There are some standard evangelical interpretations, hoary with age, which are, for all that, what more careful exegetes might call wrongity wrong wrong. A passage that comes to mind is Rev. 3:20, commonly used as a salvation text — Jesus knocking at the door of one’s heart, and won’t you pray the prayer and ask Him in? While I don’t want to be a fusser, this kind of thing, unchecked, can become widespread, and contribute significantly to false understandings of conversion. How many salvation prayers consist of asking Jesus into your heart, or asking Christ into your life? Don’t get me wrong — Christ is in us (Col. 1:27; Rom. 8:10), but not because we asked Him in. And it would be better to speak of Christ inviting us into His life — after all, He is the one with any life capable of being inviting at all.
So the passage is talking about Jesus knocking at the door of a church (the door of the Laodicean church, to be precise), and if any man there assumed the duty of a diligent porter, Christ promised to come in and dine with him, to have table fellowship with him. Where this leaves the deaf but credentialed ecclesiastical porters is a topic for another day. They were polishing the silver communion service in a back room, and they probably couldn’t hear.
This misunderstanding about Rev. 3:20 is not the end of the world, of course. Lots of people get saved using language that is not according to Hoyle. When I was in the Navy, I remember one man I was witnessing to using a prayer that went something like, “Damn it, I’m here.” The real issue is that God is a lover of heart religion, and He sees and reads what is really going on. And as Bunyan put it, it is better that your heart be without words than your words be without heart. If your heart is without words, God can still hear you.
In other instances, the handling of classic conversion texts are accurate enough as far as they go, but there is more that can be said — but not less. The “more” that can be said is usually a “more” that includes the entire church. The church is nothing without individual conversions, but the church is not nothing but individual conversions. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
For example, take the heart of stone/heart of flesh passage in Ezekiel 36. This promised transition was not one from faithful immaturity to glorified maturity. Rather, it is a promise of a glorious heart conversion — from sin to righteousness.
How does God describe Israel in this passage? They had “defiled it by their own way” (v. 17), and their sin was as “the uncleannness of a removed woman” (v. 17). God poured out His “fury” upon them for their bloodshed (v. 18), and for the pollution of their idols (v. 18). When scattered by God, wherever they went, the holy name of God was “profaned” because of the judgment upon them (v. 20, 22). God then promised to sprinkle them clean from all their “filthiness” (v. 25), and they will be cleansed from all their “idols” (v. 25). It is at this point that He promises them a new heart, promising to replace their stony heart with a heart of flesh. That stony heart was obviously a bad bit of business.
I remember Barry McGuire once saying, in response to the charge he had been brainwashed, something like, “That’s good. My brains needed a little scrub.”
But as with the vision of the valley of dry bones in the next chapter (Eze. 37:11), this is a promise of corporate regeneration. Israel needed a new heart; Israel needed to be converted. It is for this reason that the needed conversion of covenant members ought not to be controversial among us. That is how the Christian church was born — born again, actually — at Pentecost. Converting unconverted covenant members is something that God specializes in, and we need to be careful not to resist His work by claiming it is somehow unneccessary. One of the times it is most necessary is when people have come to assume it is not necessary at all. On this rule, when Jesus came, things were in a bad way for Israel. And so in Ezekiel 36-37, and in John 3, God promises to do this work of heart conversion en masse.
Now the fact that He does it en masse does not mean that individuals are excluded. We don’t want to be in the position of those who argue that Noah’s flood was global, and therefore this individual patch of ground need not have gotten wet. We don’t want to reason like those who say that the entire valley of dry bones was regenerated, and that is why we see so many individual skeletons lying about.
Jesus speaks to Nicodemus about this corporate regeneration, but He also speaks about the individual aspects of it. But even if He hadn’t, the necessity of individual conversion follows from the necessity of corporate conversion by good and necessary consequence. But the Lord, being merciful, knew that we weren’t very good at good and necessary consequences, and so He spelled both aspects out for us. And are we teachers in the new Israel, and we don’t know these things?
Unless a man is born again, he cannot see the kingdom (John 3:3, 5). But then Jesus tells Nicodemus that “you all” must be born again (John 3:7), and He consistently uses the plural in His explanation to Nicodemus. Nicodemus was an individual who needed to be born again, but he was also a representative of all Israel. The whole nation needed regeneration, and that is what happened at Pentecost. The valley of dry bones came to life. So did the Nicodemus bones.
We have to understand what kind of thing life is. In the fallacy of composition, a man says that if the tank is heavy, then every individual part of it must be heavy. But it is not a fallacy to say the entire tank is made out of metal, and so this part must be metal. Now life is more like “metal” than “heavy.” The Spirit is life itself, and this is why the new life in Christ does not have dead appendages.
“But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his” (Rom. 8:9).
There has never been a skeleton yet who was the life of the party.
One more thing, anticipating a “yeah, but.” When I said above that the life of Christ does not have dead appendages, some might object (rightly enough) and say that there are some illustrations in Scripture that do indicate dead appendages on a living Christ (John 15:5-6; Rom. 11:17). This is quite correct. Those illustrations are there, right alongside the illustrations that say the unconverted have nothing to do with Him (“tares, not wheat,” “none of his,” “never knew you,” etc.).
This is why, in order to speak as the Bible speaks, we must get more comfortable with bibical paradox, and less comfortable with the tidiness of our own systems. I do not say that God is contradicting Himself — all of reality is self-consistent, and God’s words are silver, refined seven times. There is no dross in them. What I am saying is that we are going to grow up into that self-consistent revelation far more quickly if we learn what the art of divine conversation is like.
When we commune with God in this divine conversation, the first lesson we must learn is that of how to stop finishing His sentences for Him.