Real Restoration: On Brokenness, Part 1

[The baptism series continues. I’ll be posting on Real Restoration and on baptism on alternating every-other-days. Trying hard to stick to every other day posts for my sanity.]

On how pottery is made

(Isa 64:8 ESV)  8 But now, O LORD, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.

I’m no expert in pottery, but I’m really good at watching TV. And the other day, I was watching an episode of that great American TV show “Dirty Jobs” dealing with making terra cotta pipes. And the guy who owns the pipe factory explained that one of main ingredients in the clay is broken pipes.

So I’ve been studying up a little on how you make the clay that’s used in pottery, and it seems that one of the key ingredients is something called “grog.”

Now  it happens that grog is also an alcoholic drink favored by, among others, pirates, but the kind of grog used to make pottery clay is made out of broken pottery. (Do not drink!)

So, you see, there’s a subtle lesson regarding pottery making. I’d always figured that “we are the clay” means we’re all soft and malleable, easily shaped. And that’s sometimes true. But there’s another way for the potter to shape you into a new work. He can break you, grind you to powder, add water and some other materials, and start all over.

You see, you have to either be pliable, easily shaped by the Potter’s hands, or else broken. And, for most of us, God makes us pliable by first breaking us.

On Neo-Calvinism

It seems an odd thing to me that Calvinism is all the rage nowadays. I mean, Calvinism is the furthest thing from a consumer-friendly religion! And John Piper is pushing a Calvinism straight out of Jonathan Edwards (“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”), selling books like crazy, and building a huge church. And even more remarkably, Mark Driscoll has built a megachurch in Seattle and is planting new churches by the hundreds — all the while teaching about unconditional election, surely the hardest doctrine to preach in secular America. Weird, isn’t it?

Now, I’m no Calvinist (and not interested in a comment debate on the topic). But I can’t deny that there’s something about Calvinism that works — that has an appeal to modern America. And it’s surely not predestination!

On virtually no evidence at all, I’d like to suggest that the appeal is the doctrine of total depravity. Yes, really.

Driscoll explains,

Now, there are (at least) two senses of “total depravity.” One is that you can’t come to saving faith unless God empowers you to do so by the Holy Spirit because you’ve been unconditionally elected. That is NOT the subject of this post. The other sense is more simple: we are not good.

(Rom 3:10-12 ESV)  10 as it is written: “None is righteous, no, not one;  11 no one understands; no one seeks for God.  12 All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.”

The mourner’s bench

The early 19th Century was marked in America by the Second Great Awakening. Great revival preachers, such as Charles Finney, invented the “invitation,” pointing the service toward the sermon, followed by a plea to come forward and … mourn for your sins. That’s right. The original invitation wasn’t about baptism or a request for prayer or a confession of public sin. It was for mourning.

The pew at the front reserved for mourners came to be known as the Mourner’s Bench. The term is now nearly forgotten, but it was the heart of revivalism and evangelism 150 years ago.

Finney wrote,

When sinners and backsliders are really convicted by the Holy Ghost, they are greatly ashamed of themselves. Until they manifest deep shame, it should be known that the probe is not used sufficiently, and they do not see themselves as they ought. When I go into a meeting of inquiry and look over the multitudes, if I see them with heads up, looking at me and at each other, I have learned to understand what work I have to do. Instead of pressing them immediately to come to Christ, I must go to work to convict them of sin. Generally by looking over the room, a minister can easily tell, not only who are convicted and who are not, but who are so deeply convicted as to be prepared to receive Christ. Some are looking around and manifest no shame at all; others cannot look you in the face and yet can hold up their heads; others still cannot hold up their heads and yet are silent; others by their sobbing, and breathing, and agonizing, reveal at once the fact that the sword of the Spirit has wounded them to their very heart. . . . [There must be] that kind of genuine and deep conviction which breaks the sinner and the backslider right down, and makes him unutterably ashamed and confounded before the Lord, until he is not only stripped of every excuse, but driven to go all lengths in justifying God and condemning himself.

Charles G. Finney, Reflections on Revival, ed. Donald W. Dayton. (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 1979), 16-17, quoted here.

The goal, therefore, was for the convert to begin his walk with Jesus understanding his utterly sinful state.

Our sin problem

One of the problems with Church of Christ (and much of American Protestantism) is that we don’t teach this part of total depravity. We don’t teach that people are bad.

Well … we kinda do. We do teach —

(Rom 3:23 ESV)  23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,

The tracts in the tract rack of the church of my childhood always began with this verse. Which seems logical enough. I mean, if the goal is to get someone to hop into the baptistry, we must first convince him that’s he’s damned — and this verse tells us that any one sin is enough to damn us. Therefore, to persuade someone of the need to seek salvation, we need only teach them that they are less than perfect. And it worked. Kinda.

It’s not that the logic was flawed. Rather, the heart was flawed. You see, by teaching that one sin is enough to damn (which is true), but not that we are bad people (not good), we left our converts with the sense that they are essentially good people, who have a sin problem, and that problem is the need to seek forgiveness of the very few sins they commit.

We therefore developed a self-image as good people, who just needed to get our few sins forgiven so we could go to heaven. “Repentance” thus became a turning away from those few sins toward a new life where we reject sin — those very few sins.

But, of course, we were nice, largely moral people before we were baptized. There wasn’t that much to be forgiven of or to repent from. We went from good but not forgiven to good but forgiven. This even led to the bumper sticker: “Not better than you, just forgiven!”

There’s much I disagree with in Calvinism, but this is something they get right. People come to the baptistry eaten up with sin. We do indeed have a sin problem — which is that we sin a lot, all the time. We can’t even begin to be self-justified. We aren’t nice. We aren’t good. We need not just a little forgiveness — we need to be broken, ground up into powder, mixed with water, and reshaped. We should come to the baptistry asking God not only to forgive us but to change us.

But in the Churches of Christ of my childhood, it was all forgiveness and not much change. Yes, the preacher was all about change, but change meant learning how to worship and organize and handle the church treasury. And none of that required that the convert be broken and reshaped. Just educated. And that’s a problem.

So, yes, we can learn from our Calvinist friends. Or if not from them, from Paul. Or Jesus.

(Mat 19:17a ESV)  17 And he said to him, “Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good.”

And I’m not the one who is good.