follow Jesus; to do so would be an act of extreme hubris. Rather, being a disciple of Jesus is a process that one experiences daily, with the intention that each day, one grows in her ability to live into the ways of Jesus even amid life’s disappointments and valleys.

But again, we must not forget Dr. Gushee’s call that this work is not individual, but communal. We follow Jesus when we fulfill His words in Matthew 25 to feed the hungry, take care of the sick, and support the least of these. Black congregations have been doing this Jesus work for centuries, as our institutions have often been one of the few spaces that were concerned with the well-being of African-Americans. It has been in our houses of worship that Black Americans developed the organizing skills to serve in political office, create financial and social opportunities for Black communities, and assert the humanity of Black Americans. While there has certainly been an erosion in the influence of Black churches (and sometimes, rightfully so due to the ways said institutions occasionally engage in harmful practices and individualistic, “me-first” rhetoric), there are some faith leaders in these congregations that attempt to emphasize that following Jesus means to be concerned with our neighbors.

This paradigm of communal faith engagement is critical because it can help us reimagine a faith tradition that has becoming entirely too individualistic and therefore lost its communal ethos. If we truly embrace the Baptist approach to following Jesus as outlined by Dr. Gushee’s reflection, then we need to be committed to embodying our faith as we live in the world. There should never be a time where we are not concerned with how we can be of assistance to those in our communities. We may not have the capacity to facilitate grand gestures of support, but there is always something we can do to imitate Jesus’ model of caring for others.

However, while I agree with much of Dr. Gushee’s work, I struggle with the how: how are we to begin shifting our framework of following Jesus from an individualistic one to a communal one? We live in a capitalistic and consumeristic world in which people, including self-professed followers of Jesus, often make decisions that will benefit them and them alone. I see this tendency all the time in how people select which church they will attend. Instead of making the decision to go to the struggling congregation that needs help (which arguably Jesus would have done), many choose to engage the congregations that will most fit their desires for dynamic worship and preaching, robust programming, and financial stability. We have a laundry list for what will make us happy and fulfilled in a congregational experience. If a church does not meet these requirements, many Christians look for another congregation, often with little to no regard for how their presence might be an opportunity to add what programming or practices are missing. As a result of such an approach to congregational life, countless Christians end up causing significant harm to communities. When people constantly choose to center themselves rather than their neighbors, they take their financial, human, and social resources that could help to rebuild a community and at best, offer them to a congregation that does not have the same level of need or at worst, hoard these resources and simply take from the institution which they have now selected as their “church home.”

I realize that it is a significant sacrifice to ask people to invest in a less stable community with limited resources. Humans, including Christians, have needs that should be addressed. We cannot be so service oriented that we do not take care of ourselves; even Jesus withdrew often to pray and refresh Himself. Therefore, to follow Jesus does mean there is a level of concern we should have for ourselves and what is necessary for us to thrive. Furthermore, a person’s investment may or may not increase the vitality of the community. We cannot save every church; there are some institutions that will unfortunately cease to exist due to the ever-widening gulf between the haves and have nots.

But I believe that our current over-emphasis on the self does not exemplify what it means to follow a Jesus that was chiefly concerned with making the world a more inclusive and loving place for all of God’s creation. Dr. Gushee’s thoughtful and engaging response is thus encouraging me to take the next step and ask: how can we create communities of Jesus followers that grow in their commitment and willingness to care for others?

Feeding the Hunger He Couldn’t Name

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What a poignant, moving story of pursuing something he doesn’t know how to name David Gushee offers us in “One Account of a Baptist Way of Following Jesus.” Yet one thing becomes clear to his younger self once raised Catholic as he tries out a Sunday morning service, a Sunday evening service, a Monday night Bible study at a Southern Baptist church: In this paradigm young David is not a Christian. So he does what needs to be done, all the way through full-immersion baptism, and it “takes.” His life is changed.

This is a simple, compelling, almost archetypal report on a classic evangelical conversion experience. This is much the same paradigm even I, raised Mennonite, encountered growing up. It’s what I longed for. Except as reported earlier, in my case it didn’t take. If it had, I might well be writing now more as an evangelical than an Anabaptist-Mennonite. But it didn’t.

So I was curious indeed to see how Gushee, whose writings and communications suggest ample overlap with Anabaptism and other more-social-justice-than-evangelical influences, journeyed from then to now. Before leaving “then,” Gushee offers this compelling summary:

Thus the way of Jesus in this first primitive introduction involved both gift and task — the gift of a staggering sacrifice to atone and forgive me for my sins (I was aware that they were abundant), and the task of learning how to become a faithful servant of a new Lord — no longer my wretched self-curved-in-on-itself, but Jesus Christ. This latter project, it was soon clear, was demanding, open-ended, and lifelong — one never arrived, one was always on the way, there was always more to learn, more growing to do, more sin to repent, more Bible to read and (better and better) understand, more people to (better and better) love, more millions to evangelize… and of course more Sunday School classes, church services, youth choirs, Bible studies, and mission seminars to attend.

I would not hesitate to put forward this basic paradigm of what it means to follow Jesus as foundational for me and far preferable to many available alternatives even today. Christianity as receiving the ultimate gift (of God’s saving love in Christ) and undertaking the ultimate task (of reorienting one’s life to serve Christ with everything). If one wants as close to a near-consensus Baptist vision of discipleship as might exist, I think that is it. I think it tracks with centuries of Baptist history, would be recognizable in most parts of the global Baptist world, and still deeply inspires the vision of many Baptist churches and Christians today.

But of course Gushee is not done. He names complexities, such as that

The conversionist paradigm fits badly with a developmental-staged faith that often better reflects people’s life experiences. Personal discipleship training needs to watch out for perfectionism and guilt-mongering. A social, ethical, political vision is needed and not just a personal one. Theology matters and not just a few scripture nuggets and lots of personal-experiential religion.

And he names changes in the Southern Baptist tradition since his joining days that leave him more drawn to the global Baptist expressions. The Southern variant, he reports, “became part of the Religious Right from the 1980s forward and a huge part of what became #MAGATrumpvangelicalChristianity, which has little if any family resemblance to the serious Jesus-as-Savior-and-Lord Baptist Christianity that I cut my teeth on in 1978.”

So here he and we now are, yearning for what no longer is, imagining Baptists returning “to that long-ago message. God’s love to human beings has been expressed in Jesus Christ. The best possible human life is to serve him as Lord.”

As I said, Gushee’s story is a moving one. His trajectory is a meaningful and powerful one. And I suspect he may be deliberately using the often-minimalist rhetoric of someone like Jesus, who offered cryptic parables and sayings combined with the stark “Follow me” invitations that changed lives.

I’m actually not sure if I wish for Gushee to have offered more. Every effort these days to “answer” the riddles Christianity is mired in seems to create more riddles and rage, not resolution.

Still I keep wondering how David the Christian leader who emerged from the lost boy envisions both honoring the historical emphases he values and dreaming onward, including, as he observes, toward a ” social, ethical, political vision.”

I’m thinking here of the likelihood that countless Baptists could name salvation experiences similar to Gushee’s and affirm with him God’s love expressed in Jesus whom they serve as Lord. But, as he notes, it’s complicated. I don’t know their Christian brand, but I happened to notice while biking, as I ruminated on this response, a lawn sign that named a local politician while citing John 8:36 and celebrating freedom. Another sign along my bike route promised no hate in that home. It wouldn’t surprise me if both sign posters would affirm God’s love as expressed through Jesus Christ their Lord.

Based on signals coded into many public expressions these days, such that championing freedom tends to take one in this political direction and repudiating hate in that direction, it also wouldn’t surprise me if the signs involve commitments to different visions of living for Jesus.

I’d imagine Gushee, whom I first became aware of as he called Christians not to support torture as a tool in the “war on terror,” has passionate views on how God’s love is operationalized. He hints at this in proposing that much of the Religious Right has lost family resemblance to the Baptist Christianity he joined in 1978.

I’d love for him to say more, including about how the upheaval within and across Christian denominations and traditions both in the U.S. and globally is confounding assumptions and values once seemingly more settled. How often these days I myself wonder, and how often I hear others articulate it, if I’m still a Christian when what multitudes now see that entailing seems for so many so disconnected from historic understandings of serving Jesus as Lord.

In my own Mennonite context, I’m struck that until recent years the Anabaptist conviction that the body of Christ and its visionaries offers alternatives to the earthly principalities and powers made eminent sense to me. I believed that God’s people might be trusted to prophetically challenge the often unjust structures, institutions, ideologies, elemental spirits, or socioeconomic patterns of our day, to echo the Apostle Paul or more recently such a scholar as Hendrikus Berkhof (writing on Christ and the Powers, 1953).

Now I wonder more than I once did. Sometimes these earthly powers seem to enact enough goodness to make sense of Berkhof’s proposal that though fallen they can be dikes against chaos. Sometimes they challenge evil perpetrated explicitly in the name of Christ.

Other times the powers remain as evil as ever, in need of ongoing confrontation in, precisely, the name of Christ. Yet growing numbers of us who cry Lord, Lord (Matt. 7:21-23) seem more interested in being allied with the powers or even constructing ourselves into powers. Meanwhile others who cry Lord Lord advocate for alternative communities of love and justice that can seem evanescent indeed when we too are riven by competing visions of what the Lord is calling us toward.

Within such dynamics, including the worry of some that civil war lies ahead, I still believe much of what I and some (not all) in my Anabaptist-Mennonite community have long believed. Yet I wonder more than I once did how we Christians, whatever our tradition, are getting it wrong as well as getting it right. I wonder what that may mean in this tumultuous era and the turbulence likely yet to come.

I hope you’ll continue speaking to us about such matters, David even as I’m thankful indeed for all the speaking you’ve already been doing.

 

Called to be Saints

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Dear David,

Thank you very much for your personal testimony of your conversion to Christ, and your very clear recognition and understanding that that was just the beginning of a lifetime of growing in Him.  I very much liked how you wrote about “the task of learning how to become a faithful servant of a new Lord — no longer my wretched self-curved-in-on-itself, but Jesus Christ. This latter project, it was soon clear, was demanding, open-ended, and lifelong — one never arrived, one was always on the way, there was always more to learn, more growing to do, more sin to repent, more Bible to read and (better and better) understand, more people to (better and better) love, more millions to evangelize… and of course more Sunday School classes, church services, youth choirs, Bible studies, and mission seminars to attend.”

This is very much, I think, to a very significant degree, how the Orthodox would understand conversion and subsequent spiritual growth.  I think the Orthodox would like to say more explicitly that all of this is part of responding to our Lord’s calling for all of us to grow in real, actual holiness of life—growing in the process of sanctification, we could say—as St. Paul says so trenchantly and succinctly: “For this is the will of God: your sanctification” (1 Thess. 4:3; also 1 Thess. 5:23).

Furthermore, the Orthodox like to talk about our further, tremendously awesome calling to grow in the process of what we call “theosis,” or “deification,” which St. Peter refers to when he speaks of our calling to “partake of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).  Or as St. Paul says, we are all “called to be saints” (1 Cor. 1:2; Rom. 1:7).  St. Athanasios the Great, writing in the mid-fourth century in Egypt, puts it this way: “God became man, so that man might become divine”—becoming by grace what God is by nature, while still remaining completely human.  Indeed, we say that becoming like God to the extent that this is possible is the very path and process that makes us most fully human, fulfilling the very purpose our Lord had for us when He created us in the first place.

And we understand this ongoing process to unfold through a sublime combination of our Lord’s grace linked with our own willingness to cooperate with that grace, which ever draws and enables us to have deep mystical communion with the Lord.  He’s constantly giving the invitation—“Behold, I stand at the door and knock” (Rev. 3:20); and we continually open more widely the door of our hears and minds and souls to welcome Him in, asking Him to dwell ever more fully and deeply within us, which necessarily includes His purging us ever more thoroughly of sins and sinful tendencies—including anxieties and misplaced attachments of all sorts—through our ongoing life of repentance.

This mysterious collaboration of God’s grace with our free-will we call synergism—a “working together” of God and humans, as we respond freely (for love is only ever really love when it’s freely given) to the profound love of our Lord, “Who desires all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4).  St. John Chrysostom, the great preacher of the late fourth century in Antioch and Constantinople, gives us a taste of this synergism in action with these words: “Let us, then, draw Him to ourselves, and beseech Him to join us in the attack against our miserliness.  And let us contribute our share—I mean, good will and eagerness. For He will not demand anything further; but if He can lay hold of only this much from us, He will by Himself provide everything else.”

We also understand that this growth in holiness, and this mystical communion with the Lord, do not occur in isolation.  We always are in tremendous need of our brothers and sisters in the Faith, as we grow together in the ongoing life of worship and prayer in the community of Faith.  Indeed, there’s a saying attributed to the Desert Fathers that’s so simple, yet so profound: “My brother is my life.”  With this understanding, and realizing that ultimately every other member of the human race is my brother or sister, we understand the ongoing crucial responsibility of trying to serve not only their spiritual, but also their material needs—with our Lord’s words in Matt. 25:31-46 ever in mind.

And we can also greatly benefit from our communion with all our brothers and sisters in the same Faith who have lived before us, who are now alive with Christ in the heavenly realm—especially those recognized by the Church as Saints, whom we are encouraged to get to know personally through reading their Lives and their divinely-inspired writings (filled with profound wisdom about the spiritual life, forged in the fires of asceticism, prayer,  and mystical experience, and wonderfully consistent through all these many centuries), and asking them for their prayers.  This, I believe, is the basic Orthodox understanding of “the communion of Saints,” as mentioned in the Apostles’ Creed.

Thank you again, David, for your posting.  May I close with a very hearty affirmation of your closing words: “The best possible human life is to serve Him as Lord.”

Yours, in Christ,

David C. Ford

 

 

 

Can Born-Again, Repentant, Freedom-Loving Lutherans Be Regarded As Companions On a Baptist Way To Jesus?  

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     Lutherans tend to have innate suspicions of Baptists, second only to our historic hang-ups with Pentecostals.  Of course this is a function of Luther’s bad experience with Anabaptists, and perhaps that makes his critique irrelevant to Lutheran-Baptist relations today.  Alas, many modern Lutherans have this stereotype that Baptists are legalists, creeping Pelagians.  But all my Lutheran brothers and sisters would need to do is read the work of Dave Gushee and the historical faith statements of The London Confessions (6,10.11), The New Hampshire Confession (III-VI), the SBC Baptist Faith and Message (III-V),  or the National Baptist Convention Articles of Faith (III-V)  to rid ourselves of those false stereotypes.  There is obviously a strong grace orientation and appreciation of our sinful condition in all of these options, the sort of commitments which are right in line with Lutheran thinking (Apology of The Augsburg Confession, II.24-215; IV.2).  Given these convictions, I ask Dr. Gushee if there are reasons why he is unhappy with the Reformed influence on SBC and the Baptist heritage, except for the Fundamentalist leanings that some Baptists with a Reformed theology have brought to these churches.  For is not the Reformed grace orientation faithful to Baptist roots?   

      Regarding the essence of the Baptist walk that Dave describes, I want to know if the Lutheran version of these themes could be deemed appropriate in Baptist circles.  He speaks of being born again, the need to repent, a commitment to avoiding guilt mongering in discipleship, and a sense of God’s mission to the work in the socio-ethical, political realms. Lutherans believe that they are born again!  It happened for me July 24, 1949 when baptized as an infant (Romans 6: The Small Catechism, III.14).  Can Baptists recognize and even celebrate the authenticity of this spiritual reality with me?  If not, why not?  As for repentance, how about doing it daily like Martin Luther urged in the first of his Ninety-Five Theses?  Is there room for that sort of thinking in Baptist circles? 

      Dave wants to avoid guilt-mongering in Christian discipleship.  Lutherans want that too!  It’s why Lutherans stress freedom from the Law, try not to teach or exhort Christians specifically how to live  (Luther’s Works, Vol.31, 333-377).  (Lutherans and the Reformed Christians call such instruction the Third Use of the Law [Formula of Concord,  SD VI.1].)  We fear that that once you spell out specific behaviors in Christian living the faithful start measuring themselves, and Christian life becomes a long guilt-trip.  Besides, born-again Christians intuitively know what God wants and the “saint side” of them will want to act that way (Ephesians 2:10).  When you preach the Law, do it to aid repentance, not to give people a yardstick to measure the quality of their faith.  Dr. Gushee, do these concerns at least put the Lutheran stress on freedom in a little better “Baptist light”? 

     As for engagement with socio-political realities Lutherans tend to be suspicious of claiming that public policy can ever be unambiguously Christian.  At their best, they seek coalitions in the socio-political realm, with those outside the Church.  They prefer to take the advice of another Baptist brother, Martin Luther King, Jr. who pointed to the universally accessible common-sense natural law as the norm for making socio-political judgments (Letter From a Birmingham Jail; Apology of The Augsburg Confession, XVI).  And so is not the Lutheran Two-Kingdom Ethic a legitimate Baptist alternative? 

     Of course, Dave, I am not trying to propose these Lutheran conceptions as normative for Baptists.  My point is simply to learn whether the Lutheran version of Baptist commitments could be deemed valid and authentically Christian views and practices from a Baptist point of view.        

Preaching and Response

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David Gushee’s story of inviting Jesus into his heart to become his Savior and Lord is very familiar to me. I grew up in Texas, and in that region, there is not much difference between Methodist and Baptist calls to conversion. In my early years, it was common to have an altar call to let Jesus into your heart. I have been moved myself to respond, although I do not recall feeling or having anyone tell me I was not a Christian. At least my own self-understanding of what I was doing when I responded was that I was seeking to be a better Christian, not become one. It is true, however, that John Wesley saw many in his country as “almost” Christians who needed to be awakened.

Having responsibility to respond to David Gushee in this respectful conversation, though, has made me wonder whether there was a time when Methodist evangelism/conversion had a more distinctive flavor. I have done some research myself and also consulted my colleague (Diane Lobody) who teaches United Methodist history and has studied Methodist spiritual autobiographies for years to find out more about that question. There was indeed a distinctive (and effective) pattern, and I will use this response to talk about it. I do so partly for the sake of contrast and comparison that Dr. Gushee can respond to (I suspect there may be some similarities as well as differences that need to be unpacked) and partly because United Methodists may benefit from some recovery of our past.

I have stated before in my response to Randall Balmer that following Jesus as a Methodist involved personal experience. Early Methodists did have powerful personal experiences, but this was not just heart-warming as many often think. The call in Methodist preaching led people to see their need and then find resolution in their experience of God’s love in Jesus Christ.

The pattern of preaching that John Wesley himself encouraged Methodist preachers to follow was a pattern he identified in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, specifically the Beatitudes (see his commentary in The Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament on Matthew 5:2-9). Using “happy” rather than “blessed” in his translation, he finds in this text the “complete art of happiness” and he maintains that Jesus’ discourse is “the pattern for every Christian preacher.” It is possible for him to identify this pattern because he sees the Beatitudes as a description of holy living. He understands the pattern for preaching that originates with Jesus to be the following: It starts with an invitation to true holiness and happiness, accompanied by a description of holiness that serves as a contrast to the hearer’s own life. This beginning offers an opportunity for the Holy Spirit to convince people of sin and for the hearer to respond in repentance. The truly penitent shall receive both a present inward kingdom of peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, as well as the eternal kingdom after this life. The penitent mourn their sin, but they will be comforted. They will exhibit signs of being the children of God as they regulate their emotional reactions (tempers and affections) to what goes on around them, are satisfied in life by the portion of holiness that God gives them, and love all people as themselves (showing mercy to others as they obtain mercy from God). They thereby become peacemakers in the world.

So Methodists disturbed people with the reality of sin, but this reality was met with the even greater reality of grace—God’s love and mercy in Jesus Christ offered to all. Being convinced of sin opens the possibility of our response to God. This preaching called not just for an “invitation” to Jesus (such language would not express the magnitude of what was happening), but rather a call to recognize our need and to accept the love that was being offered even in one’s painful self-awareness. From what my colleague has identified in firsthand accounts, Methodist preaching actually followed this pattern.

This approach certainly challenged folks to wrestle with new self-understanding, but they were not left to do so alone. The formation of class meetings (of 12-15 people) allowed them to gather with others on this journey, to pray together and encourage one another. They could challenge, console, and support one another to grow in holiness. Methodist meetings were considered noisy and, in the language of the time, “enthusiastic.” My colleague provided me with several examples from the spiritual autobiographies she has studied. They speak of meetings where there was both weeping and shouts of joy.

She further notes that many people came to Methodism after trauma in their lives (for instance they may have lost a loved one, suffered illness, or lost economic stability). Their earthly lives were in upheaval, or filled with anxiety and pain, and they found the message and experience of a changed life compelling. The love of Christ not only mattered for their eternal souls but also for how they moved through this life. People who lived on the margins, as we would say now, found a new way of understanding themselves—God loves “even me.” Their confidence in God’s love for them in Jesus Christ allowed them to understand their lives to be reordered and to act accordingly (for instance having noisy meetings that were not “proper” or daring to preach when social status, education, or even race would ordinarily make them voiceless). Typical Methodist language of “assurance” certainly meant assurance of salvation, but salvation was extended to this life and the difference Jesus Christ made for living in the present. They spoke of being happy, and John Wesley’s theology considered happiness as well as holiness to be the twin goals and effects of following Jesus.

My colleague sent me one excerpt that I will quote here, written in the journal of Jesse Lee, an American circuit rider in the 19th century:

I preached twice in New-London. In the evening we drank tea with a friendly widow.  Mr. Darrough, a Baptist minister, came to tea with us; he was very friendly. I told him if he did not take care, the Methodists would out do him. He said: I don’t know how they will go about it.” ‘Why,’ said I, ‘they will out preach you, and out live you, and out love you.’ ‘Well,’ says he, ‘they may, but if they do, they shall have hard work for it, for I intend to love God with all my soul; and then, if they out love me, their vessel must be bigger than mine.'”

If Baptists and Methodists could recover our earlier energy and spur each other to greater preaching, living, and loving, we might together make a good deal of difference in the world.

Reflections on How a Baptist Follows Jesus

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I appreciated learning about how Professor David Gushee was led to accept Jesus Christ as the Son of God and our Savior. It really is quite impressive how young people are able to preach sermons by how they live and what they focus on. Very often their enthusiasm for Christ touches others who are searching for answers and deeper fulfillment. Our Latter-day Saint congregation just north of Baton Rouge was blessed was a very large group of youth, and quite often their friends came with them to basketball and volleyball games, church dances, and youth conferences. Before long they began to come to church with us, and a surprising number of those young visitors joined our church. They are among some of my oldest friends.

Since May of 2000 I have been engaged in dialogue with a marvelous group of Evangelical professors. We meet semi-annually and have discussed such matters as the nature of faith, scripture and revelation, the plight of fallen humanity, the Atonement of Jesus Christ and how salvation comes, the delicate balance between free grace and righteous works, the Trinity/Godhead, theosis (deification), and several other topics. It has been one of the greatest experiences of my life, an endeavor that has been both mind-expanding and spiritually enriching. I love my Evangelical colleagues, who have become much more like brothers and sisters than dialogue partners.

I mention my long and treasured association with Evangelicals in order to pose a question I have had for many years, one that is far more personal than intellectual. Let me state the question by referring to an experience with an Evangelical (Conservative Baptist) friend with whom I have spent hundreds of hours and have travelled thousands of miles since 1997. Several years ago this Evangelical friend invited my wife and me to accompany him and his wife to a celebration of the retirement of a very prominent pastor in Salt Lake City. I had met the man being celebrated and was very impressed with his goodness and the power of his sermons, and so my wife and I agreed to go. The meeting consisted mostly of one minister after another paying tribute to this beloved servant of God and expressing their love and gratitude to him for his marvelous example. My pastor friend (and we’ll call him Bill) was the last one to speak. He indicated that our honored guest had requested that he preach the gospel, which he did. It was an impressive message.

It was, however, at the end of his message that things got “interesting.” He said (and I can remember his words quite well): “I feel like there are some in this room who have not yet come unto Christ. I’m going to ask that anyone here who has not yet given his or her life to Jesus, but wants now to do so, to come forward.” It was an altar call! Of course, no one moved. My wife and I glanced around the room, and we could see that the room was filled with full-time Evangelical pastors and their spouses. They seemed as perplexed as we were. Bill then spoke up: “Come on, now. Don’t be shy. Jesus is calling out to you. Come forward and receive him as your Lord and Savior!” Not a soul even budged in their chair, and so, after a terribly uncomfortable pause, the meeting was brought to an end.

On the drive back to our home, about forty miles from the church, the silence in the car was deafening. After about ten minutes, I asked: “Bill, did you expect that anyone in attendance at that gathering would stand up and walk to the pulpit?” He replied that there might have been someone there who had not found Jesus. At this point I was pretty upset and asked: “Bill, what do you have that I don’t have? What insight or perspective or life or relationship with the Lord do you enjoy that my wife Shauna and I do not enjoy?” [That’s my question.] Then I added: “That altar call was clearly for the two of us. So tell me, I’m dying to know: What am I missing in life? And don’t tell me you have Jesus to offer, because I’ve had him a whole lot longer than you have [he’s 56 years old].” I explained that I regularly call upon God in prayer, am eager to repent of my sins, and know something about what it means to be changed and renewed by the power of the blood of Jesus Christ. I have studied his life, ministry, miracles, atoning sacrifice, and resurrection for forty years. I have spent my entire professional life teaching, testifying, and writing about him. I have given my whole life to him! I asked: “So, once again, tell me what you have that I do not have.”

He replied quietly, “Well, you see, I have an intimate relationship with the Lord?” I asked: “What does that mean? Has he appeared to you in person? Do you see him on a regular basis? Do you have frequent visions of him?” Bill replied: “I have accepted him as my personal Savior.” “Well so have I,” I responded, “and so has my wife, but we are perfectly happy to allow other people to enjoy him as their Savior, too. Let me ask you this: Do you own Jesus Christ? Do you have a patent on him that no other people in the world possess? Is it impossible for someone who doesn’t know about or follow the ‘four spiritual laws’ to be able to come to Christ or perhaps even go to heaven?” My friend went quiet for a few moments then apologized for embarrassing my wife and me.

Believe it or not, Bill and I are best friends. We usually go to lunch together at our favorite restaurant once per month. Two weeks ago our lunch lasted for five hours! We talk about substantive things, things that pertain to our souls and the souls of those we love most in this world. We often discuss scriptural passages and various theological points. We have our differences, to be sure, but we always manage to settle our disputes and paste our relationship back together. Does he wish that I would drop all of the “extras” that members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe in and accept? Absolutely. Would I like him to accept what we Latter-day Saints call the “restored gospel”? You’d better believe it. I think at this point in our relationship we would agree that we both love and serve the same Person. Perhaps we are looking at Him from a different angle, a different vantage point. Latter-day Saints do not worship a “different Jesus,” as I have heard from counter-cultists for forty years. Once after speaking to an Evangelical group, I asked if there were any questions. One woman said, “You can’t be a Christian. You don’t believe Jesus died on the cross!” I tried to be polite but followed up with: “Well, where do you think we believe he died? Of course we believe he died on the cross of Calvary and that he was crucified for the sins of the world.” There is a great deal of misunderstanding out there.

I agree wholeheartedly with David’s statement that “The good news, God’s good gift, should not simply be reduced to Christ’s atoning sacrifice for our sins. The mission of God in the world should be broadened to include a cosmic redemption that goes beyond individual souls.” And I concur with N. T. Wright that the Christian life must be more than an obsession with “going to heaven.” He observed that “to see evangelism in terms of the announcement of God’s kingdom, of Jesus’s lordship and of the consequent new creation, avoids from the start any suggestion that the main or central thing that has happened is that the new Christian has entered into a private relationship with God or with Jesus and that this relationship is the main or only thing that matters. . . . Seeing evangelism and any result in conversions in terms of new creation means that the new convert knows from the start that he or she is part of God’s kingdom project, which stretches out beyond ‘me and my salvation’ to embrace, or rather to be embraced by, God’s worldwide purposes.” (Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church [New York: Harper One, 2008], 229; emphasis added.)

I also identify, painfully, with Professor Gushee’s concerns that in many ways his vote may well be quite different from many of his Baptist friends. There are times (too many) when my wife and I feel embarrassed by some within the political party with which we have been associated for many years. If somehow religious values and eternal truths—including what is right and what is wrong, what is lawful and what is unlawful—do not begin to dawn upon some who represent us in congress, I fear for the world in which my grandchildren will live out their lives.

It’s certainly a different world today than it was when I walked the streets of Massachusetts or rode the subways of Manhattan as a 19-year old missionary in 1968. Back then, when we spoke with people of various faiths who asked us what we had to offer, we would often reply with: “We believe we have answers to some of life’s greatest questions: Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going when I die?” A surprising number of people in the 1960s had indeed asked themselves those or related questions, and once in a great while we were allowed to share our message. I’m not persuaded that many people, certainly not the bulk of people, are particularly interested in such questions or possible answers in 2022. Perhaps my message might appeal to them today if I said, “We’re here with a message about Jesus Christ. In fact, we are here to tell you how you can help to change the world!” Hopefully there are enough people out there for whom that desire burns brightly in their souls, because our world is certainly in need of a mighty change.

 

Gift and Task: A Swedish Baptist Pietist Understanding

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Let me respond to autobiography with autobiography: it’s the best way I can explain why so much of David Gushee’s essay sounded so familiar, even though I’m not a Baptist. You see, while I’m a convinced pedobaptist, I’ve spent all of my adult life with Baptists— the last twenty years with Baptists who are also Pietists.

Because of where I went to college and graduate school, the Evangelical Covenant churches of my upbringing weren’t an ecclesial option, so I instead attended a variety of Baptist churches — and my parents are still members at one of them. (They moved from Minnesota to the other side of Virginia while I was at William and Mary.) Then when I returned to the state of my childhood to start my teaching career, I happened to find a job at a Baptist university in St. Paul, MN.

But not just a Baptist university. Bethel, I was told, grew out of the “Swedish Baptist Pietist tradition.” It had historic affinities with the Southern Baptist churches of Gushee’s memory — I’m sure many of my students have had a conversation with a youth minister like the one Gushee recounted — and American Baptist churches like the one I attended for three years in Connecticut. (Until 1945, Bethel graduates wanting to enter the missions field generally worked for the American Baptist Foreign Mission society.) But Bethel was founded and is still sponsored by the Baptist General Conference — not the one in Texas or the one dedicated to keeping the Seventh Day Sabbath, but the one that was known as the Swedish Baptist General Conference until the end of World War II and then started doing business as “Converge Worldwide” in 2008.

Like my home denomination, the BGC/Converge had originated with the pietistic revival that swept Sweden in the mid-19th century and then came to North America in the hearts and minds of immigrants who settled in places like New Jersey, Manitoba, California, and the Upper Midwest. And while it grew and developed in ways that amplified its differences with the Evangelical Covenant, Evangelical Free, and Lutheran offshoots of the Swedish revival, its Pietist heritage also kept the BGC/Converge recognizably different from Baptist denominations in this country.

Most notably, Bethel has long defined itself by its “irenic spirit” — a peaceable ethos that at its worst sounds like a pious version of “Minnesota nice” and at its best echoes the theological humility and ecumenical yearning of Pietism. That was an enormous relief to me, after having spent ten years in Baptist churches that all went through some kind of schism. I’m not certain that Baptists are markedly more prone to fracture than other Protestants, but if my experience of Baptist congregational life is at all typical, then perhaps that reflects what Gushee describes as the problem of Baptists seeing their churches less as “covenanted communities of disciples” than as voluntary groups of “earnestly striving individuals” — who often find themselves earnestly differentiating themselves from their Baptist neighbors “by social-ethical-political symbols.”

Likewise, I’ve always been struck by how rarely I hear religious right rhetoric from the Baptists of Bethel. Not to say that most of my colleagues — let alone our students — are politically progressive, but even the conservatives don’t go in for the culture warring that’s led so many Southern Baptists into what Gushee calls “#MAGATrumpvangelical Christianity.” Instead, Bethel’s Baptists like to reiterate that they are simply “centered on Jesus” — at once eliding the political and theological debates within our community and refocusing us on that Christocentric model of discipleship that Gushee described so compellingly.

It’s a model that speaks to the concerns of Pietism, after all, since it doesn’t just stop with a realization of personal sinfulness covered by God’s forgiveness, but spills over into the entirety of one’s life… with both liberating and legalizing effects. Grace, in both the Baptist and Pietist understanding, is God’s undeserved gift, but a gift that entails more than justification. Grace turns the focus of my life away from “my wretched self-turned-in-on-itself” and towards Jesus and his mission. I would not have thought to describe that conversion’s result as “task,” but Gushee’s description of this aspect of “the conversionist paradigm” also rings true: “one never arrived, one was always on the way, there was always more to learn, more growing to do, more sin to repent, more Bible to read and (better and better) understand, more people to (better and better) love, more millions to evangelize…”

“A social, ethical, political vision is needed,” Gushee argues, “and not just a personal one.” And here I’m not sure that Pietism has done much to set BGC/Converge Baptists apart from their Southern cousins.

When I write the lead essay next month, I’ll surely mention A.H. Francke (1663-1727), whose agonizing conversion led not only to personal change, but the establishment of an array of charitable institutions animated by compassion. In Swedish Baptist history, that story inspired a Bethel-trained pastor named John Eric Klingberg to found an orphanage and school whose successor is still operating in Connecticut. And I think that aspect of the Swedish Baptist Pietist ethos still helps explain why Bethel has historically sent so many graduates into what we often call “helping professions,” like nursing, teaching, and social work.

But compassionate alleviation of suffering does not, in and of itself, address the causes of that suffering — some of which have more to do with enduring structures and complicated systems than the bad choices of sinful selves-turned-in-on-themselves. In general, I don’t think that their Pietist heritage has made Swedish Baptists any more comfortable than most other evangelical Baptists with what it means to do justice, not just love mercy.

I say “in general” because there are exceptions, none more important to me personally and to Bethel and its denomination institutionally than G.W. Carlson, who taught political science and Russian history at his alma mater for over 40 years. Remarkably, GW was at once a passionate defender of Bethel’s irenic heritage and Bethel’s greatest iconoclast, a tireless advocate for civil rights, labor unions, gender equality, and peace who was beloved by students and colleagues across the political spectrum. For him, the gift of Baptist discipleship was an “early identification with people in need or people who are unacceptable to mainstream societal norms,” and its task — also amplified by his version of Pietist piety — was “to follow in the footsteps of Christ and faithfully to live out the principles of the Sermon on the Mount.”

(I’m quoting here from GW’s talk at a 2012 symposium dedicated to one of his heroes: the Southern Baptist activist and writer Clarence Jordan, who founded a multiracial community in Georgia called Koinonia Farm in 1942. I’ve written more about what GW called the “Radical Baptist” legacy of Jordan here.)

Opening Doors

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Concluding Response: “Opening Doors”
Wesley Granberg-Michaelson

Ecumenical dialogue, at its best, should prompt each of us to examine more critically and reflectively our own tradition in response to the faithful sharing of another’s witness of faith from his or her tradition. That’s one way in which the Spirit works to renew the understanding and living of our faith, and to uncover the unity of the Body of Christ. That unity already exists but is hidden and repressed by pride, corporate self-righteousness, fear, and spiritual insecurity. Living encounters open space for this work of the Spirit.

I’m encouraged and humbled by how this space has been opened thus far in our interchanges through Respectful Conversations. In several responses to my sharing last month of following Jesus from the Reformed tradition, others have probed depths in their traditions in ways that I’ve found illuminating. Doors for important connections have been found and begun to open.

J. Terry Todd, last in the sequence of responses, offers the first question: “Who Speaks for the Reformed tradition?” That gets raised by Randall Balmer, David Gushee, and Christopher Gehrz who all wonder, in different ways, how various conservative evangelicals from different backgrounds seem drawn to forms of Calvinism. I’m puzzled as well. In part it must be a need for tight rational consistency in a persuasive, closed system of theological doctrine, as Balmer suggests. But their authoritarian and, frankly, white masculine version of a rigid Calvinism is not what draws me and millions of Christians around the world to the Reformed tradition.

The World Communion of Reformed Churches, comprised of 230 Calvinist denominations with 80 million members around the world, whose President, Rev. Najla Kassab, is a female Presbyterian pastor from Lebanon, places its focus on being “called to communion and committed to justice.” Their global public profile and Reformed witness are starkly different from the “young, restless new Calvinists” that shape the popular stereotype identified by Balmer and Gushee. In truth, diverse and divergent voices try to speak for the Reformed tradition; our differences, as Gushee suggests, stem more from non-Reformed tensions in the culture.

I’m struck by how David Ford and Michael King place an emphasis on the experience of children in their responses. Ford provides a beautiful, compelling picture of the Divine Liturgy in Orthodoxy, with a child’s perspective. Having participated in several experiences of Orthodox worship in my ecumenical experience, I can underscore how Ford’s description captures its rich sensory and emotive qualities, bathed in a spirituality that illumines its theology. All this is a stark contrast to many forms of Reformed worship which gravitate only toward words interpreting the Word.

Orthodoxy’s practice regarding children and the Eucharist, as Ford describes, finds agreement with my own understanding of covenantal theology. I find no compelling reason to justify separating the sacrament of baptism from participation in the Eucharist, at any age. Even in traditions like Michael King’s, which do not practice infant baptism, the covenant community can serve as a powerful counter-cultural reality against the prevailing individualism the dominates our culture and infects churches from all our traditions, as he demonstrates.

Farris Blount III presents a critique and nuanced view of covenant, however, from the experience of the Black Church which carries deep insight and power. Particularly when involving the victims of trauma and violence, he stresses that covenant needs to be continually re-appraised, and I agree. As I mentioned in my piece, the practical history of the Reformed tradition around issues of race, including slavery, has painful examples which demonstrate the dangers of dismembering covenant into a means of protecting forms of white supremacy.

It is heartwarming to read Christina Wassell’s points of common ground centering around practices of spirituality which can foster a spirit of communion between our two traditions. Catholic and Reformed theological dialogues reveal the difficulties of opening doors of relationship through doctrinal interchange, although significant breakthroughs have been made even on issues as central as baptism, which Wassell affirms and celebrates. But I see in Wassell’s response further reason to share approaches to spiritual formation and practices as ways to push open doors of fellowship in our historically fractured relationship.

My parents named me with John Wesley in mind, not so much for his Methodism as for his evangelical spirit. But it was personally refreshing to see how Sarah Lancaster locates the five points of the Reformed tradition comfortably within the heritage of my namesake.

From Mark Ellingsen I continue to learn so much from his careful and caring excavation of the Lutheran theological tradition, enriching the close commonalities I knew we shared. We’d still enjoy and be challenged by more dialogue around Luther’s “two kingdoms” understanding. For most of my life, first for a time in politics and then in the church, I’ve been pushed toward “political theology,” appreciating what a Reformed perspective can contribute—and also the voices of the Anabaptist tradition and others. Ellingsen’s consistent plea for an ethic embracing the “joyful spontaneity” afforded by grace still may feel like a reach for many traditional Reformed folk. But I suspect that this has more to do with genetic temperament, and the effects of living in environments saturated with gray skies and rain, like the Netherlands and Scotland, than with any significant theological differences!

It’s impossible to do justice to all that has been so graciously shared by these eleven partners. In closing I want to underscore important learnings. With several, including Robert Millet’s fascinating theological journey, the essential communal qualities of Christian faith have been strongly affirmed in contrast to highly individualized expressions of following Jesus. (I know Ken Woodward but had never heard Millet’s recounting of his biting quote about a personal tailor vs. a personal savior!) Yet, while not individualistic, following Jesus does have a personal dimension that goes far beyond the intellect. The Reformed tradition stands in continual need to develop and deepen its forms of spiritual practice which reach the soul as well as the mind.

There’s a deep dialogue to be had around the nature of sin and the pathways of grace within the human personality. That’s reflected in the responses of Ford, Wassell, Lancaster, and others to traditional Calvinist understandings of “total depravity.” My own theological journey today moves down these pathways, encouraged by grandkids on my lap, but also by the resources of the Orthodox tradition, the wisdom of contemplatives like Thomas Merton and Richard Rohr, and much more.

It’s fascinating that it is our Pentecostal partner, J. Terry Todd, reminds me, and all of us, of the relational, Trinitarian framework for our theology. I agree wholeheartedly. And for the Reformed tradition, I believe that at this point in history, our two most important dialogue partners are the Orthodox tradition and the Pentecostal tradition. In that vein, Todd encourages us to “bring on the whole cacophony of Christian voices, mirrored in the Acts experience of Pentecostal tongues.” I say, absolutely.