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Protected "The SBJT Forum: Neglected Matters in Evangelism" ([edit=sysop] (indefinite) [move=sysop] (indefinite))

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''Editor’s Note:'' Readers should be aware of the forum’s format. D. A. Carson, Al
Jackson, Ajith Fernando, Robert Coleman, and John Mark Terry have been asked
specific questions to which they have provided written responses. These writers are
not responding to one another. The journal’s goal for the Forum is to provide
significant thinkers’ views on topics of interest without requiring lengthy articles from
these heavily-committed individuals. Their answers are presented in an order that
hopefully makes the forum read as much like a unified presentation as possible.

'''SBJT: Granted that there are spurious conversions in the Bible, what criteria help us to discern that a profession of faith is genuine?'''

'''D. A. Carson:''' Many complex questions
occupy the attention of the thoughtful
evangelist, but this is surely one of the
most complex.

The reason why it is an important question
is bound up with the many passages
in the Bible that depict spurious conversions.
For instance, in the parable of the
sower (better called, perhaps, the parable
of the soils), Jesus says that some people,
“like seed sown on rocky places, hear the
word and at once receive it with joy”
(Mark 4:16), but that as soon as trouble
comes they quickly fall away, for they
have no root. In the Palestine of Jesus’ day,
“rocky places” referred to a setting where
there was a thin layer of topsoil over limestone
bedrock. Because the topsoil was so
shallow, it warmed up the fastest in the
spring, and the seed embedded there
germinated most quickly. Outside the
metaphorical world, some people hear the
word and “at once receive it with joy.”
They seem to be the most promising of
the crop. But once the early rains have
died away and the full heat of the mideastern
sun blazes down, the roots stretch
down for water, cannot penetrate the
bedrock, and the plant dies. Outside the
metaphorical world, sometimes the very
people who seem to be the most promising
of a crop of converts turn out to have
no root, and when the first whiff of trouble
shows up, they wither away. But who
could tell at first which plants would
endure, and which would not?

Or consider the series of people
depicted in Luke 9:57-62. Three different
people offer to follow Jesus, or promise
to do so on some condition or other. In
every case, Jesus gently repulses them.
One says, “I will follow you wherever you
go,” but Jesus promptly erects a barrier:
“Foxes have holes and birds of the air have
nests, but the Son of Man has no place to
lay his head.” I suppose the question we
must ask ourselves is this: When was the
last time that we repulsed someone who
promised to follow Jesus, erecting barriers
or high hurdles for their religious
aspirations?

Or again, John speaks of “many
people” who saw the signs Jesus was
doing and who “believed in his name”
(John 2:23). But Jesus recognized that their
faith was spurious, and would not entrust
himself to them. What was it about them
that made their faith spurious?

Of course, we must recognize that even
the most discerning of us will sometimes
make mistakes. Those of us who have
been in the ministry for a few years (let
alone for several decades) can remember
people we have baptized whose professions
of faith soon proved to be ephemeral.
But unless we perceive the danger,
we will actually foster spurious conversions.
And this will have the further
effect of engendering cynicism about
conversion, or a false sense of security in
those who have been through the system
without really being regenerated. So the
question returns: Granted that there are
spurious conversions in the Bible, what
criteria help us to determine whether a
profession of faith is genuine?

I have space to mention two criteria,
and then to offer some reflections on their
practical outworking in evangelistic ministry
in today’s world.

The ''first'' criterion is remarkably penetrating,
but does not yield quick results.
It is the criterion of perseverance. Jesus
told some who “believed” him, “If you
hold to my teaching, you are really my
disciples” (John 8:31). The apostle Paul
writes to the Colossians to tell them that
God has reconciled them to himself by
Christ’s physical body through death, to
present them holy in his sight, without
blemish and free from accusation, “if you
continue in your faith, established and
firm, not moved from the hope held out
in the gospel” (Col 1:23). The writer to the
Hebrews affirms, “We have come to share
in Christ if we hold firmly till the end the
confidence we had at first” (Heb 3:14).
Conversely, when some fail this test of
perseverance, their very falling away may
testify that “they did not really belong to
us. For if they had belonged to us, they
would have remained with us; but their
going showed that none of them belonged
to us” (1 John 2:19). This criterion of perseverance,
then, is powerful. But it is not
an instant panacea, a tool that provides
instant discernment. In the very nature
of the case, perseverance takes time to
disclose itself.

The ''second'' criterion emerges from the
sheer diversity and creativity of Jesus’
handling of people. One person he may
command to sell all that he has, and give
the proceeds to the poor; another he may
instruct on who his neighbor is; to another
he may tell of the visit of a Pharisee and
of a publican to the temple, so as to show
the nature of true contrition and faith, and
to make clear who is truly justified; yet
another is told that unless he forgives his
brother, he cannot be forgiven himself.
What is common to all these accounts, and
a dozen more, is Jesus’ unerring ability to
get to the heart of what ''stops'' a particular
individual from closing with Christ. The
point is that genuine faith embraces genuine
repentance, and the barriers to repentance
vary greatly from person to person.
For one person it is materialism; for
another, it is the instinct of self-promotion
and self-preservation that would rather
argue about who the neighbor is than give
help to him or receive help from him; for
another, it is the religious arrogance that
deludes itself into thinking that religious
observance makes one fit for the kingdom
of heaven; for another, it is the nurtured
bitterness that finds it impossible to forgive.
In every case, the proper Christian
confession is “Jesus is Lord.” The particular
sins that defy his lordship, however,
vary from person to person. For this reason,
the Lord Jesus himself is so amazingly
flexible and penetrating in his dealings
with people. He sees through them, discerns
where their true idols lie, and
focuses on the particular sins that are so
binding and crippling to each individual.
He may not say, “Go, call your husband
and come back” (John 4:16) to the rich
young ruler or to Mary Magdalene, but it
was exactly what the Samaritan woman
needed to hear.

These two criteria, then, the criterion
of perseverance and what might be called
the criterion of discerning the chief idol,
are among the principal helps to evangelists
seeking to discern whether or not a
profession of faith is genuine.

Although these are certainly not the
only criteria, it is worth thinking through
how even these two may be of strategic
help. That serious help is needed may be
demonstrated by many things, but nothing
is more potent than one particular pair
of statistics. After George Whitefield had
preached to great crowds in New England
two hundred and fifty years ago, a careful
check was made, ten years later, of
those who had made profession of faith
at some of his meetings, and it was found
that about 85% were still following Christ
faithfully. In other words, this report represents
perseverance at a reasonably high
order. By contrast, today’s household
names in evangelism usually report that,
even according to their own figures, no
more than 5% of those who make
first-time professions of faith are found in
faithful obedience a mere five years later.
Something, surely, has gone wrong, when
maintaining the high numbers of ostensible
“converts” is more important than
obtaining a more accurate discernment of
who is genuinely converted.

That brings me to my final reflection.
Those who have evangelized in many different
cultural settings sooner or later discover
that the barriers to genuine faith
differ considerably from culture to culture.

(1) A thoughtful Hindu who trusts
Christ finds it very difficult to avoid the
syncretism that marks so much Hindu
thought. The same Hindu who “accepts
Christ” one day and verbally recognizes
Jesus alone as Lord may be seen going into
a temple devoted to Krishna two weeks
later. When challenged, that person will
probably say, without any self-conscious
embarrassment, “Well, I’m about 60%
Christian and 40% Hindu” (or some other
division of the percentages). What is very
often at stake in ''genuine'' conversion of a
Hindu is a change in his or her operating
story-line: that Hindu must not only
accept certain things about Jesus, simply
adding Jesus to the Hindu pantheon.
Instead he or she must see that ''over against''
the inherited Hindu pantheon is set a different
story, a true story, of one God, the
Creator who made all things such that
they are different than he is, of sin that is
bound up with rebellion against this God,
of God’s actions of judgment and redemption
reported through the Bible, and so
forth. ''For this is the only “story-line” in which the significance of Jesus makes Christian sense.''
(Incidentally, that is why Paul’s approach
to evangelizing biblical illiterates in Athens
[Acts 17:16-34] is so different from his
approach to evangelizing Jews and Gentiles
who are intimately familiar with what
the Bible says [Acts 13:13-52]. Paul’s
apostolic insight and flexibility were a
reflection of his Lord’s insight and flexibility.)

(2) To bring a devout and knowledgeable
Roman Catholic to an evangelical
grasp of the gospel demands a rather different
emphasis. In this case there is a
shared grasp of many of the facts of the
Bible (though some of them may be interpreted
differently), and a fair bit of shared
theology (e.g., one God, Trinitarianism,
creation, the fall, the deity of Christ, and
much more). The differences can be
summed up by the three “solas” of the
Reformation: salvation is by grace ''alone'',
it is received through faith ''alone'', and the
revelatory authority base that defines this
faith is Scripture ''alone''. Often one is not
certain that a Roman Catholic has come
to enduring evangelical faith unless those
touchstones, however cast, are absorbed
and appreciated.

(3) Nowadays in evangelizing university
students who are postmodern relativists,
the criterion for genuine faith is a little
different. Just because a student says
something like the following does not
necessarily mean that he or she has
become a Christian: “Yes, I see that Jesus
is God and man, that he came into the
world and died on the cross to pay for my
sin. I do believe that he rose from the dead
the third day. By his grace I have turned
from my sin and trusted him as my Savior
and Lord.” Why not? Because in
postmodern epistemology, all these utterances
might well be part of a larger, experiential
“try it and see” approach that does
not last very long. It might well be
embedded in a broader outlook that is
essentially pluralistic. Thus the student
may be saying, in effect, “I believe all these
things to be true, as I join this interesting
religious community. Of course, I reserve
the right to try other religious communities.
After all, they all have their own
insight and truth too, and who am I to say
that they are mistaken?” A suitable criterion,
therefore, may be an additional
confession: “And I believe that there is no
other way by which a human being may
be reconciled to God.” For a postmodern
relativist, that marks a decisive shift.

By arguing this way, am I surreptitiously
''adding'' to the gospel? No, of course
not. I am merely unpacking elements that
inhere in the biblical gospel. To return to
the two criteria by which I began: I am
insisting that genuine commitment to
Christ perseveres, and that the gospel,
genuinely appropriated, always overturns
the cherished idol to which any person
clings, whether that idol is the worldview
of Hinduism, the inherited salvationstructures
of Roman Catholicism, or the
pluralistic outlook of much post-modernism.

So one important question we must
raise whenever we engage in thoughtful
evangelism on our own turf is this:
Granted that there are spurious conversions
in the Bible, what criteria will help
me, ''on my particular patch'', to discern that
a profession of faith is genuine? How will
reflection on such matters improve my
presentation of the gospel here, on my
particular patch? For instance, if you serve
in a traditional SBC church located in the
Bible belt, what inducements, social pressures,
and traditions actually ''foster'' spurious
conversions in that environment, and
need, therefore, to be confronted in faithful
gospel witness and preaching?

The SBJT Forum: Neglected Matters in Evangelism - Revision history

JoyaTeemer: Protected "The SBJT Forum: Neglected Matters in Evangelism" ([edit=sysop] (indefinite) [move=sysop] (indefinite))

JoyaTeemer: Created page with '{{info}} ''Editor’s Note:'' Readers should be aware of the forum’s format. D. A. Carson, Al Jackson, Ajith Fernando, Robert Coleman, and John Mark Terry have been asked spec...'