By T W Ladd 11/30/20

Search Me

            When I went up to the altar and knelt down, when the deacon asked me if I wanted forgiveness for my sins, did I really think about any of my sins? No.

            Just what did I think I was doing? Was it about death? The Old Man Sunday had died. My dad’s favorite Aunt Jean had died around that time. Was I hoping to avoid death, leaping into eternal life? Maybe.

            It was around this same point in my life when I was using my mom’s Oil of Olay. Hadn’t the commercials convinced me that wrinkles were really just bad planning?

            I know I also thought it would be stupid to die and go to hell. It would be like the guy with the time-bomb strapped to his chest in the public service announcement who refused to do anything about his high blood pressure.

            It’s easier to say what I wasn’t doing. I wasn’t trying to get some one-on-one time with Jesus. Harold Bloom said American Christianity was all about being alone in the Garden with Jesus, an essentially Romantic idea. A kind of church for one. Not technically a solipsism because it was you and your God.

            So much of the evidence has vanished when it comes to our own pasts. None of the witnesses are all that trustworthy. Memory makes for poor testimony, but it’s the best I have, minus a time-machine. I know I won’t solve all of the mysteries of my earlier self. I’ve already said I don’t know why I never gave my pony a better name than an adjective that could only be applied to the poor beast ironically – which is an awful kind of name.

            When I try to reflect objectively, it seems to me that the whole asking Jesus into my heart was really about joining the adults. It was the antithesis of an individual action. It was a ceding of self, a loss of freedom. A melting into, a fusion with the collective. It was completely un-Romantic.

            It could be that someone like Harold Bloom would focus on the voluntary aspect of making a profession of faith, the willing into belief. Wasn’t that the kind of thing Fichte could get behind? Claiming impossibilities to be reality, that goes even farther than Wordsworth could in “Tintern Abbey” that the real is something we “half create,” and half “perceive.” We make it half-true by believing in it. But Wordsworth thought nature was the “anchor of all [his] purest thoughts.” Nature provided Wordsworth with at least half the words that proceeded from the mouth of God. It was his partial scripture. The other half you had to create through reason.

            And for us Baptists? Was believing even important? Wordsworth had beliefs about nature. But the Baptist didn’t really need to believe anything. She just needed to say she believed. She needed to say it to the others in her church. “Help thou mine unbelief.” (Mark 9:24) There was no metric of adequate belief for us Baptists. Just keep coming to church and no one would ever question your faith. “Without faith it is impossible to please God.” (Hebrews 11:6) And the writer goes on to clarify, “for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.” It’s the diligence of seeking that is the evidence of one’s belief. It takes effort, it takes work. “Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble. But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead? Was not Abraham our father justified by works, when he had offered Isaac his son upon the altar?” (James 2:19)

            What we never heard in church: someone saying, “I used to think I believed but then I realized that I was just faking it. Now I really believe.”
            Well, there was Fred Hughes. Fred was two years older than me and lived about two miles north of us. His ears were set very low on his skull. He had severely sloping shoulders. It seemed like there for a few years, every six months or so, and he would get born again. But he never claimed that he thought he was a believer before. He claimed that he had always been insincere before. This time was real. Before it couldn’t have been because he had always gone back to his sins. So he said. One time he went forward in church to the podium and told the preacher that he had been “high on pot for ten years.” Tears streamed down is agonized face. He and some of the others of us went away to an overnight church camp. It was there that I pointed out to him that his ten-year high required him to have started smoking marijuana at the tender age of six. He wasn’t happy with that. In fact, he completely lost his shit and started screaming in my face as I lay on one of the bunk beds. Several of the other boys dragged him off me.

            We all knew that Fred, an only child with elderly parents, had emotional issues. He was the kind of kid about whom your grandmother might have said, “That boy ain’t quite right.” He was the exception that proved the rule.

            “Cor meum tibi offero, Domine, prompte et sincere.” These are John Calvin’s words: “I offer my heart to you, O Lord, promptly and sincerely.”

            There isn’t an Evangelical alive who thinks the person doing the offering doesn’t know if he or she is giving his or her heart sincerely. You know. You are either telling the truth or you are lying. You can’t lie to yourself. As an Evangelical, you know your own heart. Fundamentalist Christians don’t believe an id. There’s no part of your mind removed from your conscious reflection, out of the reach of your deliberate thoughts. We knew the passages that ask the divine, “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts.” (Psalm 139:23) We read such verses, but we didn’t put much pressure on them. “Who can detect his own errors? Cleanse me from my hidden faults.” (Psalm 19:12)

Was anyone in my church ever concerned with secret sins? I never saw any evidence of that. I never saw adults saying things like, “I’m not sure about this matter. Perhaps my secret sins are blinding me. I’ll have to pray about it.” I saw a lot of people acting like they knew right from wrong, and they knew when others were in the wrong. There wasn’t even a great deal of apologizing. I don’t recall too many people saying, “I’m sorry for what I did to you. I was wrong.” If you’ve been washed in the blood of the Lamb, if you’re a new creation, if you’re filled with the Spirit and have God searching your inmost thoughts, you don’t really need a lot of critical introspection. “The Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.” (Romans 8:26) The Holy Spirit prays for us in terms too deep for human words.

So, what is there for us to worry about?

For the fundamentalist, salvation can’t be lost. Once you say you’ve decided to follow Jesus, like Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress, all you need to do is keep going, keep moving forward. What you think about Jesus is pretty immaterial. What you understand is even less of an issue. You only need the faith of a child. It’s not like you’re being asked to solve Fermat’s last theorem or find the Higgs’ boson. You’re being asked to say something, to identify yourself. No one asks you to put salvation or propitiation of sin into your own words before a council that then passes judgment on the correctness of your words. You aren’t required to describe a process or explain the Trinity. Call upon the name of the Lord! It’s that easy!

Rather than as you to explain what you believe, the Evangelicals want to know if you will recite the club motto with them.

Because it was never about believing. It was about belonging.

The Evangelical Christian isn’t alone with her thoughts. She’s not near the ruins of Tintern Abbey, contemplating the meaning of it all. It’s not a eureka moment. Or a series of such moments– not really, because it isn’t about understanding an idea that you can articulate, a complex idea like a recipe or set of instructions. It’s a simply urge to act. It’s joining a group, it’s submitting to a creed. The loss of independence is the price you pay for the comfort of being a member of a community.

In an Arminian Christian will tell you that you can lose your salvation. You can give your life over to Jesus, only to later fall from grace. If you die in such a state, you will be condemned to an eternity in hell. All of the Baptists I knew believed in “once saved, always saved,” a Calvinist position. Falling from grace for them was an impossibility. None of them would have questioned the sincerity of a child. None of them would have asked a person professing to have faith in the risen Christ, “But do you sincerely believe? How do you know that you sincerely believe?”

For the Evangelical, there was no such thing as self-delusion when it came to one’s own beliefs about Jesus. If you believed, it was by necessity sufficient belief. You can’t question your own sincerity. To do that would be a sign of mental illness, insanity. That’s the only way they could account for a person like Fred Hughes. He must have had some kind of brain defect or spiritual retardation, surely.

“Worry is a sin,” Baptists love to say, even though you won’t find those words in the Bible. “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” (2Timothy 1:7) Sound mind in the Greek is sophronismos. Sanae mentis, in Latin. Of sound mind. Many translations of the Bible render the word as sobriety, but that has a much more limited scope than the Greek. It certainly doesn’t mean to be free of intoxication. It’s about a mind that is healthy.

In the time of St. Augustine of Hippo, a Christian put off baptism until the end of life. This was a clear attempt to deal with idea of becoming a Christian. The sense was that the redeemed person ought to be ontologically different from the unredeemed sinner. I mean, if being a Christian was something real that mattered, then obviously the life of the Christian would be distinguishable from the life of the ordinary sinner.

This was another way of dealing with the problem of how much belief is sufficient? Not only, Do you believe? But, Do you believe intensely? And how intensely was intense enough?

In the Early Christian Church, prior to the First Council of Nicaea, the practice was almost the direct opposite of these fundamentalist Baptists. Rather than seeing conversion as a discrete event, they saw it as a process over time. Often this was a period of two or three years between the time a person declared commitment to becoming a Christian and eventual Baptism. According to Robin Lane Fox, one had to be an apprentice Christian for what we would consider a rather lengthy stretch of time: two to three years – certainly not an overnight thing, though exceptions could be made in extreme situations. The catechumens could worship in the church but they did so separately and were kept from the eucharist. Full Christians kept on an eye on their behavior. If a catechumen slipped up, he or she could be demoted to the level of a “hearer.”

The process was part of the attraction of the Church, Lane Fox thinks. The difficulty and the investment of time gave the novices a greater sense of solidarity.

The process also demonstrates that not all Christians saw knowing your own heart as a simple either/or. Christians of the time of Origen and St. Augustine would have been very puzzled by people who were both impulsive and transparent. They probably would have thought such a thing was possible with a rare miracle, but it wouldn’t be commonplace.

So, I’ll ask you, when I was ten years old and kneeling at that altar, was I being sincere?