I Have no Faith in Lizards

I am kind of stuck, with regard to new writing projects. That is a rare situation for me. I have been blessed with an ability to generate ideas prolifically, and I manage to get up almost every day and write something I’m pleased with, but for a while now, I have been idling.

I would like to do something worthwhile with my time. Humor is fun, but I wouldn’t say I’m improving the universe with it. If I could come up with something useful to a Christian audience, I’d like to do it, but ideas like that don’t fall in your lap three times a day. And there are so many people doing Christian writing well; I don’t think I’m needed. Humor is different. Virtually nobody does it well. Maybe five people in the US. Oddly, humor is still very hard to sell to publishers. Maybe it would be easier to sell serious writing, in spite of the law of supply and demand.

I considered trying Christian humor. I foresee two problems. First of all, who would publish it? It’s very easy to get yourself in trouble when you’re a humorist, by writing things that turn out to offend people. Inadvertently crossing the line must be much easier when you write Christian humor, and I have to wonder if editors have the stomach for dealing with the problem. Second, it would be a harder thing to write, because I would have to go over and over it, looking for things like doctrinal and factual errors. I would have to write it with references sitting in front of me, and it would be best if everything were run by a minister before going to print. Sounds like a nightmare to me. I’d have to find someone willing to read this junk, and then I’d have to deal with him before publication.

Maybe it would work for books. A column would require weekly or monthly interaction, but books would work out to two or three times a year, which would be easier to manage. Imagine trying to write a weekly column another person has to review before publication. You’d kill four days every week, trying to get it ready, emailing back and forth.

Yesterday at church, the pastor mentioned Charles Templeton, a person I had never heard of. Templeton used to be one of America’s greatest evangelists. As an adult, he had “a religious experience,” and he became a Christian. I don’t know what kind of experience he had; I can’t find a description of it. He toured the country with Billy Graham, filling football stadiums with believers. Later on, he started to have doubts. At one point, he watched a newsreel of Holocaust victims and decided he could not believe a loving God existed. He ended up studying theology at Princeton, which is a bit like studying stripping at a yeshiva, and he eventually proclaimed himself an agnostic. He turned hostile toward Christianity and devoted a lot of energy to attacking it. Funny thing for an agnostic to do; maybe he was unclear on the definition of the term.

What a wretched story. How does a thing like that happen to a person? How does a person know God and then decide God doesn’t exist? My best guess: he never knew God to begin with, and instead of learning to use God’s power and guidance, he had a forced ministry based on his own desires and efforts.

The Holy Spirit is the biggest difference between effective believers and believers who fail. The Apostle Peter is the evidence many people cite. Before being baptized in the Spirit, Peter was a worldly disciple who sought glory for himself, he was not reliable enough to stay awake for an hour while Jesus prayed in Gethsemane, and he didn’t have the courage to stay with Jesus after he was taken captive. He was not impressive by any standard. After the Spirit entered him, he wrote wonderful inspired scripture about the way in which a Christian is supposed to grow and develop, and he accepted crucifixion instead of renouncing his faith. He became an amazing person. A marvel.

My guess is that Templeton never experienced the baptism, and that he did his best with his limited human abilities. When his little human brain told him God existed, he believed. When it could not generate the faith to overcome doubt, he ceased believing. A Christian who hasn’t been baptized with the Holy Spirit is like an electric toothbrush that never gets recharged. He has no external power source to sustain him.

Many people think every Christian is baptized with the Holy Spirit immediately upon believing or being baptized with water, but that didn’t happen to the disciples or to other believers in their time, and two millennia of history show no evidence that it happens, generally. On the contrary; the general rule is that Christians are not fundamentally changed by belief alone. They retain their old nature, although many fight to subdue it. They don’t understand scripture any better than nonbelievers; they get little insight from God. They don’t have a greater capacity for faith. They don’t become prophets. They don’t exhibit the character improvements known as the fruit of the spirit. They develop truly silly ideas about God.

Sincere Christians raped and pillaged during the Crusades. They turned Jews over to the Nazis. They exterminated the Indians. They participated in the slave trade. I find it hard to believe that these people had experienced anything resembling the infilling of the Holy Spirit. You can have the baptism and still sin, but you aren’t likely to live like a vicious, ignorant animal, as millions of Christians have. It seems pretty clear that while you can receive the baptism simultaneously with salvation, it is a separate thing, and you don’t get it automatically. And being baptized “in the name” of the spirit is not the same thing. It’s not even equivalent grammatically. If it were the same thing, then being baptized in the name of all three parts of the trinity would mean you have been “baptized with the Father” and “baptized with the Son” as well as with the Holy Spirit. And of course, that is not what happens. Those baptisms don’t exist; I just made them up.

I think people who deny that the baptism is a separate item are sometimes trying to excuse the poor spiritual condition of their denominations. “Not Invented Here” is the phrase. If it didn’t come to their church first, it must be wrong, because surely God would give all the good stuff to the best and only correct denomination. And admitting you’re not full of the spirit, and that lots of other people in the one perfect denomination are not…that’s just unthinkable!

Human effort is great, but if it were sufficient to make you an effective Christian, the baptism of the spirit would never have been provided. The Bible is full of references to God helping us to grow from within. Helping us to obey. Giving us faith. Illuminating the scriptures so we understand them correctly. We still have free will, but he helps us to want better things, and he gives us the strength to do what our better inclinations tell us to do. You can find it in both testaments.

Spirit-filled believers allowed the Romans to kill them and turn them into torches to light Nero’s gardens; that is how brave and full of faith they were. Charles Templeton couldn’t even withstand a newsreel. My best guess is, he was limited to his own strength, and he was doing his own will. He built his house on sand.

I have seen too much, not to believe. The obstacles to my faith are vastly outweighed. Templeton got all excited by the fossil record. That’s great, but when I put my reasons for believing on one side of the scale and the fossil record on the other, the fossils don’t amount to diddly. We live in a universe created in a series of miracles. I have seen supernatural phenomena with my own eyes, so I have ample reason to find the creation story plausible. If the supernatural exists, there is no reason not to believe that God can create space and matter and do what he wants with them. There is no reason to think other spirits can’t manipulate matter; they did it to the staffs of the magicians when Moses confronted Pharaoh. Who can say ancient physical evidence is irrefutible or even trustworthy, in a universe where physical laws are clearly trumped by supernatural forces? I can’t see giving up a dramatically improved life and the assurance of a better life to come, in exchange for a cold, unfulfilling life of depravity and the remarkable belief that God’s existence is disproven by the bones of a dead lizard.

The Templeton story made me very sad. It is frustrating to read about someone discarding something beautiful and precious and vital. And to learn that he spent the latter part of his life encouraging other people to do the same thing is even worse.