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Baptism in water and Spirit

A belated happy Christmas! I hope you've all had a fantastic celebration and a good rest. India was great (thank you to those who asked about it - more on that anon) and I had a lovely Christmas at Gaby's parents. Now we're staying with my folks for a few days.

Thanks to the folk who have asked me when my baptism post was coming. You are either very short of things to do over Christmas or very gracious (or both)!

I just wanted to put something together on baptism following the Wycliffe teaching week at the end of term on birth and baptism. On the final day I caused some amusement and bafflement by asserting that in the New Testament it was always perfectly obvious who was a Christian and who was not because the Christians were baptised in the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues: i.e. it was a tangible, externally observable, unmistakeable and dramatic event.

My thesis, based on the work of the only slightly looney theologian David Pawson, is that in the New Testament, there are several aspects or stages of Christian initiation (i.e. becoming a Christian and part of the church). He argues that the reason many Christians today are so far away from the New Testament expectations of the normal Christian life is that they have not had the full normal Christian birth. Each stage is necessary and distinct though part of a whole.

The stages are: repentance, faith in Jesus, baptism by/in water, baptism by/in the Holy Spirit (usually but not always imparted by the laying on of hands). The normal pattern is that people turn away from their sin and trust in the risen Jesus. Then in some cases they are filled with the Spirit and on the basis of the clear, visible and tangible evidence of this filling are baptised in water. In other cases they are baptised and then hands are laid on and they receive the Spirit.

Baptism in the Spirit is always a tangible and observable experience which even others can observe. Usually but not always it is accompanied by speaking in tongues and/or prophesy. The New Testament does not know of any such thing as a Christian who is baptised in the Spirit but does not know that they are!

There's more below the fold: please click on the link if you're interested.

Away

I am going to India on Saturday morning for one week, so I will not be posting for several days. I hope I will be able to post some photos and news when I get back though!

I was also hoping to post something on baptism this week as a week of study on it here at Wycliffe has reawakened my zeal to reform the Church of England in this matter ;-)

So when I get back I'll try to write something about David Pawson's The Normal Christian Birth.

TTFN!

Anglicanism and tradition

Over on my friend Erik Twist's blog we are having a discussion on the role of formal, more set church services versus more spontaneous, informal church services. I tend to use the term 'liturgy' to mean these more formal services although in a sense any church service is liturgical. But I mean services which have set prayers, use perhaps a formal creed, similar words each time etc.

It has got me thinking about the role of tradition in evangelicalism. Evangelicals tend to follow the Reformation formula of 'sola Scriptura'. This means that only Scripture (as the authoritative self-revelation of God in verbal form) sets the parameters for Christian belief and behaviour. Obviously in the Reformation, this meant particularly that the Pope did NOT have the authority to set out doctrine.

However, 'sola' does not mean that everything else is irrelevant. It only means that everything else (e.g. church liturgy, creeds, the teaching of particular theologians and so on) cannot be used to establish obligatory doctrines which everyone has to agree to. They are useful guides and pointers but they must always be tested against the Bible. They are important, but not ultimate. The key question is, when Scripture and tradition disagree, which takes priority, as it were. The problem with some evangelicals is therefore not that they ignore tradition but that they accept it too much, even where it disagrees with the Bible!

Tradition is good and necessary. Without a community of Christians who believe that the Bible is the Word of God, nobody would ever know that it is. Without Christian tradition to show how Christians have read and misread the Bible in the past, we would be doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past (often we repeat them anyway, usually due to not paying enough attention to said tradition). Tradition shows us where the path is. But tradition is not the path itself. And it must always be open to revision in the light of what the Bible says.

Many Anglican 'evangelicals' assert today that the problem is that the Bible is not sufficiently clear to interpret itself in this way. This is a very logical position with a good Christian pedigree - namely, Roman Catholicism. But it is not the Anglican position (still less the evangelical position), which as a reformed church asserts that Scripture, illuminated by the Holy Spirit, is both clear and sufficient.

The 39 articles clearly demonstrate that this is the Anglican position. The relevant portions are cited below the fold.