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 mother’s 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 mother’s 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.”

There’s a Washing-Machine Technology Gap…

On a sad side note, Boston col­lege has a leg up on Stan­ford when it comes to wash­ing machine tech­nol­o­gy.

Oh well, I guess we’ll have to con­sole our­selves with the thought that we’ve been the #1 sports school in Amer­i­ca 8 years in a row!