With the FV controversy in mind, I was asked this last week whether I considered myself more “basically”evangelical or more “basically” Reformed. With the one qualifier that if you believe both, then to answer the question is not to say which you believe to be “more true,” let me address it this way. As I understand the question, it is a question about practical systematics — in your heart and life and mind, what is the root of the matter? The root of the matter is new life in Christ, and since I understand that in historic evangelical categories I am much more of an evangelical than I am Calvinistic and Reformed. I do not say this as though there is some kind of tension between the two, but rather what the priorities are. It is like the Bible. If the entire Bible is inspired by God, the breath of the Holy Spirit, then how can we say that certain passages are weightier than others? Well, because the Bible says that. New life in Christ is weightier than Calvinism. We can tell this because our gracious God has given that new life to all His true children, and He has not given Calvinism to all His true children. That will have to wait until heaven.
A couple more qualifications. The root of the matter is actual new life in Christ, not the proposition that you have to have new life in Christ. Thus there have been many non-evangelicals in the history of the Church who have had that new life in reality, and there are many professing evangelicals who need to be converted.
Okay, then, reconcile that with all the FV hubbub. “Aren’t you guys hard core sacramentalists? How can that be evangelical?” Some people ask this question because they don’t know better than to believe slander-meisters on the Internet. But others have questions because of things like the ad copy for Peter Leithart’s new book on baptism as it ran in World magazine — saying something like, “The apostle Peter tells us that baptism now saves us. But we know that baptism can’t do that, can it? Can it?”
First, here is how an historic evangelical can have a high view of the sacraments. It is the difference between looking through and looking at. When a Christian presents the gospel to a nonbeliever with an open Bible and says something like, “These words are your life,” nobody (including the unbeliever) thinks he is talking about the paper and ink that came from Thomas Nelson. They are treating the Bible (as they should) as one of God’s appointed instruments for bringing new life. I can recognize that this process is occurring when a hardline fundamentalist leads someone to Christ (and really does), even though that fundamentalist has some quirky doctrines about the Bible itself. Maybe he thinks that Paul spoke in Elizabethan English. That faulty understanding does not prevent the Holy Spirit from working through that situation. In a similar way, an evangelical Lutheran can have a much stronger view of what happens in baptism than I do, but I should still be able to recognize that he has the root of the matter straight in his heart.
Now, I believe that paper and ink from Thomas Nelson is an instrument of God in the conversion of a lost soul when that lost soul responds to God in living evangelical faith — the only kind of saving faith that God gives. I believe the same identical thing about listening to sermons, reading Christian books, receiving baptism, and taking the Lord’s Supper. When you believe God, the whole world comes alive, and this is especially true with instruments that God has appointed, like the Word . . . and like baptism. But without evangelical faith, man, your situation is worse than it was before. You gotta have Jesus, and no Christian should have a problem with that.
This is not to say that every evangelical needs to agree with our particular understanding of baptism. If you don’t, fine. Let’s talk about it. Let’s have a Bible study. But you do have a moral obligation to recognize what we are and are not saying about it. Misrepresentation is not an honest Christian option.
Two more comments and I am done. Some won’t accept the explanations we offer because they flat don’t believe us. In other words, when it sounds orthodox, it must be a trick. Heretics often manage to sound orthodox. Yeah, but orthodox people often sound orthodox too. Those who believe that we are evil people often have their own agenda, their own issues, and their own history. Internet trolls come to mind.
But what about those evangelicals who are not nasty or anything, but they simply cannot get their minds around what we are saying? Before giving my explanation of that, let me refer again to something I said earlier. The grace of God extends quite a bit further than our understanding of that grace does — thanks to God. The explanation I would offer is critical, but by that criticism I do not mean to say that they are strangers to the grace of God. But they are slipping away from the central points of historic evangelicalism. They have become attached to a particular set of expressions, a particular way of praying, a particular way of “asking Jesus into your heart,” and because they have done this in a superstitious way, they cannot conceive of the Holy Spirit regenerating anybody in ways outside their ordinary groove.
This is the same error (ironically) that is committed by the papists in their liturgies and processes for conversion. Evangelicals have their liturgies of conversion too, and woe betide those who put some clanker into their testimony. It’s okay if you say you went down to the front of the church and signed a little card with a stubby pencil, and became a Christian that way. It’s okay if you came into the kingdom by throwing a pine cone into the bonfire the last night of youth camp. But if you say you went down to the front of the church and had a minister put some water on you . . . it ‘jest ain’t fittin’.” But a superstitious reaction to water displays the same spiritual problem as a superstitious attachment to water — with the one exception that those who have a superstitious attachment to the water actually have some verses. There are no verses anywhere about the stubby pencil.
Put another way, those evangelicals who cannot grasp this rudimentary point (simple and genuine faith in Jesus is the only thing that makes any spiritual exercise or activity worthwhile in the slightest) are demonstrating that their evangelicalism is resting on the foundation of a human tradition, instead of resting on the work of the Holy Spirit, who moves mysteriously wherever and however He wills. He has even been known to brood on the face of the waters.