Becoming a Christian: Cerebral or Sacramental?

It has been suggested to me that in many (most?) Evangelical circles one becomes a Christian “by accepting the finished work of Christ”—i.e. by believing and accepting as true that on the cross Jesus paid the full price due our sin and by saying a prayer acknowledging this. 

In some places this is further explained as accepting the theory of the “penal substitutionary atonement”—i.e. the concept that Jesus paid the penalty due to our sin and accepted the divine punishment due to us by dying on the cross.  “Jesus paid it all”, so that God could now justly and freely forgive us.  Note:  conversion here involves understanding and accepting this notion with gratitude as one says a prayer asking Jesus to come into one's heart. 

This approach undergirds the practice of “accepting Christ” or “saying the sinner’s prayer”, which received its modern classic expression in a little tract called “Have You Heard of the Four Spiritual Laws?” published by Campus Crusade for Christ (now renamed “Cru”). 

The “Four Spiritual Laws” (bold font original) that one must accept as true are: 1) “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life”; 2) Man is sinful and separated from God, thus he cannot know and experience God’s love and plan for his life”.  3) Jesus Christ is God’s only provision for man’ sin. Through Him you can know and experience God’s love and plan for your life. 4) We must individually receive Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord; then we can know and experience God’s love and plan for our lives.  This “receiving” was further defined as occurring “through prayer”, so that “if you pray this prayer right now…Christ will come into your life”.

       Note please that both of these ways of converting consist of giving volitional, cerebral, affective, and mental assent to a proposition (such as the theory of the penal substitutionary atonement or the “four spiritual laws”), expressing this assent by saying a prayer in which one acknowledges the significance of Christ's death on the cross and asking Him to forgive you and make you born again.  Of course the person saying the prayer must really and truly believe what he is saying in the prayer, but if one does truly mean it, one is born again and forgiven. Neither baptism, the presence of a church community, or indeed any other individual Christian are required. This, I suggest, represents the intellectualization of conversion, and a fundamental distortion of the apostolic practice. 

This becomes apparent when one turns to the Bible and studies that apostolic practice.   This practice is not found in the epistles, but in the narratives contained in the Acts of the Apostles.  This latter work is of course a selective and interpretive history—as are (to be honest) all histories.  The apostolic sermons contained there do not represent a verbatim report of all that was said.  Nonetheless, we may believe that they represent the gist and spirit of the apostolic preaching—the true ipsissima vox, though not the ipsissima verba.

What then are the epistles?  They were all of them more or less occasional letters, written to address a particular need in a particular church.  Some epistles were more occasional and contextually specific than others—the epistle to the Galatians, for example, was written to address a very specific and urgent spiritual danger in those churches, while the epistle to the Ephesians (which was probably intended as a circular to the churches of Asia Minor) was more general in content and aim. 

The epistle to the Romans (so often the focus of Evangelical soteriology and conversion praxis) was also occasional.  It was meant to smooth Paul’s way into Rome and secure for himself a welcome, since his very name had become controversial.  It dealt with the universality of the Gospel and the consequent unity of the Church.  It began with the spiritual equality of Jew and Gentile, and ended on the same note (see Romans 1:16, 15:7f). 

All of the epistles provide a source of theology, as the apostles expound the meaning of the Faith, which includes who Jesus is and what He has done.  But they give no specific information about the nature of the evangelistic appeal first made by the apostles and preachers.  The words and thrust of that appeal is everywhere presupposed, but nowhere stated.  For the words and thrust of the original apostolic appeal for conversion, we must turn to the Acts of the Apostles.  We therefore again ask:  what did apostles ask their hearers to do?  In what did conversion—i.e. “belief”, πίστις/ pistis, faith—consist?  Yes, they asked them to “believe”—but what exactly did this involve?  Let us look at the Acts of the Apostles for some answers.

       In Acts 2 we find Peter’s sermon delivered to a Jerusalem crowd on the Day of Pentecost.  Coming at the beginning of the Book of Acts, it represents the summary of apostolic preaching that Luke (the book’s author) wants us to have.  Here, Luke seems to be saying, is the essence of the apostolic kerygma.

       It consists largely of the proclamation that the controversial Jesus of Nazareth, recently handed over to the Romans and crucified, had been raised from the dead by God and made to sit at His right hand, since Jesus was Messiah.  When the crowd heard this, they believed the message, and cried out, “Brethren, what shall we do?”  In other words, “What does God now require of us?”  Peter answered, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (verse 38).  Luke reports, “Those who received his word were baptized and there were added that day about three thousand souls. And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and the prayers” (verses 41-42).  In other words, they became a part of the Church, the Messianic community of Jesus’ disciples.

       Though Peter (or Luke) did not say that the new converts “believed” (Greek πιστεύω/ pisteuo), it is reasonable to conclude that believing consisted in what the converts then did—i.e. repenting, being baptized, and joining the Church.  To believe and to have faith (Greek πίστις) consisted of and was expressed by repentance, baptism, and joining the Church community.

       We see a similar sermon in Acts 3.  In this sermon Peter declared that Jesus was the Messiah, whom God raised from the dead after He had been crucified.  One must now repent (verses 19, 26).  Presumably Peter would have gone on to talk about baptism had he been allowed to finish his sermon, but he was interrupted before he could finish:  “As they were speaking to the people, the priests and the captain of the temple and the Sadducees came upon them” (4:1).  The final exhortation to believe and have faith—i.e. accept baptism into the Church and become a disciple of Christ—was not therefore given.

       The next example of apostolic kerygma is the sermon Peter gave to the Gentiles at the house of Cornelius in Caesarea (found in Acts 10).  (The speeches of the apostles and Stephen before the Sanhedrin in Acts 4, 5, and 7 are not examples of the kerygma addressed at conversion, but of their defense before their judicial accusers.)  Peter’s sermon to the Gentiles was also interrupted before he could finish—though not by arresting Jewish officers, but by God.

       In this sermon Peter began by declaring to his Gentile audience that Jesus was a miracle-worker, and that His enemies put Him to death by crucifying Him, and that God raised Him from the dead.  He got as far as saying, “To Him all the prophets bear witness that everyone who believes in Him receives forgiveness of sins through His name” (verse 43).  We note the reference to “forgiveness of sins”, which in his sermon in Acts 2 was promised as the result of being “baptized in the name of Jesus Christ” (Acts 2:38).  It seems reasonable that Peter was about to counsel the Gentiles to receive that baptism.

       That was when God interrupted his sermon by pouring out His Spirit upon the Gentiles in the same way as He first did upon the Jewish disciples on the Day of Pentecost—and with the same accompanying phenomenon of speaking in tongues (Acts 10:44-46, 2:4).  The purpose of this outpouring was to clinch it:  Jews might have objected that unclean Gentiles could never receive the Holy Spirit, and so should never be baptized, but God proved otherwise by this sovereign act of outpouring.   

That was why Peter baptized them afterward:  they clearly had the gift of the Holy Spirit, so who could deny them the effective sign with which the Spirit was usually bestowed (Acts 10:47)?  The baptism of Gentiles was so contrary to Jewish impulse that the other apostles challenged Peter for doing so when he returned to Jerusalem, and Peter had to defend his act of baptizing them by reference to the sovereign outpouring of the Spirit by God before he had even finished his sermon.

The point here is to notice that the intended climax of the sermon would have been an invitation to be baptized.  Baptism was ingrained in the apostolic praxis as the way to become a disciple that even after the Caesarean Gentiles had received the Spirit, Peter still insisted on their being baptized.

In Acts 13 we find another apostolic sermon in the synagogue in Pisidian Antioch.  Here Paul places the story of Jesus as the climax of Jewish salvation history. He proclaims that Jesus, crucified in fulfillment of the old prophecies, was raised from the dead.  No appeal is given to audience, but the people begged them to continue speaking to them on the next Sabbath (Acts 13:42).

The gist of this second sermon was not recorded, but only the result:  the Jewish leaders, envious at the apostles’ popularity, turned the crowd against them.  The apostles then turned from them to speak to the Gentiles, “and as many as were ordained to eternal life believed” (verse 48).  What was involved in this “believing” is not specified, but it may be ascertained by a similar situation that occurred in the Philippian jail.

In Acts 16, the apostles Paul and Silas were languishing in jail for their preaching of the Gospel.  When God miraculously freed them, the jailor saw that God was with them, and that the message they had proclaimed was true.  He therefore fell down before them and said, “Men, what must I do to be saved?”  They replied, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household” (Acts 16:31).  Luke then records, “And he was baptized at once, with his family.  Then he brought [Paul and Silas] into his house and set food before them; and he rejoiced with all his household that he had believed in God” (verse 34).

Note the repetition of “believed” in Acts 13:48 and 16:31 and 16:34. Note too that the jailor and his household were baptized and then “rejoiced that he had believed”.  Obviously for him (and for Luke and the apostles) “to believe” meant “to be baptized”.

This followed inevitably from the practice of conversion in our Lord’s earthly ministry.  In the ministry of John the Baptist, one became John’s disciple through accepting baptism at his hands.  This continued in the ministry of Christ also:  one became His follower by being baptized as well—although it was His apostles who did the actual baptizing (see John 4:1-2). From the very beginning, belief in Christ and becoming His follower consisted of baptism.  The Church on the Day of Pentecost simply continued this practice.

This is perhaps enough to draw some conclusions.  In none of these apostolic sermons were the hearers asked to accept theological propositions about the saving nature of the atonement on the cross.  In none of them were they asked to ask Jesus into their hearts.  Their belief in Him and their desire to become His disciple involved being baptized—and thereby joining the Church.  Salvation consisted of union with Christ, and this union was affected by baptism—the act in which one was united to Christ as part of His Body.  That is why St. Paul would later write about being “baptized into one body” (Greek  είς ἔν σῶμα/ eis en soma), for through baptism we are placed into the Body of Christ as one of its members.

The theology about the significance of Christ’s divinity and the significance of His death on the cross and of His resurrection, all expounded in various ways in the epistles, formed no part of the apostolic kerygma.  These theological details were important and were a part of the baptized Christian’s continued education and formation.  But (for example) how Christ’s death on the cross saved us was not a part of the kerygma; it was enough to know that baptism into Christ’s Church saved (compare 1 Peter 3:21, “baptism now saves you”) because it was the way in which one gave one’s life to Christ and became His disciple. 

In the apostolic kerygma urging people to convert and become Christians, those addressed were not asked to accept a teaching, but to join a family.  Christianity was not a philosophy to be embraced intellectually in the giving of mental assent to a series of theological propositions through saying a prayer, but a mystical Body which one entered through baptism.  Theology would come later.  Current Evangelical teaching in their large "praise band churches" (with its long sermons, central to the church service) tended to privilege intellectual understanding, and make it as central to conversion as it was in their liturgy.  For the apostles and the church which immediately succeeded them, the center was the Eucharist and sacramental re-incorporation into Christ’s Body each Sunday through partaking His Body and Blood.  This sacramental life began with the very act of conversion.