Robert M. Price : Can We Still Teach Biblical Moral Values?

Can We Still Teach Biblical Moral Values?

Robert M. Price

From the 1963 Friends Home Service Committee report, Towards a Quaker View of Sex, up to 1991's Presbyterian working document, Keeping Body and Soul Together: Sexuality, Spirituality, and Social Justice, Protestant denominations have been agonizing like Hamlet over what course of action (or inaction) they should urge on their members--if indeed that is the point of such encyclicals. Are they perhaps public relations documents? To show how relevant the church is to those who might not otherwise consider joining up? "Here's what we do and do not stand for." In this case they are descriptive documents. But then of course they are not what they're supposed to be, since every one of these liberalizing charters of sexual ethics is hotly contested, fiercely disputed by majority or large minority caucuses who start planning a schism. No one can draft a statement that speaks for all factions on a question like sex.

But if not descriptive, are such statements after all prescriptive? Are they supposed to provide a basis on which clergy are dutifully to catechize their flocks, like a new sauce formula handed down to the franchises by the head office of a fast food chain? Personally, I do not relish the role of clergyman as party hack, as dutiful flunky. Nor do I relish the notion of a congregation as a flock of docile sheep who will imbibe a pastor's or a denominational committee's opinions without a bleat. If we think Christian education is a matter of telling church members what to think, we are giving them the most pernicious miseducation they could get: indoctrination and the stifling of moral autonomy. But the issues the denominational commissions are wrestling with are quite real and deserve some serious attention.

Biblical Morality

Conservative spokespersons in churchly debates over sexual morality are in the habit of saying, as one Presbyterian did, "What's at stake is the very identity and character of [our] church, which from the beginning has held the Scriptures as the sole authority of our faith and practice." They see the proposals of their more liberal coreligionists as a dangerous slippage from what they regard as the "eternal verities" of God's Word. The whole problem we face is that we are surfing, precariously balanced, on the crest of a wave of cultural change. But the Bible provides no fixed lighthouse for us because we can trace a similar process of change within it. In the early stages polygamy and casual divorce were all right. Later these allowances are qualified. The Patriarch Abraham could marry his half-sister. Leviticus outlaws this. Adultery did not exclude having concubines, or possibly, even visiting prostitutes. It just meant not having sex with one's neighbor's spouse. This has changed in the New Testament period. Unlike the Old Testament legislators, Jesus seems to have considered divorce illicit, though whether he was just saying it was tragic or actually trying to put a stop to it, New Testament interpreters cannot agree. Besides, Matthew (6:32; 19:3-9) differs from Mark (10:2-9) and Luke (16:18) as to just what Jesus said on the issue. So we have both change and exegetical ambiguity in the text. Where, pray tell, are the eternal verities?

One might contend that there are eternal, transcultural norms floating somewhere above the text of the Bible, that they are manifest in the text only in culturally-conditioned forms, and that it is the job of the biblical interpreter to sniff out the transcultural principles and apply them in our day, in appropriate, culturally adapted garb. Charles Kraft, missionary anthropologist at Fuller Seminary, makes a good go of it in his Christianity in Culture. But note that, this way, it's actually some supposed conceptual entity outside the text, not the text itself, that wears the mantle of "biblical authority" (a perfect example of the "logocentric fallacy" attacked by Derrida).

And there is a further irony. If one goes this route, the route of sophisticated and casuistical hermeneutics, one will be playing precisely the game the liberal caucuses are playing. Once one goes this route, there simply can be no more talk about having the "clear teaching of the Bible" on one's side. A case in point: I marvel at the arrogance or the naiveté of some Pro-Life advocates who shout that the Bible condemns abortion, a claim some Pro-Choicers must accept, since a group of them burned some Bibles in a recent demonstration. But in fact the issue never even comes up in the Bible! One may think it is a valid inference from "Thou shalt do no murder," but then one is doing cross-cultural hermeneutics--in other words, fancy footwork. Just like one's "Bible-twisting" opponents.

Property Rights and Wrongs

Another factor, even more important, is that biblical sexual norms are based on quite different assumptions than the bases of our moral reasoning, whether we are fundamentalists or liberals. It seems that the biblical concern for virginity before marriage and fidelity within marriage, the cornerstones of the traditional Christian sex ethic, was mainly a matter of male property rights. Note that Exodus 20:17 includes a man's wife with his property inventory as that which must not be coveted by another man, the commandments being issued only to men. For David to commit adultery with Bathsheba is to steal Uriah's property. As if I were to sneak into your den and use your VCR every time I saw you leave your house.

In Exodus 22:16-17 we read these edifying words: "If a man seduces a virgin who is not betrothed, and lies with her, he shall give the marriage present for her, and make her his wife. If her father utterly refuses to give her to him, he shall pay money equivalent to the marriage present for virgins." Just whom is this law meant to protect? Not the hapless woman, but her father, who must not be cheated out of the bride price he was entitled to for the commodity of his virgin daughter. The seducer is not entitled to free sexual favors. He must pay for the virginity he has taken--from the woman's father! He is not to be left holding the bag: deprived of the bride price he had hoped to receive and stuck now with unsalable "used goods"!

In the New Testament period the sexual property idea had been extended to both partners: "The husband should give to her wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not rule over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does" (1 Corinthians 7:3-4). Whether this egalitarian balance had been struck already in Judaism or whether it was a Christian innovation, I do not think anyone knows.

Moral and Ritual Purity

Another presupposition of biblical (i.e., ancient Israelite and Christian) sex mores was the notion of purity and defilement. This is a difficult thing to explain. It is not really moral, but rather ritual degradation. As anthropologist Mary Douglas ("The Abominations of Leviticus", in her Purity and Danger) has ably shown, the purity laws of Leviticus, like those of other cultures, are attempts to safeguard the categorical boundary-markers set up by the society. The categories of reality set up long ago by a society dictate what is pure and impure, in terms of food, sex, intermarriage, worship, etc. Douglas argues, quite cogently I think, that this is why the ancient Israelite laws forbade pork. They had never heard of Trichinosis; the trouble with pigs was that they were not true cattle since they did not chew the cud, even though they had cloven hooves. True cattle, which one could eat, did both. Why no shellfish? They were neither fish nor fowl. Well, not real fish anyway; there was something weird about them: they lived in the sea, but they lacked fins and scales. They were not true to type, fell between the cracks, and thus they were off limits.

Similarly, there could not be crossings of lines between groups of potential sexual partners unless they were legitimated (made pure) with appropriate rites of passage. Marriage allowed for the crossing into sexual life, but even so, sexual intercourse rendered one temporarily "unclean." This did not mean it was immoral, as some early Christian theologians thought. Quite the contrary. It had nothing to do with morality. The biblical people had a pretty robust approval of sexuality. Ritual impurity was the issue.

And some lines between potential sexual partners could never be crossed: that between human and animal, and, in some historical periods, that between Israelite and non-Israelite. On the other hand, sexual contact did have to be a crossing of lines: hence the prohibition of incest (within the lines of the family circle) and homosexuality (within the same gender).

Some degrees of impurity were fairly trivial; they did not count any more when the sun set. Others were so weighty that they incurred capital punishment. Was it immoral for a man to lie with a beast? No, it was rather an "abomination," literally, a mixing, a gross defilement that could not be harbored within Israel.

Early Christianity reshuffled the categories of purity and impurity, mainly because it rapidly became a Gentile movement, shedding traditional Jewish mores as it assimilated new Hellenistic ones. But they seem not to have eliminated purity rules per se. Mark says Jesus eliminated food purity laws (7:19). Matthew thought he hadn't and so eliminated this statement from Mark (Matthew 15:17), but even Matthew dropped the rule that eating without washing one's hands incurred ritual impurity (15:20). Does the story of Jesus blessing the (impure) woman with the issue of blood (Mark 6:24-34) mean he rejected sexual purity laws? Hardly! No more than his allowing the hungry to glean on the Sabbath meant he disdained the Sabbath (Mark 2:23-27). His point rather seems to have been that human need takes precedence over such laws in individual cases. Also, note the anxiety of Corinthian spouses with pagan partners over whether their children were "holy" (1 Corinthians 7:14). Paul replies that they are, and so is the pagan spouse, thanks to his or her attachment to the Christian. He is far from throwing out the whole distinction.

These categories seem strange to us, but I think it is safe to say that we have our own culturally defined categories of purity and defilement as well. For instance, why is it a joke that certain restaurants might chop up cat meat for supper? Why would you be disgusted to find dog on the menu? Why do most Americans think it is revolting to eat bugs, though grubs and chocolate-covered ants are a delicacy in some cultures? Why will you eat a lobster as a rare treat yet turn green (and not with envy) if you see someone eat a roach? Isn't that lobster pretty much a kissing cousin of the loathsome bug you spray to death? What counts as food varies from culture to culture, and we all regard the animals not considered food in our culture as somehow disgusting to eat. It is degrading to eat them but hardly immoral.

Why is it that anything that comes out of the body is repugnant once it's out? It has crossed a boundary it cannot recross. If it does one will be defiled. But has one done anything immoral? Of course not. Moral guilt or outrage is not the source of the disgust one feels. It is impurity that one cringes from. What I am getting at is that in the Bible sexual transgressions are at least as much and as often purity transgressions as moral ones.

Honor and Shame

Thirdly, biblical sex laws have more to do with honor and shame than with good and evil, morality and guilt. Studies of Mediterranean peasant sociology tell us that it was incumbent upon an ancient Mediterranean man to prove his virility by fathering many children, and probably also by deflowering as many virgins as he could get away with. Also by having as many wives as he could afford (hence the great honor attached to Solomon's 700 wives and 300 concubines; they attested, supposedly, his great sexual prowess). The more wives, children, sexual conquests a man could boast, the greater the esteem or honor he had earned in the eyes of his fellows.

This business of male honor also explains, I think, why the woman was always blamed for a childless marriage. For the man to be at fault was unthinkable. In some cultures a shaman or itinerant holy man was brought in to miraculously grant the "barren" woman fertility. Probably in such cases, like Sarah and other recipients of angelic annunciations, what really happened was that the woman was simply impregnated by a man (the holy man or "angel") who was not sterile like her husband. (See M.J. Field, Angels and Ministers of Grace.)

The honorable behavior of the woman was just the reverse of the man's. It was her duty to remain sexually inviolate except for her husband--because he owned her! He had to be on the watch for sly rogues (like himself!) who could score honor points by seducing his virgin daughter or sister (remember the vengeance Simeon and Levi exacted on Shechem for the rape of Dinah!) or his wife.

Hence the double standard. Only they perceived no inconsistency: it was a single standard designed around the male competition for honor. The sexual purity of women was a "limited good" in the society, and so competition for male honor was like a game of Capture the Flag, with the sexual honor and chastity of the women as the flag. (On all this, see Bruce J. Malina, The New Testament World: Insights From Cultural Anthropology and L. William Countryman, Dirt, Greed & Sex.) The honor of the woman was itself simply a function of her value as her husband's or father's property: she was a more valuable commodity if her honor were intact, like a collectible doll still in the original box.

In all this what was at stake was by no means morality! Rather it was all a matter of points. Status! If one had a lot of it, one had honor. If a man had lost the limited good of his wife's chastity or if a woman lost it, he or she was shamed. But that's not the same thing as moral guilt.

By the same token, prostitutes were not sinful; they were shameful--or rather shameless: so heedless of shame/honor distinctions that they were forced to the margins of society. They did not play the game everyone else played, so they had to sit on the sidelines. (Think of Belle Watlin in Gone With the Wind; she is a highly moral character yet dares not show her face in public. She bears shame but not guilt.)

What are we to make of all this if we are concerned to derive sexual instruction from the Bible? We might be tempted to conclude that the Bible can be no help to us since it is not really talking about sexual morality in our sense at all. True, it isn't. But that hardly means it is of no help.

Over the years I have read and heard a good many discussions by Christian moralists on why premarital sex is supposed to be wrong, and I have always been surprised at how weak the arguments were. It seemed like the worst kind of special pleading. I now think this is because these moralists were trying to make something into an ethical matter that belonged to a completely different realm of discourse: that of property, purity, and honor. One example: readers are told that it is wrong to live together without getting married because the law requires a marriage license; thus, since Christians are supposed to obey the secular authorities (Romans 13), premarital sex is immoral! Pretty contrived, to my way of thinking. But what has been dimly perceived here is that, far from being a moral matter, it is really a question of honor, of having one's sexual union legitimated by public recognition.

It ought to go without saying that some premarital sexual encounters would be immoral in the full sense, say, if they involved deception ("Sure, I'll marry you, baby!"), manipulation, or exploitation. But it would be the dishonesty, not the sexuality, of the act that would make it immoral. Similarly, we have a strong moral reason for not committing adultery. Insofar as spouses have pledged their exclusive sexual fidelity to each other, adultery is the violation of a trust. Thus it is wrong, morally wrong in the full sense. (The ambiguous situation of so-called "open marriages," on the other hand, is a more difficult matter. We seem there to be verging on a multiple-spouse marriage, such as is practiced in some cultures.)

"Sin" Versus "Wrong"

I believe we have traditionally been talking about shame and honor, purity and impurity, and even property rights, when we imagined we were talking about morality. Before the cultural revolution of the 60's it worked pretty well, and it still may work. Really, the offensive thing about the biblical mores I have just discussed was the one-sidedness of them. They were all outrageously biased toward the man. But the notions of sexual property, purity, and honor are in their own right by no means to be despised, nor sexist.

Mothers still warn daughters that they should not give away their sexual favors for free. They should not come to be known as "cheap," a significant choice of words. They should hold out for a commitment to marriage to test the professions of love on the part of a teenage Lothario in heat. Here is the use of the property analogy, but note that the woman's sexuality is her own property. By being taught chastity, she is being taught to value her own property. Not a bad idea. And not oppressive. Parents tell daughters not to have sex casually lest they be regarded as "sluts," "'ho's," "bad girls," etc. If she heeds mom's advice she will have given up easy popularity (= esteem without honor) with boys in exchange for the superior good of honor among her peers. This still seems not a bad way of looking at it.

What about young men? Of course their peers still deem wide sexual activity as a badge of honor. Nothing has changed in that respect. But as Christians trying to educate our youth, we must urge upon our young men the Pauline maxim of not causing one's brother, or in this case one's sister, to stumble into sin (1 Corinthians 8:9-13; Romans 14:13-15). That is, if one's honor in the eyes of one's male peers requires one's dishonoring women by initiating premarital sex with them, then as a Christian one will resolve to trade honor "before men" for honor unseen by them but visible to one's Father in heaven who sees what is in secret. Of course this is exactly the trade-off Jesus commends in the Sermon on the Mount: honor is good, but honor from God is more valuable than honor from men, and so it is worth having less of the latter if in exchange one will gain more of the former (Matthew 6:1-6,16-18; John 5:44). And again, in all this we are still talking in terms of honor, not morality!

I have now tried to show how sexual conduct remains as it was, a matter of property and honor. But what about purity? Here is perhaps my most controversial proposal. I think that premarital sex, viewed within traditional Christian values, counts not really as a wrong, but rather as a sin. It is a ritual transgression, not a moral one. Let us remind ourselves again of the difference. There are some biblical boundaries which one transgresses without moral stain, such as food laws, but with ritual consequences. If unclean food rendered one impure, one could not approach the altar for the duration. Paul very clearly states that there is nothing immoral about eating meat offered to idols (unless one knows it will scandalize someone else), but as a ritual offense it may be deadly! He says that such eating at the altar of demons bars one from the Table of Christ (1 Corinthians 10:14-21)--just like in Leviticus! Ritual impurity, not moral, is in question.

Why, after all, do we have two different words, "sin" and "wrong"? What is the difference? A wrong may be done to a fellow human being, but a sin is perpetrated uniquely God-ward. One cannot injure God or wrong him. But certain acts cut one off from his holy presence. They are ritual in nature, and we call them sins. The great insight of the Prophets was that morally wrong acts against men and women are also counted as sins. This was the great moralization of the Holy that Rudolf Otto chronicled (The Idea of the Holy). But that hardly means immoral acts are simply the same thing as sins. It means that moral transgressions separate their doer from God as surely as ritual transgressions.

But the conversion does not work both ways: though God counts all moral wrongs as unholy, he does not necessarily count all ritually unclean acts as morally wrong. Otherwise, how could Paul have declared many of the ancient scriptural taboos defunct in the new dispensation of Christ? He certainly did not think morality had changed! He still quotes scripture with enthusiasm when it comes to morality. But kosher laws? Circumcision? Holy days? Take them or leave them, says the Apostle to the Gentiles.

Back to sex. I believe that the hushed tones of condemnation and all the talk of "stain" with which Christians have surrounded premarital sex shows that something other than morality was involved. There is a sense of defilement, of ritual uncleanness. Notice that Paul compares sexual transgressions to defiling a temple, a ritual infraction, in 1 Corinthians 6:16-19 (the word "immorality" in the Revised Standard Version begs the question; the Greek is porneia, "prostitution").

Once a friend told me that he taught Sunday School in the strict fundamentalist church he attended, but would do nothing of a more pastoral nature. He felt he could not bring himself to control his sexual behavior. He slept around. He felt that this behavior barred him from any form of ministry other than strict information dispensing. Why did he not flee the church with a bad conscience? Or, if he felt he was in the right, why did he not feel such a deep moral contradiction that he rejected the Christian ethic? For this reason, many gay Christians have felt they had to leave the church. I think my friend had implicitly understood that he was rendered not morally guilty but ritually unclean. He could not approach the altar as a priest, so to speak, as long as he engaged in ritually impure behavior. But he felt generally that he belonged, because he felt no real moral conflict.

And one often hears of evangelical singles who quietly disregard the ban on premarital sex just as Catholic couples disdain the decrees of their church not to use birth control. Deep down they feel it is not wrong, but neither would they repudiate the teaching of their church. They have committed a sin but done nothing morally wrong. Some years ago a group of Protestant seminarians sent a letter to Playboy admitting, apparently without much guilt, that, yes, they and their fiancés had engaged in premarital sex. Oh, sure, it was sin, but it wasn't wrong. I am making explicit what was implicit in the actions of these people. As in the Bible, premarital sex is a ritual purity issue, not a moral one. Transgression is sin, and sin ought to be avoided. Sin is no light matter, but it can be forgiven.

Practically speaking, what difference does this distinction make? Just this: as long as we make premarital sex a moral wrong, we can put forth no cogent reason to avoid it. And then people will think there is no reason to avoid it. But if we come clean and admit there is nothing immoral about it, that it is not in the same league with stealing or lying, but that it is ritually, religiously wrong, like blasphemy or approaching the eucharist without a meditative spirit, we can inculcate among Christian youth an appropriate and honest conscience about it.

Brazen New World

I have argued that the strange-seeming mores of the Bible, stripped of their male chauvinism, can still provide a workable guide for Christian sexual conduct. But even in this moment, I am aware of the flood waters of cultural change eroding the ground beneath my feet. The writers of the denominational ethics reports I mentioned at the start may be saying precisely that cultural change is happening so fast that the very social conventions which give categories of shame, boundary transgression, etc., their meaning are rapidly fading, to be replaced by others.

Many people are coming to see sexuality not as a thing one possesses and must guard, but rather simply as a pleasant biological action, like kissing. For them it is simply not a question of property. That seems as absurd to them as when we used to warn young men that if they masturbated they would prematurely expend their energy and virility, as if they had only so much of it. (See Vern Bullough and Bonnie Bullough, Sin, Sickness, and Sanity: A History of Sexual Attitudes.)

If no one any more believes that sex is more than recreational, then no one is going to look down on you for your sexual escapades during Spring Break. It is apparently no longer regarded as shameful behavior. And in our rationalistic, bare-bones Protestantism which, as Durkheim said, has "disenchanted the world," where no one believes in any wrong but moral wrong, where holiness has become a synonym for morality, if we cannot show premarital sex is wrong, we cannot say it is sin either. The distinction I have argued will just go out the window.

Our sexual mores are in many ways just reflections of social convention and consensus. This was no less true in the Bible, as we have seen. Social assumptions move beneath us like the tectonic plates. Their motion is slow but irresistible. We have to live on the continents that are shifting; there are no others that stand still. Maybe the framers of the Quaker, Presbyterian, and other documents have seen that. Maybe they are looking further ahead than I am.

I suspect that before long it will become apparent that the only way to maintain more traditional Christian sex mores in a society indifferent to them is to construct a religious ghetto-existence like the Amish or the Hasidim or the Catholic Charismatics in Ann Arbor. Our ethic will be an increasingly cultic one, not a matter of "doing what is right in the sight of all" (Romans 12:17). One day shunning premarital sex is going to seem as esoteric a rule as the Jehovah's Witnesses' banning of blood transfusions. Perhaps that day has come. That's what the writers of those denominational sex-creeds are telling us.

Christianity changes as culture changes. This must be so even if we view our religion as counter-cultural. It must move with the culture to some extent if it is to be in a position to counter it! The Amish make little impact on the world around them; the Quakers, in their quiet way, do. The Amish are not willing to budge; the Quakers are. These are our options.

I have tried to show how the biblical values of sexual property, honor, and purity may be carried over into Christian sexuality today, but those values are inherently no more eternal than the various biblical laws based on them, many of which we reject. Who knows what Christian sexual mores will look like in the brave new world that is ever around the corner? The writer of Leviticus could never have anticipated Paul, nor could Paul have foreseen the evangelical sex manuals like Designed for Pleasure, much less Bishop Spong's Living in Sin? and Joseph Fletcher's Situation Ethics.

Maybe our faith should be less a fearful clinging to the taboos of the past than a trust that future generations of Christians will use the same creative wisdom Christians have (sometimes) used in the past. "Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls. And the Master is able to make him stand" (Romans 14:4).

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Robert M. Price : If You Dislike Christianity, You'll Hate Buddhism!

If You Dislike Christianity,
You'll Hate Buddhism!

Robert M. Price

As a teacher of comparative Religion courses over many years, I have come to notice some surprising and even paradoxical things. It is no surprise to me when certain students keep their minds as closed as a clenched fist because their fundamentalist upbringing demands it. I know to expect it, especially since I felt that way myself when I was their age. I try not to let it rest that way, though. I have no trouble respecting various points of view, because I have no problem respecting individuals as persons, and their most intimate beliefs are a part of them. I think Rousseau had the same thing in mind when he observed that one cannot live in harmony with one's neighbor so long as one really believes one's neighbor is damned to Hell. But accepting their belief insofar as they cherish it is another thing than accepting it as on a par with other options when the belief has nothing going for it, no leg to stand on. For instance a servant of truth simply cannot dignify Creationism by treating it as a scientific alternative deserving equal time in the class room. Anyone who knows the first thing about scientific method and the nature of theorizing knows Creationism does not belong in the game. You don't enter a horse in a dog race. Thus as a teacher, your responsibility is to use Creationism as a foil to demonstrate what the scientific approach really is, and it is not a set of particular conclusions but rather a method of arriving at (tentatively held) conclusions.

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In the same way, if education is your game, you cannot allow it to appear that you respect and thus appear to legitimate narrow-mindedness. Like a good Zen Master, your business is to ask disturbing Socratic questions, to coax the truth out from within the student. For instance, I like to suggest that the person who says "I've made up my mind; don't confuse me with the facts," is making me think the opposite of what they want me to think. Do they have great faith? Instead, I can't help but think that deep down, they already know the jig is up! You don't lock up the barn that tight unless you know the horse wants out! They must know their faith would never survive a close look at certain facts. Trying to preserve the illusion, they are only making it more obvious that they know it is an illusion after all. I merely point this out.

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As I say, I am not too surprised to find this attitude prevalent among fundamentalist Christian students. But it has surprised me on occasion to discover the same sort of mind set present in other quarters. For instance, there are plenty of fundamentalist nonbelievers: people who have left fundamentalism behind in terms of doctrine, but who have only redoubled it as an attitude. Just scan the letters pages of certain Rationalist and Free Thought periodicals. Once I read a letter from an ex-fundamentalist boasting of his various efforts at propagating the lack of faith. This poor fellow was making a spectacle of himself by passing out atheistic handbills on the street corner, printing up atheist bumper stickers, etc. In short, he had given up religion only to preserve what most of us would consider its most odious and onerous aspects! For such a person, the tag "ex-fundamentalist" denotes merely another sub-type of fundamentalism, like "neo-fundamentalist" or "hyper-fundamentalist." But, again, I can empathize with this one, pathetically ironic as it is, because I have succumbed to this one, too.

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But we seem never to learn. I can remember some fifteen years ago when my wife Carol and I dropped by to visit Maryanne, a classmate of my wife, and her husband. Carol had told me she was a convert to Buddhism--which today may mean anything, often denoting more of a New Ager than any traditional sort of Buddhist. After all, if you really believe Cyril Henry Hoskins, AKA Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, is a Buddhist, you may think you are, too, even if you are as far from the Dharma as he was. As we opened a polite conversation, it rapidly developed that Maryanne took a rather non-Buddhistic stance toward Christianity. That is to say, her third eye was somewhat jaundiced when it came to Christianity. She proceeded to fulminate bitterly against its psychological and theological inadequacies. You can imagine the usual line about the destructive self-hatred and guilt over the physical body that Christianity fosters. Then she went on to denigrate the bloody superstition of the substitutionary atonement of Christ on the cross.

Let's get one thing straight. I agreed with these critiques. At the time I still maintained some sort of vague Christian identity myself, albeit of a rather left-wing Tillichian brand. My approach then was to try to "purify" Christian existence from these various phobias and superstitions, get to the philosophical/psychological meat of the thing. I have since given up the enterprise. But I felt the gauntlet had been thrown down and I made ready to reply. I figured the best defense was a good offense. Thus I sought not to defend Christianity (I couldn't have defended those aspects in good faith anyway). But neither did I consider attacking Buddhism, which then as now I revere as a true religion. My chosen strategy was to show how she was reading Buddhism even more selectively than she was reading Christianity.

Surely, I ventured, she could not be unaware of the fact that the very doctrinal features she despised in their Christian avatars were not only present in but absolutely central to historic mainstream Buddhism! I'm not sure what she took Buddhism to mean, but it's a safe bet all the Buddhist faithful in China, Mongolia, Tibet, Sikkim, Bhutan, Nepal, Korea, and Japan (to say nothing of that ancient stronghold of Oriental mysticism, Colorado) would not agree with her. For Mahayana Buddhism is solidly based on the Bodhisattva doctrine. Southern Asian Buddhism, Theravada (or Hinayana, as the Mahayana call it), is a spare and logically simpler scheme of attaining Nirvana through self-effort aimed at extinguishing the apparent self, or ego.

But the Lords of the Mahayana rejected such a goal as selfish in aim and in means. Instead, they believed, all Buddhists ought to emulate Gautama Buddha himself who, after all, did not yield to the temptation of Mara that he should leave this poor world behind and pass forever into his own Nirvana at once. For the sake of poor mortals, Samsara addicts, the Lord Buddha deferred his own rightful Nirvana. And so should we! 

And given the fact that all beings share the Buddha nature and are thus capable of eventual Buddhahood, it is finally nonsensical to suggest that I can be saved without you and everyone else being saved. It's all or nothing. This means, as the Buddha is made to reveal to his disciples in the Saddharma Pundarika (The Lotus of the True Law), that even the 24 previous Buddhas (including Dipankara, the one under whose tutelage Gautama Buddha first heard the Dharma preached many ages before) are still active behind the scenes in the Sambogkhya, the penultimate realm of existence where the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas dwell like celestial gods, answering prayers and otherwise aiding poor mortals who need a hand up.

One ought to take the vow to embark on the path to Buddhahood, and once one does so, one counts as a Bodhisattva (a Buddha-to-be). This is a long and hard row to hoe, but you'd be spending the time in pointless reincarnations anyway, so why not? Through countless lifetimes of toil and self-sacrifice for the good of others, the Bodhisattva earns good karma far in excess of that necessary to win his wings (as Clarence does in It's a Wonderful Life). He has to be in the business of doing good works to become worthy of Bodhisattvahood. 

Now, who's the Bodhisattva to do these good works for? This works out rather well for the vast majority of Buddhist laity who have not the stamina to undertake the Greater Career. They are doing their bit by financially supporting the earthly Bodhisattvas (as they did the Theravadin monks down south) and by praying to the heavenly ones, as their ancestors used to pray to the Vedic gods. Eventually the store of supererogatory merit amassed by the Bodhisattvas was believed so great that they could grant not only worldly boons but actual salvation itself! We think that the Buddha taught that there was no grace upon which to draw to gain Nirvana, since the whole idea was to change your own frame of mind, nullify the ego, which in the nature of the case only you can do. But by hook and by crook, Mahayana Buddhism eventually evolved a salvation scheme by which certain virtuosos, like the Buddha himself, might in fact offer such saving grace to those calling upon them in faith. By such an act of receptive faith the believer is allowed to draw upon the store of good Karma gained by the Bodhisattvas by their good works. It will be transferred to the believers' accounts as if it had been their own achievement. Does this sound familiar? It will sound even more so. For some Bodhisattvas, in order to gain still more abundant good Karma, will voluntarily submit to the tortures of the numerous spectacular Hells of Buddhist eschatology. Avalokiteshvara and his brethren are in this fashion undergoing expiatory suffering in your place and for your benefit.

In Pure Land Buddhism, fantastically popular in Japan where it spread from China and India, we witness the ultimate spinning out of the logic of this redemptive theology. A long succession of Pure Land patriarchs, basing their teachings on the Longer and Shorter Sukhavati Sutras (= Pure Land Scriptures), sought to refine the meaning of salvation by grace through faith alone. Their Sutras have Gautama taking the role of John the Baptist, singing the greater glories of Amitabha Buddha, an ancient king who, hearing the preaching of a contemporary Buddha, renounced the throne and took up the discipline of the Bodhisattva. His strategy was to put all of his accumulated Karmic green Stamps toward the creation of a "Pure Land," a world in which one need only be reborn to achieve the stage of non-returning, the seventh stage of the Bodhisattva path (something that would otherwise take unthinkable eons of good works, as it did in the case of Amitabha himself). At the end of one lifetime in the Sukhavati, one would infallibly attain Buddhahood. 

And how was to one guarantee one's reservations? Aye, there's the rub. The text said one need only call on Amitabha's name three times, and that would do it. But the various patriarchs sought to determine, with all the introspective microscrutiny of a medieval penance manual, precisely what mental condition constituted saving faith. What meditations and attitudes were required? As always happens with introspective pietism (read Watchman Nee, Andrew Murray, etc.) what looked easy turns out to be arduous and confusing--or is made to be so. Each subsequent patriarch narrowed the range of activity required, recognizing that the more a successful faith hinges upon one fulfilling certain conditions, the more salvation after all depends on one's own works ("Self-Power"). And this is incompatible with the doctrine hat one needs grace to be saved in the first place. On the one hand, we are so crushed beneath a burden of bad Karma that we would have no hope of ever working it off ourselves. On the other, we live in a degenerate age when the Dharma is but dimly understood. Facing Scylla and Charybdis in this way, we must be saved by grace ("Other-Power"), or we will not be saved at all. Hence the Pure Land theologians tried to circumvent the clever subterfuges of the self-exalting ego by placing complete and utter reliance on the Other-Power of Amitabha Buddha. 

In the end, the Japanese patriarch Shinran wound up recapitulating Martin Luther and John Calvin: he taught that the first inkling of an inclination one felt to call upon the name of the Buddha was itself proof of Amitabha's prevenient grace. One could never have even sought such salvation without already having been given it! We cannot even seek to repent unless we have already been regenerated by the unilateral grace of God. If we were still sinners, we would think of nothing but continuing to sin. There is no question of subtle Christian missionary influence. It is just that the logic of piety, taught not to believe in its own power, and yet having to do something, however minimal and passive, always issues in the same solution, as it did also in Visistadvaita Vedanta Hinduism, which divided into the monkey school (believers must hang on to God's grace like a baby monkey carried by its mother) and the cat school (momma cat simply carries her kittens by the scruff of the neck, like it or not).

Is all this a betrayal of Buddhism with its doctrine of self-reliance? They say no, since a religion based on the negation of self can hardly rely for its success on Self-Power! Interesting point.

So here we have a religion containing the features of crippling original sin, bankrupt and worthless selfhood, salvation by passive faith in the vicarious sufferings of a redeemer (actually a whole stable of them, as in the Catholic calendar of saints), and all of this derived from an infallible scripture, not from one's own cherished intuitions. What is this religion? Buddhism. Christianity. Take your pick. If you prefer something less complex, something more self-reliant, you can always find revamped, streamlined versions of either religion. But, as they stand, neither is all that much different from the other in broad outline. When Maryanne embraced what she called Buddhism as an alternative to Christianity, she had merely exchanged six of one for half a dozen of the other, though she didn't know about at least three of them!

One might contend that Mahayana is a corrupt form of Buddhism, one that has lost sight of the vision of its Founder, whereas Christianity's corresponding doctrines are in continuity with the central vision of its Founder. But this is the worst kind of special pleading. If it happened to the one, it would be surprising if it hadn't happened to the other, too. 

Max Scheler thought that both religions inevitably suffered the same fate because of the ever-recurrent pattern of religions that exalt a charismatic founder. The founder is first lionized because of his summons for all to follow him in the heroic path. He dies, and the followers form a sectarian community, living out his heroic ethic, necessarily in alienation from the conventional world around them. But time passes and no one finds it any more so easy to live at such a fever pitch of piety and social radicalism. They come to assimilate themselves to the world again, rationalizing this by means of deifying the founder. Now that the life style he taught seems so far beyond the reach of even believers, they conclude his own heroic life must have been the result of his being a superhuman god. Thus no one can be expected to emulate him, and his heroism ceases to be a role-model. Instead, the believers come to regard it as an act done on their behalf so as to absolve them of the sin of not being able to do it! Mediocrity, here we come! And then Luther, Shinran, and the others start in trying to eliminate any vestige of self-effort as impious, even though at first it had been the very basis of the founder's teaching! Such a decline, plainly recognized, at least on some level, in Buddhism, is more characteristic neither of Christianity nor of Buddhism.

Why had my wife's friend been oblivious of all this? My guess is that, like many today, she had really adopted some form of Western pop self-realization therapy and, ironically, called it Buddhism. Harvey Cox foresaw this trivializing trend in his 1977 book Turning East. Shirley MacLaine can call it Buddhism, like Jim Bakker calls his religion Christianity, but neither is fooling me.

It might be better to do what Herman Hesse advocated in his novel Siddhartha: follow the Buddha's path not by slavishly aping him, but by striking out on your own authentic dharma just as he did. How else are you to imitate a great non-conformist except by refusing to conform to him? Have the courage of your own convictions! Don't hide behind supposed authorities by bottling your own product and putting the Buddhist (or Christian) label on it.

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http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/art_buddi.htm

Robert M. Price : CONFIRMATION AND CHARISMA

CONFIRMATION AND CHARISMA

 

Confirmation Controversy

For about a century now, a lively debate has continued in Anglican circles over the relation between baptism and confirmation, especially as to which of these sacraments can be said to mediate the Spirit, and in what sense. G. W. H. Lampe traces this controversy back to the Anglo-Catholic revival and names F. W. Puller (What is the Distinctive Grace of Confirmation? 1880) as an early proponent of the view that water baptism is merely preparatory to the Spirit baptism received at confirmation. A. J. Mason (The Relation of Confirmation to Baptism, 1890, 1891) continued this line of thought. W. Bright ("Morality in Doctrine" in Divine Sealing, 1892) and A.T. Wirgman (The Doctrine of Confirmation considered in Relation to Holy Baptism as a Sacramental Ordinance of the Church, 1897) sought to refute this thinking, linking the reception of the Spirit instead to baptism. Dom Gregory Dix (" Confirmation or the Laying on of Hands?" Theology, Occasional Papers No.5, 1936; The Theology of Confirmation in Relation to Baptism, 1946) revived the debate a generation later, upholding the Puller-Mason position. L. S. Thornton (Confirmation Today, 1946) echoed this view. Lampe's own work The Seal of the Spirit (1951, 1967) is a rejoinder to the position of Puller, Mason, Dix, and Thornton.

On our side of the Atlantic, the debate would seem to have been settled by a post-1979 consensus that water baptism is full Christian initiation, conferring the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Yet the issue is still a live one. As recent participation in a diocesan commission on Christian initiation showed me, the meaning of confirmation is now far from clear. For instance, one study document first states that “Confirmation in no way completes Baptism,” but then a single page later we read “Adults baptized [i.e., as adults] in the Episcopal Church should not be ‘confirmed.’ For adults, Baptism is a mature profession of faith, an act complete in itself.” But for infants, it is not complete after all? This apparent contradiction stems, I think, not from any confusion on the writer's part, but rather from confusion inherent in the rather inchoate understanding of confirmation in the Episcopal Church today.

Another relevant area of debate and discussion in our circles these days is that of the Episcopalian charismatic renewal. Its advocates have approached the question of Spirit-reception from a fresh perspective, after experiencing the “Baptism in the Holy Spirit” under Pentecostal influence. These newly awakened Christians, innocent for the most part of the debates of decades gone by, have had urgent cause to reexamine the question of the relation of Spirit baptism to water baptism and confirmation. 

In the wake of all this rethinking of the rite of confirmation and the charisma of the Holy Spirit, I believe yet another exploration of the issues is justified. In what follows, I will restrict myself to a consideration of New Testament texts, especially from Luke-Acts. Space limitations make any more ambitious agenda impossible, and, besides, the issue seems rooted here. Lampe's treatment is mostly taken up with interpretation of patristic sources, as were most of those books he seeks to refute. But it becomes clear from Lampe's book that the belief in confirmation as the initial imparting of the Spirit after baptism, the position Lampe himself rejects, was both early and widespread, though not universal, in the ancient church. Lampe is concerned to show that that position cannot be the original and must have arisen within Gnostic circles and somehow spread widely through orthodoxy. He is forced to conclude this because he cannot find the position in the New Testament. If he could, all would look different. So Lampe’s whole discussion, as any discussion must, turns finally upon the New Testament evidence: if the Puller-Mason-Dix-Thornton position is to be found in the New Testament, then its early presence in the church may be viewed as the continuation of apostolic practice (at least of one variety of apostolic practice, if we keep in mind that not all even of the earliest Christians need have agreed on the matter any more than modern Christians, even modern Anglicans, do).

 

Luke and the Laying on of Hands

As we begin, it is crucial to keep in mind a cardinal principle of modern New Testament study: we must let Luke speak with his own voice. We cannot interpret Luke in the light of what Paul or John may say on the same subjects. Some are tempted to do so because of the fundamentalist theological bias that all scriptural writers must speak with one mind and even use the same terminology with the same connotations, e.g., as if "baptism with the Spirit" must mean the same thing wherever it is used. 1 Others, perhaps under the influence of the so-called Biblical Theology Movement of the 50s and 60s, assume that early church teaching was monolithic, and thus Luke cannot have taught an understanding substantially different from Paul's.2 Rather, any uniformity discerned among the New Testament writers must be established inductively after we see what each in fact says and seems to mean on his own terms.

It seems to me that Luke does view water baptism and the laying on of hands as two logically and chronologically separable stages of Christian initiation, and that for Luke baptism is a preparatory rite. It has vital significance in itself inasmuch as it brings the remission of sins. But it does not bring the Spirit; it entitles one to the promise of the Spirit, which the baptized person will subsequently receive through the imposition of hands. Let us briefly survey the evidence in this light.

Luke, with the other Synoptics, understands John's baptism as a preparatory rite: it is "a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins" (Luke 3:3). Those baptized by John are to look to the future when one mightier than John "will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire" (3:16). So for Luke, John's baptism may form a precedent implying that water baptism remits sins in preparation for subsequent Spirit-baptism.

In Acts 2, we find Peter speaking of baptism, in terms recalling John the Baptist, as being "for the forgiveness of your sins;" it will then entitle the baptized to share in the same outpoured Spirit of which they have seen the one hundred and twenty partaking (2:38). Note that baptism is at once qualified by its immediate result "for the forgiveness of sins." A secondary result will follow, reception of the Spirit, as the baptized avail themselves of the promise made to all generations (v. 39).

The episode of Phillip's converts in Samaria (Acts 8:5-24) has long vexed scholars. Luke tells us that Phillip, one of the Seven, preaches the gospel and converts many Samaritans who have hitherto been followers of Simon Magus. Simon himself believes, and all are baptized, but they do not receive the Spirit until Peter and John can be fetched from Jerusalem to lay hands on them, "for it had not yet fallen on any of them, but they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus" (v. 16). Lampe admits that "In the opinion of most ancient commentators, and of very many modern writers... the narrative means simply that no one but an apostle could administer the rite by which the gift of the Spirit was conferred..., that the rite in question was the imposition of hands with prayer, and that this sacrament of Confirmation was practised in the apostolic Church as a regular part of the initiatory ceremony, or, at any rate in such exceptional cases as that of the Samaritans, as a distinct rite administered at some time after Baptism.” 3

Lampe himself rejects this view, seeing the incident instead as a special case of authentication of the controversial Samaritans' conversion. They were vouchsafed their own Pentecost at the hands of the original apostles as a special act of solidarity at a crucial juncture in the progress of the gospel.4

James D.G. Dunn is rather of the opinion that Luke is portraying the Samaritans as yet unconverted before the arrival of Peter and John. The poor Samaritans' “reaction to Phillip was for the same reasons and of the same quality and depth as their reaction to Simon (cf. vv. 6-8 with 10f.)  ... and the implication is that the Samaritans' acceptance of baptism was prompted more by the herd-instinct of a popular mass-movement... than by the self- and world-denying commitment which  usually characterized Christian baptism in the early years.”5 Simon Magus is taken as representative of the Samaritans' “defective” faith rather than, as the text clearly implies, an exception to the general rule.

Neither of these plain evasions of the text can be accepted. Both read far too much between the lines. Lampe is undoubtedly correct that the presence of Peter and John to confirm the Samaritan converts serves Luke's agenda of depicting the early church as a harmonious whole under the watchful supervision of the Twelve. This is why members of the Twelve must be present: to give apostolic sanction to the admission of a controversial group. Peter is on hand in a similar case, that of Cornelius, but the Twelve are not needed in other cases, like those of the Ephesian disciples or Paul himself. Thus we cannot say Luke believed the laying on hands per se was the exclusive prerogative of the apostles.

But it is the appearance of Peter and John, not the subsequence of the confirmation that is the unusual point for Luke. Luke gives no sign of anything being remarkable or extraordinary in baptized persons being yet without the Spirit. In fact his wording would seem to imply just the opposite. Peter and John were on their way to impart the Spirit because the Samaritans did not already have it, simply because things had not progressed so far: "They had only been baptized.” Luke clearly seems to imply in these words that baptism would not by itself impart the Spirit.

Lampe scoffs at the possibility of such a rite ever being possible given, e.g., the sheer number of converts on the day of Pentecost, since if Luke saw it as normative he must have thought it happened then, too.6 One need only point out that the same objection attaches even to the water baptism of the three thousand converts. But one need not argue that Luke is accurately depicting universal early church practice, only that he is depicting "early catholic" practice as it was (or, more important, as he wanted it to be) in his own day.

Dunn's case is even more implausible. He must read in more than Lampe, concluding that for Luke to say that the Samaritans simply "believed Phillip" must imply mere intellectual assent instead of a real heart-warming conversion. Dunn sneers at the "superstitious" credulity of Samaritan faith, based merely on signs and wonders whether performed by Simon Magus or Phillip. Yet, ironically,  as Dunn himself makes clear elsewhere, 8 Luke himself regards signs and wonders as adequate grounds for faith and delights in having his heroes out-miracle their opponents (cf. Acts 13:6-12; 19:11-17). If the Samaritans' faith was defective and superstitious, so was Luke's. Finally, where is there any "hint in Luke's story that Peter and John disabused the confused and superstitious Samaritans of their "sincere and enthusiastic, but wrongly directed" beliefs? ⁹

I must conclude that the presence of members of the original Twelve is the only extraordinary feature of the story, and that Luke sees nothing unusual about baptized Christians only subsequently receiving the Spirit.

In Acts 19:1-7, I believe we have a paradigm case of Christian initiation as Luke understands it, since he means to do a side-by-side comparison with the initiation of the John the Baptist sect, rather in the manner of a modern television commercial demonstrating how one cleansing product works better than its competitor on the same stain. Luke's aim is to show that Christian initiation brings the Spirit, while Johannine initiation does not. This does not, however, mean that Christian baptism automatically conveys the Spirit, as we will shortly see.

Some see the Ephesian disciples encountered by Paul as already being Christian believers of some type. Some have understood Paul's question "Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?" as implying that Paul (or Luke) believed in the possibility that a baptized Christian might yet be without the Spirit. Of course I am arguing that Luke did in fact think this, but I do not believe this is how Luke intends Paul's question to be understood. One need not trouble oneself, as Dunn, for example, does, over what this question would have implied for Paul.10 We are on safe ground only when we inquire how Luke intended the question to function for the sake of the story he is telling. 11

Luke is simply trying to set up the disclosure, for the reader's benefit, that these Ephesian “disciples" have not received Christian, but only Johannine, baptism.

Many exegetes insist that for Luke to call them simply "disciples" without further qualification must mean he regarded them as Christians. 12 But this is to ignore the present context. Since Luke will have the true allegiance of these disciples revealed by Paul's questions in the next two verses, he calls them simply "disciples" in verse 1 so as not to give away the outcome in advance. They are revealed soon enough to be disciples of John the Baptist pure and simple, members of the sect he founded.

Lampe believes they are already Christians. How can Christians have received only John's baptism? Lampe lamely suggests that this is Luke's way of describing baptism in the name of Jesus, but before the Pentecostal effusion of the Spirit. 13

Käsemann's ingenious solution is that the original story depicted Baptist sectarians, but Luke has transformed them into "embryonic Christians" and made them by implication (defective) disciples of Apollos (cf. Acts 18:24-28). The point of the story in chapter 19 would then be that Paul, a faithful delegate of the Twelve according to Luke, has authenticated the conversion of Apollos' disciples just as Peter and John had authenticated the conversion of Philip's Samaritans. 14 If this was Luke's intent, then we would have another instance of his pattern that Christians receive the Spirit after baptism through the laying on of hands.

I think, however, that Luke means the reader to recognize here simply John the Baptist's followers. He intends the reader to see that Johannine initiation does not confer the Spirit, while Christian initiation does. Yet it is not baptism per se which brings the Spirit. Rather, having now been baptized in Jesus’ name, they are in the position to receive the Spirit, which they do once Paul lays hands on them. Baptizing and laying on of hands are differentiated here, and it is the latter, not the former, that imparts the Spirit.

The story of Cornelius in Acts chapter 10 is recognized by all as an exceptional case. Spirit baptism occurs spontaneously before water baptism, and thus no imposition of hands is necessary. The idea is that God himself must take the initiative in giving Gentiles the Spirit, or his stubborn human instruments may never get around to it. Only a demonstration of the Spirit such as usually authenticates Christian initiation will prove that Gentiles may indeed be initiated.

The story of Paul's conversion and baptism told in Acts 9:17-18 presents us with an unusual order of events, but the reason for this is plain. In chapter 9, Ananias lays hands on Paul to heal him, so that he may have his sight back before being baptized, but since the same gesture is the one that imparts the Spirit, both happen simultaneously, so Paul receives the Spirit before baptism. But notice that the distinction between the two ritual actions is clearly preserved: in 9:17, the laying on of hands brings the Spirit, while in 22:16, the Spirit is not mentioned, but water baptism is to “wash away your sins.”

One key passage has been neglected in the course of the confirmation debate: Luke 11:11-13. It is Luke's redaction of the Q passage, the original reading of which we find preserved in Matthew 7:9-11. Luke has changed the promise that God “will give good things to those who ask him” to one whereby he “will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.” Now what can we picture as the Sitz-im-Leben of the pericope as Luke has redacted it? Clearly it is Christian readers/ hearers who are being encouraged to seek the Holy Spirit from God who is already their “heavenly Father.” The pericope clearly presupposes that there is an intermediate period between baptism and the reception of the Spirit. And Luke encourages such baptized Christians to seek the Spirit.

I believe Luke even provided the words with which to seek the Spirit. A. variant in the Lord1s Prayer found in two miniscules (700, 162) of Luke 11:2 read “Thy Holy Spirit come upon us and cleanse us” instead of the familiar “Thy kingdom come.” If as I believe Streeter convincingly argues, 15 we have here Luke's original text (itself a redaction of the traditional version Luke received), then we recognize in the very same chapter both Luke's encouragement to seek the Spirit and the prayer to be used on that occasion.

 

Two Pneumatologies

So far it would seem that Luke believed the convert receives forgiveness of sins through water baptism but receives the Spirit through the subsequent laying on of hands. Many, I believe, cannot bring themselves seriously to consider this reconstruction of Luke's intent, because whether consciously or not they have in mind Paul’s decisive statement "Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him" (Romans 8:9b). Was Luke, then, leaving baptized Christians in a danger zone until they should receive the Spirit? Our problem here is that we are again confusing Luke with Paul. Granted, Paul certainly saw possession of the Spirit as integral to the Christian life, and apparently he saw the Spirit as conveyed through water baptism.16 But we must let Luke speak with his own voice. I wish to show briefly that Luke did not assign a salvific role to the possession of the Spirit.

As Roger Stronstad shows,17 Luke sees the baptism or filling with the Spirit entirely in terms of the Old Testament background according to which people received the Spirit with dramatic signs following in order to mark them out as divinely chosen for some task (e.g., King Saul in 1 Samuel 10:1-10; the seventy elders in Numbers 11:25-29) or to empower them to fulfill it (e.g., David in 1 Samuel 16:13; the Judges in Judges 6:34; 11 :29; 13:25; 14:6, 19; 15:14; Bezalel in Exodus 28:3; 31:3; 35:31). In every case, Luke's Spirit­ reception scenes are so intended. The experiences of the household of Cornelius, the Samaritans, and the Ephesian disciples of John are selected by Luke to show reluctant readers the divine choice of Gentiles and Samaritans as converts or of Christian initiation as superior to Johannine. The one hundred twenty at Pentecost and various others afterward are filled with the Spirit in order to speak the word of God (2:4, 11; 4:8, 31; 6:10).

Luke is concerned with the spectacular power of the Spirit, not with the salvific indwelling of the Spirit that we find in Paul. It is evident that for Luke, the reception of the Spirit is tantamount to prophesying and similar phenomena. Note how the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost is explained by the citation of Joel 2:28-32 as an outpouring of prophetic gifts.

Luke also differs from Paul significantly in that Luke envisions no permanent or constant possession of the Spirit once received. 18 This appears, first, from the fact that Peter, filled with the Spirit at Pentecost must later be filled again to speak the word boldly again (d. 2:4, 11 with 4:8,31). Second, as Acts progresses, it becomes evident that despite all Christians' initial sharing in the prophetic Spirit, only a few remain sharers of the Spirit, filling the office of prophet, namely Agabus and Philip's four daughters (11:27-28; 21:9-11). Only these, despite Acts 2:17f, are called "prophets" or "prophesying virgins."

Luke believed that all Christians were entitled initially to experience prophecy as a sign of God’s choice, but not afterwards in most cases. The idea is exactly as expressed in an Old Testament text that must have loomed large in Luke's mind, Numbers 11:25: "Then the LORD... took some of the spirit that was upon [Moses] and put it upon the seventy elders; and when the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied. But they did so no more." Afterward Moses muses that it would be wonderful if God would make all his people prophets in this manner. Luke believes God has now done this in the Christian Church, but that like the seventy elders, the prophecy was a one-time occurrence for most.

 

Our Confirmation Rite

I believe that the debate over whether baptism or confirmation imparts the Spirit has essentially been a debate between those who follow Paul's pneumatology and those who follow Luke's. The debate might be settled by finally choosing one and rejecting the other, but most of us would rather find a way of assimilating both. The two cannot and should not be forcibly harmonized exegetically, but they can quite easily be harmonized theologically. We might synthesize both Paul and Luke by saying the indwelling Spirit is received in water baptism, but the empowerment of the Spirit is received subsequently in confirmation by the imposition of hands.

Does not all this bring us back to the pre-1979 view, that confirmation does complete baptism? Not necessarily. Actually this question hinges on a rather fine theological point. The question might best be put, "does confirmation add new sacramental grace?" Before 1979, it was believed to do so. Now it is not. Luke certainly had no such developed theology of the sacraments, and the validity of the Lucan rite of laying on of hands to receive the Spirit does not depend on one.

Here is where I believe the thinking of the Episcopalian charismatic renewal becomes very helpful. Episcopalian charismatics sought to understand their dramatic experience of the Spirit in terms of traditional Anglican sacramental theology, pre-1979. They could see readily that they had, like all charismatics, experienced something very much like Luke describes in the passages we have been considering. As good pre-1979 Episcopalians, however, they knew that confirmation should have been the reception of the fullness of the Spirit. Had it not worked? They knew a sacrament must have worked, objectively, even though they had not experienced the Spirit's fullness on the occasion of confirmation. So Dennis Bennett and others concluded that the charismatic experience is not technically a sacrament but rather the subsequent experiential appropriation of that gift of the Spirit bestowed sacramentally in confirmation.19

Now that the Episcopal Church has come to view  baptism, not confirmation, as the full sacramental bestowal of the Spirit, I suggest we follow the logic of the charismatics backwards one step: let us view the laying on of hands in confirmation as an occasion for experientially, subjectively appropriating the fullness of the Spirit once received in baptism.

Whether one associates glossolalia or prophecy with the fullness of the Spirit as some, but by no means all, Episcopalian charismatics do is irrelevant here. But if we seek to be faithful to Luke as well as to Paul, we must invest the laying on of hands at confirmation with an experiential dimension. Let us prepare young people and adults for the power of the Spirit whether that power be manifested (as will vary with individual personality) as a mighty wind or as a still, small voice.

 

FOOTNOTES

 

1 John R. W. Stott, The Baptism & Fullness of the Holy Spirit (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1964), p. 23.

2 James D. G. Dunn, Baptism in the Holy Spirit. Studies in Biblical Theology, Second Series, No. 15 (London: SCM, 1974), 55; G. W. H. Lampe, The Seal of the Spirit (London: SPCK, 1967), p. 67.

3 Lampe, pp. 66-67.

4 Ibid., p. 72.

5 Dunn, Baptism, pp. 63-64.

6 Lampe, p. 67.

7 Dunn, Baptism, pp. 65, 64.

8 James D. G. Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1975), pp. 167-169.

9 Dunn, Baptism, pp. 63-64.

10 Ibid., p. 86.

11 See the similarly reader-directed statements in John 2:5 and 11:22, where Jesus’ mother and Martha of Bethany are not supposed to know of the coming miracles which, however, their remarks clearly lead the reader to anticipate.

12 Ernst Käsemann, “The Disciples of John the Baptist at Ephesus," Essays on New Testament Themes. Trans. W.J. Montague. Studies in Biblical Theology No. 41 (London: SCM, 1968), 136; Dunn, Baptism, p. 84.

13 Lampe, p. 76.

14 Käsemann, pp. 147-148.

15 B. H. Streeter, The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins (London: Macmillan, 1951), p. 277.

16 See Lampe, Chapter One, "The Pauline Conception of Sealing and its Antecedents," pp. 3-18; Dunn, Baptism, pp. 103-172.

17 Roger Stronstad, The Charismatic Theology of St. Luke (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1984), pp. 13-23, 49-75.

18 Cf. Lampe: "Luke has an insufficient appreciation of the Spirit as the inner principle of the ordinary believer's life in Christ to make him interested in whether or not the average convert partakes of it." p. 65.

19 Dennis J. Bennett, Nine O'clock in the Morning (Plainfield: Logos, 1970), pp. 15, 80.

 

 By Robert M. Price

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