by Matthew Pinson | Apr 13, 2021
A Recent Lawsuit
Two weeks ago, the Religious Exemption Accountability Project filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education. The suit aimed at the Department’s funding of colleges and universities that have policies that prohibit LGBT conduct.
The class action lawsuit named twenty-five conservative religious colleges. Among them were schools such as Baylor, Bob Jones, Westmont, Fuller Seminary, Union, Brigham Young, Liberty, and Lipscomb. Specifically, the suit holds that the Department of Education should not allow such schools to claim religious exemptions to orders and statutes that prohibit discrimination against LGBT individuals.
The timing of this lawsuit is obvious in light of the passage of the Equality Act by the U.S. House and the introduction of that Bill in the U.S. Senate. It represents the careful strategy of the LGBT lobby to silence traditional religious people and their institutions from the public square when their sincerely held religious beliefs mitigate homosexual and transgender identification or behavior.
The Advance against First Amendment Freedoms
Free Will Baptists need to know how serious this state of affairs is. Most of the evangelical, Catholic, Orthodox, Mormon, Jewish, and Muslim colleges, universities, and K-12 schools that hold traditional views on sexuality and gender have students who receive funding from the federal government. Most such schools would be forced to close their doors if their students were deprived of these funds, since such students could no longer afford to attend these institutions.
This situation represents the first in what would be a long line of attempts by the secular left to drive these institutions out of operation. LGBT rights groups have made plain their intentions not to stop with Title IV funding from the U.S. Department of Education but to continue toward the removal of tax exemption, the removal of all forms of federally recognized accreditation, and more.
In short, this powerful lobby believes that policies that preclude LGBT conduct are the same as excluding people on the basis of racial or ethnic identity. If this approach takes hold in the wider political culture, soon all non-profit institutions that hold traditional beliefs on sexual morality and gender identity will be deprived of their historic First Amendment rights to the free exercise of their religion.
What Can I Do?
What can an ordinary Free Will Baptist do? you might ask.
Educate Yourself
First, I recommend that you familiarize yourself with the current conversation on these issues. One helpful resource is Dr. Albert Mohler’s “The Briefing.”
Also helpful is the Alliance Defending Freedom, (ADF) the legal organization that has successfully argued so many religious liberty cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. This organization provided legal counsel for Welch College in 2019 when the college came under fire for its traditional Christian stance on sexuality and gender. I strongly recommend ADF.
Other good organizations defending religious liberty and providing helpful resources on these issues include Dr. David Black and the Religious Liberty Coalition and David Gibbs III and the National Center for Life and Liberty.
Exercise Your Rights as a Citizen in a Representative Democracy
Another thing you can do is to exercise your influence as a citizen by kindly and humbly communicating with your U.S. representatives and senators, as well as your state legislators. You can keep them informed of the impact of the Equality Act and similar initiatives on the very existence of traditional religious nonprofits. This includes colleges, universities, K-12 schools, and thousands of other religious nonprofits that save the state billions of dollars each year in costly educational and social services.
Political engagement exists in the context of broader cultural engagement and stewardship and does not function in a vacuum. Yet we have the ability to exercise the rights of our citizenship in a democratic republic that governs through representative democracy.
Unfortunately, the religious liberty community does not have as loud of a voice as other liberal or conservative interest groups. Take for example the LGBT lobby or the environmental lobby or even the business or gun rights or pro-life lobbies. Elected representatives are kept apprised of what those groups deem important. It’s incumbent on religious believers to communicate their concerns about religious liberty to their elected representatives on the federal and state levels.
Particularly, traditional religious people need to make their elected representatives aware of the effect the Equality Act would have on religious liberty. It would be the most sweeping legislation threatening religious freedom in the history of the U.S. If the act were passed, most traditional colleges, schools, social service agencies, and other non-profits sponsored by traditional churches, denominations, synagogues, mosques, etc., simply could not survive.
For example, the accreditation of traditional religious colleges, schools, and seminaries whose deeply held religious beliefs prohibit their hiring of LGBT individuals and admitting of LGBT students would be endangered. Furthermore, their students’ access to Title IV funds would be eliminated Thus such institutions, which have saved the states multiple billions of dollars educating citizens and community leaders for decades and even centuries, would immediately be forced out of business.
This is because the Equality Act explicitly states that organizations will not be protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993. RFRA was introduced by Congressman Chuck Schumer of New York. Passed unanimously in the U.S. House, with only three dissenting votes in the U.S. Senate, it was eagerly signed by President Bill Clinton. This act guarantees the freedom of conscience for traditional religious people promised in the First Amendment. Yet the Equality Act would do away with RFRA’s protections.
Even elected representatives who do not share our deeply held religious beliefs need to be made aware of the very valuable role traditional religious colleges, K-12 schools, adoption and other social services agencies, and other traditional religious non-profits across the U.S. have long played in our society. They need to be made aware of the existential threat this entire sector is under should the Equality Act pass.
Financial Support
Importantly, concerned churches and individuals can increase their charitable giving to institutions like Welch College. Christian colleges and universities stand to lose the most the fastest as a result of the momentum the LGBT lobby is gaining.
Christian higher education, quite simply, faces an existential threat, and the only thing that will ultimately sustain it is the financial support of its denominational, church, alumni, and donor base. This financial support has never been so important, and its increase is the greatest bulwark against the loss of Title IV funds and tax exemption.
Speak the Truth in Love
Furthermore, we must continue to speak the truth in love. Love is the final apologetic, as Francis Schaeffer used to say. And if we are not careful to love individuals whose human flourishing and spiritual lives are being harmed by the LGBT ideology, and show that love observably, we will not have the right, spiritually, to speak the truth we say we believe.
In this regard, I highly recommend the writings of Rosaria Butterfield. Butterfield is an evangelical pastor’s wife who used to be a lesbian critical theory professor and came to faith as a result of the humble, hospitable witness of a conservative evangelical pastor and his wife in a small congregation.
This pastor and his wife, and their church, bore witness to the truth of Holy Scripture regarding what kind of sexual identities and relationships honor God and His creative design and foster vital human flourishing. Yet they were loving and kind and hospitable to Butterfield and her friends, who were at the vanguard of the LGBT movement.
Pray
Lastly, pray. Pray that God will provide wisdom for people who are in leadership. Pray that God will help legislators on the federal and state levels to understand what is at stake with the Equality Act and other initiatives that jeopardize the First Amendment rights of every citizen of the United States.
And pray that God will renew faithful churches that confidently teach and model the doctrine and practice the Spirit gives us in His Word, speak the truth in love, and spread the gospel of Christ, which is the power of God to salvation to everyone who believes.
by Matthew Pinson | Dec 16, 2020
My readers have noticed that, some mornings, I have been reading gradually through the Puritan Thomas Brooks’s classic, Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices. My theological mentor F. Leroy Forlines died yesterday around 3:30 p.m. at ninety-four years of age, and it was fitting that when I sat down to read this morning, my eyes fell on the following words from Thomas Brooks about truth.
Mr. Forlines’s favorite passage of Scripture was John 8:32, “And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Another passage from the gospel of John aptly describes Leroy Forlines’s life: “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.” Mr. Forlines patterned his life after Christ. So it was characterized by truth but also by grace. Another text that he was fond of along these lines was Ephesians 4:14–15: “As a result, we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming; but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ.” Mr. Forlines always bore witness to the truth, but he always spoke it in love.
These texts came vividly to my mind early this morning when I opened Precious Remedies and saw the words below from Brooks. They describe the man who, outside my wife, children, parents, and grandparents, has shaped me more than any other living human being.
Brooks is discussing the eleventh device of Satan “to draw the soul to sin”: “By polluting and defiling the souls and judgments of men with . . . dangerous errors.” Leroy Forlines valiantly spent his life helping us battle this device of Satan. Brooks’s fifth remedy is “Hold fast the truth,” and his sixth is “keep humble.” This is the remedy Leroy Forlines modeled before us, and it is the gospel remedy that holds the cure for our souls and for the ills of our secular age—for believers in Christ to hold fast the truth and keep humble.
Meditate with me on this passage from Brooks that Leroy Forlines would smile on because it is so saturated in the wisdom of Holy Scripture. And meditate on it with the total-personality zeal with which Mr. Forlines would want you to read it—to think deeply, to feel deeply, and to ponder how this truth can transform you. And with it, reminisce about the way in which Mr. Forlines lived out for us and taught us and modeled before us these verities that alone can set us free.
—–
Remedy (5). The fifth remedy against this device of Satan is, To hold fast the truth. As men take no hold on the arm of flesh—until they let go the arm of God (Jer. 17:5); so men take no hold on error until they have let go their hold of truth; therefore hold fast the truth (2 Tim. 1:13, and Titus 1:9). Truth is your crown, hold fast your crown, and let no man take your crown from you. Has not God made truth sweet to your soul, yes, sweeter than honey, or the honeycomb? and will not you go on to heaven, feeding upon truth, that heavenly honeycomb, as Samson did of his honeycomb. Ah, souls, have you not found truth sweetening your spirits, and cheering your spirits, and warming your spirits, and raising your spirits, and corroborating your spirits? Have not you found truth a guide to lead you, a staff to uphold you, a cordial to strengthen you, and a medicine to heal you? And will not you hold fast the truth? Has not truth been your best friend in your worst days? Has not truth stood by you when friends have forsaken you? Has not truth done more for you than all the world could do against you, and will you not hold fast the truth? Is not truth your right eye, without which you cannot see for Christ? And your right hand, without which you cannot do for Christ? And your right foot, without which you cannot walk with Christ? And will you not hold truth fast? Oh! hold fast the truth in your judgments and understandings, in your wills and affections, in your profession and conversation.
Truth is more precious than gold or rubies, “and all the things you can desire are not to be compared to her” (Prov. 3:15). Truth is that heavenly mirror wherein we may see the luster and glory of divine wisdom, power, greatness, love and mercifulness. In this mirror you may see the face of Christ, the favor of Christ, the riches of Christ, and the heart of Christ—beating and working sweetly towards your souls. Oh! let your souls cleave to truth, as Ruth did to Naomi (Ruth 1:15, 16), and say, “I will not leave truth, nor return from following after truth; but where truth goes I will go, and where truth lodges I will lodge; and nothing but death shall part truth and my soul.” What John said to the church of Philadelphia I may say to you, “Hold fast that which you have, that no man take your crown” (Rev. 3:11). The crown is the top of royalties: such a thing is truth: “Let no man take your crown.” “Hold fast the faithful word,” as Titus speaks. Hold fast as with tooth and nail, against those who would snatch it from us. It is better to let go of anything, rather than truth! It is better to let go, of your honors and riches, your friends and pleasures, and the world’s favors; yes, your nearest and dearest relations, yes, your very lives—than to let go of the truth. Oh, keep the truth, and truth will make you safe and happy forever. Blessed are those who are kept by truth. “Though I cannot dispute for the truth, yet I can die for the truth,” said a blessed martyr.
Remedy (6). The sixth remedy against this device of Satan is, To keep humble. Humility will keep the soul free from many darts of Satan’s casting, and erroneous snares of his spreading. As low trees and shrubs are free from many violent gusts and blasts of wind which shake and tear the taller trees, so humble souls are free from those gusts and blasts of error which shake and tear proud, lofty souls. Satan and the world have least power to fasten errors upon humble souls. The God of light and truth delights to dwell with the humble; and the more light and truth dwells in the soul, the further off darkness and error will stand from the soul. The God of grace pours in grace into humble souls, as men pour drink into empty vessels; and the more grace is poured into the soul, the less error shall be able to overpower the soul, or to infect the soul. I have read of one who, seeing in a vision so many snares of the devil spread upon the earth, he sat down mourning, and said within himself, Who shall pass through these? whereupon he heard a voice answering, Humility shall pass through them.
That is a sweet word in Psalm 25:9, “The humble, he will guide in judgment, and the meek he will teach his way.” And certainly souls guided by God, and taught by God, are not easily drawn aside into ways of error. Oh, take heed of spiritual pride! Pride fills our fancies, and weakens our graces, and makes room in our hearts for error. There are no men on earth so soon entangled, and so easily conquered by error—as proud souls. Oh, it is dangerous to love to be wise above what is written, to be curious and unsober in your desire of knowledge, and to trust to your own capacities and abilities to undertake to pry into all secrets, and to be puffed up with a carnal mind. Souls that are thus asoaring up above the bounds and limits of humility, usually fall into the very worst of errors, as experience does daily evidence. The proud soul is like him who gazed upon the moon—but fell into the pit. You know how to apply it.
—-
Leroy Forlines would have loved these sentiments from the pages of Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices. He embodied this union of truth and humility in his own life and work and taught us to do the same. May we continue to emulate his example.
The above scripture texts are from the NASB.
by Matthew Pinson | Nov 7, 2020
I have been reading through the Puritan Thomas Brooks’s classic, Precious Remedies against Satan’s Devices. It is best taken in sip-by-sip, each morning, as I have been doing. This morning I read about one of Satan’s most effective devices, “Device 7: By making the soul bold to venture upon the occasions of sin.”*
“Saith Satan, You may walk by the harlot’s door though you won’t go into the harlot’s bed; you may sit and sup with the drunkard, though you won’t be drunk with the drunkard; you may look upon Jezebel’s beauty, and you may play and toy with Delilah, though you do not commit wickedness with the one or the other; you may with Achan handle the golden wedge, though you do not steal the golden wedge.”
In ministering to young (and old) people over the years, I have found that this is one of the best specimens of wise counsel the Bible and the Christian tradition give us for avoiding sin: Think carefully, and figure out what situations you get yourself in that predispose you to be tempted, and avoid those situations.
The first remedy against this device, Brooks says, is “to dwell upon those scriptures that do expressly command us to avoid the occasions of sin, and the least appearance of evil (1 Thess. 5. 22): ‘Abstain from all appearance of evil.’ Whatsoever is heterodox, unsound and unsavoury, shun it, as you would a serpent in your way, or poison in your meat.” A few lines down he says, “It was good counsel that Livia gave her husband Augustus: ‘It behoveth thee not only not to do wrong, but not to seem to do so.’”
Quoting Proverbs 5:8, “Remove your way far from her, And do not go near the door of her house,” Brooks counsels: “He that would not be burnt, must dread the fire; he that would not hear the bell, must not meddle with the rope. To venture upon the occasion of sin, and then to pray, ‘Lead us not into temptation,’ is all one as to thrust thy finger into the fire, and then to pray that it might not be burnt.”
The second remedy against this device, Brooks says, is to consider solemnly “that ordinarily there is no conquest over sin, without the soul turning from the occasion of sin.” God will not take temptation out of our path, Brooks warns, unless we turn from the occasion of sin. If you dance near the edge of a pit, he says, you can’t be surprised if you fall in. “He that hath gunpowder about him had need keep far enough from sparkles.” Brooks is right when he says that it’s rare to go up to the brink of sin and not give in to temptation. “He that ventures upon the occasions of sin is as he that would quench the fire with oil, which is a fuel to maintain it, and increase it.”
This godly wisdom reminds me of a Christian counseling book I once read (I can’t remember which one). It told the story of a recovering alcoholic who was in addiction counseling. He walked to work each day, and he had to walk by a liquor store. Each day, he would struggle with intense temptation to go into the liquor store and buy a bottle of his favorite drink. This went on for months. Then one day when walking home from work, he gave in to the temptation, bought the alcohol, and drank it all.
When he told his counselor about it in tears, the counselor said, “You need to take another route to work.” He said, “I can’t. The only other route would take me thirty minutes longer.” The counselor said, “You can. You must, if you really want to beat this.”
Then the author went on to compare the door to the liquor store to the opening of a cave with a dragon inside: The closer you get to the mouth of the cave, the more you are predisposed to being captured by the dragon. So the best advice is to stay away from the mouth of the cave.
Brooks’s other two remedies are just as helpful: Using the example of Joseph fleeing Potiphar’s wife (Gen. 39:10), he says: “The third remedy against this device of Satan is, seriously to consider,
that other precious saints, who were once glorious on earth, and are now triumphing in heaven, have turned from the occasion of sin, as hell itself. The fourth remedy is “solemnly to consider, that the avoiding the occasions of sin, is an evidence of grace, and that which lifts up a man above most other men in the world.”
May we pray for grace not to venture boldly upon the occasions of sin, and may we apply ourselves, with God’s help, to adhere to make use of this precious remedy against Satan’s devices every day of our lives
*These quotations are taken from pp. 66–70 of the “Puritan Paperbacks” edition published by Banner of Truth Trust.
by Matthew Pinson | Oct 20, 2020
I am reading back through my copy of Precious Remedies against Satan’s Devices that my old pastor Paul Harrison gave me in 2007. Dr. Harrison is always giving away copies of books by the Puritans—something I love about him—and one of his favorite books to give away is Thomas Brooks’s Precious Remedies.
I’ve been reading portions of it as part of my daily devotional exercises, and I’m going to share a choice quote from it below. But before that, let me reflect a little on Puritan spirituality.
I love to read the Puritans. As I often tell my classes here at Welch College, we need to read the Puritans. They represent some of the best spirituality and theology the Christian tradition has to offer. I often say that the sort of Reformation spirituality represented by our General Baptist forefathers (my own tradition, the Free Will Baptist Church, originated from English General Baptists who moved to this side of the Atlantic in the 1600s) is essentially Puritan spirituality.
Puritans could be either baptistic or paedobaptistic (baptizing infants) or Calvinist or Arminian. So, while most Puritans advocated infant baptism (like Brooks or Thomas Boston or John Owen), there were also baptistic Puritans (Baptists—part of a branch of what many scholars, such as my late major professor Richard Greaves, call “radical Puritans”) like John Bunyan and Thomas Grantham and William Kiffin. And while most Puritans were Calvinists, there were also Puritans, such as the General Baptists, who were Arminians. John Goodwin is probably the best-known Arminian Puritan.
General Baptist spirituality, as a branch of Puritan spirituality, is basically an Arminian and Baptist version of Puritan spirituality. Thus it is Arminian and so is non-deterministic and admits that apostasy of genuine believers is a possibility, and it is baptistic and emphasizes conversion in a way some paedobaptistic Puritan spirituality doesn’t. In this way it is like the spirituality of John Bunyan as seen in books like The Pilgrim’s Progress.
Thus, like Puritan spirituality, General Baptist spirituality is very much an “ordinary means of grace” spirituality. It is more about what Edith Schaeffer called “common sense Christian living.” It was about the spiritual disciplines. It was very common sense and down-to-earth, not as mystical and crisis-experience-oriented as much modern evangelical spirituality, which has been influenced by the holiness and charismatic movements.
Puritan spirituality was also less individualistic than much modern evangelical spirituality. It emphasized the church and Christian community. It was just as apt to talk about how to listen to a sermon and the importance of attending church as it was to talk about an individual’s solitary devotional exercises (which it also talked about a lot!).
Puritan spirituality, in being less mystical and more common-sense-oriented, was very Word-centered and doctrinal. Learning and studying and meditating prayerfully on Holy Scripture was at the heart of this sort of spirituality.
We need to get back to this sort of basic, biblical, evangelical, ordinary-means-of-grace spirituality.
Now that you have read my musings about Puritan spirituality, I want to give you a great quote from Precious Remedies. What Brooks does is list a device of Satan and then respond with several remedies against that device. The third device Satan uses against us is the “extenuating and lessening of sin.” Brooks writes,
“Ah! says Satan, it is but a little pride, a little worldliness, a little uncleanness, a little drunkenness, etc. As Lot said of Zoar, ‘It is but a little one, and my soul shall live’ (Gen. 19:20). Alas! says Satan, it is but a very little sin that you stick so at. You may commit it without any danger to your soul. It is but a little one; you may commit it, and yet your soul shall live.”
Brooks gives seven things to consider which provide remedies for dealing with this strategy of Satan:
- Sin which men account small brings God’s great wrath on men.
- The giving way to a less sin makes way for the committing of a greater.
- It is sad to stand with God for a trifle.
- Often there is most danger in the smallest sins.
- The saints have chosen to suffer greatly rather than commit the least sin.
- The soul can never stand under the guilt and weight of sin when God sets it home upon the soul.
- There is more evil in the least sin than in the greatest affliction.
The second remedy is one that I wanted to share with my readers. When engaging in spiritual warfare, we need to “preach ourselves a sermon” and remind ourselves that when we give way to a lesser sin, it makes it easier for us to commit a greater sin. Ponder the wisdom in Brooks’s last paragraph in this section:
“By all this we see, that the yielding to lesser sins, draws the soul to the committing of greater. Ah! how many in these days have fallen, first to have low thoughts of Scripture and ordinances, and then to slight Scripture and ordinances, and then to make a nose of wax of Scripture and ordinances, and then to cast off Scripture and ordinances, and then at last to advance and lift up themselves, and their Christ-dishonoring and soul-damning opinions, above Scripture and ordinances. Sin gains upon man’s soul by insensible degrees. “The beginning of the words of his mouth is foolishness, and the end of his talking is mischievous madness.” (Eccles. 10:13) Corruption in the heart, when it breaks forth, is like a breach in the sea, which begins in a narrow passage, until it eats through, and casts down all before it. The debates of the soul are quick, and soon ended; and that may be done in a moment that may undo a man forever. When a man has begun to sin, he knows not where, or when, or how he shall make a stop of sin. Usually the soul goes on from evil to evil, from folly to folly, until it is ripe for eternal misery. Men usually grow from being naught to be very naught, and from very naught to be stark naught, and then God sets them at nought forever.”
I encourage you to read Thomas Brooks’s Precious Remedies against Satan’s Devices. Stick with it, despite the older vocabulary (some of which you might have to google). Because it’s so scriptural, it will be food for your soul, spiritual nourishment for your mind, heart, and will.
by Matthew Pinson | Sep 19, 2020
I recently read an address C. S. Lewis gave to a group of Anglican priests and youth leaders in 1945. It reminded me of what many of us in the Free Will Baptist Church have been thinking lately: Falling all over ourselves to de-emphasize our Free Will Baptist confessional beliefs and practices is probably the surest strategy for denominational extinction we could devise. Let me make a few general observations about denominational identity and survival, and then we’ll look more closely at what Lewis can teach us.
The First Strategy for Denominational Survival
There seem to be two competing strategies for denominational survival vying for prominence in the Free Will Baptist Church (as in all denominations). The first is this: If we want to keep from dying, we must become as much as possible like the non-denominational, consumer-oriented megachurch. This, among other things will mean de-emphasizing strange doctrinal beliefs and practices like the possibility of apostasy, the pedilavium, or requiring immersion for new members transferring from non-immersionist churches. It will mean not teaching distinctive Free Will Baptist doctrine from the pulpit. It will require making it as hard as possible for people to discover that our congregation is Free Will Baptist, based on its publications and communications.
The Second Strategy for Denominational Survival
The second is this: If we want to keep from dying, we must fulfill the Great Commission mandate of evangelizing people and teaching those we evangelize everything Jesus and his deputies, the inspired apostles, taught. This means we must teach and preach doctrine, like the apostles in the New Testament said to do, and we must practice what we believe the New Testament teaches, even if it seems strange to people outside our confessional tradition. This includes distinctive Free Will Baptist doctrine and practice. If we don’t carefully inculcate the scriptural doctrines our confessional tradition has affirmed, and if we don’t emphasize distinctive biblical practices our tradition has extolled, and if we do our dead-level best to cover up the fact that we’re Free Will Baptists, within a generation we will be assimilated into the non-denominational matrix and will go out of existence as a separate denomination.
These two strategies are mutually exclusive. If one is right, the other is dead wrong. You can’t have a hybrid of these two strategies.
The Last Thing We Need is Another Denomination
Please understand: I do not think, as I know C. S. Lewis did not think, that we need more denominations. That we need more schism. If it’s not necessary to have a separate Free Will Baptist denomination because it is our conviction that the Bible teaches what our Church affirms, then it’s really wrong to have another denomination. It’s schismatic. It’s divisive. And we need to join another denomination. I think Lewis, good Anglican that he was, would agree with me on this.
There’s something that breaks my heart—and I think breaks the heart of God—about the proliferation of all the different denominations out there that basically believe the same thing but are separated because of squabbles they have had that are not about the doctrine and practice they believe the Bible entails. A denomination is not a “network.” It is a fellowship of churches that believe that their affirmation of certain scriptural—apostolic—doctrines and practices necessitates having a separate denomination.
The last thing we need is another denomination. If there are other conservative Arminian Baptist denominations that believe that the washing of the saints’ feet is a divine ordinance that must be practiced liturgically—and other beliefs in our Treatise that we believe necessitate our Church’s existence—by all means let’s join up! Let’s not be schismatic because of our preferences, or because we’re used to seeing each other and going golfing or eating sushi together at the Annual Session of the National Association each July.
If we’re going to fall all over ourselves finding more efficient ways to bury our Free Will Baptist identity, doctrine, and practice, why go to the trouble of having a separate denomination? Why not just join the Southern Baptists or become non-denominational?
Are “Missional” and “Confessional” in Opposition?
These are things a lot of us have been talking about in the Free Will Baptist Church of late. We’re trying to figure out what it means to be who we are, with integrity, in a mission field in our secular age in the West.
We’re in a rapidly secularizing culture. We must be missional. And when new believers on the mission field in majority-world countries are converted, they want you to level with them about what’s true and what’s false. They’re hungering and thirsting for knowledge. They want to know what all these things they come across in the Bible really mean:
What does the Bible mean when it says that you will receive the crown of life only “if you continue”? What does it mean when it says you can fall away and not be renewed to repentance? Is affusion (sprinkling) okay in baptism, or is infant baptism okay? Or do I have to be immersed as a convert to follow Jesus in baptism? Do we—literally, physically—need to observe the Lord’s supper liturgically, or was that just a spiritual lesson? Do we—literally, physically—need to wash people’s feet liturgically, or was that just a spiritual lesson?
That’s why the people who are opposing Protestant liberalism most in the mainline denominations are from the global South and from the mission field. It’s people in the consumeristic modern West who want to de-emphasize theological precision and biblical doctrine and practice—who seem to want to do anything but teach and preach—and sing—doctrine.
These are the sorts of conversations that are happening among many Free Will Baptists—especially those in the ministry who are in their twenties. They are taking part in a new mentality to which David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Group, called them when he said, “After countless interviews and conversations, I am convinced that historic and traditional practices, and orthodox and wisdom-laden ways of believing, are what the next generation really needs.”
Now to What C. S. Lewis Said
So, in light of these exciting conversations that are taking place, especially among Free Will Baptists in their twenties, I loved what I read recently from C. S. Lewis. Again, remember he’s talking to Anglicans in England in the 1940s:
“Some of you are priests and some are leaders of youth organizations. . . . And here at the outset I must deal with an unpleasant business. It seems to the layman that in the Church of England we often hear from our priests doctrine which is not Anglican Christianity. . . . It is not, of course, for me to define to you what Anglican Christianity is—I am your pupil, not your teacher. But I insist that wherever you draw the lines, bounding lines must exist, beyond which your doctrine will cease either to be Anglican or to be Christian: and I suggest also that the lines come a great deal sooner than many modern priests think. I think it is your duty to fix the lines clearly in your own minds: and if you wish to go beyond them you must change your profession.
“This is your duty not specially as Christians or as priests but as honest men. . . . Men who have passed beyond these boundary lines in either direction are apt to protest that they have come by their unorthodox opinions honestly. In defense of those opinions they are prepared to suffer obloquy and to forfeit professional advancement. They thus come to feel like martyrs. But this simply misses the point which so gravely scandalizes the layman. We never doubted that the unorthodox opinions were honestly held; what we complain of is your continuing your ministry after you have come to hold them. We always knew that a man who makes his living as a paid agent of the Conservative Party may honestly change his views and honestly become a Communist. What we deny is that he can honestly continue to be a Conservative agent and to receive money from one party while he supports the policy of another.
“Even when we have thus ruled out teaching which is in direct contradiction to our profession, we must define our task still further. We are to defend Christianity itself—the faith preached by the Apostles, attested by the Martyrs, embodied in the Creeds, expounded by the Fathers. . . .” [1]
Lewis and Denominations
C. S. Lewis was speaking here as an Anglican to Anglican clergy, and he was doing what he did in so many other places when he talks about confessional doctrine and not just “mere Christianity.” In his writings, Lewis talked about the virgin birth, but also about lesser doctrines such as the Anglican doctrine of the real presence of Christ in the Lord’s supper. Some people only read Lewis’s wonderful book Mere Christianity, and they think that is all Lewis was interested in—a sort of amorphous, non-denominational Christianity.
But they forgot to read the preface to Mere Christianity, in which Lewis said that “mere Christianity” is like the central hall of a great house which leads to distinctive rooms, and he did not want his appropriate discussion of mere Christianity, which unites Christians in the different distinctive “rooms”—denominations or confessional traditions—to discourage people from going into those rooms and exploring them and enjoying them.
Lewis said that his silence in Mere Christianity about his Anglican distinctives of doctrine and practice should not be interpreted that he is “sitting on the fence” about doctrines and practices that distinguish one denomination from another, nor that he thinks them unimportant:
“I hope no reader will suppose that ‘mere’ Christianity is here put forward as an alternative to the creeds of the existing communions—as if a man could adopt it in preference to Congregationalism or Greek Orthodoxy or anything else. It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in. . . . When you do get into your room you will find that the long wait has done you some kind of good which you would not have had otherwise. But you must regard it as waiting, not as camping. You must keep on praying for light: and, of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and panelling. . . . When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall. If they are wrong, they need your prayers the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.” [3]
Moving from Entry-Level Christianity to Unabridged Christianity
Oh what need we are in of this sort of time-honored wisdom in our own day of an evangelicalism that is so unsure of itself, so intimated by the spirit of the age. We need what we see throughout Lewis’s writings, and throughout the writings of the great saints and martyrs throughout the church’s past: We need to be ourselves.
We need to be, un-self-consciously, with integrity, what the Scriptures call us to be. We need to be teaching what the Scriptures teach, practicing the simple practices the Scriptures enjoin us to practice. We need to be zealously evangelizing the lost and then just as zealously teaching them to observe everything Jesus and his deputies, the inspired apostles, teach and command and enjoin in the New Testament—not just the core, not just what it takes to be saved, but everything.
Leroy Forlines says it this way: The part of the Great Commission that says we must teach people to observe everything Jesus teaches and commands means He won’t allow us just to teach “entry-level” Christianity. His Great Commission to us demands we teach “unabridged Christianity” [4].
This is what has, historically, happened on the mission field. New Christians rescued from the grip of sin and its devastation on their life, and fitted for glory, usually don’t want to stay at the “entry level”—in the hall. They want to know more. They want honest, direct answers to the questions that come to their minds when they’re reading the Bible.
That’s what we need to do. If we believe that the Free Will Baptist confession of faith and practice is biblical, we need to teach it and preach it and practice it with gusto—not to be ashamed of it. This, we’ll find, is not only a recipe for survival as a small, theologically distinctive denomination. It’s also just a common-sense playing out of the Great Commission—an honest, authentic attempt to teach people everything that Jesus and his apostles have put forward for his church. And it’s this kind of full-throated, confident discipleship in Christian truth that will lead mature disciples to make other disciples of Christ and bring growth and replication and renewal to our churches in our increasingly secular age.
[1] C. S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970).
[2] Ibid., 89–90.
[3] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 6–12.
[4]See Forlines’s classic essay, “A Plea for Unabridged Christianity,” Integrity: A Journal of Christian Thought 2 (2003), 85–102, which can be downloaded here.
