Justification: Whose Legal Fiction?

A conversation I was having yesterday with a friend has set me to thinking. My completely awesome friend JK converted to Roman Catholicism two weeks ago and he was sharing with me his frustrations with Calvin’s view of the Eucharist and how, but for rejecting transubstantiation and the consequent adoration of the elements, Calvin’s view on virtually all other points is the Roman Catholic view. I mentioned something about a perceived radical nominalism the Reformers might have been reacting against in Catholicism’s making the elements the substantial body and blood of Christ while they retain the properties of bread and wine and in some sense may still be spoken of as symbols. I guess I was driving toward the seeming appearance of an epistemological monstrosity in which God becomes bread and wine when one tries to have it both ways, so I wasn’t quite expressing myself clearly in bringing up radical nominalism. There is a transformation in the Catholic view—not just God making bread and wine Christ’s body and blood by fiat. This was key, though, because it moved us toward discussing justification, about which my buddy said the Reformers were working with a radical nominalism in having the justified imputed righteous while they remain sinners. That Luther philosophically defended simul iustus et peccator by resorting to the nominalism of Ockham and others, I agree, but Protestant justification is not a legal fiction. Not only is justification a declaration about Christ satisfying all of God's requirements of justice for us, but it is also a transformative declaration about sinners becoming the righteousness of God, in the same way that in transubstantiation, the words, “This is my body. This is my blood” are a transformative declaration about bread and wine becoming what they were not previously.

The above is a controversial rumination, but it led to one that might be just as controversial. I’m thinking that in regards to justification and our understandings of grace and what grace does to the rebel children of Adam and Eve, both Protestants and Roman Catholics have difficulty with process. Catholics might would say I have a lot of gall saying that in the way that Protestantism divvies up justification and sanctification and states justification as an instantaneous event that delivers a forensic righteousness (not a real personal righteousness, Catholics would note) decisive for final salvation, which, Catholics would go on to argue, renders the process of sanctification that follows superfluous in the economy of salvation. In some Protestant explanations of justification, I would have to admit this Catholic objection scores a legitimate point, but I would counter by speaking of justification as a delivery in the present of an earnest of the substantial righteousness, secured and vouchsafed for us by the perfect life, death, and resurrection Jesus Christ underwent in our place, that will belong to the Christian when God delivers him or her finally and completely from sin and all its effects at the last day. In other words, justification for Protestants need not be considered so exhaustive of salvation that God's delivering us at the level of our nature from the power and presence of sin between regeneration and glorification is emptied of all significance. Justification is the declaration of a fact that will be; the fact—Christ's perfect obedience imputed to us in the present—declaring what will assuredly be in the future—our glorified nature resulting from justification-grounded sanctification.

Where do I view the Catholic understanding of justification to have trouble with process in regards to how grace works? I mean, over against Protestantism Roman Catholicism does not distinguish between justification and sanctification and thinks of the decisive note of justification as a process, for crying out loud! Well, here goes. In Roman Catholicism, the declaration of righteousness a Christian receives at first justification is the declaration of a fact pure and simple, not qualified in any way. At justification, the Christian is not simultaneously a sinner and just; a Christian is just just. All is right with him or her. I may be misrepresenting from this point forward (I do not know, but I trust my ex-Reformed, out-of-the-closet Catholic friend and his Catholic brothers and mine will let me know if I have unintentionally misrepresented the Church’s teachings), but it seems the conclusion we must draw from this is that all the truly meaningful adverse affects of the Fall are healed when one is regenerated (if only until the first post-baptismal sin). Because the only thing wrong with the fallen human being is the deprivation of grace, it seems that it is only because of continuing sin throughout the remainder of life that the further sanctifying work of God is required for the Christian to arrive at the beatific vision. In other words, after first sanctifying grace there is no more healing of human nature that needs to be done. Everything afterwards is just an elaborate maintenance operation.

From the foregoing, then, sanctification and the entire sacramental system it depends on is just a maintenance operation, so thorough is the healing effected by first sanctifying grace. I might be wrong on this because Catholics recognize that concupiscence still remains in a Christian after baptism, but even if Catholics do not believe this concupiscence to be sin itself, it is still a disorder that was not present in humanity at our first creation. Concupiscence, even if we are not guilty simply by virtue of it, is still the seething cesspool of all unrighteousness. Is this the perfect and complete substantial righteousness, the healed nature, on account of which God calls us righteous? As long as the sin factory remains operational in any capacity, we cannot safely be spoken of as substantially righteous in God’s presence. This is where the Tridentine Roman Catholic formulation of justification is susceptible to the same charge of legal fiction Catholics levy at Protestant views of justification.

It seems, in Roman Catholic soteriology, that God can’t do fatherly business with human beings until they come into his presence with every last vestige of unrighteousness or unsoundness in their nature done away with. This is where I say the Tridentine Roman Catholic view of justification and grace, for all of its reliance on Aristotlean becoming, has trouble with process. If Protestants have a process problem in our understanding of such a front-loaded imputed righteousness that it implicitly makes the subsequent healing of our nature and the obedience that would flow from it superfluous in the economy of salvation, then Catholics have just as big a process problem in their view of a positional justification that requires a pristine essential righteousness moment-to-moment in a human being for saving communion with the Holy Trinity. Being called and really made righteous is a long process because the wreck the Fall has made of us is truly great and terrible. Arriving at the end of the process is not and cannot be a precondition for beginning. God takes care of working it out so he can get us started standing on solid ground. For Protestants, that solid ground is the alien righteousness of Christ imputed to us presently, which by the progressive work of the Holy Spirit will so permeate us by the last day that it will rightly be spoken of at that point as our own personal nature.

I will conclude this haphazard and off-the-cuff reflection on grace by positing that grace neither be considered exclusively in terms of God’s unmerited favor by which he relates to sinners, a la Protestantism, nor that grace be considered exclusively in terms of Divine energy that must infuse people in order to lift them into communion with the Holy Trinity, a la Catholicism and Orthodoxy. I prefer a both/and approach. They are two sides of the same reality. Grace is nothing other than the personal benevolence of God, whether exhibited in forgiving sinners or communing with his creatures whether they be upright or fallen. God forgives us, fills us, heals us, loves us, by the Spirit of his grace. Grace is forgiveness and healing and peaceful harmony with God through Christ in the Holy Spirit.

Overreacting to John Piper's 2 Minutes with the Pope

I saw this video of John Piper’s response to the question of what he would say to the Pope if he had two minutes with him, and I just had to respond. Let me throw out a few caveats before I get to it. First, Piper is responding off the cuff to a question he wasn’t expecting and this is probably in a conference situation where everybody is operating with the same assumptions and views. All in all, the situation is not conducive for a comprehensive and nuanced response to an opposing point of view. Second, I don’t know as much as I probably should about Piper. He is a big name for evangelical Calvinists, and he has had a hugely positive impact in the lives of many of my friends. I can’t argue with this. I have every intention of reading Don’t Waste Your Life, and my personal impression of him the few times I’ve listened to him on the Internet is positive. This man is a passionate, warm, human being fully alive with love for Jesus and people kind of guy. I think he is an overwhelmingly positive force in the Kingdom of God.

That all being said, I think John Piper might have a too-narrow conception of the Gospel. If his engagement with NT Wright and here, with Roman Catholicism, is any indication, Piper has substituted a comprehensive explanation of the Gospel with a very specific formal statement about how the Gospel works to bring individual sinners into right relationship with God. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with the formulation Piper here gives: “we should rely entirely on the righteousness of Christ imputed to us by faith alone as the ground of God being 100 percent for us, after which necessary sanctification comes.” This is how the Gospel works to bring people into the Kingdom of God, but, necessary and central though this affirmation might be, this does not encompass all that the Gospel entails. The Gospel put more comprehensively might go something like this: Jesus has been established as the world’s true Lord through his righteous life, death, and resurrection and that, as a result, God has lifted his curse on the whole created order, brought it into his favor, and set it on a trajectory towards its original intended end of righteousness, which will be fulfilled at Christ’s Second Coming. Take Piper’s formulation with this and we have the who, what, how, what for, and where are we going of the Gospel.

My main issue, however, is that Piper does not seem to have grasped the full nuance of the Roman Catholic position on justification, and from that flattened understanding, has rather obtusely declared Roman Catholic theology heretical.

To the Roman Catholic position on justification: are we talking about first justification as in baptism or are we talking about final justification? If we’re talking about first justification, or, to find the most analogous modern Reformed Protestant term, “regeneration,” I believe some Catholics would posit that this does come by faith alone. At any rate, the sole graciousness of God in first regenerating a sinner is quite profoundly acknowledged by the Roman Catholic Church. On this issue, perhaps, if we cut through the formal systematics each side is using, the differences are not quite as profound as would first appear.

The rub is in reference to final justification. Historically, Protestants have not parsed justification the way Catholics do into initial, positional, and final categories. To be declared righteous at regeneration is one in the same as being declared righteous in the end, and this comes solely on the basis of Christ’s righteousness imputed to the sinner. This is Piper’s position. I will play the game of double justification, though. NT Wright does it far better than Piper thinks he does and even John Calvin can speak of a double justification where in the end believers are judged according to works that have themselves been justified by grace alone through faith alone. Works may enter in to final justification, but they rest entirely on the ground of Christ’s righteousness for their worth.

On the Roman Catholic side, however, we have a final justification that is based on righteousness infused by faith and works. A first declaration of righteousness at regeneration does not guarantee a declaration of righteousness at the final day. Catholics must work with God for a righteous verdict on the final day. Obviously, this is quite different from justification by faith alone. There is no denying there’s quite a gulf between these views, but a look at the qualifications both Protestants and Catholics make on final justification, faith, and, works makes the gap look less imposing.

In Calvin’s case, with God justifying us in the end by works viewed in light of Christ’s imputed righteousness, or, in the case of NT Wright, with God in his covenant faithfulness working righteousness in his people in order to deliver them with the same verdict on the last day that he did when he first declared them righteous on their entry into the covenant, Protestants, with BIG qualifications, can also say we will be judged in some sense by our works. In this light, we must look at the way Protestants define faith. For John Calvin, faith subsumes a disposition of piety, and the Westminster Confession of Faith speaks of justifying faith as never being alone but “ever accompanied with all other saving graces,” being “no dead faith, but work[ing] by love” (XI. 2).

Let us look to the Catholic qualifications of works. For instance, without grace removing sin from believers or without God crowning his own gifts with grace in the works of believers, Catholics teach that works do not of themselves merit favor with God. It seems to me that though works are required for salvation in Roman Catholicism, they don’t amount to a hill of beans unless God determines to look on them in a merciful light. Why is it that the distinction between mortal and venial sins is superfluous prior to baptism, unless God views Christians according to a fatherly standard the unregenerate are not privy to? Catholicism is not Pelagian or even semi-Pelagian. I think semi-Augustinian would be a better designation. If you take Catholic qualifications into account, I think it is no more pertinent to call Roman Catholic theology heretical than it is to call Arminian theology heretical. First justification there does not guarantee final justification either. Unfaithfulness can muck it up. Are the Young, Restless, and Reformed crowd sectarian enough to call John Wesley a heretic?

I must also take exception to the use of the word “heresy.” I wish we Protestants would pronounce a moratorium on this word until we learn to use it correctly. In Protestant terms, it seems to me that heresy means an error so severe that it makes the holder of it almost certainly toast. Every time we Protestants call someone a heretic, this means we believe that they are almost certainly going to Hell if they do not repent. I wish conservative Roman Catholics would likewise refrain from throwing the term about when speaking of Christians who belong to what the Vatican calls, “ecclesial communities,” but even in this case, there are extenuating factors, like “invincible ignorance,” and degrees within the Catholic concept of heresy that are conceptually impossible in conservative Calvinist theology. In our post-Vatican II universe, Protestant “heretics” can still be saved unless they know in their consciences that they are maintaining heretical beliefs. For doctrinaire Protestants, it just doesn’t matter.

Finally, I must end my overreaction to a 2 minute clip by grappling with the most troubling implication of Piper’s designation of those who do not agree with justification by faith alone in the confessional Protestant sense as heretics. The implication is that prior to the rise of the Waldensians in the 12th century, all of three people were saved for about eleven hundred of the first twelve hundred years of Church history. Let me ask, is Ignatius a heretic? Is the martyr bishop Polycarp? Is Irenaeus? Is Chrysostom? Is Athanasius? Is Ambrose? Is Bernard of Clairvaux a heretic? Is predestinarian, incipient quasi-Calvinistic Augustine, our hero, a heretic? For all of his Protestantly-speaking sound teaching on the sole graciousness of God in salvation, he does not even arrive at an incipient Protestant teaching of justification by faith alone. You won’t find a formal affirmation of justification by faith alone anywhere in the first millennium of the Church. Do I believe it’s possible that it wasn’t till the second millennium of the Church that we began to grapple most fully with Paul’s teachings on justification? Yes, I do, but failing to arrive at the formal declaration of justification by faith alone hits not right at the very heart of the Christian Gospel. We must look elsewhere for the doctrine on which the Church stands or falls. We have been promised that “the increase of his government shall know no end.” If the vast majority of Christians who have ever lived have failed to grasp the most central essence of the Christian faith, heaven help us all. That would be a failure of the promise of the perpetual growth of the Kingdom of God in this world. But thanks be to the abundant mercy of our God, salvation has been marching on where it has not been expressed in confessional Protestant terms. Christ saves all those who cling in simple faith to him.

More Thoughts on Rome and Constantinople

3. I do not view the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox positions on apostolic succession and their concomitant views on the Church's infallible teaching authority to be absurdities that can be summarily swept aside by all sensible, clear thinking people, as most Protestants seem to think. Indeed, in light of the fractiousness that has always characterized Sola Scriptura Protestantism, these points of view might just be valid correctives to the subjectivism and individualism that have run amok throughout Protestant history. Perhaps, in this regard, John Henry Newman was right to muse that to study history is to cease to be Protestant.

4. The above being said, I must put forward a few keenly-felt objections to apostolic succession and Orthodox and Catholic views of the authority of the Church:

1) my autonomous Protestant spirit rankles at the thought of all Christian people being obligated to submit their reason to the teaching authority of a Church hierarchy that claims infallibility for itself and really means it.

2) Likewise, my democratic and egalitarian American soul finds it terribly constraining and inconvenient to limit the Body of Christ as it is expressed in its full-flower to communities led by a particular class of men who have been handing on an ecclesiastical baton for 2000 years.

3) Finally, the vestiges of my rationalized, pietistic, common-sense spirituality find very quaint and superstitious the notion that Christ's spiritual Kingdom can be tied so closely to the historical continuity of a flesh and blood community, or, God forbid, an institution.

Well, I can resolve, at least to some degree, the three objections above by highlighting the cultural context in which they occur. I won't reduce them entirely to cultural accident, but I have a feeling non-Western Protestants might object to Orthodox and Catholic views of Church authority on grounds different from the rather WASP-ish ones I just put forward.

On 1), I have a feeling that that autonomous Protestant spirit would rankle under just about any kind of dogmatic authority by any ecclesiastical body. I can't hack the idea of the Church being infallible in its teaching capacity, but we can't expect anything other than absolute doctrinal chaos if each individual Christian's conscience is a law unto itself, standing entirely apart from and unaccountable to the witness of communities of faith to what they believe the Scriptures to teach. That being said, historically, Protestant confessionalism has only seemed to raise the bar of "solo Scriptura" from an "every man for himself" type of anarchy to a scarcely more civilized species of tribalism.

On 2), Americans value nothing more than their sense of equality and their convenience. I don't know if these values of liberal democracy have the greatest relevance to issues of ecclesiastical validity, though. I believe Kingdom authority has definitely spilled over the bounds of the episcopate (otherwise, I should be compelled to become Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox), but I do not think that this is the case simply so that those of us in churches outside of apostolic succession may have our Christianity on our own terms. The Reformers valued legitimately constituted and exercised authority in the Church. I still think their reasons for schism were proper and weighty. Are ours?

On 3), what I referred to as "common-sense spirituality" is actually a denial of the significance of the Incarnation. Matter matters. The Church of Jesus Christ has been a continuously-existing, concrete, flesh and blood reality in the world since 33 A.D. Or has it?

If we evaluate the Church according to the criteria of doctrinaire Protestantism, we are left without a true, "New Testament" Church in the world for the vast majority of history because, for most of the Christian era, the only visible, established church has been distinctively Catholic. This is obviously a problem, if 1) Catholicism and Orthodoxy are apostate forms of Christianity, and 2) we take seriously Christ's promise in Matthew 16:18 that the gates of hell will not prevail against His Church. The standard solution to this problem has been to shift our gaze from the church of history to a more immaterial conception of the Church.

In order to find the persevering Church of Christ's promise somewhere else than directly in the at times rather suspect church of history, most Protestants predicate this perseverance on the mystical "invisible Church," which consists of the whole number of the saved but is spiritual in character and is thus ultimately known only to God. In Matthew 16:18, though, Jesus is clearly referring to the organized, tangible, worldwide assembly of believers that he knew would go on to meet in divers places every Lord's Day for at least the next 2000 years. What good would the promise of Matthew 16:18 be to us if its fulfillment was lodged in a kind of church whose perseverance could not be empirically verified? Resorting to the invisible Church on this account would be an equivocation. If there has been any point in history since the founding of the Church that there has not remained on earth a true Church, we would just have to man up and admit that Jesus was mistaken.

5. The burden is on Catholic and Orthodox apologists to "prove" their particular brands of Church infallibility. I don't think their arguments work, but, when it comes to the way Protestants understand Christ to operate in and through His Church, we must come up with something better than what essentially amounts to "ecclesial deism." Ecclesial deism is basically the implicit idea that God has dealt with the post-apostolic Church in much the same way Deists understand God to have dealt with the world, i.e., created it as if it were a watch, wound it up, and then withdrew from it to let it operate on its own. In ecclesial deism, therefore, Christ founded the Church and then withdrew from it, leaving it to its own devices.

I learned this concept from a thought-provoking, sharply reasoned essay on the subject by Catholic apologist and friend of a friend, Bryan Cross. You can read the essay and engage with it at this link. What follows is just a bit of my own preliminary engagement with said essay.

Ecclesial deism is the necessary inference that issues from the standard Protestant account of Church history. At some point in the first 1500 years of the Christian movement, the pure Church of the apostles degenerated into the apostate Church of the Middle Ages that required the Reformation in order to be restored. In order for the Church to have gotten into this condition, Christ must have chosen not to preserve the Church in her fidelity to the deposit of faith she had received from Himself and the apostles, allowing her to fall into heresy and apostasy. The degree to which she compromised the central doctrines of the faith or the rate at which this compromise occurred may vary depending on who you talk to, but the general consensus among Protestants is that at least by the time leading up to the Reformation, the (by that point distinctively) Roman Catholic Church had so distorted the Christian faith that a break with her was necessary in order to restore the Church on earth.

As I've noted above, and as I agree with Mr. Cross, this is a problematic account of history because, if we buy it, it means we have to either: a) resort to the invisible Church gobbledygook that doesn't work, b) admit that Christ was wrong about the perseverance of His Church, c) hold to a weak and defective ecclesiology in which we have no assurance that Christ is present and working effectively through His earthly Body, or, d) all of the above.

6. This particular point is probably going to tumble out like a train wreck, but it seems like Protestant-Catholic back and forth about Christ's work in and through the Church is painted in entirely too much of a black-and-white kind of discourse. Either we have a Church that speaks infallibly because Christ has promised to lead His Church into all truth, or we have a Church in which Christ is scarcely thought to be present and working effectively because of a fundamental Protestant mistrust of material and social realities and of authority.

Maybe we’re speaking past each other. Maybe not. What I do know is that either-or categories are too simplistic for this discussion but that thinking in shades of gray won't get it done either. Dialectical or analogical thinking might be better suited to the task.

7. Bryan Cross is wise to utilize Christological categories in discussing the nature of the Church. After all, the Church is Christ's Body, "flesh of His flesh and bone of His bones." Cross exposes the weakness of Protestant ecclesiology by defining the oft-used distinction between the "outward" and "inward Church," or, "visible" and "invisible Church," as an "ecclesial Nestorianism." Nestorianism is the ancient heresy that Christ's human nature is a complete created being united extrinsically to the Divine second Person of the Trinity and, thus, that Jesus Christ is not one person but two persons, a human person closely united to a Divine person. For this reason, Nestorius refused to refer to Mary as Mother of God because, in his view, she did not give birth to the Divine person her Son was united to. In critiquing Protestant ecclesiology, then, Mr. Cross likens the outward Church to the human person and the inward Church to the Divine person in the Nestorian Christ.

Cross is right. The doctrine of the "-ible Church" is an ecclesial Nestorianism, and worse yet, implies an "ecclesial Docetism." Let's let Mr. Cross explain:

Ecclesial Nestorianism necessarily collapses into ecclesial Docetism. Here is why: given that Christ is the Head of the Mystical Body, then treating the Mystical Body as something distinct from, even if extrinsically united to, the Catholic Church [he's talking about the earthly Church], reduces the Catholic Church to a merely human institution, just as Nestorianism reduces Jesus to a mere human being. The real Church (i.e., the one that Christ founded), given ecclesial Nestorianism, is the invisible Church that may or may not be in some way related to the Catholic Church. That is ecclesial Docetism. The real Church . . . is the inward or invisible Church; there is no “visible Church” per se, nor do the promises of Christ apply to it. There are many visible churches, but no universal visible Church.

In other words, the visible Church only appears to be the Church Jesus founded. The invisible Church is the real Church. This basically makes Protestant ecclesiology a peripheral theological issue. Protestants have to arrive at something better to describe the reality of Christ present and powerful in the society of the Church that we actually do have access to as flesh and blood human beings or go to Rome or Constantinople where real, tangible, and consequential ecclesiology exists.

I would infer from Cross's application of Christological categories to the "-ible Church" that proper thinking about the nature of the Church should correspond with the orthodox, Chalcedonian Christology of the hypostatic union, in which Christ is defined as one person of two perfect and complete natures joined to one another in hypostatic union, without confusion or mixture. This means that Christ's human and Divine natures may be distinguished but they cannot be separated from one another without destroying the Incarnation, hence why the Church of antiquity rightly insisted on referring to Mary as Mother of God rather than simply as mother of Jesus. Basically, Christ's actions or attributes cannot be attributed this to His human nature and that to His Divine nature but both actions and attributes proper to His humanity and proper to His Divinity to the one God-Man.

The distinction between a human visible Church and a Divine invisible Church dissolved, would then the proper view of the Church in Catholic thought be to analogize from the hypostatic union of Divine and human natures in Christ to the relationship between Divine and human agency in the Church? After all, Augustine thought of the Catholic Church as totus Christus—the total Christ of Head and Mystical Body united. Does Cross mean to imply that human and Divine agency in the Church, at least at some level, may not be abstracted one from another on the basis that the Church is the Body of Christ—"the fullness of Him who fills everything in every way" (Ephesians 1:23)?

This is simultaneously profound and dangerous to my yet deeply Protestant sensibilities. What the Catholic Church and the apostolic churches of Orthodoxy want us to see is that through the humanity of the Church, sinful and broken yet as it is, Christ has promised that He will be present and working, speaking faithfully to His people through the ages in the Holy Spirit-guided episcopal successors of the apostles. On the one hand, this is profound because it reflects the covenantal pattern of God coming to dwell among and guide His people that appears throughout Scripture and culminates in God's Incarnation as Jesus Christ. On the other hand, this is dangerous because the temptation exists that in the recognition of God's agency through human figures, God may become displaced, with bare human authority rising to the level of Divine authority and man-made traditions supplanting the original, pure deposit of faith.

My Protestant cautions noted, I think the use of the hypostatic union of the two natures in Christ is a good point from which to analogize about human and Divine agency in the Church, provided that the understanding is that it is analogical—at least until we arrive at ecclesiastical maturity when the Kingdom arrives in full force—and that we reason forth from it even-handedly. I affirm together with my Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters that Christ is, in a profoundly Incarnational way, present to us through the Holy Spirit in the earthly assembly of the Catholic Church, and that, in spite of sin and human failing within the Church, the Church—in toto—is truly one flesh with Jesus Christ and, as such, will be preserved in faithfulness to Him through the ages. I am skeptical, however, about describing this faithfulness in terms of infallibility.

When it comes to the question, though, of a sphere in which the infallibility of the Divine Person is predicated of His human ministers, it would seem to re-raise the specter of ecclesial Nestorianism to abstract the teaching capacity of the Church from its other functions, ascribing the category of Divine infallibility to the Church in its fundamental teaching capacity, while admitting of human fallibility for the Church in its other capacities. Remember, the hypostatic union does not allow us to divide Christ.

Perhaps, though, I have not fully understood what Catholics and Orthodox affirm respectively about Church infallibility. If Christ's infallibility were predicated of the Church only when she speaks or acts as one (which would be the rare instance, indeed), logical consistency with the hypostatic union would be preserved, but would this still be taking the Incarnational nature of the Church too far?

I certainly share the faith that Jesus Christ has led thus far and will continue to lead His Church into all truth and preserve her in faithfulness to Himself through the ministry of his servants, but my Protestant skepticism remains strong whether "infallible" can be applied to any singular function of Christ's Church or even to Christ's Church in those limited occasions when it speaks or acts as one before the Kingdom comes in full force.

Where I Sit with Churches of Apostolic Succession

As those of you who know me know, I've been expressing a certain affinity with Roman Catholicism for awhile now. Indeed, my encounters with the Church of Rome and to a lesser though still important degree my brushes with Eastern Orthodoxy have resulted in a rather significant shift in my theological outlook. I've gone from being a dogmatic Protestant to a confused one of the kind that should scare the be-Jesus out of all dogmatically convinced anti-Catholics.

I must admit that some of this arises from a felt need to embody the prevailing cultural fascination with novelty and thus one could say that to some degree I question and challenge conventional Protestant convictions simply because that's my background. Thankfully, that rather suspect and dangerous motivation is not my primary one. I may be a rebel, but I'm no rebel without a cause. My peculiar fascination arises from that point in my spiritual development when I began to feel a strong desire to see Jesus Christ in the face of the Christian other but found that my Protestantism was of a far too narrow character to admit that those Christian believers who differed significantly from me in any way could even rightly be called Christians.

In order in my mind to rescue the vast majority of Christian believers who have ever lived from the fires of hell, my theological outlook got "all messed up," as some would undoubtedly describe it. In that messy process, I've spent some time studying Church history—the undivided Church of ancient times, the medieval Church—and the great figures—the Church Fathers, the Protestant Reformers. As I had suspected, historic Christianity, including classic Protestantism, looks and sounds peculiarly Catholic.

I have also spent some time studying the character of Christianity as it currently exists throughout the world. To view the contemporary global Church through my former narrow separatist Protestant lenses would be to cast off the greatest part of Christ's body as chaff, whereas to view it through the more charitable eyes I believe God has given me is to see a miraculous God-wrought diversity in Christ's Kingdom as it advances ever gloriously on to the ends of the earth.

What exactly is my theological and ecclesiological identity at this point, then? As I said, I'm a confused Protestant; I have a strong dose of Reformed but I find myself even more captivated by forms of Christianity that value the sacraments and the mystical side of faith and hold the Church and its continuity of life and thought in highest regard.

Yes, I recognize that for many this place where I am at is the beginning of the road that leads to Rome or to Constantinople. Even as I write this, I am thinking of a friend who is well down that road and wrestles with whether to continue on to Rome or to remain a Protestant. I am praying for him that God grants him peace as he wrestles with this question that I myself have spent some time considering. I take this opportunity to take stock of my own thoughts as to where I sit in regard to those venerable churches that claim apostolic succession as a mark of the true Church.

1. The strongest and most compelling link in the apologetic chain for either Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy is that the line of succession of bishops down to the time of the apostles has been regarded since the beginning of the Christian movement as a mark of the true Church. Indeed, the first time in Church history that we see significant numbers of Christian people not under the authority of bishops within lines of succession from the apostles being regarded as genuine Christians is at the Reformation, and even then, it is only the Protestants who regard themselves as genuine Christians.

So what? It's no matter of small consequence that the apostolic succession of bishops in the period of the early Church was vital to the Church's preservation of theological orthodoxy against the claims of the heretics.

So much, in fact, did the Reformers value apostolic succession that they were initially very reluctant to break with it but later rejected the doctrine in no uncertain terms. Was this because they could not substantiate it based on Scripture or because apostolic succession became an impediment to the Reformation when few bishops sided with the Protestants?

That we call ourselves Protestants seems to imply to me that, at some level, reunion with Rome was the stated objective of the Protestant movement. Considering that the division of churches is a scandal to the Gospel and that unity between Christians is a command of the Savior, if all the doctrinal issues that separate Protestants and Catholics were to be resolved tomorrow, even if the Catholic Church still maintained its administrative structure intact, I would say that individual Protestants and all Protestant communities would be obligated to at least give the possibility of reunion with Rome serious consideration. For me, even if we were to pare that down to most or even half of the doctrinal issues that separate us, I think it would still be "Rome sweet home" for me!

2. Like the apostolic succession claim, the inability of Sola Scriptura to produce a consistent, principled hermeneutic for interpreting Scripture hits right at the heart of the conversions from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. It's high time that we Protestants admit that the Scriptures are not nearly as perspicuous in a broad systemic sense as we have been saying they are.

Due to the privileging of private interpretation over any kind of tradition (except for that of one's own Protestant tradition), not to mention the limits of human perspective in regard to any text, using Sola Scriptura as a biblical hermeneutic always results in interpretations of Scripture that are ultimately unfalsifiable. When a private interpretation or the interpretation of a group of Protestants has been opposed (even with other Scripture verses), the invariable response has always been, "You are stiff-necked and wicked people! If you would just listen to the Holy Spirit and approach the Scriptures objectively, you too would see what we see. You obviously do not listen to the Spirit or to reason because you do not see what we see; therefore, we are going to separate from you!" Thus goes the standard justification for our countless schisms.

Even when we push past the pop Protestant, "solo Scriptura," just me and my Bible distortion for the true, historic Sola Scriptura of classic Protestantism, i.e. Scripture as the final and sufficient doctrinal authority when interpreted in light of the historic Rule of Faith, we are still operating with a degree of subjectivity sufficient to shipwreck the prospects for doctrinal unity, since 1) Anglicans, Lutherans, and Reformed did not arrive at confessional consensus, and 2) the Rule of Faith Tradition 1 Protestants appeal to includes a great many items, like apostolic succession and Marian devotion, for instance, we would eschew out of hand.

The problem, however, for the Roman Catholic position on final doctrinal authority, is that appeals to an infallible teaching Magisterium and infallible Pope, even when limited to those circumstances in which papal and magisterial infallibility are said to apply, also result in pronouncements of Christian truth that are ultimately unfalsifiable. Indeed, for Catholics there is the conviction that when the Pope has ruled ex cathedra or when an ecumenical council or the Sacred Magisterium has ruled infallibly on a matter pertaining to faith or morals that Jesus Christ has spoken with His own authority. That being said, one still cannot help but fear that the line between "The Church has so ruled because it is true" and "It is true because the Church has so ruled " can easily disappear if the inability of the Church to be wrong is a given right from the get-go.

A great deal of misrepresentation has settled in with regard to the self-purported infallibility of the Pope and the Roman Magisterium—no, papal infallibility does not mean the Pope is incapable of personal sin or that all his public statements are to be viewed as infallible, nor does the infallibility of the Sacred Magisterium mean that everything the Church teaches or has ever taught is to be regarded by Catholics as infallible. I do not wish to add to the misinformation, but I can sincerely say that the degree of un-falsifiability insulating Roman Catholic dogma from critique is as great a logical shortcoming for Roman hermeneutics as the subjectivity and un-falsifiability inherent in Sola Scriptura is for Protestant hermeneutics. However, in light of the sheer weight of 2000 years of official Roman Catholic teaching that the Magisterium and the papacy must avoid running afoul of, there is little room left in their procedure, at least at this point in history, for the subjectivity and innovation that has so often plagued Protestant teaching.

The Eastern Orthodox position on Church infallibility appears somewhat more tenable to me than the Roman Catholic position, as it centers on the authority of the entire Church represented in the gathered bishops of an ecumenical council. In effect, then, the Eastern Orthodox Church speaks infallibly only when it speaks with the voice of the entire Church. This is not all that different from the way confessional Protestantism has strived to work, but it has not worked to preserve Christian unity the way it has in Eastern Orthodoxy. Stay tuned for more to come.

Edges of the Lord

Of the movies I watched this weekend, Role Models was easily the most fun, not to mention sinful, but Edges of the Lord was by far the most edifying. If you want to know how to grow up undercover in the midst of persecution and war, Edges of the Lord is the movie to watch. Surprisingly I had never heard of this movie before, but it was released in 2001 and stars Haley Joel Osment. Bad Polish accent (admittedly, not that bad) included, he's every bit as good in this movie as he was in The Sixth Sense and then later in Secondhand Lions.

In this movie, Osment stars as 11-year-old Romek, the young Jewish protagonist. It opens in Kraków, Poland in 1942. Romek is being taught Catholic prayers by his father in preparation for his escape to the Polish countryside, where the blond-haired and blue-eyed Romek will hide from the Nazis in plain sight by pretending to be a local farmer's cousin from the city. In order to make the charade work, Romek must be able to fit in with the devoutly Catholic Polish peasants he will be living among. Fortunately, one of Romek's saviors in the Polish countryside is the local priest, played by Willem Dafoe. He helps teach his young charge the ins and outs of Catholicism while paying careful attention to respect the boy's Jewish heritage.

Romek's other chief protectors are the farmer Gniecio, his wife Manka, and their two sons, Vladek and Tolo. Once Romek arrives in his haven, he tries to go about the business of being a typical adolescent, but the circumstances he finds himself in are anything but typical. Poland is under the tyrannical heel of Hitler's Germany, whose fury extends not only to Jews but to the Polish people as well, whom the Nazis also view as inferior. Romek, in particular, must deal quietly with his fears and hopes regarding the fate of his parents, who have gone into hiding elsewhere. The most visible challenge with which Romek must deal, however, and the one with which the movie's plot deals most extensively, is that of fitting in with and gaining the friendship of his peers.

Initially, Vladek, who is closest to Romek in age, makes things extremely hard for him, playing the tyrant with the smaller and frailer boy. Of Gniecio's sons, however, the junior Tolo is most accommodating and welcoming to their guest, soon forming a close bond with Romek. Of those village youngsters not of Gniecio's family, Romek becomes most enamored of Maria, an inquisitive, pretty, and rather fierce girl who is the lone female playmate of the group and Vladek's girlfriend. That she is also kindly disposed to Romek only serves to intensify Vladek's animosity toward Romek. Even less kindly disposed to Romek than Vladek are the sons, Robal and Pyra, of the oafish neighbor Kluba. This family will later prove to bring great grief to Romek and to Gniecio's family.

At times, it seems as if the most important concerns of the youngsters are typical ones, like swimming in the quarry, eating strawberries, the battle between the sexes, and catechism class, but the devastation of the war and the brutal Nazi occupation is ever-present to mar the otherwise idyllic setting of the film.

This becomes shockingly apparent when the neighbor Batylin is caught possessing pigs after the Germans have seized all of the Poles' livestock and forbidden them from possessing any on the pain of death. The children run to Batylin's field, looking on from the trees as the priest begs the German officer for Batylin and his wife's lives. The sadistic Nazi officer makes a bargain with the priest, agreeing to spare one life if the priest can catch a pig in one minute. If he can catch two pigs in two minutes, he can save both lives. The other soldiers on hand laugh hysterically as the priest scrambles through hay and dirt, trying desperately and vainly to catch the slippery, squealing pigs running wildly through the field. He fails and the elderly couple is executed. From her place in the trees, Maria flees the scene, leaving the boys behind. Romek is not alone in having lost his parents; Tolo later explains to him that Maria had seen her parents murdered by the Nazis in a fashion similar to that which they have just witnessed at Batylin's field.

After this tragedy, life returns to "normal" in the village. The young group of friends and the priest return to the concerns of the catechism class, with the father asking the children to draw sticks on which the names of the apostles are written. He instructs them to learn all they can about the apostle they have chosen. Maria, who is an incipient feminist, inquires of the priest if Jesus played with girls too. He tells her she must learn all that she can of Mary Magdalene and emulate it.

During this session of catechesis, the priest also has another lesson to teach the children. In light of the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews and the fact that they are unknowingly associating with a Jew in Romek, the priest inquires of the children which people group Jesus was from. Pyra suggests that Jesus was from the Vatican. Only Romek is unsurprised when the priest tells the children that Jesus was Jewish.

The theme of redemption, which begins to reveal itself even prior to this moment (Romek sees the priest beating himself in the barn after he fails to save Batylin and his wife, which Romek interprets as the priest's arguing with God), begins to come into sharp relief as Tolo insists that there can be no apostles without Jesus. He takes it upon himself to play the part of Jesus, vowing to undertake "Jesus exercises" to prepare. Romek, a quick study about the Christian faith, suggests that if Tolo plays the part of Jesus, he must hang on a tree all through the cold and dark night. Tolo is unfazed; if that is what it takes to become like Jesus, that is exactly what he will do, not to mention wearing a crown made from a rosebush and, oddly, running naked in the rain.

The children take to the "Jesus games," though perhaps in ways the priest had not intended. For instance, highlighting the theme of growing up and discovering love, Maria imitates Mary Magdalene, telling the boys that she is going to take her beloved into the barn for an hour, after which they are to pretend to pick up stones to throw at her. To Vladek's chagrin, Maria chooses to take Romek into the barn with her instead of him. What ensues in the barn is an expression of innocence and naïveté when it comes to matters of love and sexuality, which Romek and the older Maria both display. It deals with the matter in a touching, modest, and appropriately awkward way.

In the wake of Batylin's death, Gniecio decides it is time to sell his own family's pig. He ventures off into the night with Kluba to sell the pig in town. In a pouring rain, Kluba returns the next afternoon, hauling Gniecio's bloodied, lifeless body in his cart. A heart-rending scene ensues as an inconsolable Manka beats her husband's lifeless body, pleading for him to wake up. Kluba says that Gniecio had left him the previous night with the man to whom he was selling the pig but did not return. Kluba had found him later, shot in a ditch. Some neighbors had reported that the Germans had done it. Young Tolo comforts his anguished mother, but, as Romek relates in his narration, Tolo does not cry for his father.

With the tragedies in the village and in all of Europe closing in around them and finally coming to rest in his own family, Tolo comes to understand in an ever deeper way the need for redemption from human brutality and suffering. He expresses this in his continuing and escalating "Jesus exercises." The night after his father's funeral, for instance, he runs naked in the rain. Lying sick in bed the next day, Tolo summons his friends to his bedside and has them make a solemn vow.

Tolo: I have a plan, and all of you are in it. On that special night, I'm going to hang on the tree all night, and I am going to make them all come back.
Vladek: Who, Tolo?
Tolo: Papa. . . . And yours (pointing at Maria). And yours, too, Romek. . . . And we all have to take a bath together.
Romek: Get baptized?
Tolo: Get baptized together to get ready. . . . You all must say yes.

They all do. In the next scene, Tolo has his friends dip their heads into a bucket full of water and he kisses each one as they rise from their "baptism." After removing his "priestly vestments," Tolo gives one of the best baptismal sermons I have ever heard. Imagine that he is Jesus: "Because you shiver . . . (coughs) in this holy river and you might get cold, listen to me and remember that you all put your heads in the bucket, and now you have to follow me. I'm going to suffer for you. But I'm going to make things better."

The final significant conversation I want to lift out from the movie is between Romek and the priest. It has significance not only for its statement about humanity but also for Eucharistic theology and ecclesiology, but I won't get into that here. In this, Romek's most important catechism session, the priest is preparing hosts for Communion. He asks Romek if he would like one. Romek, perhaps not understanding transubstantiation fully, declines with a look of horror on his face. The priest laughs, assuring him that they are not holy hosts just yet and that he can freely eat them. Besides, he assures Romek, these are only the edges, which he never blesses. Recognizing the cosmic significance that Catholics attach to the bread, Romek asks a profound question about humanity.

Romek: Are we blessed, or are we just the edges?
Priest: We are all scraps, Romek. We are all blessed the same.
Romek: But not all the people. Right?

The priest does not answer. Romek begins to break the edges into pieces representing all the people who have been lost: Batylin, his wife, Vladek's father, Maria's parents.

Romek then informs the priest that he has been to the trains that pass through the village and asks him point blank if his parents are going to come back for him. The priest tells him that they probably will not, so Romek breaks off two more edges to represent them.

Edges of the Lord is a poignant and powerful story but a melancholy one. It treats with depth and sincerity the various ways in which war warps the young, bringing out the worst in some but also bringing out the best in others. In the process, Edges of the Lord calls on all of us to answer humanity's highest calling regardless of the circumstances—the calling to love our neighbor. It is exhortation for us to sacrifice for the edges of the Lord just as we would for Jesus himself, to love and to seek an end to all the terrible things that people do to one another. The ending to this film, as much and more than anything I have described so far, is a great statement of redemption and sacrifice—a terrible, sad, and unforgettable one but a great one nonetheless. Can we recognize Jesus in the despised and persecuted other? Can we identify with the condemned like he did?

American Religious Identification Survey: What It Means for Evangelicalism?

The latest American Religious Identification Survey from Trinity College of Hartford, Connecticut should be no cause for alarm to American Christians, but, neither can we regard its results as a cause for celebration. The most notable features of the 2008 survey are:

• The percentage of Americans claiming no religion has jumped from 8.2 in 1990 and 14.2 in 2001 to the current figure of 15 percent.
• The percentage of Americans identifying themselves as Christian has fallen from 86 in 1990 to the current figure of 76 percent.
• The percentage of Catholics in the United States has remained steady at one in four since 1990, but the percentage of non-Catholic Christians has fallen from 60 to 50 percent over the past two decades.
• Ninety percent of the decline in non-Catholic Christianity over this period has come from mainline Protestant denominations, which have seen their numbers drop from 18.7 percent of Americans in 1990 and 17.2 percent in 2001 to just 12.9 percent of today's population.
• The percentage of evangelicals in the United States continues on the rise, with one-third of the population identifying themselves as such, including 38.6 percent of those in mainline Protestant traditions.
• The largest percentage of increase in the evangelical camp has come from those attached to mega-churches, a number that has skyrocketed from less than 200,000 Americans in 1990 and 2.5 million in 2001 to the current figure of 8 million.

Well, the sky most certainly isn't falling, but, in my opinion, several of the trends noted above bode ill for the future of the Body of Christ in our country. It is no surprise that secularity continues to grow. That's a bummer for sure. Religion is becoming increasingly irrelevant in the lives of most Americans. Also, the decline within mainline Protestantism is surely distressing for a segment of American Christianity that has deep historic roots but which has in too many cases drifted from those roots in order to accommodate the culture.

For most theologically-conservative Christians, however, the numbers do not look that bad. Evangelicalism continues to grow, liberal Christianity is continuing to decline, and the Catholic Church has largely retained its numbers. Evangelicals must feel some sense of vindication in the continued growth in their camp and the continued collapse of mainline Protestantism because it represents to many of them an indictment of lukewarm, compromising Christian faith and a strong affirmation of that which sticks to its guns in spite of the culture.

Appearances can be deceiving. For instance, Mark Silk of Trinity College told CNN.com that the rise in evangelicalism is contributing to the rejection of religion altogether by some Americans. He points to the prominence of the "religious right" in politics as having turned many people the other way. That is undoubtedly true, but I think the connection relates more to the very issues many evangelicals see as problematic with mainline Protestantism, namely, that of compromising too much to the culture.

Though the areas where the influential liberal camp in mainline Protestantism has led the mainline denominations to compromise are different from the areas where particularly evangelism-driven evangelicals have led their fellow theologically-conservative Protestants to compromise, I think the results are ultimately going to be similar.

Even if conservative evangelicals are correct that liberal compromises in doctrine, worship, mission, and Christian morality within mainline Protestantism are related to matters of central concern to the Christian faith (in many cases they are), it is a mistake to assume that the compromises evangelicals have made in the name of winning and keeping converts are not also matters of fundamental integrity to the Christian faith. Just because evangelicals have doggedly retained essential points of Christian doctrine, stayed true to the mission of winning souls for Christ, and insisted on biblical standards of morality, that is no assurance that all remains well within the Church.

What happens if evangelicals continue to insist on individual head and heart matters but continue to neglect the love for one another that characterizes real Christian community, refrain from making disciples, and refuse to carry out the mission of establishing Christ's Kingdom in the Church and in the world? How does 12.9 percent of the American population sound? That's where we're headed if the "Let's have a religious entertainment service instead of public worship, and let's build mega-churches so nobody gets to know one another" movement continues. Private Christianity will inevitably dry the well up! Individualistic American Christians need real community and love, not Sunday rock concerts and a purely private relationship with Jesus.

Reclaiming the Sacramental (Part 2)

The God we as Christians serve is a Living Mystery who surprises us more and more the longer we follow him. The strangest thing about God is that as we come to know him in deeper and ever more profound ways, the more we grow in the realization of how very little we actually know about him. The distinction I want to highlight here is between that of the relational knowledge of God and the intellectual knowledge of him. One would naturally think that these two things exist in a direct relationship—that as one grows the other does as well—but this is precisely the opposite of the way things work. The more we know God, the less we realize that we "know" about him. Believers in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the Father of Jesus Christ have long testified to the ways in which God transcends our understanding and is thus in a very real sense unknowable to our very limited and finite human minds. This sense of mystery stands out particularly strong in the writings of the Hebrew prophet Isaiah: "'For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,' declares Yahweh. 9'For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts" (55:8-9).

In the Christian faith tradition, most notably in its Orthodox and Catholic varieties, one way of sounding Isaiah's theme has been through the negation of positive properties of God. This is called the apophatic way. The apophatic way is designed to bust our idols by clearly defining what God is not. It guards against the danger inherent in all speech about God, which is that of literally conceiving of God in creaturely terms. For instance, while speaking of God as Father is authorized by Christ's use of the term, calling God "Father" can become idolatrous if we conceive of God as a literal father. In order to keep us from doing so, the apophatic way would be to detail how God is not at all like a father. The purpose of this initial negation of the concept of God as Heavenly Father would be to arrive at an understanding of God as Heavenly Father that does not in any way diminish his glory or ascribe to him any similarity to created things. The apophatic way, then, shows us that God is Father in a way that nothing else in the universe can possibly be. Perhaps no group of Christian thinkers excelled in the expression of the apophatic way as did the great 14th-century Rhineland mystics, Meister Eckhart and his brilliant students Johannes Tauler and Henry Suso. The most shocking apophatic statement comes from Eckhart, who provocatively declares, "God is neither good nor better nor best of all. Whoever would say that God is good would be treating him as unjustly as he were calling the sun black." Of course, Eckhart is not denying the goodness of God here but showing how God transcends all of our conceptions of what goodness is. God is good in a way that we never can be and in a way that we never could have been, even if we had never fallen into sin.

In our ways of thinking about God, we must constantly guard against the impulse to reduce God from the Living Presence he is to a rigidly and easily defined set of propositions. The Angelic Doctor Thomas Aquinas famously said, "If anyone claims to have understood God, then what one has understood is not God." I think these ancient words of St. Thomas have a prophetic significance for contemporary American evangelicals when it comes to our understanding of the way God works in the world, particularly in regard to the rites of baptism and the Lord's Supper. Most evangelicals, to use the words of Leonard Vander Zee, deny the ability of material objects, including and especially the sacraments, "to carry the freight of spiritual reality." Though the Reformation is 500 years in the past, to many Protestants the idea of sacraments raises the full specter of the abusive medieval Roman Catholic sacerdotalism against which Luther and Calvin railed as if it were a present reality threatening the integrity of the Christian faith. "Protestant horror" is an appropriate term for this reaction. This Protestant suspicion of all things that sound remotely Catholic arises, I believe, not from a sola scriptura reliance on the explicit teachings of the Bible or from a religious climate like that of the 16th century but a spirit-matter dualism that is more characteristic of Enlightenment rationalism than the Spirit-led theological premises that informed the Apostles' writing of the New Testament. It is more characteristic of the modern mindset to systematize knowledge and reduce it to its lowest common denominator, such as the philosophically simple distinction between spirit and matter, than it was in the first-century Judeo-Christian mind. Whereas we as early 21st-century American evangelicals view the mystery associated with a messy theology that does not radically separate spirit from matter as a problem that must be solved, the Jewish writers of the New Testament embraced a spiritual God who repeatedly humbled himself and used visible, tangible signs, symbols, and personal invasions into history in order to relate to human beings. The God of Israel repeatedly revealed himself in the natural world, speaking to Moses through the flames of the burning bush, guiding the children of Israel in the Exodus in the form of the pillar of smoke in the daytime and the pillar of fire at night, and, most dramatically, becoming one of us in his Incarnation as Jesus of Nazareth. When we deny the possibility that God continues to relate to his people through the elements of this world, we are thus taking a departure from the view of God presented in the Bible.

While our philosophical inheritance from the Age of Reason and modern life may be fundamental to mainstream evangelicalism's rejection of the sacraments, we cannot just dismiss the theological objections and questions that the sacraments raise for evangelicals. In my last posting, some of the ideas I put forward were undoubtedly shocking to many of you. In fact, some of you have expressed alarm at the dangerous ideas I put forward, particularly my foray into ecclesiology, with the direct correlation I made between salvation and the Church and between Christ and the Church. Also, I made some remarks that appeared to denigrate the reality that we are saved by faith alone and that, at face value, seem to make salvation primarily a sacramental affair. I will take this opportunity to moderate some of those remarks, which, upon further reflection, I must admit were put forward with somewhat less nuance than they should have been. Let me first take up the question of the Church's role in salvation.

The most shocking statement I made was that "the Church opens the gates to heaven in some sense through the sacraments of salvation it administers." This statement seems to imply that the Church and the sacraments by themselves can save us, or, inversely, that without the Church and the sacraments we cannot be saved. I too reject the idea that the Church and the sacraments by themselves can save us or that we cannot be saved without them, as would, incidentally, most Catholics. If we personally reject Jesus Christ, the Church and the sacraments can do nothing for us. If, by faith, however, we are in Christ, no power of the Church can separate us from him. Though the Catholic Church would explain this in different terms than I would, consistent with the Reformed tradition, I would say that the Church and the sacraments contribute to our salvation in the sense that they augment and strengthen the faith through which Jesus saves us. In other words, the sacraments strengthen the influence of the Christ event in our lives. They sign and seal our salvation by powerfully and experientially conferring God's promises on us. In the unusual situation in which the sacraments are not available, however, the promises of God's Word remain true, albeit without the additional assurances that the sacraments alone can provide.

I also mentioned how I do not find the teachings of the Catholic Church about its role in salvation to be substantially wrong but object only to the degree to which it understands this role. I stand by that statement. We must realize that this is not the 16th century and that the Roman Catholic Church has done much to address the abuses that led to the Reformation. While many of the popes and spiritual leaders of the Middle Ages were corrupt and abused their spiritual authority for political and material gain, it is undeniable that recent popes, notably John Paul II, and the current Pope, Benedict XVI, are holy men who deeply love Jesus Christ and are earnest and sincere in shepherding the flock. No longer are indulgences and promises of salvation aggressively marketed to poor peasants for the purposes of filling the Vatican's coffers and no longer does the hierarchy of the Church use the threat of excommunication as a political weapon. Furthermore, in spite of the sex abuse scandal, for which the Vatican is truly beginning to express godly repentance, the vast majority of priests are holy and faithful men who love the Lord deeply. That being said, however, I cannot affirm the Catholic teaching that the Church directly and exclusively administers salvation to the faithful through the priesthood. For me, this places too much stress on the Church's role in salvation and makes God's grace too dependent on human mediators. I do not deny that the Church has some bearing on our salvation but only object to the extent to which this is expressed in Roman Catholicism.

This brings us to another question. I mentioned the connection between the Church and Christ. How is Christ present in the Church? Is he first and foremost present through a professional priesthood that can be identified directly with him, or, do we envision Christ's presence in the Church in a more organic sense? As a Protestant, I must choose the latter and affirm the priesthood of all believers. Though my ecclesiology is quite high for an evangelical (high Church evangelical is an oxymoron if ever there was one!), I cannot identify Christ's presence in the Church with a professional clergy. However, I enthusiastically affirm that Christ is present in his assembled body in a more excellent way than he is in each Spirit-filled Christian individually. Jesus affirms this, when he promises in Matthew 18:18-20:

Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. 19Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. 20For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.

Though we cannot say that the Church is Christ and that Christ is the Church (Jesus is locally present only at the right hand of the Father in heaven), we clearly see that the Church has great spiritual power and authority because Christ is among his people when his body is assembled. When we encounter the Church, we are encountering the living Christ powerfully present. Conversely, then, when we reject the Church and the sacraments, we are rejecting the Head of the body, Christ. As a result, we can say that in a real sense we are incorporated into Christ through our incorporation into his body by the sacraments and that we are cut off from him through our dismemberment from his body. That is why the author of Hebrews is so insistent that Christians do not forsake the regular gathering together of believers. It is hazardous to our spiritual health to do so.

Finally, how can we reconcile the saving significance of the sacraments with the Protestant tenant of salvation by grace alone through faith alone when the sacraments involve physical things and actions? This was a difficult question for Luther and Calvin to answer, but our importation of a modernist dualism that radically separates spirit from matter complexifies this question to an even further degree. How we read this into the Christian life of faith is most evident in our interpretation of Jesus' words in John 4:24: "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth." Protestants, particularly evangelicals, have long used this verse as a proof text to argue against all forms of ritualized worship. True worship is that which occurs in the heart and the head; therefore, ritual actions and ritual objects cannot carry the weight of spiritual reality and are thus unnecessary, if not harmful, to true worship. A look at the context of the passage in which Jesus speaks these words and a discussion of the historical context of the Reformation will introduce needed balance to our understanding of these words.

The biblical context of this verse is Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well. We must note that this interaction is unusual because of the animosity between Jews and Samaritans that existed at this time. The Samaritans were the descendents of those Hebrews in the northern kingdom of Israel who were not deported by the Assyrians when Israel fell in the eighth century B.C. Recall that when Judah and Israel divided after the reign of Solomon, Israel set up a temple in Bethel to rival Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem in order to sever the religious connection between the northern tribes and their kinsman in the South. The religion of Israel centered in the temple at Bethel combined elements of monotheistic Judaism with the pantheism of the local Canaanite peoples. The Hebrews who remained in northern Palestine after the Assyrian deportation intermarried with these Canaanite peoples and, in time, became indistinguishable from them, resulting in the rise of a distinct ethnic group called the Samaritans. The animosity that existed between first-century Jews and their Samaritan cousins was thus based not just on race or ethnic identity but also on religious grounds. In the course of Jesus' conversation with the Samaritan woman, she brings up the differences between Samaritan religious practice and that of the Jews. She says, "Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where we ought to worship" (v. 20). When Jesus responds that the day is coming when God's worshipers will worship neither in Bethel nor in Jerusalem but rather in spirit and truth, on the one hand, he is speaking to the pantheistic impulse to identify God directly with a physical location that the woman's words indicate, while, on the other hand, he is also speaking to the Jewish understanding of God's exclusive relationship with the physical descendents of Abraham (v. 21-24). By reaching out to a pagan half-breed Gentile woman, Jesus is showing us that the new covenant is not limited to one specific ethnic group or to a particular region of holy geography. The Messiah has come to claim for the Father worshipers from all peoples, nations, and places who will worship him in spirit and truth. This does not mean, however, that this worship is only expressed in an internal and subjective experience. After all, the greatest commandment is to "love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength." This is worship in spirit and truth—a passionate, engaged, embodied (erotic even) spirituality that ardently worships God with all of one's faculties.

"God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth" was an important statement for the Protestant Reformation, not in the sense that the Reformers were rejecting any and all ritualized expressions of worship but in the sense that ritual worship is not to be the sum total of authentic Christian spirituality. The 16th century was a time of ecclesiastical abuse and neglect by the Roman Church. Secular priests were often poorly trained, bishops were often absent from their dioceses, sermons, when provided, were most often in Latin, as was the liturgy of the Word, and promises of the forgiveness of sins and even salvation were exchanged for money through the purchase of indulgences. What the Reformers were reacting to was a spirituality that was mediated exclusively through the Church and that demanded nothing of Christians but loyalty to the Church, yearly confession, and participation in the Mass, which the vast majority of the laity could not understand and in which they were only occasionally given the Eucharistic bread and never the cup. None of the Reformers rejected liturgical worship and, with the exception of Zwingli, all retained a sacramental understanding of baptism and the Eucharist. Furthermore, while Calvin completely rejected transubstantiation, Luther maintained the physical presence of Christ in the bread and wine and did not forbid Christians from accepting transubstantiation as an explanation of how the Lord's Supper works. For the Reformers, ritual and sacramental worship thus remained an important part of authentic Christian spirituality.

The significance of this for our understanding of how the Reformers affirmed the saving significance of baptism and the Lord's Supper while affirming salvation by grace alone through faith alone is that God uses the material substances of water, bread, and wine to confer his promises on us. The Reformers' focus in the sacraments was not on what people do but rather on what God does in the sacraments. God freely offers his grace through baptism and the Eucharist. It is Jesus who baptizes us with the Holy Spirit in baptismal waters. It is Jesus who feeds us with his flesh and his blood when we come to the Lord's Table. Even the verbs we use in talking about baptism and the Lord's Supper testify to this. For instance, we do not baptize ourselves but we are baptized, and though we do eat the bread and do drink the wine, are they not first given to us?

Yet, this is just the problem, that things somehow bring the grace of God to us? Is this not a works salvation because sacraments are bodily received? It is no more a works salvation than the mistaken belief that sincerely praying to receive Christ in and of itself causes us to be saved. Notice something very important about Protestant ideas regarding salvation. We are saved by grace alone through faith alone. It is not faith that is causal of our salvation but grace. Grace is the cause of our salvation, and faith is simply the vehicle through which God confers this grace on us. Faith cannot appropriate salvation from God or it too becomes a meritorious work that we must do to please God—a "spiritual" work but a work nonetheless. In other words, faith does not work upward from us to God. Faith comes down from God to us. It merely enlightens us to the salvation that is already freely given in Christ. Let's look at Ephesians 2:8-9: "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast." What is the gift here? Is it salvation or is it faith? It is both. Salvation is freely available to us in Christ; faith opens our eyes to this reality.

We still have not answered the question of how we understand faith, though. What does faith mean? I think the modernist spirit-matter dualism we have imported into our understanding of Christianity has dramatically warped what we mean by the word “faith.” Is it a platonic acceptance of the objective truth of certain propositions, or is it a passionate grasping on to and trust in the promises of God that transforms our lives? The witness of Scripture would clearly direct us to the latter. Faith is not an airy, ethereal, abstract belief in objective facts that have little bearing on our lives. No; faith is a passionate, engaged, embodied subjective experience of the objective reality of God's redemption of us in Christ that makes each of us a new creation.

Faith, however, sometimes seems the farthest thing from this experience. Sometimes it is very faint. Sometimes it is all we can do to hang on to it. That is why Christ instituted the physical signs of baptism and the Lord's Supper. Until Christ returns, they remind us that the Christian faith is based on the historical events of the God-man's life, death, and resurrection. In Christ's physical absence, they testify to the fact that he was here, that he was and is one of us, that he loved us and gave himself for us, that he died, that he defeated death and rose again, that he ascended on high and is at the right hand of the Father, and that he will come again to make all things new.

Through the power of the Holy Spirit, the sacraments are the visible words by which we know our Savior. In them, God promises us the realities to which they point. Whenever our faith is weak, whenever the clouds come to make us doubt whether or not we have indeed experienced the saving grace of Christ, each of us can point to our baptism and claim the promises God made to us in those waters. This does not mean that baptism in and of itself is a guarantee of salvation or that it mechanically accomplishes our salvation, but for those who live by faith in the Son of God, we can count God's testimony in baptism that "This is my beloved child in whom I am well pleased" to be true. And if we doubt Christ, that he was crucified and rose again, that he was our Passover lamb, that his sacrifice counts for us, we can come to His Table and receive his body and blood anew. Were you there when they crucified my Lord? When we sit at the Lord's Table, we can emphatically say, "Yes! I was there. It counts for me."

To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, God only wise, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.

Reclaiming the Sacramental (Part 1)

My theological journey has taken me places I never thought it would. I grew up Southern Baptist, thinking that the conservative evangelical Protestant branch of Christianity was the truest expression of Christian faith and practice and thus the tape by which to measure all that Christianity truly should be. Granted, I continue to believe in the principles upon which our movement is based, such as the priesthood of the believer, Scripture as our final and unfailing authority, salvation by grace alone through faith alone, and the need to be born again, but I can no longer hold to a view of the Christian faith common among conservative evangelicals that we alone are good, true, Bible-believing Christians who will be saved and that, by contrast, all other Christians, whether they be mainline Protestants, Catholics, or Orthodox, are only “barely” Christian and that they will be saved only to the degree that they understand and live the Christian faith more or less just as contemporary American Protestant evangelicals do. I absolutely reject this uncharitable, limiting, narrow, and false view of worldwide Christianity. This does not mean, however, that there should be no standards or boundaries for what constitutes orthodox Christian faith. What I’m trying to say is that what constitutes orthodoxy does allow for a broad and diverse range of ways to be authentically Christian. Because of the tremendous ways in which I've been blessed by evangelical Christianity, I do remain committed to the movement and plan to follow God into the future from this base of experience, community, and faith, but I also have come to deeply appreciate what other Christians bring to the table. In this process of appreciative awareness, I have been affected in ways that have far surpassed my expectations and brought me to points at which I have been challenged, blessed, strengthened, disoriented, perplexed, and overwhelmed in the encounter, and as a result, my life, my faith, and my entire worldview have undergone some changes. I want to share some of those with you.

For quite some time, I have been curious about and sympathetic toward the Roman Catholic Church. In light of the history and the continuation of misunderstanding, distrust, and animosity that has existed between Protestants and Catholics since the Reformation, it has grieved me that both of these authentically Christian groups have been at odds with one another when they have shared so much in common and served the same Lord. At first, I was naïve in this regard, thinking that our understandings of and ways of living out the Christian faith differ only on things that are not matters of great importance. That is not true. There are fundamental differences, many of which Protestants and Catholics believe to be significant enough roadblocks to prevent our full fellowship with one another and our inter-Communion and even to prevent the salvation of the other. On the first count, I agree (the ideas of either Catholics giving up the whole sacramental system for "faith only” or of Protestants taking up the whole sacramental system and ecclesial hierarchy are fundamentalist pipedreams, get real!) but on the latter, even though I disagree with these folks, they still have good reasons for thinking so. As a result, I do not think that Protestantism should try to remake Catholicism in its own image in order to ascribe to it saving significance or that Catholicism should try to do the same with Protestantism. This is dishonest, and it is an indignity to the beauty and glory of each faith group's history and also a minimalization of the less positive aspects in each of our histories. I'm going to propose that we accept one another as being different on some very important matters, so much so that we cannot in good faith become organizationally or doctrinally one, while yet striving to be united in love, faith, and the praise of God, accepting and embracing one another as authentically Christian brothers and sisters who have so much to learn from one another, extending the hand of fellowship to one another, engaging in constructive dialogue and work together, and, in all things, viewing our differences as opportunities to bless one another rather than as occasions for strife and discord.

That being said, I do believe that the Bible and Christian faith is made up of theological propositions that are objectively true. Therefore, distinctively Protestant teachings and distinctively Catholic teachings that contradict one another cannot be simultaneously true. Furthermore, God does not expect us to remain completely loyal to the theological tradition to which we belong when he reveals to us that some of that tradition’s teachings miss the mark. As a result, during the course of my theological journey, I have come to reject some of the most sacred of mainstream evangelical Protestant theological assumptions, particularly that grace only comes to us through purely spiritual means and thus that baptism and the Lord's Supper are purely symbolic and in no way communicate grace to those who receive them.

I must clarify a few points, however, before I attempt to show how these assumptions are not biblical and that they are destructive of reaching the goal of a lived Christianity that is adequately engaged with the world and thus fully committed to making "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.” A few of you reading this may come from evangelical Christian traditions that do believe that baptism and Communion are sacraments, particularly if you're Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, or Anglican/Episcopalian. If you’re from a Restorationist tradition like the Disciples of Christ, the independent non-denominational Christian Churches, or the Church of Christ, you're probably familiar with the idea of baptism being part of the salvation process. I ask you to also open your mind to the possibility that the Lord's Supper communicates sanctifying grace. However, since most evangelicals are from Baptist or Baptist-influenced (at least in regard to ritual and church polity) traditions, the notion of baptism and the Lord's Supper as purely symbolic and commemorative ordinances is by far the most common understanding of these two rites in American evangelical Christianity. Though I have great respect for the Baptist heritage—remember, I grew up Southern Baptist—I honestly have to say that it is unfortunate that Baptists have embraced and spread ideas about these two sacraments that do not match up with what Paul, Peter, John, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, the Wesleys, and the vast majority of Christians throughout history have believed to be true. (In all fairness, the Protestant understanding of baptism and Communion as ordinances originates with the Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli. Zwingli's teachings on ritual weren't widely accepted in the early days of the Reformation, being overshadowed by those of Luther and Calvin. However, Baptist traditions later embraced his idea of ordinances, and as these traditions grew, so did the influence of this teaching.)

The connection this has to my appreciation of Catholicism is that my arrival at a more moderately-Protestant view of baptism and Communion is by way of my engagement with Catholicism. I believe that the spiritual descendents of the Reformation have taken the Protestant tenant of salvation by faith alone much further than the original reformers ever dreamed. I think that a second or third-generation Protestant (meaning a Protestant tradition that later broke off from the original Reformation movements or in turn broke off from these breakaway movements as well) understanding of salvation by "faith alone" must be balanced by Catholic and older Protestant views of these two sacraments’ relations to salvation. The key here is balance. Though I take very seriously the possibility that Catholic teachings about the Church are indeed objectively true, it is my current belief that the Catholic Church overemphasizes the Church's role in connecting believers to Jesus, but to me, this is only a matter of degree and not of substance. Anyway, in Catholicism, the Church is Christ's presence on earth, the Body of Christ in the most literal sense, so the sacraments of the Church are the primary means by which the believer connects with Jesus and receives salvation and the Holy Spirit. On the other hand, I think that second and third-generation Protestants go too far the other direction, insisting that the church (notice that church is now lowercased) has no role in bringing people to salvation beyond declaring the Gospel, and thus implicitly that people can be saved independently of the church. In this understanding, the church is merely spiritual, the “invisible” collection of the redeemed that cannot be directly correlated to the visible institution to which believers belong. I think that this distinction between the invisible spiritual church and the visible institutional church, if not outright artificial, is much too sharp. While it is certainly true that there are some who are part of the institutional church but who are not in right relationship with God, the inverse, that there are genuinely faithful Christians outside of the institution and community of the church is not biblical. I will clarify this by saying that not only is the church in us but we are also in the church. The church and the believers in the church are mutually constitutive of one another. There is no church without believers and there are no believers without the church. For instance, then, the New Testament does not consider those who are not part of the church, have intentionally refused baptism, and, for these reasons, are not receiving Communion to be people who are currently in right standing with God. With all fairness, all faithful Protestants insist that Christians should be part of the church but imply by their understanding of the church and grace that people can live a Christian life and be finally saved without the church.

I propose a middle way between the Catholic understanding of the Church's primacy in communicating grace to the Christian and the mainstream evangelical Protestant understanding of the church as having no direct role in bringing people to salvation. I propose that the church is really the Church. Jesus is present in the Church itself in a way that I am afraid that evangelicals have forgotten. God speaks to us through the Church and communicates grace through the Church. In baptism and Communion, the sacraments that all Christians practice, we are personally and powerfully interacting with the Lord. This is not to say that we do not interact with Jesus personally and individually through faith and the Holy Spirit in prayer. We absolutely do. In fact, I believe that this is a very important way in which we relate to Jesus, but the Church itself and the sacraments it provides are channels by which we can know, receive, love, worship, and unite with God in a very special way. Let's consider Matthew 16:17-20:

Jesus replied, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. 18And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. 19I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." 20Then he warned his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Christ.

This has been an historically controversial passage in debates between Protestants and Catholics about the office of the Pope, but here, I want to direct our attention instead to the matter of the keys of the kingdom of heaven being given to Peter and by extension to the Apostles and the Church built on their teachings. There have been a number of ways that Protestants have explained verse 19, including that the church has the keys to heaven only to the degree that it is the Church's responsibility to spread the gospel of Christ. I agree, but I also think this passage implies much more about the function of the Church. I think this also refers to the fact that the Church opens the gates to heaven in some sense through the sacraments of salvation it administers. I think verse 20 gives us a clue that Jesus is referring to the sacraments here. I had always wondered why Jesus is always so concerned about keeping his identity concealed in the synoptic Gospels. Why did he not urge the disciples instead to proclaim it from the hilltops that he was the Christ? It's not because Jesus wanted to keep the message of salvation in him from people, it's because Jesus always intended to reveal who he is through his death and resurrection. It is at Calvary and the empty tomb that Jesus most clearly reveals himself to be God, and it is in his atoning death and resurrection that he wants to reveal to each of us that he is the Christ, the Son of the living God. That is the mystery Jesus’s sense of mystery about his identity is pointing to. Paul and other ancient Christians also talk a lot about mystery, referring to the sacraments of baptism and Communion as part of the Paschal mystery. They are mysteries caught up in the great mystery of redemption purchased on the cross. They are signs rather than mere symbols of Jesus’ atoning death and resurrection. They confer to a significant degree the graces that they signify, so in baptism and Communion, we receive in an important way the benefits of Christ's death and resurrection. Baptism and Communion are thus sacraments: Sacred, Advangtageous Christian Rites And Mysteriously Effective New Testament Signs. By pointing us to Calvary in verse 20, Jesus shows us that the Church is the guardian of the mystery of salvation, both in the proclamation of the Gospel and in the administration of the sacraments. I don't think it means that the Church has any particularly formal role in and of itself to decide who God will save or damn (God most certainly still saves when the Church miscarries its salvific work), but it does point us to our solemn responsibility to help bring people to salvation and our evangelistic and sacramental roles in that process.

Now, I want to turn to the relevant passages of Scripture regarding the sacramental nature of water baptism. We see baptism in the Gospels, the baptism given by John the Baptist to Jews, including Jesus himself. John's baptism of Jesus, while not Christian baptism per se, clearly pre-figures Christian baptism in that God declares that Jesus is his Son and Jesus visibly receives the Holy Spirit in his baptism. This all correlates to the ideas of the Christian’s adoption by God as his child in baptism, the calling, or anointing if you will, of the believer into the Father’s purposes through baptism, and the receipt of the Holy Spirit through baptism. After his death and resurrection, Jesus institutes Christian baptism in the Great Commission in Matthew 28:19-20, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you," and in Mark 16:16, "Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned." Though the second is of questionable biblical origin, it is certainly orthodox even if not written by Mark himself. Notice that Mark does not complete or close the argument regarding baptism. Though he says that "Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved," he does not state the inverse. This passage indicates that salvation comes at least in part through baptism but in no way implies that not being baptized through no fault of one's own contributes in any way to one's damnation. One only guarantees his or her own damnation by rejecting the offer of salvation in Christ.

We must also note that in Mark 16:16 baptism is connected closely to belief. Baptism is known as the “sacrament of faith” in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I think most sacramental Protestants would probably also speak of baptism in similar terms. Ironically, Catholics and most sacramental Protestants baptize infants. How does belief relate to infants? Are these traditions in conflict with Scripture. I really don't think so. I do not agree with the Baptists, the credobaptist Pentecostal/charismatic traditions, or the Restorationist traditions that only "believer's baptism" is valid. If you were baptized as a young child or infant, I do not recommend rebaptism since the dominant teaching throughout Christian history has been that baptism is not to be repeated. Though the household baptisms mentioned in the book of Acts do seem to indicate that the Apostles baptized infants, this is probably not enough biblical evidence in and of itself to affirm this practice (as a rule of thumb, Protestant Bible interpreters require two or three passages in the teaching portions of Scripture to uphold a doctrine; a passage or two in a narrative portion of Scripture is not sufficient evidence to infallibly uphold a doctrine). On the other hand, I don't think the fact that the word for baptism used in the Greek literally means “to immerse” (it also more generally means to wash) or that the overwhelming majority of, if not all, the first-generation Christians baptized in the Bible were adults who had first professed faith in Jesus (a curiously inconsistent usage by non-sacramental Protestants of narrative passages of Scripture to infallibly uphold a doctrine of universally prescribed credobaptism) to be enough biblical evidence to make a particularly strong argument against baptizing babies.

The truth is that we have not been given a New Testament Leviticus by which to construct the Church and its rituals. The New Testament does not give us a rigid legal code that locks us in to specific, exact, right down to the detail ways to structure our ritual worship the way the Old Testament does. Paul, in 1 Corinthians, seems to indicate that there are many matters that God has left up to the reason and common sense of people in the Church to decide. The particular mode of and candidate for baptism may be one of those things that God has given us some latitude in. The only things the Bible and the most ancient of apostolic traditions insist on is that it be done with water (obviously), be done in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that it not be repeated. Also, our earliest extra-biblical source, the Didache, dated to about 110 A.D. and, therefore, according to tradition and even some critical scholars, while the ink on the last writings that ended up in the New Testament was still wet, authorizes the baptism of infants and does not absolutely insist on immersion though it prefers it. If we wanted to get really legalistic about this, we could also insist that both the baptizer and baptizand be naked, as Hippolytus, writing early in the third century A.D., shows that the early Christians baptized in the buff. It is thus not improbable that the baptisms in the Bible were done in the nude too. That’s one possibly biblical tradition that I think we all agree should not be revived!

There are a number of ways to reconcile the baptism of infants to the biblical connection of baptism to faith. Catholics and other Christians with a high ecclesiology—theology of the Church—essentially believe for the recipient of baptism. Also, since Catholics believe that an infant who receives baptism has been born again, this means that she will begin to believe in the Lord as soon as she is able. I personally like a Reformed explanation of how baptism is a sacrament of faith. Baptism is the sign and seal of the New Covenant. God speaks to the heart of the child in baptism, and, just as babies hear and respond to the voices of their parents, they hear and respond to the voice of their Heavenly Father as he speaks “This is my son (or daughter) in whom I am well pleased” to them in baptism. They trust in God when they’re baptized in the same way that they trust in their parents when they hear their voices. As Jesus says in John 10, “My sheep hear my voice, and they follow me.” This also points to the fact that God takes the agency in saving us. He calls to us before we even know to call out to him. It also points to our passivity in baptism. It is not a choice; it is not a work. God gives himself to us in the waters of baptism; he works in us, willing that we believe in him. A Presbyterian friend once told me that his baptism as a baby represented to him God’s calling of him from the time of his birth. Patrick's later conversion to faith in Christ was merely confirmation of this call. I will later explain how adult baptism can be, if not done in a legalistic sense, a passive reception of grace, how it is not a work any more than praying to receive Christ is, and how it does not conflict with the Protestant tenet of salvation by grace alone through faith alone.

I next want to point out that Peter and Paul talk about baptism in the Bible in ways that Baptist- influenced or Baptist evangelicals would be very uncomfortable with. For instance, though there are issues with using narrative passages to formulate doctrine, I think a look at the first sermon and first altar call in the history of the Church is instructive. After being cut to the heart at the words of Peter, his audience asks of him, "'What must we do to be saved?' And Peter said to them, 'Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit'" (Acts 2:37-39). You would never hear such a statement from a preacher in most evangelical churches. Regardless of whether or not this is in context, most evangelical preachers or teachers would never make such a statement.

In Romans 6:1-4, Paul directly connects our death to sin and ascent into new life with baptism:

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? 2By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? 3Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

Due to the imagery used here, it is highly unlikely that Paul is speaking of a purely spiritual baptism into Christ to which many non-sacramental Protestant authorities point in efforts to negate the apparent salvific implications of baptism put forward in this passage.

Consider also Paul's words in Galatians 3:26-28:

For in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. 27For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

He connects the putting on of Christ and the radical equality of all believers directly to the baptism that they have all received. Also notice the connection to faith here. We become sons and daughters of God through faith. Paul simultaneously holds in full force both the primacy of faith and the importance of baptism in salvation. He doesn't seem to find any conflict between salvation by faith and the salvific implications of baptism. A further note on the context of this passage, the context of Paul's letter to the Galatians is that Paul is correcting the Galatians legalistic dependence on the Law of Moses to save them. Paul does not consider baptism a work of the Law in the same way he does circumcision. Baptism is thus not a meritorious work. It is not a way to earn salvation by pleasing God. We cannot please God. It is only by his own grace that we can please God. Christ's institution of baptism is simply a tangible way of communicating to us the promise of receiving the righteousness of God by which he makes us pleasing to himself.

Paul carries this argument further, showing how baptism is not something we do for God to try to please him but something that God does in us. In Colossians 2:11-14, he writes:

In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, 12 having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. 13 And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, 14by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.

Again, we see baptism directly connected to Christ's atoning death by which he earned salvation for us all. Notice here how he connects a circumcision of the heart to baptism. Baptism is a circumcision made without hands, a putting off of the flesh. Granted, of course, water baptism is an external event in and of itself, but this is not the whole picture of it. God works inside us in this physical bath. Baptism is thus not just an external witness to an internal reality that has already taken place. Baptism is God's use of water, of matter, to confirm and seal his promise of salvation to us. Mysteriously, baptism somehow carries with it the grace it signifies without itself being an identity with that grace. We must think of baptism's role in our salvation as conferring the promise of receiving the grace rather than conferring the fullness of the grace itself. Baptism is simply God's visible, tangible way of promising to change us internally, to give us the grace of regeneration, of justification, of rightness with God, of washing from sin. Though I would not say that baptism in and of itself can save us, it must still be reckoned as important to our salvation in the sense that it strengthens our faith. The emphasis in this is not on what we do but on what God mysteriously and counter-intuitively does in us.

Salvation is a mystery. It goes against our logic. Sometimes it just doesn't make sense. What is God thinking? Using something physical to help change us spiritually? But, isn't that what the Incarnation is all about? God taking on a material body, coming to a material earth, spiritually saving beings composed of matter, redeeming physical nature, physical creatures, and a physical earth (which he promises to perfect when he returns), the God-man dying a physical death on a physical cross, the God-man rising physically, bodily from the grave, the risen God-man revealing his identity in the breaking of bread (Luke 24:35), Jesus coming in water and blood (1 John 5:6). Isn't it universal Christian doctrine that God's physical work of conception, birth, life, death, and resurrection accomplished the spiritual salvation of his people; isn't it also catholic, orthodox (meaning universally accepted and doctrinally sound) teaching that we will experience eternal life in bodily form; isn't it true that when salvation in all its fullness becomes a present reality that our bodies will be redeemed and glorified together with our spirits? Could we have been saved without the Incarnation? I honestly don't know. God possibly could have redeemed us some other way, but the fact is that he did it the way he did it. In that light, maybe it does make perfect sense that God continues to use matter in saving us, since the basis for our salvation in the first place is the broken flesh and spilled blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit,
as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be;
world without end. Amen.