Eyre Lines

The training evening for the next Alpha was last night; it starts in earnest next Thursday, so the volume of posts will probably increase as I get more ideas from the discussions and want to work through them here. I’m in the process of reading Douglas Campbell’s “The Deliverance of God” at the moment, so when the video of Nicky Gumbel describing the Alpha process was shown, I immediately noted that he (and Alpha) cleaves to the standard evangelical model of conversion.

And this is based very heavily on the theory of Justification, which is what Campbell’s book focuses on – it’s subtitled “An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul”. At just over 1200 pages, it’s going to keep me out of trouble for a while yet. I don’t intend to review what I’ve read of it to date, but Richard Beck has done a series on it recently. What I have read, however, mounts a very detailed and convincing assault on the concept of Justification generally and salvation via the “Justified through faith” route specifically (Romans 1-4 being the most significant text here).

Let me outline this paradigm. Mankind are all sinners. God cannot accept sin, and therefore sin in any measure whatsoever deserves death and/or hell. They have through two potential routes, “natural theology” (i.e. the obvious testimony of creation) or Mosaic Law, a conviction of this, but no way out of it; Paul specifies that the Law is inadequate to save anybody. Jesus’ death on the cross provides, via faith in Christ, justification by grace to all. The logic is inescapable; all are guilty, all are condemned but faith in Christ produces deemed justification and therefore saves. The standard model of conversion involves this; pray the “sinners prayer”, receive (be born again in) the Holy Spirit and faith, be saved.

It is worth mentioning that the 12 Step formula, admitting powerlessness over something and our lives having become unmanageable, becoming convinced that there existed a higher power which was capable of releiving us from this position and making a decision to turn our wills and our lives over to the care of that higher power mirrors extremely well the evangelical standard model. And that works; I’ve seen it work in many people. The spiritual experience doesn’t always occur at any of those points (Steps 1-3), it can occur later. Some of them have gone on to find their relationship with their higher power in Christianity. OK, some have found that by another route, but they aren’t the subject of this post!

Justification theory is not quite entirely PSA (Penal Substitutionary Atonement) in its full exposition, but is a major foundational part of that theory. I don’t intend to deal with the detail of my theoretical reaction to PSA in this post; I have another post (or possibly series) under construction at the moment in which I intend to do that. Here, I intend to talk about practice.

Now, if you’ve read my previous post, you may realise that I didn’t arrive at faith via this route. I didn’t have anything remotely like a conception of irretrievable, unforgiveable sin and of a stern judgmental God who could only accept perfection. I didn’t believe any god of any sort existed, for a start, and forgiveness appeared to be reasonably readily obtained (sometimes with a bit of pain and time) in every situation I’d come across. I just got a whole package which included an extremely lively consciousness of past sin and at the same time a consciousness of forgiveness and a compulsion to try very hard not to do any of that stuff again, all in one “zap”.

In fact, to my more or less complete consternation, the model of salvation which best fits me is Calvinist (about which I wrote a while ago). Full Calvinism doesn’t start with a conviction of sin and praying the sinners’ prayer (or something like it), it starts with divine intervention in changing you, and only after that do you get on to bits like considering past sins.

So, we have Nicky Gumbel and Alpha doing conversions one way, (with, apparently, very considerable success – I have multiple friends who have arrived at belief via Alpha or something very like it) and Calvin describing another way of getting converted of which I seem to have personal experience. The two are just not the same. Conviction of sin followed by a choice to give your life to Jesus demands a free will choice, and Calvin says that the totally depraved non-Christian (the “T” of “TULIP”) cannot make, has not the capacity to make, that decision.

Do we see a pattern emerging here? The Evangelistic paradigm is, basically, Luther on Justification, and Luther and Calvin are not all that far apart. The distinction may, therefore, be rather subtle.

So, let me add to that. Actually, only a few people who arrive at faith via Alpha have been able to say to me with conviction that they were, in fact, convicted of otherwise irredeemable sin and then made the decision. Most, it turns out, have been somewhat convinced by the talks, but much more influenced by one or more very powerful testimonies and the fact that they feel love and friendship from the people round them and want to be part of that. But in the process, they have arrived at something very like the spiritual experience testified to by people who have gone the Lutheran/Evangelical route or the Calvinist route. Significant numbers of them have then worked at it, much as twelve steppers work at the twelve steps, and maintained their “conscious contact with God”. Some have at a later time lost this again.

This, I should point out, doesn’t really conform very well to anyone’s theoretical soteriology.

Then again, there are those I know who have just made a decision that this is where they want to be and have started working at it, without any particular crushing consciousness of sin or appreciation that there is only one way out of this into God’s favour. Many of these are people who were just brought up to believe in the system and have never challenged it. And some of them do arrive at a conscious contact with God, sometimes in a blinding flash (or zap) after they have been working at it for months, years or sometimes decades, sometimes very gently and imperceptibly. (It’s worth mentioning, however, that many who tread this route never seem to attain this state, at least not in any form strong enough for them to testify to).

And this is, essentially, works-based soteriology of the kind which Luther and Calvin both considered theoretically impossible. It ought to work; the psychological establishment has long understood “act as if” techniques, and so have the twelve step fellowships. Eastern Orthodoxy, the Western Monastic tradition and observant Judaism are examples in practice, whatever their theory may be.

It may actually be that I have an element of this operational in my own experience, because a couple of years before my original zap, I started to try to improve myself. 20/20 hindsight reveals that what I actually did about this bore a significant resemblance to steps 1, 4-5, a God-free 6 and 8-10, starting with an appreciation of powerlessness and a searching moral inventory. It took the zap to insert the God-related steps, though. The motive had, of course, nothing to do with anything spiritual; it was a purely pragmatic approach to improving my ability to function in society, but it does seem possible that it could have had an unanticipated result!

I anticipate that some might say that actually there has to be only one way, and these might try to find the elements of their chosen one solution in the lives of others who did not seem at first appraisal to have fitted their template. I think they stretch to attempt this, and also have a tendency to reject the experience of some who, to a more objective eye, might well display all the characteristics of a “saved” person, notably Paul’s “fruits of the spirit” (Gal. 5:22-23) and attest to their own conviction of being “saved” (or otherwise justified, or “right with God”).

I was at one time guilty of this; I knew how it had happened with me, and assumed that this was the only way it could happen and be authentic. I could see the result in the writings of mystics (at least in places), so I assumed that the way to go was the way they had described (my own “out of the blue” was no help to anyone). Most of them used seclusion, privation and sometimes sensory deprivation, so 20 year old Chris would have said everyone had to do that, if, that was, they wanted to experience something like the zap; I had used bits and pieces of the praxis of some of the great mystics myself to try to re-experience the zap, and had duly had some recapitulations (though generally not with anything like the original force). It therefore seemed experimentally verified.

So, could it be that those originating these concepts of salvation had found a way themselves, and thought that it perforce had to be the only way? Not entirely – Paul’s writings spawned the standard Lutheran/Evangelical model, and Paul himself clearly had a “bolt from the blue” conversion which doesn’t fit the model. I could, however, empathise with a Paul who was asked “how do I get an experience like yours” thinking “well, I suppose it could go like this…”.

So, it seems to me that there are a number of ways in which faith is, in fact, arrived at. Surely any theory of salvation should take all of those into account? None I’ve yet come across do that, though. You could tack a set of them together and say “well, all of these seem to work”, but their mechanisms are theoretically incompatible to a large extent.

I wonder, however, whether that matters. Faith, as opposed to belief, is first and foremost an emotional thing, a commitment of trust and obedience. Emotions do not have to be held on rational grounds (the conflicts I talk of between SR (scientific rationalist Chris) and EC (emotional Chris) bear witness to this, even if no psychological studies convince. Often, there seems no rationality in emotions at all. If, therefore, we talk of something which is largely or partly emotional, is it surprising that it appears to arise from a set of mechanisms which are contradictory? Augustine, after all, once wrote “credo quia absurdum” (“I believe because it’s impossible”).

Me, I don’t understand why the teenaged Chris suddenly had a zap, a peak spiritual experience. I don’t need a theory, though, I have the experience.

But a theory would be nice…