My Life IN Grace
I have heard that someone recently converted to Calvinism should be locked up for two years before being allowed to share his new-found faith. There may be some merit to that statement. I recall that the Lord sent Paul to Arabia and then Damascus for three years before he began preaching. But somehow he did not restrain me, maybe for the reason that I should learn from my mistakes.
After returning from Memphis I was so excited that I wanted to share my joy with everyone. Some people said I was like a child with a new toy; I have never been known as one who lacked enthusiasm for a cause in which I believed. Of course, I thought others would be as relieved and excited as I, and I could not comprehend how they wanted to cling to their old traditions. There were four major theaters of operation for me for the next nearly twenty years: Smith Springs, Lipscomb, Engedi Ministries, and Covenant Presbyterian Church. Although action was moving forth on all these fronts simultaneously, for the help of the reader, I shall discuss them separately. Only one remains today.
Smith Springs
The doctrines of grace now, after the Memphis Ligonier Conference, appeared fully developed in my preaching and in David’s. I also incorporated them into my Bible classes on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights. Classes allow for interaction, and I found people questioning me on what I was saying. They were quite concerned about my teaching that a true Christian can never lose his or her salvation. One gentleman became so angry that he stalked out of my class, out of the church, and he never returned. One of the former elders went to the current elders and complained about my teaching “once-saved-always-saved”.
One of the elders then suggested to the others that perhaps they should invite David in to explain himself. Danny spoke up at that point and told them that before they did so they should know that he agreed with me. That was enough to change the invitation from a planned inquisition to a request to lead a study for the elders. For several months on Monday nights we spent many hours going back to the scriptures for a fresh look, beginning at point zero, and asking what God was saying to us. One by one the elders, all brought up to believe Church of Christ doctrines, accepted the same conclusions that David, Danny, Jacob and I already had. One of the elders was away on an extended trip, and we wondered how he would take our new-found theological views. When he came back bursting with joy over what he had been reading in J. I. Packer’s Knowing God, we not only breathed a sigh of relief but were awestruck at the realization that what was happening to us was the work of God. That elder, David Goolsby, had also been exposed earlier in his life to Reformed teaching at Lipscomb by a professor who had the courage to share the doctrines of grace with his students and subsequently was dismissed. Thus five elders and two ministers now began a period of complete harmony among themselves, a most unusual situation for any Church of Christ, and approached the task upon which all of us agreed of taking this gospel of grace to the congregation.
A little story should be inserted here. Even though David Gaylor had boldly preached that initial sermon at Smith Springs on election and attended the Memphis conference with us, he was still struggling with a few theological issues. It always bothered David if he and I differed on anything, and so he was impelled to seek resolution.
One issue was instrumental music, which Church of Christ has traditionally opposed. When we were at the Memphis conference, David refrained from singing and told Danny and me that if one had a conviction, he should honor it. On the way back I shared Psalm 150 and my reasons for worshipping God with instruments as well as voice. It bothered him that we did not see alike, and one Sunday morning he came bounding in and remarked that he learned it did not matter whether we have instruments or not, as the Bible taught that what counted was the heart (Eph. 5:19).
Second, even though David had preached on election, the full weight of it had not struck him as he believed still that man’s choice is somehow involved. During our studies together with the elders the light came on, and I shall never forget his exclaiming in a loud voice, “Oh, dear God, why me?”
Finally, although he had long said that he believed our salvation is for the most part secure, he thought there was still a possibility, but very small and remote, that we would walk away from Christ and lose it. Then again on a Sunday morning he came in all smiles. He and I would no longer be at all divided on this issue, although I confess that those differences did not bother me. He said, “I know now that a Christian cannot lose his salvation!” I asked him which passage convinced him, and he told me that as he was reading through Romans 8:29-30 and noticed that all the verbs are in the past tense. The last decree of God Paul lists is that we are glorified, so, David announced, from God’s perspective beyond time he sees us as already glorified! We are already there!
Returning to our narrative, as one would expect, we had those who pushed back against what they were hearing. One gentleman came to an elders and ministers’ meeting intending to refute us. He always brought along a pocket Greek dictionary. I pointed out to him Acts 13:48 (“And when the Gentiles heard this, they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord, and as many as were appointed to eternal life believed”). I challenged him to check the meaning of the Greek word. He did and then put up his Greek dictionary and never used it among us again. Soon, after all the elders told him they believed in divine election, he walked out.
On the other hand, there were the experiences of greatest joy when the Spirit opened the hearts of Smith Springs’ members to the gospel. As I taught the doctrines of grace in my classes, people’s lives were changed before my very eyes. I recall one young lady who wept openly every time we discussed justification by faith alone because she found it so wonderful, so liberating, and so exciting. People who had been down on life, discouraged and depressed, turned to joy and love. Life had new meaning. It was especially true among the younger people who were inclined to be less bound to old traditions. They began to spread the gospel among themselves, and they found a new passion for God. We started one summer a class on Tuesday nights for special theology studies attended by several Lipscomb students who wanted to continue studies we had started during the academic year. To that nucleus were added several Smith Springs young people, then older people began to come until it was thoroughly diverse in terms of age makeup. We decided to study the Westminster Standards, starting with the Westminster Confession of Faith and continuing with the Westminster Larger Catechism. The study continued for a year. To this day many of that group will say that was one of the most profitable experiences of their lives. It was rich!
Just at the time the elders and ministers decided to introduce the doctrines of grace to the congregation, one of the ladies suggested that we encourage all members of the congregation to read through the Bible in a year. This we did. We produced devotionals to go along with the reading recorded by various members. Now that the sovereignty and grace of God were topics that were mentioned in classes and sermons, it was amazing to the members to see how these truths were reflected throughout the Bible. They began to see unity and a flow in the unfolding purpose of God in Scripture. It was an exciting time for the church and highly fruitful!
People were talking to each other about the gospel and eagerly exploring and studying scripture. David and I both had our times in preaching when we pushed too far too fast and said things that offended people, as when I preached on Mal. 1:2 (“Yet I have loved Jacob but Esau I have hated”) and when David went so far as to say “Free will is a crock!” But moderation is a virtue lacking in the new convert. On the whole, I think those involved would agree that the Lord was at work, that many people were blessed, that the gospel of grace was impressed on many hearts, and it was a wonderful time for the church. We lost some, but we gained some, and attendance remained high. Some of the people who stayed were unhappy with what was being taught. Some would stay regardless of what was taught. But for many, whose hearts the Lord illuminated, it was a time of great spiritual growth.
One of the areas where the gospel of grace had a decided impact on the lives of the members of Smith Springs was marriage. I remember Ewan Kennedy, a young, Reformed Lipscomb student from Scotland who is now a pastor of a PCA church, telling me that had learned that when he and his wife had difficulties, he was his wife’s worst problem. I used that example in my teaching at Smith Springs as we emphasized the total depravity all of us all. Over and over testimonies were given by Smith Springs’ members on how that understanding improved or even saved their marriages. One lady thanked us for teaching her husband the doctrines of grace because it had changed him so much. Another testified as to how understanding grace helped him and his wife to adjust to each other, as for both theirs was a second marriage. Still others told me that it had saved their marriages. I can personally testify to the effect on my marriage after I confronted my own pride and selfishness and admitted that I was my wife’s worst problem. Legalism with its assumption of human goodness makes no allowances for such admissions.
In 1999 David Gaylor decided to retire, and the church opted for a full-time minister instead of two part-time ones. Although I despaired that they would find someone who would also be committed to the gospel of grace, God in his providence provided Tim Alexander who wanted David and me to continue at Smith Springs with him although we were no longer on staff. The spiritual growth continued under Tim for another almost twelve years. Tim developed into a powerful preacher, and I often thought I heard Charles Spurgeon thundering forth the living word from the pulpit when Tim preached. In the last few years Danny directed the education program and developed a rich Biblical curriculum. In spite of some very unpleasant situations created by the introduction of grace into Smith Springs, the good results and the wonderful changes in lives, the replacement of doubt and despair in the lives of people, and the awareness of the personal love God has for us and his involvement in our lives all far outweighed the unpleasant situations. My wife and I remained at Smith Springs enjoying the love and fellowship of many wonderful people until circumstances of distance from Smith Springs and Tim’s departure indicated it was time to make a change.
Lipscomb
At the same time the above developments were occurring, I was sharing my new-found beliefs on my campus with the same zeal. Now I can freely admit to being deliberately confrontational, which was a very unwise course of action. Also, I confess that I over-emphasized grace and neglected the concomitant full and total responsibility of man, justifying to myself this omission by thinking that they had heard enough already of laws and human responsibility. At one point, several years later when God had given me a little wisdom in the matter, I personally apologized to the vice president and president of our university for the embarrassment I caused them. However, in spite of my intemperance, students were challenged to think, and a considerable number came to accept the doctrines of grace. There was a somewhat consistent pattern with them. When I confronted them with their total depravity and inability and their salvation by grace alone according to the elective purposes of God, they would be visible shaken and shocked. They needed time. Some would return after a weekend to say that God convicted them with the truth of what they had heard, and some even required a summer of contemplation. But over the course of the next sixteen years or so, a large number of students embraced Reformed theology. I really do not know how many; that is for God to keep the count.
What I found rewarding in the process was the joy it brought to their lives and the ability it gave them, as to Smith Springs members, to deal with the difficult times of life. I could give far more examples than any reader of this blog would want, but let me mention two. A student named Paul was sitting in our department lobby as I was putting thoughts together for a chapel devotional. I asked him if one dead in sin could come to Christ. He said that anyone could, if he wanted to. I pointed out a few verses like John 6:44 (“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him”). We talked for a while, and then went our separate ways. That was Friday. The next Monday Paul walked into my office and said he had been thinking all weekend about our conversation, and he realized that dead men could not climb ladders. He said that he always thought grace was likened to our climbing a ladder. When we went as far as we could, God pulled us the rest of the way up. He said he realized that a dead man could not even start to climb a ladder! Paul would find the knowledge of God’s sovereign love for him helpful later when he faced illness and death in his family.
Tom was a student I had in a political thought class (I have his permission to tell his story). He turned in an examination with the answer to the question “is man essentially estranged,” in which he discussed in detail the Biblical doctrine of the depravity of man. I asked him where he learned this concept, and he said that one of his Bible teachers had taught it. I asked him if he wanted to hear the rest of the story, and he agreed. When all the doctrines of grace came together in his mind, his life was changed, but I did not immediately perceive the depth. On the last Wednesday before Christmas break as I was preparing to leave to help my wife with Wednesday night dinner at church, he asked if he could talk to me. I agreed, and he came in my office. He sat down opposite me, and with tears in his eyes, said he wanted to thank me for teaching him the whole story of grace. I said it was my privilege to share it. He said, “You don’t understand what I am saying. After what I learned from you I am determined to get out of my life of sin!” I was humbled and expressed my gratitude for what God was doing in his life. Some months later another student told me that the knowledge of sovereign grace and the extent of God’s unconditional love for him enabled him to get off drugs. I then went to Tom and asked him what sin he had in mind, and I was right. For both these young men who had tried every possible means available to them and were unable to break the deadly addition to drugs, grace did it! Tom said he came to classes high every day, asked me if I noticed, and said that it took him three months, but he was determined. By God’s grace he was rid of the addition. He is now happily married and has been deeply involved in helping others understand the doctrines of grace. He served faithfully as one of the members of the board of Engedi Ministries.
Others have been able to overcome depression as they struggled with deep personal issues. All have found their faith and commitment to Christ enhanced as they know there is nothing they can do to cause God to love them more or less, and that they are not going to hell. I remember one young man who told me that in his youth group at a Church of Christ he would get as close as he could to a bonfire during a devotional so he could get used to the fires of hell! He would go with us regularly to the Ligonier conferences in Orlando and feast on the gospel of grace that he told me sustained his soul.
At one point I brought students in and interviewed them in front of a video camera to gain testimonies on how their lives were changed. It was an exciting time. I do not regret for a moment sharing the gospel with them and do believe that God placed me there with that purpose in mind. But such an idea would have been furthest from my mind when I originally joined the faculty in 1986; I had no idea what God had in mind for me!
Once, when my overzealousness had caused the administration to come down on me and I thought of leaving, one of my good friends, Charles Bradley, who died quite suddenly only recently, took me aside and said that any Reformed pastor would give anything to be in my position, and I should not even think of leaving. It was good advice, and I thanked Charles many times. Charles served as pastor of the Hopewell Presbyterian Church in Columbia and was a member of the Associate and Reformed Presbyterian Church. For a while he had a church plant in Bellevue, just around the corner from where we now live. As they met at 4:00 on Sunday afternoons, I would often attend and bring young people from Lipscomb and Smith Springs with me.
I can smile at the unpleasant times now. Yes, I was overzealous, but it was that overzealousness that God used to change lives. At the same time, I found the Bible department was furious with me and stopped me from teaching a history class on the development of Christian thought. The chair of the Bible department told me I would never again teach a Bible course and asked me not to share these doctrines with students. The vice president removed me from my chapel position to which he earlier appointed me. He is the same vice president to whom I went years later and apologized. The fact that these doctrines blessed the lives of students did not seem to matter to the administration at the time. I did not stop sharing my faith, but I learned discretion and perhaps a little wisdom. I found that it was predestination that was most objectionable. I have a good friend in the Bible department who was always honest with me. He said that my advocacy of the doctrine of predestination was what they had against me, and caused my job to be on the line if I persisted in teaching it. Apparently, total depravity, irresistible grace, definite atonement, and assurance of salvation are not problems. There is something in the basic DNA of the followers of the Stone-Campbell movement that cannot tolerate any denial of human free will.
I retired from Lipscomb in 2011. I am pleased to write that the days of conflict were brief, and for the last many years I have sustained a very good relationship with the Bible department and with the entire faculty. They know what I believe, but they have been willing to accept and love me in spite of that, as I have them. My wife and I were privileged to sponsor the semester in Vienna program four times, and I was always able to be in charge of the devotionals and worship services without any restrictions. I have continued dialogues with students but been careful not to force my views on them and allow them to proceed at their own pace. Ultimately it is the Holy Spirit who convicts the heart; I can only carry the message.
Engedi Ministries
When David and I ended our preaching work with Smith Springs in 1999, Danny Hale approached us with a proposition. He had recently sold his business and wanted to set aside part of the proceeds for the work of the Lord. He said it was his dream to have a ministry that would teach the gospel in a number of venues such as a web site, classes, radio program, conferences and theological materials. He insisted that all we do be done with excellence to God’s glory. The ministry he envisioned would be patterned somewhat after Ligonier Ministries, but we would have as our primary focus reaching those who were enmeshed in legalism, especially in Church of Christ. We were grateful for our liberation and wanted to share the good news with others. We needed a capable administrator, and we all agreed on Carl Conway, a Smith Springs member who had recently closed his business. Danny knew that the ministry would help both Carl and me financially, as we both lost income from our previous jobs.
We began in 1999 recording classes that I taught on Tuesday nights at Smith Springs. Carl selected Tuesday, the same night I had been holding theology classes for several years. The first class was on justification by faith, and I remember Danny’s bringing me a copy of the finished edition with art work capably done by Abe Goolsby, one of our board members and a son of David Goolsby. Over the next several years we produced many tape series, later transferred to cd format. Danny and I both produced the lectures on theological topics, Biblical textual studies, and church history. Abe designed the covers for them all.
Our classes were well attended and interest was high. We attracted people from many different churches, especially after we moved our location from Smith Springs, which is in the far eastern part of the city, to a more centralized location at Faith Church. Faith is affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church (Dutch Reformed), and they were gracious enough to allow us the use of their sanctuary on Tuesday nights. Most memorable among the many classes held over many years was the one on Romans which attracted the largest number of people and the one that analyzed the Reformation both doctrinally and historically. Danny and I worked together on that one, and we even incorporated two debates in which the participants actually played the roles of Luther, Eck, and Erasmus.
We held two conferences at Faith Church, and at both of them the preaching was powerful, rich, and thoroughly Biblical. Our speakers included Rubel Shelly of Woodmont Hills Church, Scotty Smith of Christ Community, my friend Charles Bradley of Hopewell Presbyterian who came with a van load from Columbia for each session, David Gaylor, Jim Cross of Donelson First Baptist Church, Edward Fudge, Jerry Hoek of Faith Church and Jim Bachmann of Covenant Presbyterian Church.
In 2000 we started publication of weekly email devotionals designed to help people begin their week with a good but brief message from God’s word. Soon our subscription list expanded to cover people on every continent of the world except Antarctica. These devotionals are still being written and published, offered free to anyone interested.
We set up booths at theology conferences and placed our materials in as many hands as possible. We did reach many people in legalism. Only recently I received email correspondence from a lady whom I do not know personally. She is a Church of Christ member who is beginning to experience grace and wrote me to offer encouragement and say that our message is not falling on deaf ears. Danny was visibly shaken when one morning at Smith Springs a gentleman approached him and said that he had been tracking him down from across the world. He was a missionary in the Philippines and had heard some of the taped messages Danny produced. He told him he would have no idea how many people had come to Christ as a result of his material. We really had no idea that our work would prove so valuable in the hands of missionaries. Smith Springs supported three missionaries, and all of them used Engedi resources. One told me how learning the doctrines of grace changed his and his wife’s lives and radically affected his preaching. We had one gentleman in India who said he used Engedi resources, and there were missionaries in other countries. Carl continually received emails from people blessed by Engedi, people we usually had never met and sometimes did not know how they came in contact with us and our materials.
With my retirement from Lipscomb and with the recession making it difficult to maintain our financial resources, I thought it best to retire from the ministry also. The board considered that we had achieved our original goals and disbanded the ministry. We continue the devotionals and the web site, but not really under the auspices of the ministry as such. I enjoy writing the devotionals and plan to do so as long as God makes it possible. Carl is willing still to handle the web site and to manage the email list and weekly distribution of the devotionals.
Covenant Presbyterian Church
My final area of operation concerns my relationship not only with Covenant but with the local presbytery of the Presbyterian Church in America. Through my association with my friend Charles Bradley, I was introduced to Arch Warren who, like me, had a background in the Church of Christ. Arch was pastor of Zion Presbyterian Church in Columbia, Tennessee. Arch invited me to monthly luncheons held by pastors of the PCA Presbytery, and they graciously received me. These godly men gave me solace and encouragement during the times when my situation at Lipscomb was strained. Arch is now my neighbor at River Plantation in Bellevue and teaches the Sunday school class my wife and I attend.
At these luncheons I met Jim Bachmann, senior pastor of Covenant, and Larry Ferris who is now associate pastor, and both became good friends. I had heard of Covenant from two Lipscomb students who had embraced Reformed theology, both of whom found Covenant and were impressed. One of the students said that one is always confronted with the holiness of God there.
It was this same student, I believe, who informed Jim when I ended my preaching work at Smith Springs in 1999, and I received a call from Jim at my Lipscomb office asking me if I would be willing to come to Covenant and teach classes in the area of church history. I did, and I met many wonderful people who have continued to be good friends since. Covenant was very gracious to me, inviting me again and again to teach classes for them. I did so until I decided to devote myself fully to Smith Springs and to working with Tim to create there a church that would truly glorify God and hold forth the word of life. Meanwhile, Covenant supported Engedi Ministries both financially and by their members attending our classes with great regularity.
Last May when Tim ended his work at Smith Springs, we made the decision that we had known for some time we would need to make due to distance after our move to Bellevue, and left Smith Springs. Each trip to Smith Springs was a 50-mile round trip drive. In order to be sure, my wife and I visited several churches in our part of town before deciding that Covenant was indeed the church to which the Lord was calling us. Now as members I eagerly anticipate what the Lord has now in store for us. My excitement over the glorious doctrines of grace has not diminished at all, and I am ready to do what I can for the cause of Christ. And I have found what the student said of Covenant to be true, for each time I worship there I am indeed confronted with the holiness of God. The worship centers on Christ and presents Christ in every word and note of music from first to last. Christ is presented in art and architecture as well. I try to absorb everything and thank God for it all…for my gift of salvation…for my gift of the knowledge of my salvation…for the family God has given me…for the friends…for the church…for gifts that abound…for every day God graciously gives me. Everything is a gift for which we must be thankful and enjoy.
May God be glorified and enjoyed forever!
-David Lawrence
circumstances
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Thursday, January 12, 2012
My Journey to Grace
My Journey in Grace
Part II: Why I Am a Reformed Christian
This blog is actually the third in a series of my spiritual journey. The first dealt with the fact that I am a Christian because of God’s eternal purpose for me in Christ. The second discussed why I am a Reformed Christian, and in this blog I propose to tell the story of my personal journey in grace.
This is really not so much my journey as the unfolding of God’s purpose for my life, a purpose He planned before he created the world. Now that humbles me and boggles my mind, that the sovereign Creator of the universe would have a gracious plan for me! That plan, my journey God designed for me, takes the strangest twists and turns, so that it really seems incredible that, given where I began, I should be where I am today. At times I want to say, “If I knew then what I know now, I would have done things differently. But that is silly. What happened is what God intended to happen, and when I think like that, I am calling into question the unfathomable purpose of God. I think my journey will be of interest to many of you because it will reflect your own journey. I had no sooner published the previous edition of the blog on why I am Reformed when a former student contacted me to say that he could see his own story in it. So if my story blesses any of you and brings glory to God, I am happy, and I write with that clear intention.
T. W. Brents, The Gospel Plan of Salvation. This book may seem a very strange place to begin the story, but I think it should begin here. As I mentioned in my first blog on why I am a Christian, God effectually called me to faith and salvation one day in 1955 at the corner of Elm and National in Springfield, Missouri. I joined the South Street Christian Church in Springfield, and on the next Easter Sunday my family and I were all baptized. I felt a call to the ministry, and although I had been a Christian but a short time and had but a minimal knowledge of Scripture, through a professor of mine at Drury College, I secured an appointment as pastor of the Christian Church in Sparta, Missouri. My best friend, Roger Kensinger, delighted that I had given my life to Christ and I think wanting to encourage me, told me of his knowledgeable minister, Oscar Ellison, at the Southside Church of Christ in Springfield. I finally decided that it would be to my best interests to resign my position as pastor at Sparta and attend Southside to sit under Oscar’s ministry. So by 1957 I was taking notes on his sermons and teaching classes. I certainly did learn much Biblical information. Oscar knew I wanted to preach, so he gave me a reading list, first of which was the above book. I read it and soon found that it was an attempt to refute Calvinism. Brents presented Calvinism as the greatest threat to the gospel. I didn’t know anything about Calvinism, but I assumed that it was really bad.
I don’t remember too much about the book, but I recall Brents teaching that God does not deal directly with us and there is no working of the Holy Spirit on us beyond giving us the Bible, meaning a denial of the doctrine of the direct operation of the Holy Spirit. Essentially Brents was teaching that God gave us the Bible and left the rest up to us. I remember his insistence that we are not inherently sinful, so we are quite capable of picking up a Bible and discerning what we must do to be saved. When he came to the doctrine of predestination he taught unequivocally that God blanked out his mind so we would have free will. In other words, God made himself ignorant of what we would do in order to give us free choice. God’s ignorance of the future further underscored in my mind the fact that we are on our own in this life and should expect no direct help from God. I admit to thinking it rather strange that God would be ignorant and wondering how he could know anything at all. But that was what I was supposed to teach and preach if I wanted to succeed in the Church of Christ, and so I did as I was told. But my wondering about the matter I now consider as the first step in my journey. At least I knew that Calvinism existed and a little about it, albeit from the negative side. I knew enough to write a paper in a college French class critiquing John Calvin’s views on infant baptism and sprinkling. That did not go well with my Presbyterian French teacher!
Florida Christian College and Homer Hailey. I think the next thing God wanted me to think about occurred at Tampa, Florida, where I attended classes to gain more Biblical knowledge. Church of Christ unfortunately does not believe in their ministers attending seminary, so one has to learn any way he can. The president of FCC, now Florida College after its board decided that a college could not be Christian, had encouraged me to come there after I graduated from Drury. I did not stay long, as Alice and I wanted to get married, but my time there was profitable. One highly knowledgeable teacher was Homer Hailey under whom I took two classes. One of them was entitled “The Scheme of Redemption” and was a synthesis of Ephesians and Colossians. It was well organized and required much memorization of text. I now found out that what Brents expended so much effort refuting was indeed in the Bible. Paul wrote of an eternal purpose of God and of predestination, so I listened carefully to Mr. Hailey’s explanation. In order to preserve free will, he taught that God did not predestine people but a plan, and when we, of our own free will, choose to follow the plan as revealed in the Bible, then we become God’s predestined people. So now I did not have to teach the ignorance of God; instead I could teach that God predestined a plan and left it up to us to select and follow it. But I admit, as I wondered about T.W. Brents’ comments, that I also wondered about what Mr. Hailey was teaching. Paul really didn’t say that God predestined a plan; he said that we are chosen and predestined in accordance with the plan. But I was young, had much to learn, and again my job was not to question but to teach what I was told to teach as the acceptable interpretation of passages. After all, the most important thing to convey to people in the congregation was their obligation to hear the gospel, repent of their sins, confess their faith, be baptized by immersion for the remission of sins, and live a faithful life if they would have a chance at heaven.
Pleasant Valley Church of Christ, Wichita, Kansas. Alice and I were married in 1960 and moved to Charleston, Arkansas, where I preached for the local Church of Christ for three years. It was a small congregation with limited ability to pay their preacher. Southside in Springfield gave me some support, but I supplemented my income by teaching in the local high school for two years. I also worked at a radio station in nearby Paris, Arkansas, to earn time on the air for a radio broadcast. In 1963 we moved to the east part of the state where I preached for the Melton Avenue Church of Christ, a group of humble, committed, loving Christian people. There our first son, Jim, was born in 1964. In 1966 we moved to Wichita, Kansas, where I now preached for the Pleasant Valley Church of Christ. All but Charleston were churches affiliated with the Non-Institutional (“Anti”) segment of the Church of Christ, far more conservative and legalistic than most Churches of Christ. Here, attempting again to teach and preach what I was told, I encountered full-blown legalism, and I was shocked at how ugly and unloving it was. One of the members insisted on witch-hunts to discover any sin in the members in the attempt to have a perfect church. One of the members had been thrice married before he was baptized, and that presented a great problem to them. I found the man humble, fully repentant of past sins, and committed now to living a Christian life, but unwilling to divorce the wife who had led him to Christ, as he was told to do. I involved myself in considerable controversy when I insisted that we accept this godly man into fellowship, causing many to leave. I remained there ten years, but this issue resurfaced. During this long process God led me to discover the primary place of love in the Christian life. Every sermon of mine included some reference to love. Again and again I mentioned Jesus’ admonition to his disciples that the world would know that they were his by their love for one another (John 13:35). At this point I knew that legalism was wrong and love was right. I knew I wanted to pursue a course of love rather than suspicion, judgmental attitudes, and attempts to follow the letter of the law. Liberalism seemed appealing, so much so that my wife was concerned about me, and rightfully so. I wanted to leave the Church of Christ, but with her encouragement we found solace in a mainline church, the Northside Church of Christ in Wichita. So many people are like I was at that time knowing only the religion of the Pharisees (legalism) and the religion of the Sadducees (liberalism) and think they must choose between those two. What I didn’t know, what people today don’t realize, what people had difficulty in Jesus’ time understanding, was that Christ, neither legalism or liberalism, is the answer!
Wichita State University, Kelley Sowards’ class on History of the Reformation. While we were at Pleasant Valley (certainly a misnomer), our second son, Jon, was born. I knew that with a growing family, I needed to supplement my income, and teaching had always been appealing. Thus I began in 1969 work on my master’s degree at WSU. All my professors were outstanding and quite helpful. The class that God used most to shape me on my journey was taught by one of the greatest Renaissance-Reformation scholars anywhere, in my opinion, Dr. J.K. Sowards. His teaching methods were effective, and he certainly knew his material. He guided me through both my master’s and doctoral studies. I enrolled in his class on the Reformation, and listened spellbound as he lectured on Luther’s journey to grace, how that through his academic studies in preparing to teach at the University of Wittenberg the Pauline epistles, beginning with Romans, he discovered the meaning of Romans 1:16-17. We are declared righteous by faith alone. It is not our righteousness, but God’s righteousness. And even that faith by which we are declared righteous is a gift from God, as Luther accepted and staunchly defended the doctrine of divine predestination. This concept blew my mind! It was glorious and wonderful! It made sense. It was Biblical. It went into my heart, but there remained now a strange dichotomy between head and heart. I did not teach this doctrine at Pleasant Valley or at Northside. I have asked myself why not, and the only answer was that it wasn’t yet the time, and God restrained me. I still taught what I was supposed to teach, but in my heart I cherished this wonderful doctrine of justification by faith. Now I knew that my doubts about what T.W. Brents and Homer Hailey taught on the subject were well founded. But again, I dared not articulate those doubts. Like Mary, I treasured these things in my heart. That was enough for now.
Wichita Collegiate School. While finishing my degree, one of my WSU professors, Dr. Philip Thomas, helped me secure a position as director of the Wichita Historical Museum which now supplemented my meager preacher’s salary. After completing the master’s in 1970, I was able to fill a position on the faculty of Collegiate, an independent college preparatory school where I was to teach for the next fifteen years. I can remember actually praying that I would get the position while sitting at a desk at the museum when the secretary at Collegiate actually interrupted my prayer by calling and inviting me for an interview. During that time I was able to complete my doctorate in Renaissance and Reformation history at the University of Kansas, and also I was asked to share the pulpit at Northside with the late Louis Tandy.
When I first joined the Collegiate faculty I was still at Pleasant Valley and reacting bitterly against the evils of Church of Christ legalism. I found the atmosphere at Collegiate spiritually refreshing. I was asked to teach theology courses and be the chair of that department along with teaching literature and history classes. The faculty were wonderful people from diverse denominational backgrounds. I was asked to secure speakers for our Friday weekly chapels, and thus I had the opportunity to interact with pastors of many denominations. I felt reborn into a much larger Christian family. However, when we left Pleasant Valley for Northside in 1976, and, just after finishing my Ph.D. written and oral exams, I was asked in 1978 to preach, I immersed myself in the work of this church that was much more loving than the one I left. I became involved in youth work as well as teaching and preaching. In many regards it was a spiritual step back to the Church of Christ system. Now I saw that it could work much better than in the “anti” sect, and I wanted to import it to the Collegiate campus, especially with the goal of recruiting students there for our youth group.
Soon after I began at Northside, Robert D. Love, founder of Collegiate and its board chairman along with his wife embraced the Reformed faith. He had heard the teaching of R. C. Sproul and became a supporter of Ligonier Ministries. As a result, Reformed teachers came to our campus. I had voluntarily given up teaching theology when the school grew to the point that I needed to specialize, and my degree was in history. My position as chairman of that department was filled by Gerry Matatics who had just graduated from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Gerry brought full-blown Calvinism to the campus. His work was augmented by R.C. Sproul’s frequent appearance on campus, along with John Gerstner and Frank Kik. Dr. Gerstner had taken a year’s position as theologian-in-residence at Eastminster Presbyterian Church where the Loves, the headmaster and family, and many other of our faculty attended. Frank Kik was pastor of Eastminster. Now I was confronted with the hated doctrine of Calvinism, what Brents taught was the nemesis of the gospel and what Mr. Hailey tried to explain away. In spite of the lingering doubts about his failure to do so and the awareness of what Luther learned, and in spite of the fact that my uncle Marlow had convinced me that my salvation was secure in Christ, I felt I had to maintain the denominational position to which my position at Northside obligated me, and I attempted to refute the teachings of these Reformed theologians on our campus. I got myself in hot water, so to speak, and deservedly so. My efforts to refute were weak and totally inadequate, as my son Jim later told me. And all of this theology was sinking deep in my mind as well as heart. I confess that I took notes in Gerry’s now daily chapels, and that I still have them. He taught some great truths very capably, although later he renounced the Reformed faith for Catholicism. God was filing it all away in my mind and heart.
Before leaving my experiences at Collegiate, and so much more could be written about them, I should mention an unforgettable experience that happened to me while there. I was attempting to foist my works-righteousness theology on one of my Collegiate classes, particularly baptismal regeneration, when one of my students, Geoff Todd, asked if he could just read something from the Bible. Geoff was a very capable student, the son of Dr. Richard Todd, my excellent professor of classical (Greek and Roman) history at WSU. It was hard to forbid the reading of scripture, and I felt sure I could adequately respond to any passage Geoffrey might select. However, he read Romans 4 in entirety. I had no answer. There was nothing I could say, and I knew it. God had slain me with his word. I just remained dumb for a moment and went on with something else.
Smith Springs Church of Christ, Nashville, Tennessee. I received my Ph. D. degree in 1984 and entertained the itch now to move into college-level teaching. Even though I was just appointed chair of my department and made teacher of the year at Collegiate, I accepted in 1986 an invitation to join the faculty of Lipscomb University (then David Lipscomb College) in Nashville. One of the Northside members, a good friend, told me of an advertisement that appeared in a Church of Christ news journal. I called about the position and was asked to submit my resume. Alice told me to send it only if I was prepared to move, but I didn’t think I stood a chance. Within a week I received a call from Dr. Robert Hooper, chair of the history department. He later told me that the fact that I wrote at the bottom of my resume that I only wanted to do the will of the Lord that convinced him that I was the one they wanted. I remained at Lipscomb twenty-five years and enjoyed nearly every minute of it. Lipscomb is a Church of Christ related school, so I thought I would at last be on friendly soil theologically. I was to find soon that I was mistaken.
I told Bob Hooper that I wanted to continue to preach, as I had always done so. He said that they liked their faculty to preach and told me of two churches looking to fill their pulpits. I secured a position as interim minister for the Smith Springs Church of Christ and later worked with David Gaylor in preaching for the next thirteen years.
It was immediately apparent with me that this church was different, and it was hard to identify the exact ways in which it was. Otis Charlton, who had planted this church, was an old man who thought young thoughts. He was quite progressive and insisted that we search for great principles rather than getting bogged down in legalistic issues. I met others who were challenging traditional Church of Christ interpretations. I was a bit shocked, but I enjoyed the people and the work. God was now preparing my mind and heart to embrace ideas that he had been instilling in me for many years.
David Gaylor’s sermon on Ephesians 1. The next major jolt God has in store for me was to sit in the audience one Sunday morning while my colleague David Gaylor expounded on the text of Ephesians 1. It was the interpretation of this text by Homer Hailey that had confused me years ago and caused me to wonder, but I never expected that in the context of the Church of Christ I would hear a sermon actually enunciating what was clearly taught in that passage. We always explained it away or ignored it for our traditional proof texts. Now David was pointing out that Paul taught that God chose us for eternal life. And further, he brought forth the fact that Paul was teaching that salvation was God’s work of grace. It was the work of God the Father in choosing us, God the Son in dying for us, and God the Spirit in sealing us. And after Paul discussed the work of each of the three persons of the Godhead, he wrote that it was to God’s glory. I can still hear David boldly pointing out verse 6 “to the praise of his glorious grace,” verse 7 “according to the riches of his grace,” verse 12 “so that we might be to the praise of his glory,” and verse 14 “to the praise of his glory.” And it was all “according to the purpose of his will” (verse 5), “according to his purpose” (verse 9), and “according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will” (verse 11). We were on our way to a full-blown articulation of the doctrines of grace!
My office and my son Jon, “God broke me, Dad.” Perhaps the defining moment was a meeting with our son Jon in my office at Lipscomb. As might be expected, I dearly love both my sons and am grateful to God for giving them to us. Jim attended WSU and remained in Wichita, while Jon came with us to Nashville and attended Lipscomb, graduating in 1992. One day, while he was a student there, he appeared at my office door and asked if he could talk with me. Naturally, I invited him in and prepared to listen. He told me about being in the youth group at Northside in Wichita and trying so hard to live the Christian life, but time and again messing up. I can remember one of those emotional times at teen camp when many of the young people cried in remorse and repentance over their sins, and I distinctly remember Jon hugging me in tears. He said that when he came to Lipscomb, a Christian school, he was sure that in that environment he could get his act together, but he messed up again and again. He said that one night as he lay on his bed in Sewell Dormitory that he realized he was nothing but scum. He said “then, Dad, at that point God broke me, and I knew his grace.” That remark was the proverbial ton of bricks landing on my thick skull. I pondered for a moment as Jon rose and started to leave my office. When he got to the door, I stopped him and said, “If that is so, Jon, then you could never leave God.” He turned and quietly said, “No, Dad.” I sat after he left and allowed the realization to overtake my soul, not just my mind and heart, but my total being, that the one true and living God had invaded the life of my son, convicted him, took him to the depths, and then revealed to him his grace. T.W. Brents and the others in the Church of Christ were wrong. God does work directly on the human heart. All I had been hearing from the Reformed teachers at Collegiate was true. My suspicions about the interpretations of Church of Christ being wrong were also correct. It wasn’t just Martin Luther to whom God reached out; it was also to my own flesh and blood. And if to Jon, then why not to me? Why not to all of us who are Christians? This is huge. This is wonderful. When I took young people from Northside to youth rallies and the speakers talked about grace, it was then just a pretty word; but now it became a powerful reality. I knew there was no going back from grace as surely as I knew on that day in 1955 on Elm Street in Springfield that there was no going back from the call of God. Wow!
Danny Hale: “Grace is predestination.” It was now impossible to keep quiet in the pulpit at Smith Springs. David had blazed the trail. Now I began to articulate in my preaching the reality of salvation by grace rather than works. It had its effect. I recall one Wednesday night when one of our elders, Jacob Roll, had the audacity to ask me after services as we stood in the aisle, “David, do you believe a Christian can lose his salvation?” Now I had the courage to destroy that damnable dichotomy between heart and soul and articulate what I had known since my talk with my uncle Marlow. “No, Jacob, I do not,” I replied. That is heresy in Church of Christ. It is an affirmation of the Baptist once-saved-always-saved doctrine, and anything the Baptists teach is anathema in Church of Christ. Jacob responded, “So do I, David.” From that time our hearts and lives were knit together.
Soon after that, on another Wednesday night after services, another of our elders, Danny Hale, confronted me in the hallway outside the sanctuary. He said to me, “David, I notice that you are interested in grace,” to which I replied that I was. He told me that I needed to know that grace is predestination. The dichotomy returned for a moment and I replied as I had been programmed and said that I didn’t believe in predestination. He told me that I needed to get the books of R.C. Sproul, to which I replied that I knew Dr. Sproul from his visits to Collegiate and that I didn’t agree with him. He told me that nonetheless I needed to get his books.
I should comment that I was aware that Danny had earlier expressed an interest in the will of man and the will of God and what the power of each was and their relationship to each other. He had asked me about the subject, and at the time I had no coherent reply. What I didn’t know is that Danny subsequently went to Logos Bookstore and obtained a copy of Dr. Sproul’s Chosen by God, and Danny’s life was forever changed.
I called Bob Love in Wichita and asked him if he could put me in touch with R.C. He said he would and he would also send me some of his lectures on VHS tapes. He sent a whole box of them, and among them were his lectures on the five points of Reformed theology (the TULIP). I remember sitting in front of the monitor in our family room and watching them one by one. My big hang-up had been the idea that man was basically good, a doctrine I learned from Brents and my early experiences in Church of Christ. Down went that idea with the first lecture. All the convoluted and twisted interpretations of predestination fell with the second, especially the idea that the most important concern to God was our free will. And so with the atonement, and so with the effectual call, and so with our assurance. I knew God had called me, and I knew that I was not going to lose my salvation. It was wonderful to learn that Christ died with my name on his heart, and that his death alone secured my eternal salvation. As I listened to each of the points in lecture after lecture, I realized that what Dr. Sproul taught was true and I was in agreement. I was Reformed. I could be no less than openly so from now on. No going back, no way!
Kyle Jones, “Dr. Lawrence, predestination is true!” In this midst of this unfolding of God’s plan for me to understand his beautiful doctrines of grace, one of my students encountered me on the sidewalk beside the building on the Lipscomb campus where my offices and classrooms were located. Kyle had been in a number of my classes, and we had developed a friendship that endures to the present. For whatever reason, Kyle felt the need to confront his professor. With authority and passion in his voice, he shouted out at me as I was about to walk into Burton Hall, “Dr. Lawrence, predestination is true!” I was somewhat taken aback, and I responded, “Kyle, I have been considering the doctrine, and I can promise you that I will look into it honestly.” I have since thanked both him and Danny for their willingness to confront me and for the honest love and concern both of them manifested for me.
The Memphis Ligonier Conference on the Sovereignty of God. The doctrines were solidified for me and Danny when we attended a full Ligonier conference at the Independent Presbyterian Church in Memphis, Tennessee. Danny had been saying for some time that we needed to meet with R.C. or hopefully attend a conference. (Dr. Sproul had told Bob Love that he would indeed be willing to meet with me in Orlando, but that meeting never materialized; we opted instead for the closer conference in Memphis.) The full conferences of three days with several speakers were usually reserved for the national conference in Orlando, but this time, in God’s providence, one was held at Memphis. Our group consisted of Danny and his wife, David Gaylor and his wife, Jacob Roll and his wife, and my wife and me. We were confronted with the holiness and sovereignty of God in glorious music and powerful proclamation of truth. Danny looked back on it and remarked that it was the first time in his life that he had truly heard the gospel. So many of the questions I had on the sovereignty of God were answered, including the question of how the responsibility of man coincides with God’s sovereignty. I shall never forget Jacob and me attending a class taught by Albert Martin, “Called to Account,” dealing with that very question, and both of us leaving the session literally trembling.
What Comes Now? Do we go home and share our newfound knowledge with our church? Do I open up on the Lipscomb campus? Or do we sit on it? Well, the latter couldn’t happen. But this blog has been lengthy, and I thank you for enduring. We’ll leave the discussion of the aftermath, of how God directed us to live, experience, and share our understanding of sovereign grace for the next blog. For now, I still marvel that God would deign to reveal these wonderful realities to me. I once said to R. C. Sproul at a Ligonier conference as I talked to him in the bookstore that coming to understand the doctrines of grace was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. R. C. corrected me, quite rightfully so, and said, “No, that is the second greatest thing that ever happened to you. The first is your salvation!” May God continue to call his elect to salvation, and may he continue to open their hearts to what that calling means…as Paul wrote: “…I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead…” (Eph. 1:16-20).
To Him be all Glory now and forevermore!
-David Lawrence
Part II: Why I Am a Reformed Christian
This blog is actually the third in a series of my spiritual journey. The first dealt with the fact that I am a Christian because of God’s eternal purpose for me in Christ. The second discussed why I am a Reformed Christian, and in this blog I propose to tell the story of my personal journey in grace.
This is really not so much my journey as the unfolding of God’s purpose for my life, a purpose He planned before he created the world. Now that humbles me and boggles my mind, that the sovereign Creator of the universe would have a gracious plan for me! That plan, my journey God designed for me, takes the strangest twists and turns, so that it really seems incredible that, given where I began, I should be where I am today. At times I want to say, “If I knew then what I know now, I would have done things differently. But that is silly. What happened is what God intended to happen, and when I think like that, I am calling into question the unfathomable purpose of God. I think my journey will be of interest to many of you because it will reflect your own journey. I had no sooner published the previous edition of the blog on why I am Reformed when a former student contacted me to say that he could see his own story in it. So if my story blesses any of you and brings glory to God, I am happy, and I write with that clear intention.
T. W. Brents, The Gospel Plan of Salvation. This book may seem a very strange place to begin the story, but I think it should begin here. As I mentioned in my first blog on why I am a Christian, God effectually called me to faith and salvation one day in 1955 at the corner of Elm and National in Springfield, Missouri. I joined the South Street Christian Church in Springfield, and on the next Easter Sunday my family and I were all baptized. I felt a call to the ministry, and although I had been a Christian but a short time and had but a minimal knowledge of Scripture, through a professor of mine at Drury College, I secured an appointment as pastor of the Christian Church in Sparta, Missouri. My best friend, Roger Kensinger, delighted that I had given my life to Christ and I think wanting to encourage me, told me of his knowledgeable minister, Oscar Ellison, at the Southside Church of Christ in Springfield. I finally decided that it would be to my best interests to resign my position as pastor at Sparta and attend Southside to sit under Oscar’s ministry. So by 1957 I was taking notes on his sermons and teaching classes. I certainly did learn much Biblical information. Oscar knew I wanted to preach, so he gave me a reading list, first of which was the above book. I read it and soon found that it was an attempt to refute Calvinism. Brents presented Calvinism as the greatest threat to the gospel. I didn’t know anything about Calvinism, but I assumed that it was really bad.
I don’t remember too much about the book, but I recall Brents teaching that God does not deal directly with us and there is no working of the Holy Spirit on us beyond giving us the Bible, meaning a denial of the doctrine of the direct operation of the Holy Spirit. Essentially Brents was teaching that God gave us the Bible and left the rest up to us. I remember his insistence that we are not inherently sinful, so we are quite capable of picking up a Bible and discerning what we must do to be saved. When he came to the doctrine of predestination he taught unequivocally that God blanked out his mind so we would have free will. In other words, God made himself ignorant of what we would do in order to give us free choice. God’s ignorance of the future further underscored in my mind the fact that we are on our own in this life and should expect no direct help from God. I admit to thinking it rather strange that God would be ignorant and wondering how he could know anything at all. But that was what I was supposed to teach and preach if I wanted to succeed in the Church of Christ, and so I did as I was told. But my wondering about the matter I now consider as the first step in my journey. At least I knew that Calvinism existed and a little about it, albeit from the negative side. I knew enough to write a paper in a college French class critiquing John Calvin’s views on infant baptism and sprinkling. That did not go well with my Presbyterian French teacher!
Florida Christian College and Homer Hailey. I think the next thing God wanted me to think about occurred at Tampa, Florida, where I attended classes to gain more Biblical knowledge. Church of Christ unfortunately does not believe in their ministers attending seminary, so one has to learn any way he can. The president of FCC, now Florida College after its board decided that a college could not be Christian, had encouraged me to come there after I graduated from Drury. I did not stay long, as Alice and I wanted to get married, but my time there was profitable. One highly knowledgeable teacher was Homer Hailey under whom I took two classes. One of them was entitled “The Scheme of Redemption” and was a synthesis of Ephesians and Colossians. It was well organized and required much memorization of text. I now found out that what Brents expended so much effort refuting was indeed in the Bible. Paul wrote of an eternal purpose of God and of predestination, so I listened carefully to Mr. Hailey’s explanation. In order to preserve free will, he taught that God did not predestine people but a plan, and when we, of our own free will, choose to follow the plan as revealed in the Bible, then we become God’s predestined people. So now I did not have to teach the ignorance of God; instead I could teach that God predestined a plan and left it up to us to select and follow it. But I admit, as I wondered about T.W. Brents’ comments, that I also wondered about what Mr. Hailey was teaching. Paul really didn’t say that God predestined a plan; he said that we are chosen and predestined in accordance with the plan. But I was young, had much to learn, and again my job was not to question but to teach what I was told to teach as the acceptable interpretation of passages. After all, the most important thing to convey to people in the congregation was their obligation to hear the gospel, repent of their sins, confess their faith, be baptized by immersion for the remission of sins, and live a faithful life if they would have a chance at heaven.
Pleasant Valley Church of Christ, Wichita, Kansas. Alice and I were married in 1960 and moved to Charleston, Arkansas, where I preached for the local Church of Christ for three years. It was a small congregation with limited ability to pay their preacher. Southside in Springfield gave me some support, but I supplemented my income by teaching in the local high school for two years. I also worked at a radio station in nearby Paris, Arkansas, to earn time on the air for a radio broadcast. In 1963 we moved to the east part of the state where I preached for the Melton Avenue Church of Christ, a group of humble, committed, loving Christian people. There our first son, Jim, was born in 1964. In 1966 we moved to Wichita, Kansas, where I now preached for the Pleasant Valley Church of Christ. All but Charleston were churches affiliated with the Non-Institutional (“Anti”) segment of the Church of Christ, far more conservative and legalistic than most Churches of Christ. Here, attempting again to teach and preach what I was told, I encountered full-blown legalism, and I was shocked at how ugly and unloving it was. One of the members insisted on witch-hunts to discover any sin in the members in the attempt to have a perfect church. One of the members had been thrice married before he was baptized, and that presented a great problem to them. I found the man humble, fully repentant of past sins, and committed now to living a Christian life, but unwilling to divorce the wife who had led him to Christ, as he was told to do. I involved myself in considerable controversy when I insisted that we accept this godly man into fellowship, causing many to leave. I remained there ten years, but this issue resurfaced. During this long process God led me to discover the primary place of love in the Christian life. Every sermon of mine included some reference to love. Again and again I mentioned Jesus’ admonition to his disciples that the world would know that they were his by their love for one another (John 13:35). At this point I knew that legalism was wrong and love was right. I knew I wanted to pursue a course of love rather than suspicion, judgmental attitudes, and attempts to follow the letter of the law. Liberalism seemed appealing, so much so that my wife was concerned about me, and rightfully so. I wanted to leave the Church of Christ, but with her encouragement we found solace in a mainline church, the Northside Church of Christ in Wichita. So many people are like I was at that time knowing only the religion of the Pharisees (legalism) and the religion of the Sadducees (liberalism) and think they must choose between those two. What I didn’t know, what people today don’t realize, what people had difficulty in Jesus’ time understanding, was that Christ, neither legalism or liberalism, is the answer!
Wichita State University, Kelley Sowards’ class on History of the Reformation. While we were at Pleasant Valley (certainly a misnomer), our second son, Jon, was born. I knew that with a growing family, I needed to supplement my income, and teaching had always been appealing. Thus I began in 1969 work on my master’s degree at WSU. All my professors were outstanding and quite helpful. The class that God used most to shape me on my journey was taught by one of the greatest Renaissance-Reformation scholars anywhere, in my opinion, Dr. J.K. Sowards. His teaching methods were effective, and he certainly knew his material. He guided me through both my master’s and doctoral studies. I enrolled in his class on the Reformation, and listened spellbound as he lectured on Luther’s journey to grace, how that through his academic studies in preparing to teach at the University of Wittenberg the Pauline epistles, beginning with Romans, he discovered the meaning of Romans 1:16-17. We are declared righteous by faith alone. It is not our righteousness, but God’s righteousness. And even that faith by which we are declared righteous is a gift from God, as Luther accepted and staunchly defended the doctrine of divine predestination. This concept blew my mind! It was glorious and wonderful! It made sense. It was Biblical. It went into my heart, but there remained now a strange dichotomy between head and heart. I did not teach this doctrine at Pleasant Valley or at Northside. I have asked myself why not, and the only answer was that it wasn’t yet the time, and God restrained me. I still taught what I was supposed to teach, but in my heart I cherished this wonderful doctrine of justification by faith. Now I knew that my doubts about what T.W. Brents and Homer Hailey taught on the subject were well founded. But again, I dared not articulate those doubts. Like Mary, I treasured these things in my heart. That was enough for now.
Wichita Collegiate School. While finishing my degree, one of my WSU professors, Dr. Philip Thomas, helped me secure a position as director of the Wichita Historical Museum which now supplemented my meager preacher’s salary. After completing the master’s in 1970, I was able to fill a position on the faculty of Collegiate, an independent college preparatory school where I was to teach for the next fifteen years. I can remember actually praying that I would get the position while sitting at a desk at the museum when the secretary at Collegiate actually interrupted my prayer by calling and inviting me for an interview. During that time I was able to complete my doctorate in Renaissance and Reformation history at the University of Kansas, and also I was asked to share the pulpit at Northside with the late Louis Tandy.
When I first joined the Collegiate faculty I was still at Pleasant Valley and reacting bitterly against the evils of Church of Christ legalism. I found the atmosphere at Collegiate spiritually refreshing. I was asked to teach theology courses and be the chair of that department along with teaching literature and history classes. The faculty were wonderful people from diverse denominational backgrounds. I was asked to secure speakers for our Friday weekly chapels, and thus I had the opportunity to interact with pastors of many denominations. I felt reborn into a much larger Christian family. However, when we left Pleasant Valley for Northside in 1976, and, just after finishing my Ph.D. written and oral exams, I was asked in 1978 to preach, I immersed myself in the work of this church that was much more loving than the one I left. I became involved in youth work as well as teaching and preaching. In many regards it was a spiritual step back to the Church of Christ system. Now I saw that it could work much better than in the “anti” sect, and I wanted to import it to the Collegiate campus, especially with the goal of recruiting students there for our youth group.
Soon after I began at Northside, Robert D. Love, founder of Collegiate and its board chairman along with his wife embraced the Reformed faith. He had heard the teaching of R. C. Sproul and became a supporter of Ligonier Ministries. As a result, Reformed teachers came to our campus. I had voluntarily given up teaching theology when the school grew to the point that I needed to specialize, and my degree was in history. My position as chairman of that department was filled by Gerry Matatics who had just graduated from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Gerry brought full-blown Calvinism to the campus. His work was augmented by R.C. Sproul’s frequent appearance on campus, along with John Gerstner and Frank Kik. Dr. Gerstner had taken a year’s position as theologian-in-residence at Eastminster Presbyterian Church where the Loves, the headmaster and family, and many other of our faculty attended. Frank Kik was pastor of Eastminster. Now I was confronted with the hated doctrine of Calvinism, what Brents taught was the nemesis of the gospel and what Mr. Hailey tried to explain away. In spite of the lingering doubts about his failure to do so and the awareness of what Luther learned, and in spite of the fact that my uncle Marlow had convinced me that my salvation was secure in Christ, I felt I had to maintain the denominational position to which my position at Northside obligated me, and I attempted to refute the teachings of these Reformed theologians on our campus. I got myself in hot water, so to speak, and deservedly so. My efforts to refute were weak and totally inadequate, as my son Jim later told me. And all of this theology was sinking deep in my mind as well as heart. I confess that I took notes in Gerry’s now daily chapels, and that I still have them. He taught some great truths very capably, although later he renounced the Reformed faith for Catholicism. God was filing it all away in my mind and heart.
Before leaving my experiences at Collegiate, and so much more could be written about them, I should mention an unforgettable experience that happened to me while there. I was attempting to foist my works-righteousness theology on one of my Collegiate classes, particularly baptismal regeneration, when one of my students, Geoff Todd, asked if he could just read something from the Bible. Geoff was a very capable student, the son of Dr. Richard Todd, my excellent professor of classical (Greek and Roman) history at WSU. It was hard to forbid the reading of scripture, and I felt sure I could adequately respond to any passage Geoffrey might select. However, he read Romans 4 in entirety. I had no answer. There was nothing I could say, and I knew it. God had slain me with his word. I just remained dumb for a moment and went on with something else.
Smith Springs Church of Christ, Nashville, Tennessee. I received my Ph. D. degree in 1984 and entertained the itch now to move into college-level teaching. Even though I was just appointed chair of my department and made teacher of the year at Collegiate, I accepted in 1986 an invitation to join the faculty of Lipscomb University (then David Lipscomb College) in Nashville. One of the Northside members, a good friend, told me of an advertisement that appeared in a Church of Christ news journal. I called about the position and was asked to submit my resume. Alice told me to send it only if I was prepared to move, but I didn’t think I stood a chance. Within a week I received a call from Dr. Robert Hooper, chair of the history department. He later told me that the fact that I wrote at the bottom of my resume that I only wanted to do the will of the Lord that convinced him that I was the one they wanted. I remained at Lipscomb twenty-five years and enjoyed nearly every minute of it. Lipscomb is a Church of Christ related school, so I thought I would at last be on friendly soil theologically. I was to find soon that I was mistaken.
I told Bob Hooper that I wanted to continue to preach, as I had always done so. He said that they liked their faculty to preach and told me of two churches looking to fill their pulpits. I secured a position as interim minister for the Smith Springs Church of Christ and later worked with David Gaylor in preaching for the next thirteen years.
It was immediately apparent with me that this church was different, and it was hard to identify the exact ways in which it was. Otis Charlton, who had planted this church, was an old man who thought young thoughts. He was quite progressive and insisted that we search for great principles rather than getting bogged down in legalistic issues. I met others who were challenging traditional Church of Christ interpretations. I was a bit shocked, but I enjoyed the people and the work. God was now preparing my mind and heart to embrace ideas that he had been instilling in me for many years.
David Gaylor’s sermon on Ephesians 1. The next major jolt God has in store for me was to sit in the audience one Sunday morning while my colleague David Gaylor expounded on the text of Ephesians 1. It was the interpretation of this text by Homer Hailey that had confused me years ago and caused me to wonder, but I never expected that in the context of the Church of Christ I would hear a sermon actually enunciating what was clearly taught in that passage. We always explained it away or ignored it for our traditional proof texts. Now David was pointing out that Paul taught that God chose us for eternal life. And further, he brought forth the fact that Paul was teaching that salvation was God’s work of grace. It was the work of God the Father in choosing us, God the Son in dying for us, and God the Spirit in sealing us. And after Paul discussed the work of each of the three persons of the Godhead, he wrote that it was to God’s glory. I can still hear David boldly pointing out verse 6 “to the praise of his glorious grace,” verse 7 “according to the riches of his grace,” verse 12 “so that we might be to the praise of his glory,” and verse 14 “to the praise of his glory.” And it was all “according to the purpose of his will” (verse 5), “according to his purpose” (verse 9), and “according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will” (verse 11). We were on our way to a full-blown articulation of the doctrines of grace!
My office and my son Jon, “God broke me, Dad.” Perhaps the defining moment was a meeting with our son Jon in my office at Lipscomb. As might be expected, I dearly love both my sons and am grateful to God for giving them to us. Jim attended WSU and remained in Wichita, while Jon came with us to Nashville and attended Lipscomb, graduating in 1992. One day, while he was a student there, he appeared at my office door and asked if he could talk with me. Naturally, I invited him in and prepared to listen. He told me about being in the youth group at Northside in Wichita and trying so hard to live the Christian life, but time and again messing up. I can remember one of those emotional times at teen camp when many of the young people cried in remorse and repentance over their sins, and I distinctly remember Jon hugging me in tears. He said that when he came to Lipscomb, a Christian school, he was sure that in that environment he could get his act together, but he messed up again and again. He said that one night as he lay on his bed in Sewell Dormitory that he realized he was nothing but scum. He said “then, Dad, at that point God broke me, and I knew his grace.” That remark was the proverbial ton of bricks landing on my thick skull. I pondered for a moment as Jon rose and started to leave my office. When he got to the door, I stopped him and said, “If that is so, Jon, then you could never leave God.” He turned and quietly said, “No, Dad.” I sat after he left and allowed the realization to overtake my soul, not just my mind and heart, but my total being, that the one true and living God had invaded the life of my son, convicted him, took him to the depths, and then revealed to him his grace. T.W. Brents and the others in the Church of Christ were wrong. God does work directly on the human heart. All I had been hearing from the Reformed teachers at Collegiate was true. My suspicions about the interpretations of Church of Christ being wrong were also correct. It wasn’t just Martin Luther to whom God reached out; it was also to my own flesh and blood. And if to Jon, then why not to me? Why not to all of us who are Christians? This is huge. This is wonderful. When I took young people from Northside to youth rallies and the speakers talked about grace, it was then just a pretty word; but now it became a powerful reality. I knew there was no going back from grace as surely as I knew on that day in 1955 on Elm Street in Springfield that there was no going back from the call of God. Wow!
Danny Hale: “Grace is predestination.” It was now impossible to keep quiet in the pulpit at Smith Springs. David had blazed the trail. Now I began to articulate in my preaching the reality of salvation by grace rather than works. It had its effect. I recall one Wednesday night when one of our elders, Jacob Roll, had the audacity to ask me after services as we stood in the aisle, “David, do you believe a Christian can lose his salvation?” Now I had the courage to destroy that damnable dichotomy between heart and soul and articulate what I had known since my talk with my uncle Marlow. “No, Jacob, I do not,” I replied. That is heresy in Church of Christ. It is an affirmation of the Baptist once-saved-always-saved doctrine, and anything the Baptists teach is anathema in Church of Christ. Jacob responded, “So do I, David.” From that time our hearts and lives were knit together.
Soon after that, on another Wednesday night after services, another of our elders, Danny Hale, confronted me in the hallway outside the sanctuary. He said to me, “David, I notice that you are interested in grace,” to which I replied that I was. He told me that I needed to know that grace is predestination. The dichotomy returned for a moment and I replied as I had been programmed and said that I didn’t believe in predestination. He told me that I needed to get the books of R.C. Sproul, to which I replied that I knew Dr. Sproul from his visits to Collegiate and that I didn’t agree with him. He told me that nonetheless I needed to get his books.
I should comment that I was aware that Danny had earlier expressed an interest in the will of man and the will of God and what the power of each was and their relationship to each other. He had asked me about the subject, and at the time I had no coherent reply. What I didn’t know is that Danny subsequently went to Logos Bookstore and obtained a copy of Dr. Sproul’s Chosen by God, and Danny’s life was forever changed.
I called Bob Love in Wichita and asked him if he could put me in touch with R.C. He said he would and he would also send me some of his lectures on VHS tapes. He sent a whole box of them, and among them were his lectures on the five points of Reformed theology (the TULIP). I remember sitting in front of the monitor in our family room and watching them one by one. My big hang-up had been the idea that man was basically good, a doctrine I learned from Brents and my early experiences in Church of Christ. Down went that idea with the first lecture. All the convoluted and twisted interpretations of predestination fell with the second, especially the idea that the most important concern to God was our free will. And so with the atonement, and so with the effectual call, and so with our assurance. I knew God had called me, and I knew that I was not going to lose my salvation. It was wonderful to learn that Christ died with my name on his heart, and that his death alone secured my eternal salvation. As I listened to each of the points in lecture after lecture, I realized that what Dr. Sproul taught was true and I was in agreement. I was Reformed. I could be no less than openly so from now on. No going back, no way!
Kyle Jones, “Dr. Lawrence, predestination is true!” In this midst of this unfolding of God’s plan for me to understand his beautiful doctrines of grace, one of my students encountered me on the sidewalk beside the building on the Lipscomb campus where my offices and classrooms were located. Kyle had been in a number of my classes, and we had developed a friendship that endures to the present. For whatever reason, Kyle felt the need to confront his professor. With authority and passion in his voice, he shouted out at me as I was about to walk into Burton Hall, “Dr. Lawrence, predestination is true!” I was somewhat taken aback, and I responded, “Kyle, I have been considering the doctrine, and I can promise you that I will look into it honestly.” I have since thanked both him and Danny for their willingness to confront me and for the honest love and concern both of them manifested for me.
The Memphis Ligonier Conference on the Sovereignty of God. The doctrines were solidified for me and Danny when we attended a full Ligonier conference at the Independent Presbyterian Church in Memphis, Tennessee. Danny had been saying for some time that we needed to meet with R.C. or hopefully attend a conference. (Dr. Sproul had told Bob Love that he would indeed be willing to meet with me in Orlando, but that meeting never materialized; we opted instead for the closer conference in Memphis.) The full conferences of three days with several speakers were usually reserved for the national conference in Orlando, but this time, in God’s providence, one was held at Memphis. Our group consisted of Danny and his wife, David Gaylor and his wife, Jacob Roll and his wife, and my wife and me. We were confronted with the holiness and sovereignty of God in glorious music and powerful proclamation of truth. Danny looked back on it and remarked that it was the first time in his life that he had truly heard the gospel. So many of the questions I had on the sovereignty of God were answered, including the question of how the responsibility of man coincides with God’s sovereignty. I shall never forget Jacob and me attending a class taught by Albert Martin, “Called to Account,” dealing with that very question, and both of us leaving the session literally trembling.
What Comes Now? Do we go home and share our newfound knowledge with our church? Do I open up on the Lipscomb campus? Or do we sit on it? Well, the latter couldn’t happen. But this blog has been lengthy, and I thank you for enduring. We’ll leave the discussion of the aftermath, of how God directed us to live, experience, and share our understanding of sovereign grace for the next blog. For now, I still marvel that God would deign to reveal these wonderful realities to me. I once said to R. C. Sproul at a Ligonier conference as I talked to him in the bookstore that coming to understand the doctrines of grace was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. R. C. corrected me, quite rightfully so, and said, “No, that is the second greatest thing that ever happened to you. The first is your salvation!” May God continue to call his elect to salvation, and may he continue to open their hearts to what that calling means…as Paul wrote: “…I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead…” (Eph. 1:16-20).
To Him be all Glory now and forevermore!
-David Lawrence
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Why I Am a Reformed Christian
Why I Am a Reformed Christian
In the previous blog I wrote of the route I took to becoming a Christian and why I did. I would refer the reader to that post as these comments will be built on what was said in it. This topic will be addressed in two blogs: first, what is Reformed theology and what’s the big deal about it? Second, the journey to grace on which God led me.
I fully embraced Reformed theology about 1995; thus I have lived with it for several years, during which time I have read many, many books of theology, preached, taught and written. For several years Engedi Ministries was a fruitful outlet with a weekly radio program, weekly devotionals (which I still write), regular classes, special studies sent to our supporters, and even more venues.
As it was well-known at my university (Lipscomb in Nashville, a Church of Christ related institution) that I embraced these “different” doctrines, I often had students ask me about my beliefs. One student approached me and said, “Dr. Lawrence, I hear you believe in predestination. What is predestination?” Another student, not known for being tactful, once asked me in the midst of a class, “Dr. Lawrence, I have heard that you are a Calvinist. What is a Calvinist?” (I fully understood that the term “Calvinist” is often used as a pejorative for Reformed.) Not wanting to open up a theological debate in the midst of a history class, although the students would have welcomed the diversion from the lecture, I responded, “A Calvinist believes the Bible, all of it, and accepts it as the verbally-inspired word of God.” It is the “all of it” that really sets off Reformed theology, as it means that Reformed people are not at liberty to pick and choose what scriptures from which to construct their theology; we must deal with all of it, try to harmonize them, and if we can’t, still accept them. Some call the picking and choosing approach “cafeteria theology,” and others “cherry picking.” Reformed people are committed not to make this approach even though it would be admittedly easier.
That such is done was brought home to me when a lady in our church who had embraced the doctrines of sovereign grace told me about an experience her son had in a Church of Christ related school nearby. The teacher assigned the boy to memorize and be prepared to write on the board Rom. 8:28 ending with “those who love God.” The boy memorized and wrote all of the verse on the board including the last phrase, “and are called according to his purpose.” The teacher went to the board, erased that phrase and chided the boy, “That’s not one of our verses!”
Not only do Reformed people commit themselves to incorporating the entire Bible into their theology, they commit themselves to using verses honestly, without twisting them to fit a preconceived doctrine. I recall John Calvin’s comment at the end of his life that he had never knowingly written against any person or twisted any scripture passage. In other words, if Scripture conflicts with our doctrine, it is the doctrine that must change. I was made aware of this situation when I attended a legalistic school in Florida while still quite young. I did have some very good teachers, and one of them was a man for whom I had great respect. He taught a class called “The Scheme of Redemption” which was a synthesis of Ephesians and Colossians. I was still very green when it came to the Bible, so this was my first exposure to the fact that God had an eternal purpose in Christ. For the first time I encountered the word predestination, and I found these ideas very intriguing. However, the teacher explained that what God predestined was not people but a plan, (the purpose), and when we chose of our own free will to conform to the plan, we became God’s predestined people. Even then I looked at the verses and wondered, for that is not what they said. Paul wrote that before the beginning of time God chose us to be a holy people and predestined us to be adopted as his children, all in accordance with his eternal purpose in Christ (Eph. 1:4,5,11). At that point I hadn’t even studied Romans and encountered chapters 8 and 9!
Thus Reformed Theology is built on the proposition that all the Bible is God’s word to us, and by the guidance and illumination of the Holy Spirit, we learn God’s purpose: what he prophesied, what he did in Christ, and how we are saved to his glory. At the heart of the Reformation lies the doctrine of forensic justification by faith alone, a doctrine that Martin Luther was able to uncover from his own struggles with trying to be good enough to be saved and a careful examination of the Greek text of Romans 1:16-17. Even the faith by which we are justified and declared righteous in God’s sight (by the righteousness of Christ which is a foreign, alien righteousness to our own) is a gift of God, for God is sovereign and has his elect people chosen from before the foundation of the world. Because all of us are sinners and incapable of good works, even of choosing Christ out of our fallen minds and hearts, God opens our hearts through the act of re-birth by the Holy Spirit, brings us to saving faith, declares us righteous, guides us by his Spirit in the life-long process of sanctification, and eventually brings us to glory. As Paul put it in Romans 8:29-30: “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son that he might be the firstborn among many brothers, and those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.”
Many people think of the acronym TULIP when they think of Reformed Theology or Calvinism. Actually, John Calvin would not have known of this term, as it came into being long after his death. Calvin, by the way, was a second generation reformer who is not responsible for defining the doctrines of sovereign grace but rather of clearly systematizing them in the most influential book of the Reformation, The Institutes of the Christian Religion. (The true father of the Reformed faith, I assert, is Martin Bucer, the reformer of Strassbourg. I wrote a biography of Bucer that was published in 2008.) The acronym TULIP came about after Jacob Arminius, a professor at the University of Leiden in Holland challenged the theology of the Dutch church on five points (first four, then, to be logical, five). He came to believe that although man fell and is a sinner that his fall and his sin are not so radical that he cannot still make a free-will decision to come to Christ. He also believed that God’s predestination of us is not based solely on God’s eternal purpose, but that it is conditioned on our response. Thus God looked down the stream of time, like someone previewing a movie, and predestined us based on his knowing ahead of time the choice we would make (prevenient predestination). He also believed in the third place that Christ’s death was to make salvation possible for all men not certain for anyone, and, fourth, he believed that the call of God is resistible. His students suggested that once he had denied these four basic doctrines, logically he should accept that if the Christian disobeys God, he will lose his salvation. In other words, if we, rather than God, are responsible for being in Christ, we can also take ourselves out of Christ.
These five objections to the Reformed theology of the Dutch church were considered at a synod held at Dordt in the early seventeenth century, and all five were repudiated by the theologians of Holland. What started as five points of objection to the established religion of Holland, having been denied point by point, resulted then in the “five points of Calvinism:” which would be total depravity (radical fallen-ness), unconditional election, limited or definite atonement (also called particular redemption), irresistible grace (or the effectual calling) and the perseverance (or preservation) of the saints (saved).
What is the appeal, then, of Reformed theology? Why did I change my theology and embrace it? Let me list five of my reasons:
1. Reformed theology is Biblical. It has stood the test of time and the scrutiny of countless Bible scholars through the years. No one has been able to offer repudiation based on Holy Scripture. All attempts that I have encountered through the years are based on philosophical argument and not Biblical exegesis. It is, in my understanding and belief, the most complete and accurate systematic statement of the theology of the Bible ever devised by theologians. (While Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica is as extensive and complete as John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, and essentially in agreement with it on most points, Aquinas based his conclusions on Aristotelian dialectical reasoning…he said he wanted to reach the conclusions of Augustine with the methodology of Aristotle…Calvin’s is based on textual Biblical exegesis.)
2. Reformed theology is consistent with itself. My mind has difficulty with inconsistencies. Arminianism is inconsistent, for it claims that we are saved by God’s grace, and yet at the bottom it is because of our choice. We are saved because Jesus died for us on the cross, they say, yet that death is not sufficient in and of itself. Man is fallen and dead in sin, yet he can still make a free-will choice for Christ, which is not only a good work but arguably the best work man can make. Yet they also teach we are not saved by good works. They teach that they give all glory to God, and yet ultimately we are the ones who have taken the decisive step. Reformed theology follows the purpose of God through the various covenants that he made with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and Christ in a smooth, flowing pattern, with God adding additional revelation at every juncture until culmination in Christ. Man’s sin is met with God’s grace. Man’s inability with God’s ability. I recall one student telling me that the problem she had with me was that what I believed was too rational! I am still trying to process that statement. (No Reformed person believes for a moment that one is not saved because he does not accept Reformed theology and is an Arminian. We do speak of the “happy inconsistencies” of Arminianism. The Bible teaches that whoever puts his faith in Christ is saved, not whoever has an accurate understanding of theology. Pelagians however, who trust in their own good works for their salvation, need to realize that they are on very shaky ground.)
3. Reformed theology is true to reality. I can remember a student I met when I first came to Lipscomb. I was expecting to find students who “had it all together” now that I was teaching at a school that was associated with my church. This student, brought up Church of Christ, shocked me when he said that he would never go to church again. I asked him why. He told me about his parents who fought continually and whose lives were completely messed up. But he said they always went to church, and as soon as they got out of the car, they were Mr. and Mrs. Perfect Christian. In legalistic churches there is no allowance for messing up, so there must always be the pretense of being pious. I heard more and more about people serving communion of Sunday who had been involved in all kinds of sin on Friday and Saturday, but they could never admit that, because they would be looked down on. After all, we were saved only if we were “obedient.” Reformed theology faces head on our brokenness, our sin, our fallen state, admits it, confesses it, and looks to Christ for pardon. It conforms to the reality of who we are, the world we live in, and our own weaknesses and inabilities. We are allowed to be ourselves and take off our mask of hypocrisy. We are all sinners who come to Christ for pardon, forgiveness and deliverance. I recall a good friend and former student who would come in my office and say, “Dr. Lawrence, I was in my sin over the weekend.” That’s who we are: sinners, but we are sinners who know that we sinners and seek from Christ not only the grace to receive pardon but the grace to live more and more Christ-like lives.
4. Reformed theology is a tree that bears good fruit. Jesus said that a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Why do I say it is a good tree? It shows us how much God has loved us, even before he created the world, and even forever, from eternity past to eternity to come. We shall never be able to do anything to cause God to love us less, and there is nothing we can do to make him love us more. This realization is empowering! I have had students tell me that understanding the doctrine of predestination actually enabled them to overcome drugs. Some have said that knowing their own sin saved their marriages. Others have said that they were humbled. One very tall student stood in the doorway to my office once trembling, and he said that he had never known anything so humbling. His father thanked me for teaching his son these doctrines, which he admitted he did not himself accept. However, he said that his son was only lukewarm to the Christian faith before and was now on fire! People find great joy in the grace of God and the assurance of their salvation, and this joy never diminishes. I remember studying with one young man who was co-teacher of a Sunday school class with me in an Arminian church. As we looked at 2 Tim. 1:9, he was amazed and thanked me for showing me how much God loved him. I have asked students if understanding that God loves them so much and that the work of Christ on their behalf is so complete that they shall never lose their salvation would cause them to want to go out and sin. I can remember that one of the objections to the doctrine of the eternal security of the believer or God’s promise to preserve his people to everlasting life (often referred to as “once saved, always saved”) was that it would be an inducement to sin with impunity. So the answer I received without exception was that, on the contrary, understanding their eternal security in Christ gave them motivation to live a holy life to God’s glory. As one young person said, “How can I spit in the face of a God who loves me that much?” Well put!
5. Reformed theology is the consensus of the ages. The concepts of God’s sovereignty, our sin, God’s grace, and the outworking of his eternal purpose in the Messiah form the constant theme of the Bible and its writers and of Christian theology through the years. It is often thought that Luther, Melancthon, Zwingli, Bucer, Calvin and other reformers of the sixteenth century simply dreamed up this new theological approach. On the contrary, these concepts were accepted by men and women of God through the years. Steven Lawson has done a great service to Christian scholarship in his series on the Foundations of the Faith. In his first volume, A Long Line of Godly Men, he shows the consistency of doctrinal thought in writers of the Bible, leaders of God’s people, prophets, and apostles. He is continuing his study through Christian history. Having taught this subject myself, I know of the theological thought of medieval scholars in the universities and monasteries. There is a consistent pattern of thought: salvation by grace. Foremost among scholars in the West is St. Augustine of Hippo who emphasized God’s sovereign purpose in election and salvation by grace alone basing his conclusions on Paul’s writings. St. Anselm of Canterbury defined the atonement of Christ as a satisfaction of God’s justice and even, if we read Cur Deus Homo carefully, taught particular redemption. Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter Lombard, Gregory of Rimini, and Duns Scotus are only a few of the great scholars who subscribed to the consensus of grace including divine election. Then came John Wycliffe and John Hus as precursors of the Reformation. Yes, there were the dissenters like the British monk Pelagius who believed that man was born neutral, that Adam’s sin affected only him, and man’s salvation the result of his free choice and his own works, and John Cassian who took a midway position between him and Augustine with his doctrine of the preserved island of righteousness (Semi-Pelagianism), but the majority held to the belief that we are saved by grace. Bernard of Clairvaux’s favorite passage was Titus 3:4-5 (“But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit”). It was for Martin Luther to define the doctrine of forensic justification by faith that would bring to completion the essentials of Christian theology. And yet, there is always room for progress and growth in understanding. The Reformers had an expression: Semper Reformanda, or always reforming. I think of John Owen’s definitive work on the atonement in The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, of the work of Jonathan Edwards as well as the contributions of other Puritan scholars and theologians to this day.
We have so far looked at the five distinctive doctrines of Reformed theology and my five reasons for accepting it. As the number five seems to have some significance for us, let me now include another summation in five terms, what we call the five solas of the Reformed faith. Arminians and Pelagians ultimately have a complex and inconsistent theology and have been known to ridicule the simplicity of Reformed theology. Yet there is simplicity in God that is both profound and awesome while at the same time all encompassing, profound and complex. So what are the five solas?
1. Sola Gratia: salvation is by grace alone. (“For it is by grace that you are saved… Eph. 2:8)
2. Soli fide: salvation is through faith alone. (“For it is by grace that you are saved by faith and this [faith] not of yourselves for it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast” Eph. 2:8-9).
3. Solo Christo: salvation is in Christ alone. (“I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me” John 14:6).
4. Sola Scriptura: Salvation is according to Scripture alone. (“All scripture is breathed out by God and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work” 2 Tim. 3:16-17.)
5. Soli Deo Gloria, to God alone may be all the glory. (“To him be glory forever” Rom. 11:36…”to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever, Amen.” Eph. 3:21.)
Before concluding this discussion on what being Reformed is, I want to include a remark made to me a few years ago by Frank Brock, then president of Covenant College in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I had gone there to meet with Dr. Brock, and he took me on a tour of the campus. As we were walking, he said that he always envisioned being Reformed in three categories: first, accurate doctrine or theology, as we have discussed above. Second, Christian piety, or living the Christian life as best as God grants us the grace to do so, and third, a Christian world view.
Paul said that we are saved by grace through faith not of ourselves, as we saw above. But he goes on to say in verse 10 that even though our salvation is not of works, yet we are created in Christ unto good works to which God has appointed us to walk in. God’s purpose for our lives involves personal righteousness which, although never perfect in this life, ever develops under the guidance of the Holy Spirit (Rom. 12:1-2, 2 Cor. 3:18, Rom. 8:29, Matt. 5:16, and many other scriptures.) Good works do not justify us, but no one who is justified can continue in a life of unrepentant sin without obedience to God. John says that the person born of God cannot continue in sin (1 John 3:9). Christian piety, which includes love, humility, kindness, compassion, meekness and other manifestations of the heart and character of Christ (what Paul describes in Gal. 5:22-24 as the fruit of the Spirit), is an integral part of the Reformed faith and what it means to be Reformed. It is an integral part of what it means to be a Christian, but Reformed Christians are always conscious of the fact that all they do is through Christ (Phil 4:13), not themselves, that they are enabled by Christ to serve him (Phil. 2:12-13), that apart from him we can do nothing (John 15:5), and all is to be done to the glory of God (1 Cor. 10:31). In this view there is no room for pride or self-glory (Gal. 6:14, Eph. 2:9).
Finally, there is a world view. Calvin began his theology with creation, one of the key points that separated him from Luther who began with redemption. Reformed theology encompasses all of life for all time. Nothing is insignificant. No person is meaningless. Everything has its place in a universe governed by a sovereign God according to an eternal purpose, from eternity past, through all of time to eternity future. We see everything as it comes from God and as it relates to God. We do all to the glory of God. From infancy to the grave, from the time we get up to the time we retire, it is that God is all in all in our lives. We see everything, as my good friend (Bob Love, founder and first chairman of the board of Wichita Collegiate School) once said, through a filter of faith!
Once again, as I said at the end of the first blog, I thank you for persevering to the end. If you are interested, my next blog will tell my story of my own journey in grace.
To Him be all glory!
-David Lawrence
In the previous blog I wrote of the route I took to becoming a Christian and why I did. I would refer the reader to that post as these comments will be built on what was said in it. This topic will be addressed in two blogs: first, what is Reformed theology and what’s the big deal about it? Second, the journey to grace on which God led me.
I fully embraced Reformed theology about 1995; thus I have lived with it for several years, during which time I have read many, many books of theology, preached, taught and written. For several years Engedi Ministries was a fruitful outlet with a weekly radio program, weekly devotionals (which I still write), regular classes, special studies sent to our supporters, and even more venues.
As it was well-known at my university (Lipscomb in Nashville, a Church of Christ related institution) that I embraced these “different” doctrines, I often had students ask me about my beliefs. One student approached me and said, “Dr. Lawrence, I hear you believe in predestination. What is predestination?” Another student, not known for being tactful, once asked me in the midst of a class, “Dr. Lawrence, I have heard that you are a Calvinist. What is a Calvinist?” (I fully understood that the term “Calvinist” is often used as a pejorative for Reformed.) Not wanting to open up a theological debate in the midst of a history class, although the students would have welcomed the diversion from the lecture, I responded, “A Calvinist believes the Bible, all of it, and accepts it as the verbally-inspired word of God.” It is the “all of it” that really sets off Reformed theology, as it means that Reformed people are not at liberty to pick and choose what scriptures from which to construct their theology; we must deal with all of it, try to harmonize them, and if we can’t, still accept them. Some call the picking and choosing approach “cafeteria theology,” and others “cherry picking.” Reformed people are committed not to make this approach even though it would be admittedly easier.
That such is done was brought home to me when a lady in our church who had embraced the doctrines of sovereign grace told me about an experience her son had in a Church of Christ related school nearby. The teacher assigned the boy to memorize and be prepared to write on the board Rom. 8:28 ending with “those who love God.” The boy memorized and wrote all of the verse on the board including the last phrase, “and are called according to his purpose.” The teacher went to the board, erased that phrase and chided the boy, “That’s not one of our verses!”
Not only do Reformed people commit themselves to incorporating the entire Bible into their theology, they commit themselves to using verses honestly, without twisting them to fit a preconceived doctrine. I recall John Calvin’s comment at the end of his life that he had never knowingly written against any person or twisted any scripture passage. In other words, if Scripture conflicts with our doctrine, it is the doctrine that must change. I was made aware of this situation when I attended a legalistic school in Florida while still quite young. I did have some very good teachers, and one of them was a man for whom I had great respect. He taught a class called “The Scheme of Redemption” which was a synthesis of Ephesians and Colossians. I was still very green when it came to the Bible, so this was my first exposure to the fact that God had an eternal purpose in Christ. For the first time I encountered the word predestination, and I found these ideas very intriguing. However, the teacher explained that what God predestined was not people but a plan, (the purpose), and when we chose of our own free will to conform to the plan, we became God’s predestined people. Even then I looked at the verses and wondered, for that is not what they said. Paul wrote that before the beginning of time God chose us to be a holy people and predestined us to be adopted as his children, all in accordance with his eternal purpose in Christ (Eph. 1:4,5,11). At that point I hadn’t even studied Romans and encountered chapters 8 and 9!
Thus Reformed Theology is built on the proposition that all the Bible is God’s word to us, and by the guidance and illumination of the Holy Spirit, we learn God’s purpose: what he prophesied, what he did in Christ, and how we are saved to his glory. At the heart of the Reformation lies the doctrine of forensic justification by faith alone, a doctrine that Martin Luther was able to uncover from his own struggles with trying to be good enough to be saved and a careful examination of the Greek text of Romans 1:16-17. Even the faith by which we are justified and declared righteous in God’s sight (by the righteousness of Christ which is a foreign, alien righteousness to our own) is a gift of God, for God is sovereign and has his elect people chosen from before the foundation of the world. Because all of us are sinners and incapable of good works, even of choosing Christ out of our fallen minds and hearts, God opens our hearts through the act of re-birth by the Holy Spirit, brings us to saving faith, declares us righteous, guides us by his Spirit in the life-long process of sanctification, and eventually brings us to glory. As Paul put it in Romans 8:29-30: “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son that he might be the firstborn among many brothers, and those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.”
Many people think of the acronym TULIP when they think of Reformed Theology or Calvinism. Actually, John Calvin would not have known of this term, as it came into being long after his death. Calvin, by the way, was a second generation reformer who is not responsible for defining the doctrines of sovereign grace but rather of clearly systematizing them in the most influential book of the Reformation, The Institutes of the Christian Religion. (The true father of the Reformed faith, I assert, is Martin Bucer, the reformer of Strassbourg. I wrote a biography of Bucer that was published in 2008.) The acronym TULIP came about after Jacob Arminius, a professor at the University of Leiden in Holland challenged the theology of the Dutch church on five points (first four, then, to be logical, five). He came to believe that although man fell and is a sinner that his fall and his sin are not so radical that he cannot still make a free-will decision to come to Christ. He also believed that God’s predestination of us is not based solely on God’s eternal purpose, but that it is conditioned on our response. Thus God looked down the stream of time, like someone previewing a movie, and predestined us based on his knowing ahead of time the choice we would make (prevenient predestination). He also believed in the third place that Christ’s death was to make salvation possible for all men not certain for anyone, and, fourth, he believed that the call of God is resistible. His students suggested that once he had denied these four basic doctrines, logically he should accept that if the Christian disobeys God, he will lose his salvation. In other words, if we, rather than God, are responsible for being in Christ, we can also take ourselves out of Christ.
These five objections to the Reformed theology of the Dutch church were considered at a synod held at Dordt in the early seventeenth century, and all five were repudiated by the theologians of Holland. What started as five points of objection to the established religion of Holland, having been denied point by point, resulted then in the “five points of Calvinism:” which would be total depravity (radical fallen-ness), unconditional election, limited or definite atonement (also called particular redemption), irresistible grace (or the effectual calling) and the perseverance (or preservation) of the saints (saved).
What is the appeal, then, of Reformed theology? Why did I change my theology and embrace it? Let me list five of my reasons:
1. Reformed theology is Biblical. It has stood the test of time and the scrutiny of countless Bible scholars through the years. No one has been able to offer repudiation based on Holy Scripture. All attempts that I have encountered through the years are based on philosophical argument and not Biblical exegesis. It is, in my understanding and belief, the most complete and accurate systematic statement of the theology of the Bible ever devised by theologians. (While Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica is as extensive and complete as John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, and essentially in agreement with it on most points, Aquinas based his conclusions on Aristotelian dialectical reasoning…he said he wanted to reach the conclusions of Augustine with the methodology of Aristotle…Calvin’s is based on textual Biblical exegesis.)
2. Reformed theology is consistent with itself. My mind has difficulty with inconsistencies. Arminianism is inconsistent, for it claims that we are saved by God’s grace, and yet at the bottom it is because of our choice. We are saved because Jesus died for us on the cross, they say, yet that death is not sufficient in and of itself. Man is fallen and dead in sin, yet he can still make a free-will choice for Christ, which is not only a good work but arguably the best work man can make. Yet they also teach we are not saved by good works. They teach that they give all glory to God, and yet ultimately we are the ones who have taken the decisive step. Reformed theology follows the purpose of God through the various covenants that he made with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and Christ in a smooth, flowing pattern, with God adding additional revelation at every juncture until culmination in Christ. Man’s sin is met with God’s grace. Man’s inability with God’s ability. I recall one student telling me that the problem she had with me was that what I believed was too rational! I am still trying to process that statement. (No Reformed person believes for a moment that one is not saved because he does not accept Reformed theology and is an Arminian. We do speak of the “happy inconsistencies” of Arminianism. The Bible teaches that whoever puts his faith in Christ is saved, not whoever has an accurate understanding of theology. Pelagians however, who trust in their own good works for their salvation, need to realize that they are on very shaky ground.)
3. Reformed theology is true to reality. I can remember a student I met when I first came to Lipscomb. I was expecting to find students who “had it all together” now that I was teaching at a school that was associated with my church. This student, brought up Church of Christ, shocked me when he said that he would never go to church again. I asked him why. He told me about his parents who fought continually and whose lives were completely messed up. But he said they always went to church, and as soon as they got out of the car, they were Mr. and Mrs. Perfect Christian. In legalistic churches there is no allowance for messing up, so there must always be the pretense of being pious. I heard more and more about people serving communion of Sunday who had been involved in all kinds of sin on Friday and Saturday, but they could never admit that, because they would be looked down on. After all, we were saved only if we were “obedient.” Reformed theology faces head on our brokenness, our sin, our fallen state, admits it, confesses it, and looks to Christ for pardon. It conforms to the reality of who we are, the world we live in, and our own weaknesses and inabilities. We are allowed to be ourselves and take off our mask of hypocrisy. We are all sinners who come to Christ for pardon, forgiveness and deliverance. I recall a good friend and former student who would come in my office and say, “Dr. Lawrence, I was in my sin over the weekend.” That’s who we are: sinners, but we are sinners who know that we sinners and seek from Christ not only the grace to receive pardon but the grace to live more and more Christ-like lives.
4. Reformed theology is a tree that bears good fruit. Jesus said that a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Why do I say it is a good tree? It shows us how much God has loved us, even before he created the world, and even forever, from eternity past to eternity to come. We shall never be able to do anything to cause God to love us less, and there is nothing we can do to make him love us more. This realization is empowering! I have had students tell me that understanding the doctrine of predestination actually enabled them to overcome drugs. Some have said that knowing their own sin saved their marriages. Others have said that they were humbled. One very tall student stood in the doorway to my office once trembling, and he said that he had never known anything so humbling. His father thanked me for teaching his son these doctrines, which he admitted he did not himself accept. However, he said that his son was only lukewarm to the Christian faith before and was now on fire! People find great joy in the grace of God and the assurance of their salvation, and this joy never diminishes. I remember studying with one young man who was co-teacher of a Sunday school class with me in an Arminian church. As we looked at 2 Tim. 1:9, he was amazed and thanked me for showing me how much God loved him. I have asked students if understanding that God loves them so much and that the work of Christ on their behalf is so complete that they shall never lose their salvation would cause them to want to go out and sin. I can remember that one of the objections to the doctrine of the eternal security of the believer or God’s promise to preserve his people to everlasting life (often referred to as “once saved, always saved”) was that it would be an inducement to sin with impunity. So the answer I received without exception was that, on the contrary, understanding their eternal security in Christ gave them motivation to live a holy life to God’s glory. As one young person said, “How can I spit in the face of a God who loves me that much?” Well put!
5. Reformed theology is the consensus of the ages. The concepts of God’s sovereignty, our sin, God’s grace, and the outworking of his eternal purpose in the Messiah form the constant theme of the Bible and its writers and of Christian theology through the years. It is often thought that Luther, Melancthon, Zwingli, Bucer, Calvin and other reformers of the sixteenth century simply dreamed up this new theological approach. On the contrary, these concepts were accepted by men and women of God through the years. Steven Lawson has done a great service to Christian scholarship in his series on the Foundations of the Faith. In his first volume, A Long Line of Godly Men, he shows the consistency of doctrinal thought in writers of the Bible, leaders of God’s people, prophets, and apostles. He is continuing his study through Christian history. Having taught this subject myself, I know of the theological thought of medieval scholars in the universities and monasteries. There is a consistent pattern of thought: salvation by grace. Foremost among scholars in the West is St. Augustine of Hippo who emphasized God’s sovereign purpose in election and salvation by grace alone basing his conclusions on Paul’s writings. St. Anselm of Canterbury defined the atonement of Christ as a satisfaction of God’s justice and even, if we read Cur Deus Homo carefully, taught particular redemption. Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter Lombard, Gregory of Rimini, and Duns Scotus are only a few of the great scholars who subscribed to the consensus of grace including divine election. Then came John Wycliffe and John Hus as precursors of the Reformation. Yes, there were the dissenters like the British monk Pelagius who believed that man was born neutral, that Adam’s sin affected only him, and man’s salvation the result of his free choice and his own works, and John Cassian who took a midway position between him and Augustine with his doctrine of the preserved island of righteousness (Semi-Pelagianism), but the majority held to the belief that we are saved by grace. Bernard of Clairvaux’s favorite passage was Titus 3:4-5 (“But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit”). It was for Martin Luther to define the doctrine of forensic justification by faith that would bring to completion the essentials of Christian theology. And yet, there is always room for progress and growth in understanding. The Reformers had an expression: Semper Reformanda, or always reforming. I think of John Owen’s definitive work on the atonement in The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, of the work of Jonathan Edwards as well as the contributions of other Puritan scholars and theologians to this day.
We have so far looked at the five distinctive doctrines of Reformed theology and my five reasons for accepting it. As the number five seems to have some significance for us, let me now include another summation in five terms, what we call the five solas of the Reformed faith. Arminians and Pelagians ultimately have a complex and inconsistent theology and have been known to ridicule the simplicity of Reformed theology. Yet there is simplicity in God that is both profound and awesome while at the same time all encompassing, profound and complex. So what are the five solas?
1. Sola Gratia: salvation is by grace alone. (“For it is by grace that you are saved… Eph. 2:8)
2. Soli fide: salvation is through faith alone. (“For it is by grace that you are saved by faith and this [faith] not of yourselves for it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast” Eph. 2:8-9).
3. Solo Christo: salvation is in Christ alone. (“I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me” John 14:6).
4. Sola Scriptura: Salvation is according to Scripture alone. (“All scripture is breathed out by God and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work” 2 Tim. 3:16-17.)
5. Soli Deo Gloria, to God alone may be all the glory. (“To him be glory forever” Rom. 11:36…”to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever, Amen.” Eph. 3:21.)
Before concluding this discussion on what being Reformed is, I want to include a remark made to me a few years ago by Frank Brock, then president of Covenant College in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I had gone there to meet with Dr. Brock, and he took me on a tour of the campus. As we were walking, he said that he always envisioned being Reformed in three categories: first, accurate doctrine or theology, as we have discussed above. Second, Christian piety, or living the Christian life as best as God grants us the grace to do so, and third, a Christian world view.
Paul said that we are saved by grace through faith not of ourselves, as we saw above. But he goes on to say in verse 10 that even though our salvation is not of works, yet we are created in Christ unto good works to which God has appointed us to walk in. God’s purpose for our lives involves personal righteousness which, although never perfect in this life, ever develops under the guidance of the Holy Spirit (Rom. 12:1-2, 2 Cor. 3:18, Rom. 8:29, Matt. 5:16, and many other scriptures.) Good works do not justify us, but no one who is justified can continue in a life of unrepentant sin without obedience to God. John says that the person born of God cannot continue in sin (1 John 3:9). Christian piety, which includes love, humility, kindness, compassion, meekness and other manifestations of the heart and character of Christ (what Paul describes in Gal. 5:22-24 as the fruit of the Spirit), is an integral part of the Reformed faith and what it means to be Reformed. It is an integral part of what it means to be a Christian, but Reformed Christians are always conscious of the fact that all they do is through Christ (Phil 4:13), not themselves, that they are enabled by Christ to serve him (Phil. 2:12-13), that apart from him we can do nothing (John 15:5), and all is to be done to the glory of God (1 Cor. 10:31). In this view there is no room for pride or self-glory (Gal. 6:14, Eph. 2:9).
Finally, there is a world view. Calvin began his theology with creation, one of the key points that separated him from Luther who began with redemption. Reformed theology encompasses all of life for all time. Nothing is insignificant. No person is meaningless. Everything has its place in a universe governed by a sovereign God according to an eternal purpose, from eternity past, through all of time to eternity future. We see everything as it comes from God and as it relates to God. We do all to the glory of God. From infancy to the grave, from the time we get up to the time we retire, it is that God is all in all in our lives. We see everything, as my good friend (Bob Love, founder and first chairman of the board of Wichita Collegiate School) once said, through a filter of faith!
Once again, as I said at the end of the first blog, I thank you for persevering to the end. If you are interested, my next blog will tell my story of my own journey in grace.
To Him be all glory!
-David Lawrence
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