My Road to Wittenberg: In Need of Forgiveness

I grew up in a charismatic church. In December 2001 it was over. I had to move on.

About three years prior to that I had started listening regularly to R.C. Sproul on the radio during my drive home from work. Dr. Sproul opened the Scriptures in a way that I had never heard before. He taught with the authority of one who had spent many years studying the texts in their original languages, and his teaching was firmly grounded in the history of the church. He wasn't only pointing out the errors of the past. He was explaining the tremendous continuity of the faith over the centuries, and using that as a secondary source of authority for his doctrine. Over time I gained a new perspective on the depths of human depravity and the overwhelming magnificence of God's unconditional grace. I came to believe that worship is better expressed in reverence than in unbridled freedom and emotional expression. But the teaching from Dr. Sproul that really shook me was on the subject of infant baptism. He was the first person to tell me that there is a Biblical case to be made for the practice.

I had never even considered the possibility that such a thing might exist. You may ask, "Given the fact that infant baptism is the practice of most Christians in the world today, and has been from the beginning of the Church, wouldn't you just assume that there was a Biblical foundation for it?" Well... No. In the first place, charismatics put even less emphasis on Baptism than Baptists do. Water baptism was just assumed. It was a given. Every church practiced it in one form or another. "Spirit baptism" was the new thing God was doing in the earth. It was the thing we had to constantly contend for. So, growing up I heard a great deal about "Spirit baptism," and almost nothing about water baptism -- except that the two were not the same. Strange as it may seem, I didn't know that infant baptism is and always has been the practice of most Christians in the world. We were taught that it was an old church tradition, introduced by superstitious Catholics sometime in the second or third century, and cleansed back out of the true church during the Reformation. Obviously (cough... choke... hack), no one in the Bible was ever baptized as an infant, and there is no verse telling us to baptize babies, so how could it possibly be biblical? As I was growing up, if it was acknowledged at all, infant baptism was treated with a quiet and polite form of scorn or derision -- as you might treat your neighbor if he thought his backyard was a foreign country. In public teaching it was not given any serious rebuttal.

To hear Dr. Sproul present a Biblical case for the practice of infant baptism was nothing short of stunning. From my perspective this was truly impossible, and yet... There it was. In listening to Dr. Sproul, I didn't run into a wall of internal conflict. It kind of took my breath away, but I never had much doubt that his position was correct. His style of teaching was so markedly different from what I was accustomed to in my upbringing -- where the Bible had often been merely a prop for whatever theme or message the minister wanted to convey. Sproul seemed more than willing to let the text speak for itself. The difference was so remarkable that I had come to place a very high degree of trust in him as a teacher. So when he spoke on Baptism -- when he opened the Scriptures on this new topic -- what he said was a surprise, but I never really doubted him.

One of the things Dr. Sproul said in his discussion was that Baptism is not our sign, it is God's. This, he said, is the reason that the practice of re-baptizing Christians is wrong. If Baptism were our work, then maybe we could ask for a redo. We could assume our effort was somehow inadequate, and that we need to take another swing at the ball, so to speak. But Baptism is God's work and God's sign -- a sign God puts on us through the hands of the pastor and the institution of the Church. It would be profoundly irreverent to suggest that God didn't do it right the first time. It would be irreverent to say, "Lord, I wasn't really paying attention the first time..." or, "Lord, I was just a baby the first time, and even though I know you baptized me, I don't really remember what happened, so, could you please repeat it just one more time?"

That hit home with me. Most of the youngsters baptized in our charismatic church were baptized only once, but I had been baptized as a baby in my grandmother's Lutheran church. I had committed the sin Dr. Sproul was describing. I had presumed to tell the God of the universe that he could have a mulligan!

As strange as it may seem, I think this issue of Baptism became the straw that broke the camel's back. Yes, I had adopted Sproul's views on predestination, and quite vigorously argued for the Five Points of Calvinism in private conversation and in correspondence. I had been displaced from my spot on the worship team, and I was pretty disgusted with the undisguised effort to manipulate the emotional response of the congregation during worship anyway. It wasn't something I wanted to continue leading. So I was experiencing more and more alienation from several different directions. But the differences over Calvinism were essentially an abstraction, and there is a certain relativity and subjectivity involved when you begin looking for more reverence in worship. Most importantly, I did not have a strong sense of having sinned in those areas. Those were areas of disagreement and disharmony, but they didn't seem like matters of sin and guilt. The baptism issue was different. It was much more personal, and completely objective. You either get re-baptized or you don't. I had done it. I had sinned, and I could hardly even talk about it with the people around me. In a sense, they were guilty too, but they didn't see it. They wouldn't see it. For them, even entertaining the thought that what had happened back there was wrong would begin jeopardize their entire identity as "Spirit-filled" Christians. It wasn't going to happen.

So there I was, with guilty conscience, and nowhere to turn for consolation, much less forgiveness.

It was time to look for a new home...