Steve Finnel strikes again with yet another irrelevant
self-promoting shouty and theologically flawed drivel!
Why is he posting this on a post about me being ill? Because he has written a piece which he feels
proud of and trawls around for somewhere to dump it unthinkingly with his paste
button.
The flaws in it are many. But lets start with his basic assumption
about the point at which Paul 'believed'.
Paul's 'belief' on the road should not be confused with 'faith'. As Christians we often make this mistake, and
there is indeed a large overlap. But
there are differences. It is possible to
believe without faith (James 2:19
You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and
shudder). It is possible to
have faith without belief (Mark 9:2 Immediately
the boy’s father exclaimed, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!).
So Steve Finnel’s assertion that because
Paul believed on the road but wasn’t baptised until later therefore salvation by
faith is incorrect – does not work because while Paul believed on the road that
it was the Lord Jesus speaking to him, it was only after meditating on this
while fasting that the belief grew into faith which was then completed in the
baptism.
Secondly, no right-thinking proponent of ‘Salvation by Faith
alone’ actually means precisely that.
The phrase was coined in opposition to the idea that Salvation could be
bought from the Roman Catholic church or that it could be earned by
accumulating sufficient good deeds, or by sufficient accumulated participation
in church sacraments. So the phrase should
really be understood to ‘Salvation is not by those Catholic methods we reformers
grew up with’. The book of James makes
it clear that true faith is made known by the deeds it produces. The doctrine of Salvation by Faith Alone does
not mean that you can go around professing faith but continuing to live
unchanged. Thus saving faith is revealed
by repentance. But repentance is not of itself,
saving faith. There are many repentant
people who have turned away from lives of crime who do not have faith in Christ.
Thirdly, Steve has this notion that salvation is by
Baptism. Neglecting the obvious case of
the thief on the cross who was saved by his faith in Christ without baptism
(and I don’t swallow the ‘special unction’ nonsense that some invent to get
around this), the scripture does not support this view. Steve
has his nice progression from faith through repentance and confession to water
baptism. But the scriptures do not
present these as a progression. They
come across to me more as parallels, things that should happen pretty much
simultaneously. If anything, the water
baptism is almost like an extra, the icing on the cake. Take for example my favourite story – the household
of Cornelius – because it blows apart all these systems that we try to build
up. Peter is preaching to the people,
and while he is ‘still speaking these words’ the Holy Spirit came on all who
heard. So: If Peter had not finished speaking, how did
they have sufficient understanding to have faith? Yet the Holy Spirit came on them, which is
normally supposed to happen after water baptism! And did they confess? They spoke in tongues praising God, but is
praise confession? And did they
repent? Peter was still speaking – they had
not yet had a chance to analyse the implications of a message they had not
fully heard on their lifestyles. So on
what basis were they the offered baptism – faith, confession, or
repentance? It was none of those – they were
offered baptism because it was clear that God had moved into their lives and
made them Christians, like those Jews present.
The baptism did not make them Christians, it acknowledged their Christianity. They were saved and became Christians by the
invasion of the Holy Spirit; by the sovereign will of God, not by the faith,
confession, repentance or baptism that our theology tells us are required. God is so much greater than our
theology! So muc more loving and accepting
than the boundaries and hurdles and procedural steps that we put up to keep
people out of the Kingdom of God.
So, where in the Scriptures it does talk about baptism as if
it washes away our sins in the way Steve points out that it often does, it is
not actually the waters of baptism that achieve it. It is the fact of being baptised into Christ that
saves us, because in the baptism into him we become partakers in his death and resurrection
and receive the removal of sins by washing in his blood not in water. The symbol of baptism represents that we have
signed up for the deal, and that is what those scriptures allude to. They do not imply that the baptism of itself
washes away any sins.
Put it this way: there are many people who have been
baptised in accordance with the formularies of their respective churches who
are most definitely not Christians (Adolf Hitler being one!), though they might
proclaim to be so. And there are members
of churches that do not practice baptism, considering it to be a symbol
rendered meaningless by the passage of time and culture (or churches that delay
baptism for one reason or another) who though very unbaptised are still manifestly
Spirit-filled saved Christians.
Personally I would not lean to either extreme. I do believe baptism is primarily symbol that
does not save us of itself (although like the first time you take communion it
can be the means by which the essential steps of Salvation can be implemented)
but that does not mean that it is dispensable or meaningless. Its like a marriage ceremony, which I would
see as essential for a Christian couple in the west but not all cultures have marriage
in the way we do yet God would still acknowledge their relationships as he did
the polygamous patriarchs and Adam and Eve who never went to church or to the
town hall but were still acknowledged as a couple by God.
And on a final note – having become a Christian at age 5 I was
baptised twice: as a Plymouth Brethren at age 13 and as an Anglican aged about
42. I kid you not. (The Anglican one was
technically a ‘conditional’ baptism because they didn’t believe the photo of my
first baptism, but I still accuse them of being Anabaptists!) And I affirm that my sins were washed away
when I was 5, and that I was a Christian long before my baptism(s), and that my
baptism(s) were public declarations of my Christianity and forgiveness and
cleansing, not the vehicle by which those things came.
Ephesians 2:8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and
this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works [and I comment: "works such as baptism"], so that no
one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do
good works,which God prepared in advance for us to do
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