Choice and Children

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome.

Today we are talking about altar calls, and one specific “altar call” in the Bible, where Joshua says, “Choose ye this day whom you will serve.” I think those words are often used in modern-day altar calls, but let’s define our terms here. Greg, what would you consider an altar call? What is this phenomenon that we are talking about?

It’s interesting that Protestant churches don’t have altars prominent up front, but it’s a practice that’s developed in American Christianity and from thence spread around the world that involves calling people to the front of the church, somewhere generally toward the end of an evangelistic sermon, to give them an opportunity to commit their life to Christ.

Now, there’s problems with what I just said, theological problems and grammatical problems, I suspect, but I think that’s a fair enough explanation for most people. I think most people who are involved in the practice would say, “Yeah, it’s kind of like that.” They might want to fine-tune it a little bit. It seems to imply a certain kind of theology, although it doesn’t necessarily require all the details we might want to read into it.

Why would you call someone to the front of the church? The obvious reasons are to get them away from distractions so the counselor can talk with them one-on-one, to force a demonstration of faith so that people are not content to sit back in their own hearts and minds and nod assent without really doing something that might draw criticism from their friends, to make them the center of observation and such.

They’ve demonstrated that they made a choice by walking down.

Yeah. Now, if you’re an Arminian or just a broad evangelical you might not have a problem with that. There are those of us who do. As good Calvinists we need to be really careful. Does man make choices? Absolutely. Every day we make choices. People who are listening chose whether or not to tune in right now to listen to this thing and to stay with us or not. Scripture and Calvinism never deny that man makes choices. The question is where do those choices come from?

I think most Christians would say, “Oh, well, they come from the heart.” Yes, they come from the heart, so what’s the nature of man’s heart? Is it totally depraved before regeneration? Is it kind of depraved? Is it depraved in most areas except for, well, maybe one? Is there enough freedom left in that heart so that man can exercise his will to choose Jesus, to choose the fear of the Lord, to choose salvation?

The Calvinist with scripture would say no. Every imagination and thought of the human heart is only evil continually until we are born again. Being born again is not the fruit of choosing Christ. It’s what brings us and enables us to choose Christ. But still, the call for a choice is not in and of itself bad. The offer of more counseling is not in and of itself bad. In fact, it’s probably a good thing under the circumstances. Asking people to make a visible decision is not always a bad thing.

I think a couple of the reasons that Calvinists have objected to this is, for one, it’s a fairly recent invention. For 1800 years or more of church history there was no such thing, which may seem strange to people. “How did the church grow and how did they evangelize without altar calls?” Quite well, thank you. It is a modern invention.

Secondly, because of the things it highlights and emphasizes, it does run the risk of suggesting that man’s will is, at some points, unfallen and that the appeal is not to the grace of God here but to that good thing still left in man that he can exercise, if only he would. So now having acknowledged the effects there and beyond divine sovereignty – we’re not asking God to change his heart, or at least we’re not believing that God by himself can change his heart, we’re asking him to make a choice – if that’s so, then we need to bring persuasion to bear.

And this is what I would add to the list as the biggest problem that I have with altar calls personally, is that they are almost always an exercise in emotional manipulation.

Yup, that’s what I was going to add. Every time that I’ve seen them employed in recordings, real life experience, whatever, it’s always been along with music that is intended to inflame certain types of emotions and maybe mute other ones as well, and more or less force a choice that, less charitably, they could add to their roster of the number of decisions made that year as a church. Most of the time I’ve seen it, it’s definitely been an exercise in exactly what you said, Emily.

The most apparent problem or I think the most elementary problem with decisional theology is that ultimately it puts people’s trust on the decision that they made, rather than on Christ. So even if we’re not digging as deep as “What is our anthropology? What do we believe is the nature of man before and after regeneration?” the simplest question is where is our trust after we’ve had this experience?

I have a cousin several years older than me and he attended occasionally I think a Baptist church. If you ask this gentleman today, “Are you a Christian?” he will say, “I sure am,” and he will name the place, that particular Baptist church, he will name the date, the morning service, and he will tell you that he responded to an altar call. The fact that there is absolutely nothing in his life that suggests that he knows Jesus, loves Jesus, or is intending to follow him in any area of his life seems to him totally beside the point.

He did what was required once. He bought the insurance policy. He signed on the dotted line, so he’s a Christian. He would probably admit he’s not a very good one, but in terms of such theology as he has or had, he’s saved because he made the decision and can tell you exactly when. He can’t tell you anything about Christ or the cross or substitutionary atonement or justification by faith or how to be born again even, but he can tell you he made a decision and walked down the aisle.

Which is also kind of interesting, since that is the exact opposite implication of everything Finney said. Later he would go back up…

But we haven’t even talked about Finney yet. We must introduce him before we start telling more stories about him.

Let’s move in that direction. I hope we have at least thrown in enough comments to say if you came to Christ by walking down an aisle…

That doesn’t invalidate your salvation.

It doesn’t invalidate it, and praise God. A lot of people came to Christ that way, especially in the 60s and 70s, and that’s great.

This is the place where we need to talk about ideas, and ideas behind ideas, and ideas behind practices. If the altar call was absent for so long in church history, where did it come from? As best as I understand, as best as the records seem to say, it started with some Methodists about the time of the Second Awakening in American history. That puts it late 1700s or early 1800s, sometime in there.

The Methodists began to use it, not in the modern form. They invented something called the anxious seat or the anxious bench, and it did some of what the modern altar call was supposed to do. If you felt particularly moved by the sermon and were convicted of your sins, you were invited to come forward and sit up front on a particular bench, under the watchful eye of the pastor so there would be no further distractions, and so when this was over someone, probably the pastor, could come and talk to you immediately. In the meantime, you could contemplate your sins and your need for Jesus. So it began there, and largely on the frontier, but then it moved east and Charles Finney picked it up.

Charles Finney was born 1792 and died in 1875. He had been a lawyer. He had been a formal member of a Presbyterian church, but he knew nothing about Presbyterian theology and hadn’t read the Westminster Standards, but he apparently had read the book of Romans as part of his law assignments. In those days, I guess, the Bible was still considered required reading. If you want to know how to construct an argument, you read Paul’s arguments.

Romans especially as a legal formulation.

Yeah, so he did that and somehow he believed he had come to Christ, and I cannot pronounce upon his soul’s eternal welfare, but he sure missed the message of what Paul was saying, if that’s where he picked up his faith or what passed for faith.

He decided very soon that God was calling him to preach, so he went before the presbytery and said, “I want to be ordained,” and they gave him a very superficial examination. “Do you agree with the Westminster Standards?” because in those days that was the mark of being a pastor, an elder, or anything. You had to agree to the Standards as they were then commonly perceived. And Finney’s reply was something to the effect of, “Insofar as I am familiar with them, yes.” What he didn’t say was, “I’ve never read them,” and they didn’t inquire further, and he was ordained.

There’s kind of a suspicion there. If Finney got in by doing that, how many other pastors in that day? “Uh, yeah, as far as I know them….”

Yeah. Anyway, as he preached he developed his own theology, and his books are available online for free in numerous places, so you can go and read for yourself what he said. I’m not making this up. I’ve actually read enough of what he wrote to be thoroughly disgusted. But you know, when someone gets a reputation for serving Christ, and the reputation includes, “And there was this kind of fruit, so many hundreds or thousands of people came to Christ, and there was this moral change, this religious change….” you hear that, and you hear it from people you respect and see it in church history books, most people believe it because they don’t have time to go back and do the original research and actually read what the guys wrote, said, and preached.

And you don’t want to be disingenuous and think, “Oh, but they probably weren’t really saved.” That’s kind of a sick place for anyone to go immediately.

Yeah, we don’t want to jump there immediately. I’d heard good things about Finney for years, and even when I began to hear bad things I still assumed, “Okay, well, he had some problems, but what modern evangelist doesn’t, really?”

But as I read more specifically what he said, and then went and read what he actually said in his own words, I was somewhat aghast because he passes on substitutionary atonement. He passes on justification by faith. He says basically, “These things are illogical and impossible. God would be a fraud if you took this way of saving people, because people are sinners and the way to be with the holy God and have communion and fellowship with him is to stop sinning. Just calling them righteous doesn’t fix that, so what needs to happen is that people need to stop sinning.

“Now, Jesus set us a good example, and God is willing to apply the persuasions of his Spirit, which cannot be more than any other person’s persuasions because you can’t touch the free will, and human nature then is malleable.”

“Well, no. There’s no such thing as human nature. That’s the problem. Man does not have a set nature. Man makes his nature, makes himself, by his choices. If you are choosing day by day to sin, then we call you a sinner. If you choose day by day to do righteousness, we call you a Christian. It’s really that simple. You simply need to understand this and understand the consequences. If you continue to be a sinner you’re going to hell, but if you want all of the good things that come with being a Christian, then you need to stop sinning. You need to embrace Christ and receive entire sanctification, for the moment. Of course, if tomorrow you go back to sinning, well, you were a Christian and now you’re not, and now you need to come back to Christ again,” and so we go back and forth.

This is basically the attitude of the rich young ruler who tells Jesus, “All thy commandments have I kept.” The minute you think you’re able to keep the commandments in your own power, you’ve proven you didn’t, because that was a lie.

And pride, and probably breaking every other commandment along the way, like idolatry.

So what Finney did to preaching, making It into persuasion, particularly emotional persuasion in practice, kind of de-supernaturalizes the process of evangelism.

Yeah. Here is a quote from his lectures on revivals. He writes this:

“A revival is not a miracle, that is something about the powers of nature. There is nothing in religion beyond the ordinary powers of nature. It consists entirely in the right exercise of the powers of nature. It is just that, and nothing else. When mankind become religious, they are not enabled to put forth exertions which they were unable before to put forth. They only exert powers which they had before, in a different way, to use them for the glory of God. A revival is not a miracle nor dependent on a miracle in any sense. It is a purely philosophical result of the right use of constituted means, as much as any other effect produced by the application of means.”

So technique is everything. Creating revival is a science, just like selling vacuum cleaners. Ever had a Kirby salesman at the door?

That’s before my time.

We had one once, and he didn’t get in, but even that moment was, “Boy, you’re persistent!” but that’s how he sees it, because man’s nature is open to persuasion. It’s in [inaudible 16:49] Well, it would be if man came into an environmentally-clean slate, that is if there were not bad things around him influencing him to be bad. Then you could just come up, and the devil could lay down his arguments, you could lay down yours, and yours are so much better so that every man is probably going to come to Christ.

The problem is we don’t have that flat playing field. The man that you’re witnessing to, that you’re evangelizing, already is living in a world that’s tainted by a corrupt social system. There’s prostitution, there’s drunkenness and alcohol, there’s gambling, there’s an unjust governmental system, you go down the list. Of course, black slavery was a thing.

All of these things combine to create a corrupt environment that your man has been subject to for 20, 30, or 40 years. So in order to balance that persuasion already in play you need to help things out a little bit, so a little more play to emotion to push things back into balance so that your man has a fair shot at choosing freely.

The devil has played his cards heavy and hard and early. We’re going to play some of God’s cards, some of his Holy Spirit persuasion in the form of, like you said, emotional manipulation, and then that puts the man in a place where he has to choose, but he does have to choose. You can’t in the long run con him into faith. You can’t hypnotize him. You can’t subdue his will by your superior charisma. He actually does have to make the choice. You just need to get him in the state where that’s possible.

As Finney says, this is a science. It’s something that’s learned. It’s something that can be taught. And Finney, as evidenced by the fact he wrote a book on it, was more than willing to instruct pastors, preachers, and evangelists on how to use these techniques.

And these techniques were picked up by all of the other reform societies that were buzzing around America at the same time. We’ve talked a little bit about those – the temperance movement, the prison reforms, all of that. So you had all of these groups using the same techniques to try and make man better, to try and fix society so that man could be better.

And what’s at the bottom of this is a theology that says that man’s nature is implicitly good. Man has a good heart. There’s good in there someplace.

“No, there’s not.”

“Yes, there is.”

“No, there’s not.”

“Yes, there is. I can feel it.”

“There’s good in him still. I can sense it.”

Yes, basic Romanticism, before it really was in place to have that label, but the roots there were sown further back. But once we’ve admitted that man is basically good, or at least potentially good, or there’s some good left in you, then the problem must be the environment.

Here, for the most part, although not exclusively, we’re talking socioeconomic environment. Karl Marx is only 40 years off at this point.

If that.

Yeah, so this idea of the economic system, this capitalist thing, social conditions – you mentioned some of the problems – but there was also the physical thing, and this is always fun to talk about, because it usually catches teenagers by surprise. There was a belief that certain sorts of foods and drink were dangerous.

Now, we all know about Prohibition and all of that, which would really come to flower in the 1920s, but it had an early start. But side-by-side with the fear of alcohol was the fear of other sorts of eating and drinking – things that were too cold or too hot. Red meat up front was really frowned upon, and red meat in those days played a hefty part in breakfasts, bacon or steak and eggs and things like that. The urban myth of the day, or church myth of the day, was that red meat made young men…

Lusty?

Yeah, that, thank you – produced sexual arousal, and what generally follows with young men who aren’t married, so if we could stop having our young men or boys eat red meat and gave them something more nutritious to eat, then that would fix a lot. They would be much more pure at heart. So a couple people came up with ideas.

There was a doctor who came up with the idea for a breakfast food that would have all the proper nutrients and fiber and such, and he was going to market it in the form of a wafer or cracker. The man’s name was Graham – the graham cracker.

About the same time – and of course this whole era meshes with the whole obsession with prophetic speculation – there was a group of Adventists who also were afraid of the dangers of red meat, and in fact of anything that wasn’t kosher. They were pushing even beyond the kosher laws. One of them came up with another alternative breakfast food that consisted of taking corn and smashing it and toasting it and serving it up with milk. It came out of Battle Creek, Michigan. His name was Kellogg.

And then of course we have – and I can never remember whether the guy was Methodist or what, maybe one of you will remember, he was an elder in some denomination…

I think he was Methodist, if you’re thinking of who I think you’re thinking of.

I always get it wrong and get corrected. Wine was suspect, even at the communion table, so he came up with a way of using non-fermented grape juice.

Which hadn’t been done technologically before ever.

No, it was a new invention, which surprises people. “Hasn’t there always been grape juice?” No.

No, because when you squeeze grapes it starts to ferments. That’s just what happens.

Yeah, unless you want to drink it right then. Particularly in Israel, when grape harvest came toward the end of the harvest season and they needed the juice for Passover, it’s got to be fermented, sorry.

The man’s name, of course, was Welch – Welch’s grape juice.

This was a time when a lot of people were looking at the environment. The environment might mean social structures and institutions. It might mean your financial status. It might mean what you’re drinking or what you’re eating or what you’re having for breakfast. But if we could fix these things, whatever they are, and get them out of the equation, then man will be free. And being mostly good at heart, somewhat good at heart, potentially good at heart – there’s some good in there someplace – we can probably persuade him, or at least an awful lot of people, to make some good choices.

Get the alcohol out of the way and the man will stop being a drunkard. Get the red meat out of the way and the young men will become chaste, and so on down the line.

Take the guns out of society and no one will be a mass shooter anymore.

That’s right. If we take the guns away then nobody will be afraid, will live without fear, there’s no violence. And so begins the long history of American reform movements. I don’t know that we can lay it all at Finney’s doorstep, but he certainly crystallized it in something that was more or less a form of religious existentialism. You define your nature moment-by-moment by your free choices, and therefore you are able to rewrite your nature, rewrite who you are as a person, simply by making the proper choices from here on out.

It’s not existentialism in the sense that there were absolutes – manmade absolutes masquerading as divine absolutes – but still, you could make yourself into the kind of person you wanted to be, and therefore, the church at large and the population at large could help everybody be like this and do this. You could start little societies in your hometown and your county. The county was a very influential political and social block in those days, more so than the states.

But eventually it comes to the point of realizing that, if we’re really going to pull this off, if we’re going to get rid of slavery, if we’re going to shut down the production of alcohol, if we’re going to readjust distribution of income, if we’re going to arrange for women to have the vote and so on, we need government power behind this.

“If you leave it up to popular vote, people will vote against their best interest to maintain their vices, because that’s where they are. But once we’re able to get the right laws passed and we dismantle things and get rid of them, then people will breathe a sigh of relief and they’ll be so much happier. They’ll thank us and they’ll be glad that we did it, and this will be the beginning of marvelous freedoms. Social utopia will arrive,” or as Finney says, “If the whole church as a body had gone to work 10 years ago and continued it, as a few individuals whom I could name have done, there might not now have been an impenitent sinner in the land. The millennium would have fully come in the United States before this day.”

This is the abolition movement as well. It’s easy to give that one a pass because obviously slavery is horrible, but the same political motivations and the same theological motivations were pervasive throughout that movement, which is why you have individuals here and there who would say, “Yes, I am so anti-slavery. The only thing I hate more than slavery is abolitionists.”

Indeed, and sometimes with justification. Abolitionists invented terrorism in the person of John Brown, but that’s another discussion for another time. Or perhaps it isn’t, because this is what happens. When you become firmly convinced that your one pet principle defines the human condition, the human need, the need for salvation and what God is all about in your time and era, then everything needs to serve that point, whether it’s women’s rights or Prohibition or abolition or redistribution of income or prison reform. Whatever it is, if you’re not for this then you’re on the wrong side. You are God’s enemy at this point. You may be deluded and you may be mouthing platitudes taught to you by people you shouldn’t trust, but the fact is you’re in the way.

Therefore, in the long there are no innocent bystanders. You may think you are. You may think this isn’t even your struggle. You’ve done nothing. You’re not involved. But if you’re not – as they used to say in my generation – part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.

In the person of John Brown, some Unitarian transcendentalist ministers in Boston, created terrorism. “Go out and kill some innocent people to show everybody that you’re not messing around, that everybody needs to get on the ball and everybody needs to change, or more innocent people will die because, you know, they’re not really innocent. They should be out there doing something right now. It’s that serious. It’s that important.

“And because we are so absolutely dedicated to this particular movement, we are absolutely righteous. We are the good guys, and being the good guys, whatever we decide to do, whatever we have to do, whatever fate lays upon us, it’s for the kingdom of God. Glory, glory, hallelujah.”

It’s frightening, it’s terribly frightening, and we still see it today, although less and less the name of God or Jesus is used, but still love, compassion, mercy, human rights, dignity, things that are most certainly Christian in heritage and Christian vocabulary are used to provoke people to social movements, to fix one thing. And if you’re not on the side of this movement, you’re the enemy and they can say and do horrible things to you with a clear conscience. They believe they’re right.

This is where Romanticism and Transcendentalism have led us, where Marxism has led us, progressivism. By saying this thing that seems noble – “Man is basically good” – wow, isn’t that great and sweet and noble and uplifting. No, it’s one of the most horrifying things imaginable, because it’s a license to destroy everybody who stands in the way of your little narrow vision of making the world good.

So we can’t lay it all at the doorstep of Finney, but he did not help. He systematized, he popularized, and it looked good. Lots of people walked those aisles and came to the anxious bench, or later came to the front of the church building or wherever he set up his preaching. But when it was all over, Finney was able to look back on the fruits of his labors and he found that most of the people who had come to Christ didn’t go to church anywhere.

The region he had preached through was called the burned-out region in New York, because people were burned out on religion. They’d gotten excited, but you know what? If excitement is your religion…

You can’t be excited all the time all your life. It’s just exhausting.

It’s exhausting. It doesn’t work and, like with any drug, you need more and more to get the same high.

This is also the region where most of the cults – there’s some that we know about because they’re still with us; there’s all sorts of weird cults and communes and attempts to create Utopia – they sprung out of this region in those days, Mormonism being one obvious example, but there were many others, because people were just looking for something weird and different and exciting, to have that religious twang, and they knew they weren’t going to find it in church, so people deserted churches.

Finney, at the end of his life, had to admit, and he did, that his labors were mostly worthless. He sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind. Of course, he blamed his converts for not staying with it, but that’s what you get.

Now, given his take on human beings, here’s one of the things I want to throw into the equation. On at least one occasion he was asked, “What about small children?” because of course Finney’s arguments are arguments for adults, for big people, people capable of rational thinking, thinking like a lawyer. And even his sermons would have had more depth than a lot of what passes for sermons in our age. But what about small children who can’t follow those kinds of arguments and aren’t open to that kind of persuasion? This was his response –

“All that can justly be said…is that if infants are saved at all, which I suppose they are, they’re rescued by the benevolence of God from circumstances that would result in certain and eternal death, and are by grace made heirs of eternal life. But after all, it’s useless to speculate about the character and destiny of those who confessedly are not moral agents.” That’s from his Lectures On Systematic Theology.

Not moral agents, not human, so his basic [inaudible 33:11] given was, “Well, I guess they’re saved.”

But more because that makes us feel good about the character of God.

Yeah, that’s about it. His language is interesting. “They’re rescued by the benevolence of God from circumstances that would result in certain and eternal death,” not from a corrupt nature inherited from Adam, because he didn’t believe in that.

They hadn’t sinned yet if they weren’t moral agents.

Yeah, they haven’t sinned, but the circumstances into which they would grow up or, if they died in the womb, into which they would be born, would likely issue in them becoming sinners and going to hell, so God probably does something with them, so I guess he saves them, but that’s speculation. Who knows? They’re not even moral agents.

What’s so interesting about that is that he basically makes an argument, not until he gets to the end, that is almost Calvinist in its underpinnings. “God is so benevolent and gracious that he saves them from circumstances that would certainly lead to their death.” Right, so why does he stop being benevolent and gracious once you get past a certain age?

Plus the grace of God is totally unconnected with Christ. It’s God simply doing things arbitrarily without foundation.

God’s a good ol’ boy and he does stuff like that all the time, because I would, wouldn’t you? If I were God, I’d save children.

Now, Calvinism traditionally hasn’t come down really very clearly on what happens to children who die in infancy, but where covenant children are concerned I think the consensus is pretty firm, based on King David’s confession that they will not come back to us in this life, but we will go to them. Covenant children are saved. As for the rest, there’s been an argument back and forth, which I don’t want to get involved in.

Will not the judge of all the earth do right?

The judge of all the earth will almost certainly do right. It’s not for us to go there. On the one hand, we don’t want to say that those who abort babies by the thousands are the greatest evangelists of all time.

The Westminster even says elect infants.

Right, elect infants, and it doesn’t specify which those are.

It again leaves it up to God’s sovereignty.

Right, and I think that’s what we need to do as well. So while we don’t want to be a discomfort to those who are outside the faith, God is good, God is merciful, but we cannot pin him down on things where he has not [inaudible 36:07] and we want to be very careful there.

On the other hand, there are some things we can say because God has been very clear, and that has to do with the so-called age of accountability. Let me ask you what you two have heard. I apparently went dark for a couple decades and lost track of what evangelicals in society say. What are you told or what do you hear is the age of accountability now?

I’ve never heard a firm age posited.

It’s very much, “Well, it depends on the person you’re talking about.”

So you can have a 4-year-old who professes faith and that’s perfectly valid, but if they’re like 8, then maybe they get to 13 and they want to re-dedicate then, yeah, 8 probably wasn’t good enough.

When I was young and listened to a lot of Christian radio, the impression I got was that as soon as a child was capable of saying “I believe in Jesus” or “I love Jesus,” the child was at least old enough to know right from wrong, and to know what sin was, and to recognize his or her need for a Savior and to ask Jesus into her heart. This is why there were backyard clubs and VBSs that were evangelical and such, not for the nurture of covenant youth, but to reach out to small children and get them to ask Jesus into their heart, to make some kind of profession of faith.

Do you remember the Left Behind series?

Oh yes.

Unfortunately.

I never read it. I mean I scanned a few pages here and there in Barnes and Noble…

I watched the two movies.

I think my entire generation was scarred with those movies.

But at some point someone told me, and I believe this is correct, maybe you know, that when the rapture happens in those books or in the movie, it takes away not only professing Christians and small children, it takes away teenagers as well.

I don’t remember that.

There was a whole parallel series of books about the kids who were left behind.

So some did stay, all right. But whatever the case, I am now hearing, as you say, 13, 14, 20. This is frightening. “Even a child is known by his doings, whether his works be pure and whether it be right.” The Bible leaves no such vagueness.

But here’s the thing. Yes, we’re endangering individual souls because we’re not telling small children the gospel. That’s horrible, but it gets worse because what we’re saying is if the child is not a moral agent, we’re saying the child has no relationship with God. He or she is not the image of God, does not have the work of the law in his heart, has no voice of conscience as we understand it.

We’re even saying he lacks a willing agency.

Yeah, so pretty much on all fronts we’re saying the child is not human. Now, what happens when the church says these two things? The most important thing in man’s social/religious life is his ability to choose freely without coercion and, secondly, children by the way are not really human. What happens when we put pro-choice together with children that aren’t human, and you let that percolate for about [300? 39:52] years.

And you let it percolate in a society that was once Christian, and quickly just kind of forgot about it all.

Some people will say that the church was always readily influenced by the world, and there’s truth in that, but in the long run the church is the center of the world. It’s where God meets with man, and what happens in the church has far more long-reaching effects than anything the world does.

When the church in her worship enshrines principles of pro-choice and “don’t bring your children along,” we should not be surprised when the world picks up on that and says, “Oh, thank you.”

Don’t need them.

Yeah. “Let us take note of that and we will proceed along according to your religious and theological advice.” It is most frightening, and honestly until we repent of these things it seems a little disingenuous to ask God to judge the abortionists. We’ve kind of set them up for it.

It also leaves our own teenagers and 20-somethings in the lurch. We’ve taught them the theology that says that their choice is the most important thing, and that children are not that big a deal, so when they ‘get into trouble,’ to use an old expression, are we surprised that the appearance of righteousness can be more important – not having anyone find out, not letting mom and dad ever know, hushing this up quietly. Are we surprised that they consider these real options?

You end up with that still in very extreme conservative patriarchal circles, where you basically end up with someone whose church community is basically, “We’ll help you out as long as you’re living a holy life and as long as you’ve never made any mistakes and as long as there’s nothing weird or bad on your record.” So people, even in really conservative societies, get driven to abortion clinics by people that are “thinking of the best for them.”

And the idea too that comes out in those circles of “You are responsible for the behavior of your children, and they stay in your house until they are moved out or married,” – well, obviously moved out, but only if they’re a boy. They can only move out on their own if they’re a boy. If they’re a girl they have to stay in your house until they’re married. We talked about this a little bit on the last episode.

There’s this idea that you’re so responsible for leading your family properly, that the moral agency of the children, the fact that these children are growing up into adults who are going to have to make choices, who have to make choices day-by-day, whether you notice it or not, to live righteously or not – and I’m using that language of choice because we do make choices, but we’ve pushed the idea of choice so far away in those circumstances that we don’t recognize the real choices that are being made. Does that make any sense?

As I’ve said many times, I’m a Calvinist. I [receive? 43:18] the Three Forms of Unity and, with one or two really minor exceptions, mostly pertaining to the Sabbath Day, I embrace the Westminster Standards better than most Presbyterians do, honestly. I do believe in a 6-day creation, and yet I see an awful lot in the Reformed Presbyterian tradition that reduces that tradition to the five points surrounding man’s sin and God’s sovereignty and salvation, infant baptism, and all the things we’re not. We’re not Charismatics, we’re not Dispensationalists, we’re not pre-mil, we don’t do altar calls, and that seems to define us.

You may notice that the name that I didn’t use anywhere is Jesus. “Calvinism” itself becomes a substitute for a genuine relationship with Jesus Christ. “I believe these things, I know these things, I know the technical vocabulary, I can tell you where in the Confessions these things are found, I maybe even know a few Bible verses to back them up, so that makes me a great Christian, right?” It makes you a very accountable Christian.

But even then it’s all law. There’s no gospel in there.

There’s no gospel at all. I mean you can say, “I know the gospel. Here it is,” but if you don’t believe it, if you don’t live in terms of it, if you don’t embrace Christ as your Savior as he’s offered in the gospel, simply knowing all about him is just one more piece of legalism, one more law thing.

When you can look at the character of a congregation and see that it’s marked by the works of the flesh – adultery, fornication, drunkenness, witchcraft, idolatry, all those things – it’s a pretty good hint that although they may be formally orthodox, they have reduced their orthodoxy to a piece of legalism. “Believe this and live.” You know what? “Believe this and live” is a whole lot easier than “Do this and live,” and just as much a lie.

There’s the danger of this in worldview education that’s kind of sprung up a lot in the past 10-20 years, I think, that we need to believe the right things about the world and make sure our kids have a Christian worldview, and Jesus might not make it into the curriculum.

Yeah. I am now thinking of the books on worldview that I know, and how right you are – a sudden dawning realization of something we should have noticed a long time ago.

You ever re-read a book that you thought was good when you read it five years ago…

Oh, Eragon.

I meant theologically, but yes, Eragon. That counts.

Yeah, I’ve done that, and I won’t even tell you whose book it was. It sounded really great at the time because I was reading it from where I was, with the problems I was facing in our church community and our school community particularly. “This is a good antidote to what I’m seeing.”

It would take a few years, about five years, to go back and look and say, “Oh, wait a minute. Now let me look at it from this angle. Oh, what in the world did I just give my approval to? Oh, he said that? What he’s actually saying…oh, wow.”

At least when you read Chesterton you know he’s going to be wrong on stuff.

And loudly wrong about it, too.

And kind of hilariously wrong.

Hilariously wrong. He’ll let you know. He doesn’t pretend anything. You know he’s Roman Catholic. You know the time and place he lived. You know his opinions, which he takes to be gospel oftentimes, but he’s entertaining at least. He’s well-educated and well-read and really good with rhetoric.

Back to the gospel. What was it then that Joshua was actually saying? What people usually do is they grab that one phrase, “Choose you this day whom ye will serve.” Actually it’s “…choose you this day whom ye will serve…”

There’s a lot before and a lot after that.

Yeah. “…but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” It’s interesting that my house still makes it in because there’s a covenant claim, but this is what he’s saying. This is chapter 24 of Joshua. I’m not going to read the whole thing, but he gathers the nation together and recounts their redemptive history back to the time of Abraham and Terah, back to the time when they served idols.

He tells how God intervened sovereignly, brought Abraham across the Euphrates, gave him Isaac, and to Isaac Jacob, and so on. He talks about their descent into Egypt and then how he brought them out, and their wars on what at that point was that side of Jordan.

And I have given you a land for which ye did not labour, and cities which ye built not, and ye dwell in them; of the vineyards and oliveyards which ye planted not do ye eat. Now therefore fear the Lord…

So a statement of sovereignty, historical prologue, God’s revelation of himself in their past history, and now the stipulations.

Now therefore fear the Lord, and serve him in sincerity and in truth: and put away the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the flood…

That is the other side of the river Euphrates. There were people who had brought idols with them, members of Abraham’s sheikdom, which numbered in the thousands. Some of them had brought their idols along, little teraphim. Those things were still circulating after all this time, and then they picked up more in Egypt.

…put away the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the flood, and in Egypt; and serve ye the Lord. And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve…

Take your pick. You can have any of these false gods.

Yeah, you are absolutely free to choose any false god you like.

…whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell…

You can serve the ancient false gods or the new pop false gods. You can choose any god you want.

That’s the point of “choose you whom you will serve.” He’d already told them they ought to serve Jehovah.

That was a command. That wasn’t a choice offered.

No, it was not, “Well, you know, Yahweh would love to have you. If you just come down, he’s waiting right here with open arms.” No, it was “Fear the Lord. This is your obligation. This is the whole duty of man. But if not, then let’s talk free choice. You can choose the gods of your fathers – Abraham and Terah before him. You can serve the gods of Egypt. You can serve the new gods of Canaan. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

As I say, it is somewhat remarkable that “my house” still is in there in most of the posters and Christian memes and things, because it is a covenantal statement. He does not say, “As for me, I’ve chosen to serve the Lord. I’ve talked to my wife and she’s on board. She’s made her choice. And our older kids, they’re with us. They’ve come to Jesus. And our younger ones, we’re still praying.”

We’ll let them decide.

“We’ll let them decide when the time comes, but we’re praying for them. Then the little one? Who knows. She’s hardly a moral agent, but we’re hoping.”

There’s none of that kind of nonsense. He chooses for his household. Now, does he choose eternal life for all of them? He chooses the path that is the path to eternal life, but apostasy is a real thing. So in that respect, this is less a subjective claim than it is an objective one. “We are submitting ourselves to the terms of the covenant,” and since he’s saying it he means, “I sincerely,” but he does not presume to read the hearts of his family, just to know where they’re standing as far as he can tell and what track they’re on, and that as head of the house he’s making the commitment for the family.

His family is officially a Christian family.

It is a Christian family, which in itself rings all kinds of bells. “Can you do that? Can you have a Christian family?” Well, can you have a Christian church? Really?

Can you have a Christian rock band?

Yeah. Here we’re talking covenant, and they are covenanted. What happens next is really interesting.

And the people answered and said, God forbid that we should forsake the Lord, to serve other gods; for the Lord our God, he it is that brought us up and our fathers out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage, and which did those great signs in our sight, and preserved us in all the way wherein we went, and among all the people through whom we passed. And the Lord drove out from before us all the people, even the Amorites which dwelt in the land: therefore will we also serve the Lord; for he is our God.

Wow! Isn’t that the kind of response that every evangelist wants? The whole crowd saying, “No, no, no, no, don’t try to turn us off. Don’t tell us to count the cost. We’ve counted the cost. We’re going to serve the Lord! We’re on the Lord’s side! Let’s all start singing that hymn, guys.”

But what does Joshua say?

Joshua says, “You can’t serve the Lord!”

That’s not what they tell you to say in preaching school, I bet.

No, I don’t think so.

And Joshua said unto the people, Ye cannot serve the Lord: for he is a holy God. He is a jealous God. He will not forgive your transgressions nor your sins. If ye forsake the Lord, and serve strange gods, then he will turn and do you hurt, and consume you, after that he hath done you good.

Now, Joshua is not saying that God doesn’t forgive sins. We’ve seen enough of that in God’s self-revelation in the Torah, in Deuteronomy especially, that God defines himself as the one who has mercy upon his people from generation to generation. He is merciful and forgives sins.

What he’s saying is, “You can’t say it and not live it, because God is going to hold you accountable. God is going to take your confession and your oath seriously. You’re coming near to God in a covenant oath. Now, I can’t see your hearts, but God can. And if your heart isn’t in this, if you don’t mean this and if it’s not a real thing, it would be better for you never to have sworn the oath. It would be better for you to walk away right now than to simply say the thing and then live a different way, because God won’t brush it off.

“You can’t say to God later, ‘Well, you know how I talk. Oh, it was a moment of emotional extremes. Oh, you know, that was me then and this is me now. I’ve acquired more religious information than I had at the time. Surely I’m free to change my mind and choose the best course according to my current information.’”

You can’t do that with God, so he does tell them to count the cost. When the people say, “Oh, we didn’t know that. Yeah, you’re right, we better not…”

No, the people say, “Nay, but we will serve the Lord.” They insist.

And Joshua said unto the people, Ye are witnesses against yourselves that ye have chosen you the Lord, to serve him. And they said, We are witnesses.

That’s a covenant act. They’ve just sworn an oath and they called themselves as witnesses and they admit it. This is a legal transaction in blood.

I love how Joshua is just like, “I’ve lived with you guys. You’re witnessing against yourself here.”

Yeah, and that follows with –

Now therefore put away, said he, the strange gods which are among you, and incline your heart unto the Lord God of Israel.

“Okay, that was brilliant. Great speech. All those little idols? Throw them out now. Burn them, smash them, get rid of them now. You can’t go on like this. You can’t hop between two opinions. You can’t serve two gods.”

And the people said unto Joshua, The Lord our God will we serve, and his voice will we obey. So Joshua made a covenant with the people that day, and set them a statute and an ordinance in Shechem.

And Joshua wrote these words in the book of the law of God, and took a great stone and set it up there under an oak that was by the sanctuary of the Lord. And Joshua said unto all the people, Behold, this stone shall be a witness unto us, for it hath heard all the words of the Lord which he spake unto us. It shall be therefore a witness unto you, lest ye deny your God.

They just said they were going to be witnesses. We’ve got 2-3 million people and Joshua says, “Never mind, let’s get a rock. This rock? It heard things, too.”

“Joshua, the rock isn’t sentient.”

“No kidding. It still may be a better witness than you guys are. We’ll see how this plays out.”

I think he went away hopeful, but perhaps unconvinced. The first chapter of Judges suggests that they did a pretty good job of walking with the Lord, although later in Othniel’s day apostasy set in for a little while, and God used the kings of Mesopotamia to chastise his people and put them back on track for a while.

We’re coming up on Judges next and that will be a roller coaster of up and down, back and forth, round and round. See, this is the problem. We’re kind of in the Old Testament…

And all the ending notes are not happy.

Because Jesus hasn’t come yet. We’re waiting for Jesus to come. Genesis begins with God creating heaven and earth, and it ends with Joseph in a coffin in Egypt. Deuteronomy begins with “Here is the word of the Lord” and ends with Moses dying and no prophet like him rising again. In Judges we’re taking the land, and it ends with “…and the Levites are completely blowing their job as pastors.”

There are some bright notes. Ruth comes to mind and we’ll get to it eventually. We’re waiting for Jesus.

For tonight shall we close up with some recommendations? Since we mentioned G.K. Chesterton, I’m going to go ahead and recommend his essay, “A Piece of White Chalk,” which is worth reading, for all of our ragging on Chesterton tonight.

I don’t know that essay. What’s it about?

It’s about Gilbert Keith walking out and obtaining some parcel paper to draw on, on his walk as he’s rambling about the countryside. Of course, parcel paper is brown and he needs something that is not brown to write on it. Pencil won’t show up very well, so he obtains a piece of white chalk, and it’s a meditation about the nature of virtue. It’s fun, it’s great.

He goes out and he draws a cow, but of course anyone could draw a cow, so he didn’t really draw a cow, he drew the soul of the cow, which I feel like is what I have to claim for all of my drawings because they do not represent the physical reality very well.

Bryan, you got something?

I will go ahead and recommend another podcast actually that I just started listening to last week. It’s been around for years, but it’s just me finally getting on the bandwagon. It’s called Cults and it is disturbing in all of the ways you’d expect a podcast that explores cults to be.

I think they start with the Manson family, so a nice cheery start. Listener discretion advised, they remind me at the start of each episode. They do go into some unfortunate details. It’s been interesting to see the different ways that people play on psychology and – if we want to tie into tonight’s episode – emotional manipulation even to fill up their…

And the hunger for religion.

Exactly – to build up their follower base and to gain earthly power. It’s been very intriguing. I think I’m on episode 16 or something like that.

How long are the episodes?

It’s roughly an hour, and then most of the time each cult is split up into two episodes. So if you’re like me, you could listen to an entire cult’s worth in an hour, because I listen at 2X speed.

That reminded me. I didn’t have anything, but that reminded me of a book that I think you both read in high school, Psychological Seduction by William Fitzpatrick.

You’ve actually recommended this before.

Oh, does it still count?

I’ve double-recommended things.

We’ll let it slide.

Well, let me start here and then I’ll recommend another one. It’s not about using psychology to seduce, it’s about psychology being seductive.

Seeing as how you have your high schoolers read it.

Yeah, this is not lessons in seduction. This is how psychology will seduce you away from the gospel if you’re not very careful, because it does offer an alternate diagnosis of man’s problem and then may or may not offer a solution to said problem, depending on the nature of the problem.

“The problem is, you know what? The fact that you’re the product of millions of years of evolution means you’re screwed, and all you can do is learn to accept yourself as you are and hope everyone else does. That will be $150, please.”

The author is himself a psychologist or psychotherapist and he’s a Roman Catholic Christian. There’s one kind of weird chapter about suffering that I would think you could probably skip. My students who have read it have enjoyed it and found it pretty simple and straightforward and somewhat reminiscent of the style of C.S. Lewis.

Speaking of Lewis, I will also jump on the G.K. Chesterton bandwagon and recommend a chapter called “The Ethics of Elfland” from Orthodoxy.

I am overdue for a re-read of Orthodoxy.

I’m just realizing I am too, because I don’t remember much of the book right now, but I remember this one chapter because it gets quoted by people I read, “The Ethics of Elfland.”

What is it about fairytales and imaginative and fantasy literature that makes it such an easy vehicle for the gospel, and why do we not want to go there sometimes, or how do we try to twist it? Because it is such an easy vehicle for the gospel, why do we try to build our own gospel on it?

I believe that’s the chapter where he talks about God’s providence. Why does the sun rise? Because God says, “That was great! Do it again! Fantastic! Do it again!” over against the so-called laws of nature. So there you go, 2 for 1.

Great. Thank you, guys, so much for this conversation. We’ve gone over time, but it’s been well worth it, I think. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in.

If you’d like to support us financially, you can visit our website, anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion. If you’d like to get in touch with us, we’d love to hear from you. Send us an email at [email protected].

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