ANTHROPOCENTRICITY
(Read on to understand why we use this word)
In our understanding of the need of the lost, we often classify some of them as being "members of a cult." Then we learn as much about the cult as possible, so the Lord can use our testimony to free them from that cult.
No one will ever go to Hell because he was a member of what we would call a cult.
We know that the sin upon which the Holy Spirit bases His conviction is "because they believe not on (Jesus) John 16:9
Then we say that because a cult doesn't proclaim the finished work of Christ as the only means of salvation, every member of that cult must be lost.
There is something drastically wrong with this means of identification. While knowledge of the errors of a cult will always help the soul winner to reach the lost cultist, being member of a cult does not necessarily mean the person is lost.
Let us build a few very obvious hypothetical cases.
A lady who has been born again and is God's child goes into a nursing home with Alzheimer's Disease. This dread disease indeed incapacitates the mind, but it is not with the mind that she originally believed. It was in the heart (Romans 10:9) She is visited by a suave cultist, who gets her to sign a paper joining the cult and leaving her money to it when she dies. Of course the family will have legal recourse to the contents of the will, but she still joined the cult. This act of mental weakness does not do away with her salvation.
Someone is truly saved and, under duress, denies Christ. He dies before he has opportunity to confess the sin and get right with God. He dies. He goes to ?????? - Heaven, of course, because the work done in his heart was a true work of the Holy Spirit in regeneration.
An old man gets married. He is a Christian; his wife is not. She persuades him to join her at Kingdom Hall, and he becomes a practicing Jehovah's Witness. Is he still saved?
It is easy to say, "A Christian would never do that!" But it is amazing to realize, in times of weakness, what a Christian might do. Peter, under duress, denied his Lord. All of the other disciples forsook Him in His hour of need.
Lot dwelt in Sodom, and offered his own virgin daughters to the lustful men of the city. Yet he was a justified man - the Bible tells us!
What God might be doing is to get our eyes off everything that is purely subjective, and look to the objectivity of His Person and Work as the only genuine things on which we can eternally count.
Our problem is that we are humans, and humans feel and think - and very often make their feelings and thoughts the criteria by which they judge divine realities.
This is what the scholars would call anthropocentric - and it results in interpreting the world in terms of human values and experiences. Christians have to learn to interpret everything in terms of divine realities which may or may not be experiential.
The eternal salvation of a human being is a divine reality, and the capability of its lining up to human values systems doesn't really matter.
But that is all we have to go by, and so we very properly interpret the need of an individual by what we can see and hear.
The man cusses, so he must be lost. (Peter - Matthew 26:74)
The woman is a harlot, so she must be unsaved. (Rahab)
The couple must be going to Hell; they are Catholics.
All of the above are usually true, but we must never consider their situations to always be the total manifestation of their lives. As Christians, we see through a glass, darkly. We come up with conclusions based on anthropomorphic reasoning. Yet we must never allow ourselves to believe that our subjective outlook is absolute infallibility.
The quest for infallibility has been a hallmark of religious thought for millennia. Of course it is the Catholics who have come up with their own specific infallible person, but even his infallibility is limited by the theological structures in which he must exercise it.
Some well meaning Christians have devised a theology built around the sovereignty of God, yet it is they themselves who have defined the extent and limits of His sovereignty. For a human theologian to think to define the workings of a sovereign God is unthinkable, yet it is true.
Why is it done? Certainly not maliciously, but in some way thinking that their definition and promulgation of God's sovereignty will somehow make that sovereignty more in tune with anthropomorphic theology.
Who can define God? Who wants to try?
As Christians, we must get our priorities as biblically correct as possible. We must assert truths regardless (and in necessity to the denial of) our feelings. How do you know you are saved? I know I am one of his sheep because He said, "My sheep hear my Voice."
I can give, in my human understanding, an explanation of what happened at Chapel No. 4 in
Logan Heights, Fort Bliss, Texas on April 1, 1949, BUT "I know not how the Spirit moves, convincing men of sin
Revealing Jesus through the Word, creating faith in Him
"I know not how this saving faith to me He did impart
Nor how believing in His Name wrought peace within my heart
"But I know Whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able
To keep that which I've committed unto Him against that day."
Can anyone explain exactly what takes place when the Holy Spirit does a supernatural act of regeneration?
In order to facilitate our evangelistic approach, we have used terminologies that can be understood by finite men.
The use of these "slogans" does not abrogate the regenerative work of the Holy Spirit, but, as much as we would desire it, neither does it guarantee that salvation has taken place.
If you ask a person when he became a Christian, he will usually answer in one of these ways:
"I prayed the sinner's prayer." Does repeating words save anyone? All who have used the sinner's prayer have emphasized it not only necessary to "repeat these words" but "mean them from your heart." That is hardly a good guarantee, for the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it? An emotional presentation can be answered in merely an emotional way from the heart, but what has been accomplished? The great danger with the mere "sinner's prayer" approach is that the sinner is now ushered into a society (the local church) with which he already agrees on certain moral and political stands, and who make sure he is kept busy so he will never have time to stop and breathe and ask himself whether he is truly regenerate or just a pleasant looking tare in a wheat field. The fact that there are probably many other tares makes it easier.
"I accepted Christ." Tozer on "Accepting Christ" - "Everything is made to center upon the initial act of 'accepting' Christ (a term, incidentally, which is not found in the Bible) and we are not expected thereafter to crave any further revelation of God to our souls. The trouble is that the whole 'Accept Christ' attitude is likely to be wrong. It shows Christ applying to us rather than us to Him. It makes Him stand hat-in-hand awaiting our verdict on Him, instead of our kneeling with troubled hearts awaiting His verdict on us. It may even permit us to accept Christ by an impulse of mind or emotions, painlessly, at no loss to our ego and no inconvenience to our usual way of life. ... the formula 'Accept Christ' has become a panacea of universal application, and I believe it has been fatal to many. ... We are telling people that the easiest thing in the world is to accept Jesus Christ, and I wonder what has happened to our Christian theology which no longer contains any hint of what it should mean to be completely and utterly abandoned to Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour." [Taken from The Quotable Tozer: Wise Words with a Prophetic Edge, compiled by Harry Verploegh, Christian Publications: 1994.1
"I walked the aisle." The only thing that is guaranteed by your walking the aisle is that you got a bit of exercise. Some have "walked the aisle" in response to a genuine move of the Holy Spirit and have, by that act, indicated a positive response to Him. Others have been motivated by emotion only, or because the preacher has made the appeal with such charisma and determination and at such a length that your resistance to him was worn down by his persistence. Walk the aisle if you want to, but never trust that experience for the assurance of your salvation.
"I asked Jesus into my heart." Jesus said that He would make His abode in you. The Holy Spirit was promised as One Who would be in you. Neither would come and dwell in an unclean heart. When your heart is cleansed through the salvific work of the Holy Spirit, He will come in. Although this expression can be used as an indication of salvation, it is theologically flawed and subjectively inadequate. "Come into My Heart" may be a nice-sounding chorus, but we need to understand that it is not He Who is responding to our invitation.
"I committed my life to Christ." Along with all the other phrases, this one also suggests some merit in our decision. We must never fall into that trap. In this we see the action clearly going from our decision-making process toward God. Salvation is never man toward God; it is always and can only be God toward man. Perhaps the greatest fault with these expressions is that they put the responsibility for salvation on the actions and thoughts of man.
Biblical salvation must be seen as God's action toward man. The Holy Spirit convicts of sin because we are not trusting Christ. We may be trusting good works, sacraments or prayers - but always we will find that man is doing something, and man's do is anathema to God. When He has convicted us of sin, and I don't mean that the "soul winner" has to get you lost. The Holy Spirit has to "get you lost", that is, He must convince you of your utter hopelessness and nothingness. The reason He can do this is because you are not trusting Christ, and because you are outside of God's saving Grace, you are doing things contrary to God's Law. The "soul winner" might use your disobedience to the Law to show you your sinfulness, but conviction that leads to salvation can only come through the Holy Spirit.
When He has convicted you of sin, He will also show you the solution, which is in the substitutionary Atonement of Christ. He may not show you all the facts; your understanding them in your head is not necessary. It is in the heart that man believes unto salvation.
By the power of His message to you, you have no choice but to respond to the Holy Spirit. You can respond either positively or negatively. It would be comfortable to think we have to say "yes," but the Bible records people who said "no." We will never know if the person to whom we give the Gospel has come to the ultimate yes or no, so we can present the Gospel more than once. It is very possible that there is an ultimate "no" after which the Spirit will cease to strive. But as we can never know that this has taken place, it is our duty to evangelize whenever the opportunity comes.
If you respond negatively, you have said that the moving of the Spirit was worthless and have committed the unpardonable sin. But let me warn all Christians that they will never know if a person has indeed committed this sin. It might seem to you like he has, but until you get the ability from God to search the hearts of man, you will never know.
If you respond positively, God grants you the faith to place your trust in Christ. It is never the quality or quantity of your faith. Your faith has no merit outside of the merit of the One Who gave it to you. Feeling like you have faith or not feeling you have faith - neither matters. All that matters is that in your heart (perhaps still without precise understanding) you responded not to your feelings or to the emotional appeal of the preacher, but to the Holy Spirit.
It is easy to see the inadequacy of all of the terms that are often used, but they may be an exterior means of expressing a reality, or they can be mere cliches with no accompanying spiritual regeneration. Our testimony should be that salvation came when Holy Spirit did a work of regeneration in our hearts.
Anthropomorphism simply refers to the humanizing of divine reality, and it has had a very successful invasion of Evangelicalism.
Note some of our hymns, "Oh, how I love Jesus, Oh, how I love Jesus, Oh, how I love Jesus, because He first loved me." Would it not be better to talk about His love three times and finish the chorus with "And that's why I love Him"?
Even when Jesus is mentioned, it is often in relationship to our experience. "Jesus. Jesus, how I trust Him."
We have to regulate our thinking from the exterior to the interior and ask some very basic questions.
What characterizes someone as a fundamentalist? Is it because he agrees with the fundamentals of the faith? Can an unregenerate person agree with these same fundamentals? Unfortunately, yes.
Can a person agree with the doctrines of Grace and be unsaved? Tragically, yes.
It is not what I profess to believe or even what my head agrees to that makes the difference. It is not even what I believe now that determines if I am a Christian. It is whether regeneration has taken place. Therefore we must face the fact that there is always a possibility of there being tares in evangelical/fundamental churches.
I am not speaking against having a solid biblical statement of faith. To believe correctly is the absolute duty of every Christian. But to have a head knowledge of truth is never the absolute proof of salvation.
Head assent to Christianity produces better citizens, but only a heart regeneration makes a Christian.
THE CRITERION OF ACCEPTANCE
Much of the "evangelical" world has misplaced its Shibboleth (a usage regarded as a criterion for distinguishing members of a different group - Judges 12:6). Now experience is enthroned, and social awareness (for many evangelicals) and results (for most Fundamentalists) has become the criterion of acceptance.
A vast majority of evangelicals canonizes socially acceptable living, and equates this with biblical salvation. Mother Teresa was accepted as a Christian by a large group of evangelicals because, as Dr. James Dobson said, "she exhibits the fruit of the Spirit in her life." Jack Van Impe cannot understand why anyone would not accept this "ninety pound lady" as a Christian because of all the deeds of kindness she did.
The "Church" (seemingly composed of all socially acceptable people who profess religion) has become a segment of society responsible for morally acceptable behavior. In this the church has been mis-identified.
The Universal Church is the Body of Christ and is composed of every supernaturally regenerated person - past, present and future. This entity has never been given any earthly responsibility.
The only manifestation of the Body of Christ which we have in the world is the local church, which, as a microcosm of the Body of Christ, is composed of born again believers gathering together in a locality. There is absolutely no possibility of an unregenerate person being part of the Body of Christ, but because we live in an imperfect world and the local church is administered by finite man, there is a possibility that unregenerate people will adhere to a local fellowship. It is, of course, the duty of the oversight to use biblical discernment to avoid this.
But while Fundamentalists rightly criticize the lack of discernment of our evangelical brethren, most of them crown human charisma and success. Both camps are in danger of the humanization of divine reality, and coming up with an anthropomorphic religion that is scarcely superior to Romanism in its sensuality.
"Better felt than telt" is the motto of most, while the only true criterion is "Thus saith the Lord."