by Matthew Pinson | Dec 12, 2014
The end of the fall semester is always such a wonderful time on the campus of Welch College. Of course, it’s a hectic time. Students and faculty prepare for exam time, grading, and the other busyness of the end of the semester. Administrators take care of financial matters, attend the annual SACS convention and Free Will Baptist Leadership Conference, and prepare for and host the semi-annual meeting of the Board of Trustees.
The most enjoyable and endearing part of the end of the fall semester, however, is Christmas. I always enjoy the beautiful decorations, the campus Christmas reception and the dinner for the leadership team and board that Melinda and I host, and the faculty and staff Christmas party. This week we even enjoyed students who strolled around the campus and neighborhood caroling. This is all a part of “Christmas on Richland Avenue.”
Yet the premier event on campus during this season goes by that name: Christmas on Richland Avenue. It is the presentation by the Department of Music of the Christmas installment of the Sarah Lacey Nicholas arts series, named after long-time Welch music faculty member Sarah Lacey Nicholas. Each year the Choral Union, comprising students with a few Welch staff and alumni sprinkled among them, under the direction of Mr. Mark Lancaster, performs Christmas on Richland Avenue.
This year the Choral Union presented Johann Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. This was followed by a time of Christmas carols with audience participation, as well as three additional anthems by the Choral Union. One of those anthems was a beautiful arrangement and orchestration of “Silent Night” and “Away in a Manger” by Dr. James M. Stevens, who has served as chairman of the Department of Music for the past eleven years.
To give you a taste of “Christmas on Richland Avenue,” along with warm Christmas wishes from the Welch College family, I’d love for you to watch and listen to “Silent Night Manger Lullaby.”
May Our Lord bless you this Christmas!
by Matthew Pinson | Dec 5, 2014
Recently a friend and former student, Jesse Owens (now a Ph.D. student in historical theology at Southern Seminary) told me about a statement Herbert McGonigle had made about Wesley “raising the ghosts” of John Goodwin and Thomas Grantham. This was very interesting to me, because of a paper I wrote twenty years ago comparing the soteriology of the English General Baptist Thomas Grantham with that of the Arminian Independent Puritan John Goodwin.
In that paper I emphasized the differences between Grantham’s more Reformed-leaning Arminianism and that of Goodwin [1]. I noted that, while Grantham and Goodwin, like all Arminians, agreed on how one comes to be in a state of grace, they differed on what it means to be in a state of grace. Under the category “how one comes to be in a state of grace” are affirmations such as conditional predestination, universal atonement, and the resistibility of grace before and after conversion.
Under the category “what it means to be in a state of grace” are issues such as a penal satisfaction view of atonement (as opposed to a governmental view), the imputation of Christ’s righteousness in justification (as opposed to an anti-imputation view), and apostasy viewed as a definitive, irremediable shipwreck of saving faith (as opposed to seeing it as a possibly repeated lapsing through unconfessed sin). Despite their differences, both Grantham and Wesley were Arminians. They both differed with Calvinism on the crucial question of how one comes to be in a state of grace.
So, needless to say, Jesse’s quotation from McGonigle got my attention. So I looked into it more. The actual quotation was about the famous Calvinist (and writer of “Rock of Ages) Augustus Toplady’s A Letter to the Rev. Mr. John Wesley, in which Toplady criticized Wesley for saying that certain evangelical clergy were trying to raise John Calvin’s ghost. McGonigle mentioned that Toplady said Wesley “should remember that he raised the ghosts of John Goodwin, ‘the Arminian regicide,’ Thomas Grantham, ‘the Arminian Baptist,’ and Monsieur De Renty, ‘the French Papist’” [2].
With my curiosity piqued, I started to do some digging, and what I found was very interesting. First, I went back and looked at Toplady’s reprinting of Jerome Zanchius’s The Doctrine of Absolute Predestination Stated and Asserted, which reprinted Toplady’s letter [3]. I also noticed that Toplady, in a book entitled More Work for Mr. John Wesley, mentioned Grantham in another list of anti-predestinarians that he said Wesley was resurrecting: “Be content, therefore, with conjuring back the Ghosts of Peter Bertius, Samuel Hoord, Gregory Lopez, John Goodwin, and Thomas Grantham. The second-hand Arguments, which you so industriously cull from these and such-like Heroes, are quite sufficient (tho’ not to prove your Doctrines, yet) to convince us both of your Zeal and your Abilitys, without your calling up ‘all the Devils in Hell’ to augment your Train” [4].
When Jesse first told me about this quotation from McGonigle, I immediately thought that Toplady was not necessarily saying that Grantham was a direct source for Wesley’s doctrine of predestination but was simply one of the sort of Arminian-type ghosts Wesley was resurrecting. Still, as I replied in an email, even Toplady’s knowledge of Grantham and use of his name shows that Grantham was a much larger figure in Toplady’s day, nearly a century after the publication of Christianismus Primitivus, Grantham’smagnum opus.
Yet this second comment from Toplady, saying that Wesley had “industriously cull[ed] from . . . these and such-like Heroes” led me to believe that Toplady had a reason for saying that Wesley had directly culled from Grantham.
So I kept up my sleuthing.
Then I found a biography of Wesley, Luke Tyerman’s Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley, M.A., Founder of Methodism, a third edition published in 1876. Tyerman made passing mention of several of the books and pamphlets that Wesley published in 1741 (Wesley was famous for reprinting myriads of pamphlets and anthologies and extracts of books for the general public). One of those was an eight-page pamphlet, A Dialogue Between a Predestinarian and His Friend. In a footnote, Tyerman wrote, “It was hardly honest of Wesley to publish this without a word of acknowledgment as to its author and origin. We have compared it with ‘A Dialogue between the Baptist and Presbyterian . . . By Thomas Grantham, Messenger of the Baptized Churches in Lincolnshire. London, 1681.’ . . . and have no hesitancy in saying, that Wesley’s Dialogue, abridged and altered, is taken from that of Grantham.” [5].
Then, in the Dictionary of National Biography entry on Wesley, I noticed that there was also passing reference to the Dialoguepamphlet. The DNB entry remarked simply that it was “mainly borrowed from Thomas Grantham” [6].
I kept searching and found an 1896 annotated bibliography of John and Charles Wesley’s works written by Richard Green. Green, in the entry on A Dialogue Between a Predestinarian and His Friend mentioned that Joseph Gurney in 1778 had said that the pamphlet was “taken without acknowledgment” from Grantham’s pamphlet. But, according to Green, John Heylin had stated, “I have compared the two, and find that the charge is altogether groundless” [7].
Obviously, my curiosity was further awakened. So I went and compared the two works myself. What I discovered was that, while Gurney and Tyerman overestimated the degree of dependence Wesley had on Grantham’s earlier work, the charge was not “altogether groundless,” as Heylin claimed. The truth is somewhere in the middle.
There can be no question that Wesley lifted several lines of his pamphlet directly from Grantham. The wording in many instances is verbatim, and the big tip-off is that Wesley follows Grantham’s line of thought throughout. The material he uses at the beginning of his pamphlet is what Grantham used at the beginning of his, and so on through the work, up to the end. While this use of someone else’s material without attribution is shocking in our day, it was more common back then.
So what we have here is that Grantham was at least one influence (if small) for Wesley’s doctrine of predestination. Obviously, this is something completely different from Wesley’s reliance on John Goodwin. Wesley reprinted lengthy books from him with glowing prefaces. Instead, in Grantham’s Dialogue Between the Baptist and the Presbyterian, with the imaginary Presbyterian’s answers being direct quotations from Calvinist luminaries, confessions, and catechisms of the time, we have a handy source of ammunition against Calvinism that any anti-Calvinist would have found useful. And Wesley certainly did.
I wish, however, that Wesley had seen fit to follow Grantham on the latter’s more Reformed understandings of the penal-satisfaction nature of atonement, justification by the imputation of the active and passive obedience of Christ, disavowal of Christian perfection, and how a believer who is in union with Christ and thus imputed with his active and passive obedience can apostatize only by becoming an unbeliever and thus no longer being in union with Christ—an irremediable state.
Instead, Wesley went with Goodwin, reprinting much-longer works by the latter that advocated a governmental view of atonement, spent many pages deriding imputed righteousness as a legal fiction, and arguing, literally, for repeated regeneration. (Goodwin’s wording, as Jesse Owens points out in his excellent recent paper on Goodwin, is that people can be “twice regenerate” and that regeneration can be “reiterated” or “repeated.”) [8].
I also wish that Wesley had given Grantham credit for that eight-page pamphlet, as he did John Goodwin for the lengthy reprinting he did of Goodwin’s work. If nothing else, it would have given Grantham more name recognition outside the Baptist fold and ensured a greater legacy for his work.
This whole episode has reminded me of how great figures of the past can be ignored by subsequent history. Grantham, whom the esteemed British historian Diarmaid MacCulloch recently called a “doctor of the church” and “one of seventeenth-century English Christianity’s long-neglected but rewarding intellects” has almost been forgotten by church historians. Until the last few years, his name was found only in obscure older Baptist histories, with modern mention only by Free Will Baptist historians [9]. Yet his formidable body of scholarship, despite the differences some (including me) might have with him, deserves another look.
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[1] A version of that paper will be published in my forthcoming collection of essays entitled Arminian and Baptist: Explorations in a Theological Tradition (Nashville: Randall House, 2015).
[2] Herbert McGonigle, Sufficient Saving Grace: John Wesley’s Evangelical Arminianism (Eugene, OR: Paternoster, 2001).
[3] The Doctrine of Absolute Predestination Stated and Asserted (New York: George Lindsay, 1811). Toplady’s letter to Wesley is reprinted as an appendix to this volume, and the quotation concerning Grantham and Goodwin appears on p. 296.
[4] Augustus Toplady, More Work for Mr. John Wesley: Or, a Vindication of the Decrees and Providence of God from the Defamations of a late printed Paper Entitled “The Consequence Proved” (London: James Matthews, 1772), 83.
[5] Luke Tyerman, Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley, M.A., Founder of Methodism , vol. 1 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1876), 365-66.
[6] Dictionary of National Biography, s.v., “John Wesley” (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1899), 60:313.
[7] Richard Green, The Works of John and Charles Wesley: A Bibliography (London: C. H. Kelley, 1896),
18.
[8] Jesse F. Owens, “Scripture and History in the Theology of John Goodwin” (unpublished paper, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2014), 16.
[9] “Foreword,” in Clint C. Bass, Thomas Grantham (1633-1692) and General Baptist Theology (Oxford: Regent’s Park College, 2013), ix-x. Bass’s theological work complements John Inscore Essick’s more biographical Thomas Grantham: God’s Messenger from Lincolnshire (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2013).
by Matthew Pinson | Nov 19, 2014
A few years ago, my friend and former student Jacob Riggs asked me to participate in a panel discussion on denominational identity. He sent me a list of possible questions, to which I typed out some rough answers (most of which I never introduced into the discussion). Below are some of those questions, and some of the notes I made. I would encourage my readers to send me feedback by clicking on the “Contact” link above.
Some younger Christians have trouble with understanding why local church membership is important, much less denominational involvement. Why is it important to be a part of a denomination?
Free Will Baptists have historically seen conferences or associations or general assemblies as God’s way of bringing churches together for the protection of sound doctrine, mutual accountability, the ordination of church officers, and the joint support of missions and Christian education. Even though such general assemblies on the state and national level would not ordain ministers, they have been seen as important for maintaining the other aims I just mentioned.
The bottom line on this is really a concept I call confessional community. We confess what we believe to be biblical faith and practice—apostolic faith and practice—and we constitute churches and ordain ministers to confess the apostolic faith and practice. What is the natural response if we think Scripture teaches that churches should covenant together for the protection of sound doctrine, mutual accountability, and the joint support of missions and Christian educational institutions that also confess apostolic faith and practice? It is to have confessional solidarity with those of apostolic faith and practice throughout our nation and the world.
Denominationalism and Non-Denominationalism Church Beliefs
One concern about denominations is that they can appear to be divisive among the universal Church. Is this true? Why or why not?
It’s helpful to keep in mind confessional or theological commitments rather than division. This is a positive designation rather than a negative one. Natural divisions occur when people disagree about significant matters. But that doesn’t mean that those people have to be divisive or uncharitable in the negative sense.
I have some very good friends who are Calvinists and paedobaptists. Let’s say I start a church and a conservative Presbyterian friend joins the church. I preach a sermon one Sunday from Hebrews 6:4-6, and his eleven-year-old son gets confused, saying that the sermon contradicted what his father taught him clearly a few weeks earlier—that true believers can never lose their salvation. Several months later, my friend’s wife gives birth to their new baby daughter. They come to me and request baptism for the infant. I gently deny it, lovingly and respectfully saying, “The Bible teaches that only believers should be baptized.”
Now, if I really believe that the Bible teaches the possibility of apostasy and believer’s baptism, and my friend really believes in eternal security and infant baptism, then we have a real, practical problem on our hands. It’s not just a theoretical, pie-in-the-sky problem where we’re making something like the timing of the Great Tribulation into a test of fellowship.
We’re talking about actual, practical problems where we simply can’t go forward because he believes the Bible is demanding that he have his covenant child baptized and feels compelled by Holy Scripture to go forward with that baptism, and I believe the Bible prohibits the baptism of infants.
What are our options? We have to part ways amicably. This is all denominationalism really is.
What’s ironic is that most non-denominational people today don’t sprinkle infants if it’s requested either. And most of them take a clear position on whether or not one can lose his salvation. This is just to use two examples. So most non-denom churches are really baptistic, once-saved-always-saved churches, though many are pretending to be cool on these divisive issues but really aren’t.
What about the Willow Creek Association? Presumably, high-church Episcopalians will not be comfortable in the Willow Creek Association. Does that mean that the Willow Creek Association, non-denominational as it is, is divisive? Of course not. My point is that every group of believers, no matter how denominational or non-denominational they claim to be, have specific beliefs and practices that make it impossible for others to be a part of them and to raise their family in that church group
In a sense, if being different from others is divisive, then everybody’s divisive. Even so-called “interdenominational” churches, in the end, can’t work. They have a shallow view of denominational differences. You can’t have a church that is Catholic-Protestant-Orthodox, high church-low church, liturgical-non-liturgical, tongues-speaking-non-tongues speaking, baptistic-paedobaptistic, etc.
The only way you can pull this off is if you arbitrarily agree that certain things are “off-limits” for discussion, that things like whether you can lose your salvation or not, whether you should have your infant baptized or not, whether you should have archbishops or not, whether your worship should be liturgical or not, whether the major decisions are made by an elder board or the congregation are just things that the Bible doesn’t cover—they’re out of bounds for discussion.
If you can get enough people together who all happen to believe that these sorts of things are not covered in the New Testament, then I guess denominations or confessional groups would not be necessary. But, in the end, I think serious, theologically grounded people of all persuasions are going to find non-denominationalism impossible.
Are there any potential dangers in being a part of a denomination? If so, what are they, and how can we avoid these?
There are no potential dangers to being a part of a certain confessional community per se, of being a part of a church that confesses apostolic faith and practice per se. The potential danger is of being human and being contentious and uncharitable, not recognizing that the universal church is made up of people who may be in error on certain key points that don’t compromise orthodoxy. But this isn’t a danger inherent in being a part of a denomination.
I’ve known self-consciously non-denominational people who are just as contentious on questions of end-times eschatology or Bible translations or elder rule or any number of things who would never dream of being a part of a denomination, but they are much more contentious and uncharitable toward other parts of the wider church than some denominational people I know.
What would be a situation where you would see it as appropriate to leave our denomination?
I believe it would be appropriate for an individual to leave our denomination if it denied an article of faith and practice that Free Will Baptists have historically considered biblically binding (e.g., Arminian theology, the ordinances, self-government of churches, interdependence of churches, Christian moral teaching)
For various reasons, there are some younger leaders who end up leaving our movement and do ministry with other groups. What can our movement do to encourage those who are on the fringes to stay?
I think the best way to keep people loyal to confessional commitments is to get them to fall in love with biblical exegesis, systematic theology, and the Christian tradition. There’s no question that the young people in our movement who are the most saturated in serious Bible exegesis, theology, and a love for the saints and martyrs of the Christian past have no desire to leave our denomination. And the very few of this type of young people who do end up leaving for other serious theological groups do so because of a genuine change in their doctrinal convictions.
We have a great heritage, but we also have some examples of division. How can we recover from times of division and maintain unity and identity?
I wrote an article one time on Free Will Baptist controversies for the Encyclopedia of Religious Controversies in the United States and had the opportunity to give serious thought to this issue of controversies and splits and divisions among Free Will Baptists. What I concluded after my research was that almost every split and controversy in Free Will Baptist history has come about because we were not satisfied to be Free Will Baptists but became wannabes. We imported faith and practice from other denominational or non-denominational groups because we were embarrassed by our own commitments as Free Will Baptists. If we had had the self-confidence and courage to stand by our principles and be confident in our scripturally grounded identity, and had not had an inferiority complex about who we are, we would not have experienced the divisions and splits we have experienced.
by Matthew Pinson | Oct 23, 2014
Not Just “Sheer Believers”
Recently I heard Christian cultural analyst Ken Myers say something that shocked and saddened me: When many evangelicals talk about the Great Commission, what they really mean is not the Great Commission in Matthew 28, but getting people to make an initial salvation decision. Myers said that nowhere does the Bible command us to make “sheer believers” or “mere Christians.”
Kingdom Disciples
He’s right. The Great Commission is so much more! In it, Christ commands us to extend the reign of God (God’s kingdom) over people’s lives, making them disciples and teaching them to live as Christ the King commands. The aim of the gospel is God’s creation of a people for His name—a Holy Priesthood and a Royal Nation composed of people from every tribe, tongue, and nation. God’s way of raising up a kingdom of priests who will name his name and call others to repentance and faith and kingdom living is summed up in Christ’s Great Commission.
That Great Commission is a commission from Christ the King, whose desire is to extend His rule over people’s lives. That’s why, as Myers points out, just before the “Go therefore” in the Great Commission, Jesus says, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth.” This is the basis for the Great Commission. It is rooted in the purposes of Christ’s kingdom, His rule. And the way he extends His rule is to make people who were once aliens from the commonwealth of Israel into kings and priests who are living out their lives in churches that are outposts of His kingdom here on earth.
Baptized Christ-Followers
This kingdom focus is about evangelizing people to make disciples of Jesus Christ—a people for His name—followers of His who live their lives in accord with His kingship. These gospel disciples are to be made members of the visible body of Christ through baptism—a public identification with Christ symbolizing the reality of death to sin in Christ and miraculous resurrection to a new, cross-bearing life in Christ.
Then the church is charged by Christ to take these Christ-followers who have publicly abandoned a life of sin and have been baptized into Christ to go one giant step further: To fulfill the Great Commission, the church is to engage in a teaching and learning process in which Christ’s followers come to practice His full-orbed teachings. The church is to engage in a process of “teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you.” This involves Christian education—teaching and learning. And it is thorough and holistic—“all things that I have commanded you.” It involves teaching Christ’s baptized disciples the Christian world-and-life-view. And it results in a transformed life that transforms the world around us (“observe”).
Younger Pastors and Leaders
It is disheartening to speak with so many young pastors and church leaders in our denomination who feel that much popular evangelicalism and fundamentalism has truncated Jesus’s Great Commission. It is not just the emergent church that believes the seeker-sensitive movement has failed the church and failed the Great Commission. It is also vibrant, young, conservative pastors and church leaders who see a glaring disconnect between the full-orbed Great Commission of Christ and the easy, niche-marketing techniques of contemporary evangelicalism.
Younger evangelical Tullian Tchividjian gives voice to this growing segment of younger evangelicals in his book Unfashionable. He argues persuasively that we have been trying too hard to be like the world to win the world, and this has gutted the evangelical church of its faithfulness and effectiveness in fulfilling the Great Commission. No longer can the church simply baptize pop culture, he argues. Younger people are too quick to see through that.
Failing to Produce Disciples
In their “Reveal” study a few years ago, Bill Hybels and Willow Creek Community Church acknowledged that the seeker-sensitive model, while it had succeeded in getting numbers of new members, had failed in producing true disciples (though what they seem to be doing with this realization is moving in a more emergent direction). What this means is that, even though many evangelical churches are getting more people on the membership roster, they are failing to fulfill the Great Commission.
Of course, God desires higher numbers of disciples. But increasing numbers on the roll is not the goal. It’s only a means to the end of fulfilling the Great Commission. The problem with much current evangelical practice is that it short-circuits Great Commission fulfillment in its efforts to reach larger numbers.
This creates a short-term feeling of success. We can pat ourselves on the back because we have used shallow marketing and entertainment techniques to manipulate people into accepting a Christ that is remade in the image of consumer culture, a Christ that is accepted only because religious customers who are in the market for religious goods and services believe He can meet their felt needs, which are often very similar to their consumer tastes and desires.
But this approach will fail in the long-run, because it is not Great-Commission-driven. This leads Michael Horton, in his book A Better Way, to say that, in their attempt to reach the lost, market-driven evangelicals are ending up losing the reached! But this is the consequence of subtly manipulating people into an emotional decision for Christ based on shallow marketing and entertainment techniques rather than practicing Jesus’s own Great Commission.
Deep Disciples Produce New Disciples
Only when we make true disciples who can disciple others will we have a Great Commission movement in our churches and culture—the sort we saw in the awakenings and great missions movements of history. These movements occurred only at the times when the church was the most set-apart from the world, consecrated to Christ, and deep in the faith. Yet the shallow evangelism, worship, preaching, and teaching of a worldly, customer-friendly evangelicalism produces—at best—“sheer believers,” “mere Christians” who are spiritually anemic and cannot reproduce themselves.
Surveys bear this out. As the Barna Group has said over and over again, only 19 percent of people claiming to be born again have a Christian worldview. And not more than 25 percent tithe; attend church, read the Bible, and pray on a regular basis; and witness and invite people to church. And yet 85 percent of unchurched people who join churches do so because of the influence of a Christian friend or family member. What this means is that 25 percent of Christians are winning 85 percent of new believers!
The math suggests that the best way to increase the number of new believers is to increase the number of deep, core church members. Eighty-five percent of the new believers are joining because of the witness of 25 percent of existing believers.
Discipleship Beyond Entry-Level Christianity
Yet too often pastors feel pressured to dumb down the worship and teaching of their congregations to placate people who are in the 25 percent furthest from the core, whom the pastors are worried might leave for a church that will better cater to their consumer tastes.
So we are less likely to be singing the Bible, reading the Bible, praying the Bible, and preaching the Bible with depth and substance, as Ligon Duncan has said. Many of our Sunday schools are becoming superficial and devoid of biblical doctrine and theology. Many of our youth programs are increasingly lacking in serious scriptural teaching and preaching. We are amusing ourselves to death. As Leroy Forlines is fond of reminding us, the church can get by on “entry-level Christianity” only so long.
Yet depth and substance are just what the 25 percent core are longing for! They’re spiritually atrophying on the milk diet of entry-level Christianity that we’re giving them in Sunday school, in our singing, in our praying, and in our preaching. We should be doing everything we can to increase the percentage of these people in our congregations, because, if the statistics are accurate, the more of these core believers we have in our churches, the more people will receive Christ. In other words, the more deep disciples we produce, the more new disciples will be made!
Conclusion
Yet we don’t have to have statistics to find this out. It’s in the Great Commission. That is God’s plan for multiplying His church. He wants to replicate His kingdom of priests by extending His rule over more and more people, as they become ardent followers of Him, renouncing their former lives, being baptized as a testimony to their death to a life of sin and the radical reorienting of their lives in Christ, and being taught to live out their lives in obedience to all Christ’s commands.
These disciples will be reproducing disciples, disciple-making disciples, evangelistic disciples. This is Jesus’s way of spreading His gospel. This is His way of evangelizing the world. It is His way of building His church. Let’s recommit ourselves to practicing the Great Commission!
This post was originally published in December-January 2009-10 issue of ONE Magazine.
by Matthew Pinson | Oct 16, 2014
The Commission for Theological Integrity of the National Association of Free Will Baptists (of which I serve as chairman) sponsors a blog, fwbtheology.com. From time to time, I post a theologically oriented blog post on that website and place a link to it on this blog. This week, I posted a blog entitled “A Problem in Calvinism’s Order of Salvation.” You can gain access to it by clicking here.
