My experiences with the “moment of salvation,” were, I discovered later, fairly typical among children who grow up in evangelicalism. Many of us grow up pretty familiar with the concepts of Christianity and the principles of the gospel– at least, the Protestant rendering of the gospel. While I am still fairly Protestant in my theology, I can honestly admit that the faith systems of Catholicism and orthodoxy have components that I find attractive– and helpful to understanding my own faith.
However, for kids growing up in an Protestant/evangelical environment, there’s a standard script for us. We pray a prayer, with the help of our parents, usually, somewhere between the ages of 4-7. At some point when we’re slightly older, and we’re more capable of understanding, we look back at the “fuzziness” of what happened when we were 5 and start wondering. Did I actually “get saved”? Did that count? This usually leads into a re-dedication of some type, usually a public announcement that we’re going to commit to God in some way, to serving him more faithfully.
In my experience, the question was articulated to my pastor’s wife as “was I sorry enough?” Did I repent enough? Do I feel bad enough about my sin? I don’t actually remember her response, but I remember not being comforted by it.
I was still plagued by this question when I entered college. Was my repentance genuine? Did I merely say the words because I was afraid of the Rapture, afraid of Hell? Was I foolishly believing in a child’s prayer that really didn’t mean anything?
It took me a long time to realize where these doubts sprang from– they all came from the phrase: “you should check up on your salvation, then!”
These words were repeated to me, from the pulpit, practically every Sunday, and they were always accompanied by a sermon on temptation and sin. The abuser who led our church* would rain down from the pulpit (an area of the stage he called the Holy of Holies, and where no one else in the church was allowed to stand) a vitriolic barrage. He would rage against sin, corruption, unholiness, and temptation, to an extreme so profound it would be impossible to really articulate.
But if you struggled with any kind of continual temptation– if you were addicted to anything, or if you were constantly discontent, or if you couldn’t maintain constant rejoicing, if you were depressed, or if you constantly disobeyed your parents . . . anything in your life that strayed from his conception of a “holy Christian life,” well, then, you should “check up” on your salvation, because you couldn’t possibly be a real Christian if you struggled. Being a Christian meant “conquering” our sin, of being reborn as a “new man,” of “putting off the old man.” If we still had an ongoing battle with “sin,” then, well, Jesus couldn’t be dwelling in your hearts, then, could he?
This constant battering was not limited to my church, either. I went to two separate Christian universities, and people struggling with “doubt” over their salvation, specifically, was a consistent experience. Especially as we got older, because, as adults, we start encountering serious ideas. Calvinism. Arminianism. Molinism. Universalism. Lordship. A lot of terms get thrown around, and when we get confronted with them, it’s usually troubling. We’ve usually been told, quite harshly, that to question anything about our particular system or approach to the gospel is inherently sinful. It’s simply not to be done. This sometimes results in the kids I knew clinging even tighter to their particular brand of a salvation experience.
In graduate school, I somehow ended up in an intense conversation with a young man who was . . . well, an intense adherent to Reformed theology. He asserted that if God is truly sovereign, the reality of our world is one that fits better with Determinism than anything else. It was the first time I had really, honestly tried to understand a different perspective from the mostly-Arminian view I’d grown up with.
The psychological dissonance was so bad I ended up sobbing, hysterically, for three hours.
My point isn’t to make some claim about a “true methodology of Salvation” because I’ve realized that’s… a teensy bit ridiculous. Sorry, Calvin. And Luther. And… basically everyone else who’s ever taught anything about soteriology. I’ve decided that whatever road brings you to God is the road you needed to take, and it doesn’t matter what philosophical word you could apply to it.
My point is that in IFB, in evangelicalism, in most of our different denominations, the human need for questions and answers frequently leads us to where I ended up– in a place so narrowly defined, in a methodology so constricted, that your approach to faith simply can’t be flexible. You’re right, everyone else is just wrong.
At Liberty University, there’s a video that makes fun of the Calvinist-Arminian debates that happen everywhere (not an exaggeration). The video has the two debaters arguing:
Calvinist: You are just quite obviously pre-destined to be wrong!
Arminian: And you have the free will to be stupid!
And . . . that is where most of the debates end up. Because nearly everyone I’ve heard is terrified of being wrong, because, if they’re wrong, then maybe they’re not “saved,” and maybe they’re not going to heaven, and maybe (*gulp*) they’re going to hell. And that’s a “reality” that can’t be faced easily.
A truer reality, I think, is one where you can realize that God loves us all, unconditionally, and that what he most wants from all of us it to have a relationship with him. It’s a “got milk?” question without a whole lot of baggage.
*to this day, I have a difficult time with the word “pastor.” I can use preacher, minister, evangelist, father, reverend . . . but not pastor. “Pastor,” to me, was this man only. He exerted so much control and domination over my life that his demands for absolute loyalty were accompanied by the “right,” he claimed, to call him “Pastor.” That was his identity, and I still can’t break away from it. It causes some psychological tension for me, whenever I mentally think of my church’s leader now, who I simply call “Matt,” although everyone else refers to him as “Pastor Matt.”