Some More Thoughts on Christian Baptism

Baptism is an expression of salvation, and not a means of salvation as held by certain churches. Baptism is of vital importance in the life of the believer and is more than an archaic ritual, yet it is not ultimately salvific.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve had a chance to respond to all the things that Nota Bene and Integrity Blog have said in reference to baptism.

Mea culpa–I’ve been running around like a chicken with my head cut off. Which I understand is quite a sight, although I’ve never personally witnessed it. Which puts me in mind of Mike the Headless Chicken.

But I digress…

We’re discussing what it means to follow Jesus, and how baptism relates to that. The Catholic position is that baptism is the way one normally becomes a Christian. So far I’ve limited myself to discussing one specific passage that Sean first mentioned. They’ve made a LOT of observations since I’ve posted, so I encourage you to read their blogs to see what they’ve been saying. There’s no way I could respond to it all without this being my full-time job, so I’ll just do what I can. Hey guys: if I misunderstand, misrepresent, or fail to address what you consider to be your strongest arguments please let me know: I am being selective, but I’m trying to be selective with integrity.

In this post I’ll try to provide a broader understanding of baptism. It may be long, so buckle your seatbelts! My basic thesis will be that baptism is an expression of salvation, and not a means of salvation as held by certain churches. Baptism is of vital importance in the life of the believer and is more than an archaic ritual, yet it is not ultimately salvific.

Jack and Sean’s observations fall into two categories: scriptural and historical.

I’d like to begin by offering my own scriptural observations.
The Bible is clear that salvation issues from placing one’s faith [belief plus trust] in Jesus. There are several relevant passages of Scripture, referencing a few should suffice: John 3.16–18, Acts 16.31, Romans 3.23–24, Galatians 3.26–27, Ephesians 2.8–9, 1 John 5.1.

These passages are clear: God adopts us into His family when we place our faith in Jesus. I don’t see such a clarity in the passages Jack references or in the ones that Sean references. I do see an emphasis on the importance of baptism, but I don’t see a demonstration of baptism as a means of salvation.

The only texts Jack raised which might even seem to teach salvific baptism are towards the end of his post, The Church would also point to the words of Peter and Paul on how baptism incorporates us into the Body of Christ: Romans 6:3–4; Col 2:12 … 1 Cor 6:11. [note: I edited slightly for length]. In each of these verses, Paul is speaking descriptively: all the believers had been baptized, so he can speak of baptism as a synonym for being a believer.

Now I’d like to make a few historical comments:
First, I’d like to acknowledge that the early church clearly thought that baptism was salvific.

I’d also like to say that it’s an unpersuasive point. Theology evolves. Over time the church gradually comes to a deeper understanding of the ramifications of the Bible’s teaching and incorporates it into our theology. The most well-known example is the doctrine of the Trinity. All the clues were in the Bible, it just took the Church a few centuries to put them together in a consistent way.

The early church fathers were wrong about baptism. They clearly did not understand the Scriptures at this point. In fact, I’m willing to bet that there were divergent views among the early church theologians about baptism (I just don’t have the historical expertise to know them off the top of my head or the time to ferret them out).

I’d like to close by explaining what baptism does.
Jack asked me what exactly I think baptism does:
1) Baptism forces people to publicly profess their faith in Jesus Christ as Lord.
2) Baptism requires a public display of solidarity with the Church.
3) Baptism is a test of obedience. Someone unwilling to follow Christ in such a small thing cannot be properly called a follower of Christ.
4) Baptism is an object lesson in faith, and provides excellent symbolism that can be used to help people understand the gospel.

Baptism does all these things, and probably a good deal more. It does not, however, save anyone.

Why Are There So Many Different Ministries?

I recently received an email from a student asking me why there were so many different campus ministries at Stanford. I think a lot of students have similar questions, so I’ve decided to tweak my reply and post it here.

Do The Various Campus Ministries Compete?
Only in intramurals.

Seriously though: I sure hope not! Ideally, we should each view ourselves as having a small role in accomplishing what God is doing on campus.

Then Why Don’t They Merge?
There are at least two significant reasons: we believe slightly different things and having different groups maximizes ministry.

Why Should Different Beliefs Lead to Different Ministries If You Agree On the Essentials?
Because beliefs drive behavior, and at some point different beliefs will call for different behavior. Let me give you a concrete example: some groups believe that you must celebrate communion at every weekly meeting and others don’t. In a given group, only one of those practices can prevail. By having two different groups, both sets of believers can flourish.

OK, Maybe. But How Does Having Different Groups Maximize Ministry?
In the same way that having multiple churches maximizes ministry in a town. Suppose there was only one church in a town of 10,000. Even if the church building can accommodate 500 people, it would take 20 services a week to accommodate everyone if they all decided to come!

Suppose, on the other hand, that you have 10 churches each of which can accommodate 250 people. If each church had 4 services a week everyone could attend.

In the same way, there’s limited meeting space on campus (and we’re not allowed to build our own buildings). We need to have different groups scheduling meetings at different times in different places.

Also, since each group develops its own flavor, personal preferences can be accommodated. There are some people who would never consider attending a religious group that worshiped God by means of 45 minutes of continuous light rock. There are others who would never consider attending a group that worshiped God by means of incense and hymns. By having multiple groups, there is a greater likelihood of a person finding a group that they click with.

But Shouldn’t We All Be In Unity?
Absolutely! But that doesn’t imply that the groups should merge into one. Just as you can be in unity with other Christians without becoming the same person as them, groups can remain distinct and exist in unity.

We are in unity in that we proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ and consider one another a part of God’s plan for exposing students to the gospel. We encourage one another on to love and good deeds, and we pray for one another. We rejoice at one another’s successes and commiserate over one another’s failures.

We do not, however, merge. To do so would be a bad strategy for reaching the campus.

Don’t You Ever Do Anything Together?
Yeah. There are some special prayer meetings and worship services–you’ll find out about those as the school year progresses.

There’s Gotta Be A Sermon in Here…

In a bizarre news story, a man fell into his own grave and died.

Here’s the synopsis:

63 year old Giovanni Greco was in the habit of visiting his future mausoleum to make sure it was being built the way he wanted it. One day he was trying to get a view of the roof and when he slipped, hit his head on a marble step, and fell dead into his own tomb.

This just sounds like some sort of parable…

Do Universities Really Need Missionaries?

Missionaries are people who are called to proclaim the gospel where there is no church to proclaim it, and there ain’t no church on campus!

For a while now I’ve been meaning to add this our site, but I’ve been a little too busy. I should have read Jon Walker’s article Did Jesus Rush Through His Week?!

My wife and I are considered missionaries by the Assemblies of God. That catches some people off-guard. After all, aren’t missionaries people who serve exclusively in pagan lands (preferably while wearing a pith helmet in the jungle)?

Not necessarily. A missionary is someone who is called to proclaim the gospel where there is no church to proclaim it.

There are a lot of nuances and qualifications I could add to that definition of a missionary, but I think it will suffice for this discussion. The key phrase is where there is no church to proclaim it.

That describes the college campus. College campuses (excluding commuter schools) are communities unto themselves. Students can attend classes, sleep, eat, watch movies, play games, do laundry, and shop for the necessities without ever leaving their campus. In fact, many campuses don’t even allow freshmen to have vehicles.

What’s the ramification? It doesn’t matter how many churches there are in the surrounding town–the college campus is a different world. Students are in great need of the gospel, yet they are insulated from the churches that proclaim it.

And so when we minister on campus we’re proclaiming the gospel in a place where there is no church to proclaim it. We’re missionaries.

That’s not to say there aren’t any differences between us and other missionaries. For example, the goal of most missionaries is to establish an indigenous church that is self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating. In other words, they’re trying to establish a church that makes the missionary unnecessary!

Our goal is different. We can’t create a church at Stanford that meets all three criteria (being self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating) because of the nature of the campus and the students who inhabit it. The challenges are chiefly in the area of self-governance (the students keep graduating, making totally student-run groups unstable) and self-support (college students have no money to provide for a full-time pastor). Incidentally, that’s why we raise missionary support.

In other words, the college campus is a perpetual mission field. We simply can’t build a church that will make our ministry unnecessary or redundant.

And that’s why universities need missionaries–they are self-sufficient communities that are isolated from any nearby churches. Since the students won’t come to church, the church must go to them.

And that’s missions.

Oh–I shouldn’t finish this without mentioning two more details:

1) There are roughly 14,000,000 college students in America: almost half the nations in the world have lower populations!

2) The world comes to America for education: of those 14,000,000 students over 500,000 are from other nations (over half of those are from Asia and another 7% are from the Middle East). Walking across virtually any college campus you can find students from countries that don’t allow missionaries entry. They’ve come here and they can be reached here. That’s one of the reasons Chi Alpha emphasizes International Student Friendship Ministries so strongly.

Unless One Is Born of Water and Spirit

In which I attempt to clarify what I mean by being “born from above”

Wow–Jack, author of Intregrity blog made several comments back-to-back in response to my earlier posting about baptism.

I’ll have to wait to address his lengthier comment, but I’ll tackle his shorter question right now: To make my question more explicit: what I don’t understand is how you reconcile this “physical birth” interpretation in the context of Jesus stating the conditions of entry into the Kingdom. Are you suggesting that it read as, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is physically born and spiritually born, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” Doesn’t seem odd to cite physical birth — something we all have experienced by the virtue of our existence — as a condition to entry into Heaven? Doesn’t that interpretation render the “of water” part of the phrase a moot point? After all, who hasn’t been physically born?

Thanks–I was worried that I wasn’t clear enough in my previous posting. I now know that I was positively muddy!

Here’s the flow of conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus in the NET Bible translation of John 3.5–7:

Jesus replied, I tell you the solemn truth, unless a person is born from above [anothen], he cannot see the kingdom of God.

In this snippet of dialog, Jesus explains the whole shebang: you must be born from above. The word anothen is ambigious in Greek. In this context, it might either mean “from above” or “again”. Recent scholarly translations come down on the side of “from above,” which makes the most sense of the conversation (NET and NRSV are two of the translations: check them out).

Nicodemus said to him, How can a man be born when he is old? He cannot enter his mothers womb and be born a second time, can he?

Nicodemus doesn’t understand what Jesus is saying. Being born from above doesn’t make any sense to him, but neither does being born again. Evidently, he thinks being born again is the more likely meaning, so he asks Jesus the above question based on that mistaken understanding.

Why would Nicodemus assume that Jesus was talking about physical birth? Because Nicodemus thought his own physical birth was salvific. Nicodemus was trusting in his status as a biological member of God’s chosen peole to assure him of citizenship in God’s Kingdom.

Jesus answered, “I tell you the solemn truth, unless a person is born of water and spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed that I said to you, ‘You must all be born from above.’ ” (John 3.3–7, NET Bible)

Jesus is now trying to help Nicodemus understand his real point–that everyone must be born from above. To that end, he draws a contrast between the physical birth that Nicodemus thinks Jesus is talking about and the spiritual birth that Jesus is driving at.

What evidence is there for this point of view?

1) It makes sense of the flow of conversation. Jesus talks about spiritual birth, Nicodemus thinks he’s talking about physical birth, so Jesus bridges from physical birth back to spiritual birth.

2) “Born of water” is clearly a metaphor for something. Physical birth is the topic being discussed when the metaphor is used, and the metaphor fits.

3) The parallelism in the text itself. The unclear term “born of water” is in parallel construction with “born of flesh”. Using the clear to interpret the unclear, we see that “born of water” means the same thing as “born of flesh.” In other words, being born.

4) It does justice to Nicodemus’ likely frame of mind. Nicodemus thought he was guaranteed access to the Kingdom of God based purely on the accident of his birth as a Jewish person.

I hope that helps.

There are other interpretations out there: just do a search on Google for “born from above.”

A Visit From Paula’s Parents

A brief summary of a visit from Paula’s parents.

paula_parents.jpgWe just dropped Paula’s parents off at the airport. I hope they have a good, safe trip back. I also hope nothing gets confiscated–Paula’s mom had some cuticle scissors taken on the way in!

In case you’re wondering, it was a pleasant visit. We went to San Jose, San Francisco, Big Basin (where we saw some truly impressive redwoods), and Santa Cruz. Woohoo!

Mentioning San Jose reminds me: I recently discovered that San Jose is actually larger than San Francisco (both in terms of land mass and population). It’s the third largest city in the state–following Los Angeles and San Diego–and the eleventh largest in America.

That really threw me for a loop. My whole life I’ve thought there were two big cities in California: Los Angeles and San Francisco. Once again, my Gen X geographic illiteracy races to the fore!

Thoughts on Baptism and Following Jesus

In which I discourse on why we need to be “born from above” instead of “born again.”

This post is part of an ongoing dialog I’m having with Sean Gallagher at his Bene Diction blog. Right now we’re discussing what it means to follow Jesus, and the current subtopic is how baptism relates to that. This post will be concise because of the blog medium, so please let me know if anything is unclear.

Sean believes that one becomes a Christian upon being baptized. In his own words,

As a Catholic, I believe that a follower of Jesus is one who is born of water and Spirit (Jn 3:5), that is, one who has been baptized… Once a person has been baptized, at any age, this ability is never taken away… even if a person totally refuses to work with that grace [of baptism], that person is still a follower of Jesus.

Wow. It took us exactly one round of replies to get to core Catholic/Protestant differences.

One of the crucial texts here is John 3.3–7:

Jesus replied, I tell you the solemn truth, unless a person is born from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus said to him, How can a man be born when he is old? He cannot enter his mothers womb and be born a second time, can he? Jesus answered, “I tell you the solemn truth, unless a person is born of water and spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed that I said to you, ‘You must all be born from above.’ ” (John 3.3–7, NET Bible)

In this passage, Jesus tells Nicodemus that everyone must be born anothen. The word anothen is ambigious in Greek. It can either mean “again” or “from above.”

Nicodemus thinks Jesus is saying “you must be born again” (hence his question, “How can a man be reborn? He can’t enter his mother’s womb again, can he?”) Nicodemus has misunderstood Jesus, and that is the context for what follows!

Jesus answers, “No, I’m not telling you to be born twice in a physical sense. You have to be both physically born [born of water] and spiritually born [born from above]. What is produced by flesh is flesh, but what is produced by Spirit is spirit.” (please note the use of parallelism here–it’s essential for interpreting the passage properly: ‘flesh’ parallels ‘water’ and ‘from above’ parallels ‘spirit’.)

In other words, neither person is discussing baptism. Jesus says that we are given physical life in our first birth (a birth of water), and that now we must have spiritual life planted in us (a birth of spirit). He goes on to explain exactly what that means later in the same conversation:

“For this is the way God loved the world: he gave his one and only Son that everyone who believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world should be saved through him. The one who believes in him is not condemned. The one who does not believe has been condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the one and only Son of God.” (John 3.16–18, NET Bible)

In other words, we are made alive spiritually by placing our faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

I’m sure there are other references that Sean takes to support salvific baptism, and I’m eager to dialog about them. I’m also curious to see what people think about the “born again/born from above” interpretative issue. I find that the wording is one of those sacred cows in the evangelical world even though it’s an untenable translation.

P.S. The NET Bible is one of my favorite translations, but I can’t find a way to directly link to a reference them. Hence my links are to the NIV at http://bible.gospelcom.net even though I quote from the NET Bible! If you know how to link directly to a NET Bible reference (a specific chapter and verse), please let me know!

70% Of College Homework Excuses Are Lies

NEWS FLASH: Studens lie to get out of homework.

A recent news item highlights the need for spiritual renewal at America’s colleges and universities. Students lie.

More to the point, Dr. Joseph Ferrari (who teaches psychology at DePaul University in Chicago) has discovered that they lie to avoid the consequences of not doing their assignments on time. 70% of the time an assignment is late, the accompanying excuse is a lie designed to get them off the hook.

Ladies and gentleman, I give you the next generation of Enron executives…

This Sounds Suspiciously Like a Video Game Concept

Hermann Burchard, mathematics professor at Oklahoma State, has suggested that we invent a cosmic-sized airbag to bounce incoming metors away from earth.

Hmmm.…

That reminds me of what a friend of mine thinks might be the (unintentional) funniest line in a movie. In Armageddon, all the science gurus at NASA are trying to figure out how to avert the annihilation of all life on earth, when someone says (roughly), “What we need here is the world’s best deep-core oil driller.”