I was born-again as an 18 year old college student into a kind of fundamentalist Christianity. In the late 70s there were two types of conservative Bible believing Christians, fundamentalists and Evangelicals. The former grew out of the fundamentalist-modernist controversies in the early 20th century, and were seen as backward rubes after the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial.” In the 1950s, a group of conservative Christians reacting against this anti-cultural, anti-intellectual type of Christianity decided to call themselves Evangelicals. They came out of Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California, and Billy Graham, growing in popularity, joined them with the founding of Christianity Today. They wanted a more culturally engaged and intellectually robust Christianity. Today, there is no distinction; all conservative Christians are referred to as Evangelicals, and the word fundamentalist in reference to Christians has disappeared.
This Christianity I was born-again into didn’t exist in an historical vacuum, although for the Christians I was around, the history of Christianity seemed irrelevant. I often say when referring to this version of Christianity that it was anti-intellectual, anti-theological (or anti-doctrinal), and ahistorical. It was just me and the Bible. We didn’t want any of that other stuff getting in the way of our relationship with Jesus. This wasn’t overtly taught, for the most part, but it was part of the spiritual dynamic of that kind of fundamentalist Christianity. I began to realize all this after I came across Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who is There, probably in my junior year. From him I realized how truncated this version of Christianity tended to be, as if entire parts of life were cut off from it, and narrowed down to just what was seen as the “spiritual.” It wasn’t long before I rejected the fundamentalist label and started calling myself an Evangelical. The fundamentalist label has completely disappeared over the last 40 years.
I distinctly remember the realization dawning on me that my early understanding of Christianity came from somewhere, and how thrilling that was. That was only the beginning, though, because I didn’t fully realize it had practical consequences until I was introduced to Reformed theology in February 1985 when I was only 24 years old. That’s when I learned about the anti-theological nature of fundamentalism, and the implications of that for my newly Reforming faith. But before I get to some history and theology, it would be helpful to explain what I mean by moralism.
Everyone knows what morals are or what morality means. A dictionary definition puts it this way: “of, relating to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong; ethical.” Moralism related to Christianity is simply the focus on right and wrong, be it in conduct, thought, or speech. This, it was implied, was what Christianity was all about, mediated through the Bible and my relationship with Jesus. The gentleman who introduced me to Reformed theology told me this turned Christianity into a jumping through hoops exercise. If you jumped through all the right hoops, doing good and right, you knew you were right with God, but when you failed, guilt was a constant companion. That struggle, striving to do right, failing all the time, trying again, an endless exhausting cycle, explained my experience quite well, and put me on a journey to a more full-orbed Christianity that I continue on to this day.
Pietism and Perfectionism
I remember him telling me this Christian experience came from Pietism, something I’d never heard of. I had no idea my experience of Christianity had been influenced by something that started developing over 300 years ago. In the 17th century a movement in German Lutheranism arose responding to Scholasticism, a dry doctrinal orientation of the Christian faith. The Pietists were looking for something more dynamic, more personal, more experiential that touched the whole person, not just the mind. Christianity had to be more than just propositional statements of doctrines about the Bible. A significant aspect of this experiential Christianity of the Pietists was a focus on holy living. In due course Pietism would grab hold of John Wesley, and his influence would come to dominate modern Christianity. Wesley was an intense character, to say the least. When he and his brother Charles were at Oxford in 1729 they started a religious study group derisively called the “Methodists” because of their emphasis on methodical study and devotion. The “Holy Group,” as they were also known, were active in doing good works in the community and intense in their religious devotion, and John applied his intensity to a critical self-examination. Striving for holy living, and failing, became a theme of his life.
In due course as Wesley’s influence grew so did his twofold emphasis, a conversion experience and holy living. He eventually came to believe that Christians could completely overcome sin and live a perfectly holy life, that Christians could completely overcome sin. In the 19th century this made its way into a stream of Christian thought called perfectionism, developing and growing in influence in various holiness movements such as victorious Christian living and the higher life movement. Evangelist D.L. Moody (1837-1899) did as much as anyone to bring perfectionism into the American Christian bloodstream, even though he didn’t teach the doctrine itself. We can see in him the transition from perfectionism to moralism by promoting holiness with an ethical emphasis. A perfect example of such moralism was his focus on the will. “Whatever the sin is,” Moody exhorted in a typical statement, “make up your mind that you will gain victory over it /” (from George Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture). This became much of my early Christian experience. I obviously wasn’t very good at making up my mind because I didn’t get much in the way of victory. I imbibed the idea that if you were a serious Christian and worked on it hard enough, you could overcome sin in your life, but given sin isn’t what we do but part of who we are, these movements were destined to fail in the face of human experience. I was a perfect example of this.
My mentor introduced me to a book by the great Princton theologian B.B. Warfield called Studies in Perfectionism that helped me think through what up to that point was my lived Christian experience. This passage explains the problem perfectly.
Perfectionism is impossible in the presence of a deep sense or a profound conception of sin. This movement proclaimed, it is true, only an attenuated perfectionism—a perfectionism merely of conduct. But this involved a correspondingly attenuated view of sin. The guilt of sin, the corruption of sin, were not denied, but attention was distracted from them and fixed on the practice of sin. This is a fatally externalizing movement of thought and brings with it a ruinous underestimate of the baneful power of sin.
Warfield calls perfectionism and its attendant moralism a “fatal externalizing movement” because it trivializes sin by making it primarily about our actions, or lack thereof. Sin is a far more profound dilemma than just what we do; rather, it is who we are, our being, in philosophical terms, our ontology. We are sinners, saved sinners, but sinners, nonetheless. Alas, sin is not like the water you dry off your skin when you get out of the pool; it is your skin!
Paul uses the Greek word σάρξ- sarx translated in English as flesh. He doesn’t mean a la Plato and the Greeks that our bodies are what make us predisposed toward sin, but rather it is our immaterial sinful natures. Our self-centered sinful inclinations are who we are as embodied, fleshly creatures, and thus mere will power can’t overcome it. Moralism makes sin about our wills, thus fatally externalizing it. D.L. Moody was wrong; making up our minds is worthless in our battle to overcome sin. What we need is a new nature, biblically speaking, a supernatural work of the Holy Spirit, to be born again (John 3). The most vivid Old Testament image is found in Ezekial 36. In striking typological imagery, we see the Lord restoring Israel to the land of Promise. He’s clearly speaking about more than a plot of land because what’s in view is a personal transformation of His people He came to save (Matt. 1:21). It’s worth quoting at length because it helps us understand this process is far more profound than our merely willing it. There area a lot of “will’s” in this passage, but they are all God’s.
24 “‘For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land. 25 I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. 26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. 28 Then you will live in the land I gave your ancestors; you will be my people, and I will be your God. 29 I will save you from all your uncleanness. I will call for the grain and make it plentiful and will not bring famine upon you. 30 I will increase the fruit of the trees and the crops of the field, so that you will no longer suffer disgrace among the nations because of famine. 31 Then you will remember your evil ways and wicked deeds, and you will loathe yourselves for your sins and detestable practices. 32 I want you to know that I am not doing this for your sake, declares the Sovereign Lord. Be ashamed and disgraced for your conduct, people of Israel!
The more profound the nature of sin, the more profound our salvation is from it. Only a supernatural work of God can transform a human heart from dead inanimate spiritual stone to living, vibrant, beating flesh. Born His enemies, we are transformed into his children who cry Abba, Father.
Thankfully, perfectionism is forgotten, a relic of a bygone more naïve era when an obsession with progress dominated Western culture. When I became a Christian, though, the spirit of perfectionism was still in the air even if not overtly taught. I eventually came to call it moralism. As Wesley’s life reflected, it’s easy to fall into a kind of morbid introspection, which is one reason it took him until he was 35 to believe he was actually a saved Christian. Although I was nothing like Wesley, my early Christian experience was moralism, and it was exhausting.
Unfortunately, because of the thin theological foundation of much modern Evangelicalism, most Christians confuse Christianity with moralism. One of the reasons skeptics and non-Christians in general think Christianity is all about ethics, obsessing about right and wrong, guilt and shame, is because for many Christians it is exactly that. Because God is merciful in the power of the cross most Christians don’t live guilt ridden lives on a roller coaster of success and failure to overcome sin. Even the most theologically ignorant among us know Jesus paid for all our failures, past, present, and future. For me, though, having a solid theological foundation was invaluable in helping me overcome my own morbid introspection.
What Exactly is the Gospel?
Have you ever asked yourself that, or has someone else, and you’ve had to come up with an answer? What would you say? It’s so simple it’s difficult. As sinful human beings we want to have something to do, to work out, basically save ourselves, but that’s not possible. No matter how “good” we are, it will never be good enough because we can’t change who we are, born enemies of God. In Pauline terms, no one will be saved by obedience to the law. The first night I was introduced to Reformed theology, my mentor painted a picture for me of man in his lost state. He said it’s like we’re dead at the bottom of the pool. There’s absolutely nothing we can do to save ourselves because, well, we’re dead. Our only hope is to be brought back to life by Almighty God. That is our predicament in our lost sinful state apart from God. In the contrasting version, we’re now drowning in the pool calling out for someone to save us, to throw us a rope so we can grab it and in effect save ourselves.
The way I’d seen it previously, and the way I think most Evangelical Christians do, is that we’re drowning—not dead. As Miracle Max says in The Princess Bride, “Your friend here is only mostly dead. There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.” Many Christians mistakenly believe we’re “mostly dead” in our sins, as I did before I embraced Reformed theology, or Calvinism. It wasn’t difficult for my new friend to convince me of this because I seemed to know it intuitively. I can’t save myself. Plus, he told me something I already knew; the wages of sin is death, as God told Adam would happen if he ate of the tree he was commanded not to eat. He and all his progeny, us, are now alienated from God and by nature want to hide from Him because we know we are guilty. Plus he shared with me a bottom-of-the-pool verse in Colossians (2:13):
13 When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins.
It seemed impossible to argue with that. And in Ephesians 2, Paul also says, “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins,” and then he adds, God “made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions” Death to life seems pretty clear. Then he tells us how he did it:
6 And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, 7 in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. 8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast.
This is all gospel 101, but it’s amazing how easily we forget it when it comes to living the Christian life. Prior to embracing Calvinism, I had even memorized verses 8 and 9, but since I didn’t have any theological grounding, I believed non-Christians were just drowning and needed to hear the gospel. It was up to them to receive it or not, and if they “made a decision for Jesus,” then they would be born-again. But after my introduction to the 16th century Reformer, I realized nobody chooses to be born! In that passage in John 3, Jesus tell us this means we are “born of the Spirit,” or in Ezekiel’s terms, our hearts by God’s Holy Spirit are transformed from stone to flesh!
In theological terms we call this justification, but the Christian life doesn’t stop there. God saves us to make us holy, what is called sanctification. While it’s relatively easy to buy into God doing the work to save us from our sins, justification, we then think making ourselves more holy is our work, up to us; it’s not. In fact, that’s impossible. The confusion comes in confusing our choosing and efforts with God’s supernatural transformational work. The former is our responsibility, the latter is God’s. The transforming of our being, of our becoming more holy, more set apart to him for service to others, is God’s job and He’s quite good at it, even as we fight it every step of the way. After decades of living the Christian life, there were two verses that brought this to life for me and took off all the pressure of performance. The first is 1 Corinthians 1:30:
It is because of him [God] that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, sanctification and redemption.
When I finally grasped that transformation of who I am to become more like Christ was as much God’s job as saving me from my sin, it was life changing. The other passage is from John 3, the “born-again” chapter. What at first glance seems a bizarre analogy to salvation, makes total sense in I Corinthians 1:30 hindsight:
14 Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, 15 that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.”
I wrote about this in detail in a previous post, but all we have to do is look up to Jesus, both for being saved from sin and being transformed to overcome it. The word believe means trust, so we don’t have to understand “how” it works, but only trust that he has to power to pull it off. Our tendency is to look down at the bite, the pain, the circumstances, the situation, at us. Don’t do that! Look up to Jesus because the reason he came to earth was to both save us and sanctify us from sin. In fact, that is why he was given his name, as the angel of the Lord told Joseph (Matt. 1:21):
She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”
Not try to save us, but to actually do it! God doesn’t do try. Believe it, trust it, Him, and you’ll know exactly what the gospel is.
Recent Comments