Re: [TruthTalk] Questions set the tone, short bio. of Bill

[Wm. Taylor]

Kevin asks, "By the way how did you become a christian or are you still working on it?" I reply, Kevin I hope you are not asking me in vane.   I grew up attending a Church of Christ in a small farming community. On most Sundays there were fewer than fifteen people in attendance, and certainly never more than 4 or 5 kids at any given time. Instead of having a Sunday School class for the kids, our pastor usually had us sit with the adults. This was back in the 60s. “Hell Fire and Damnation” was still very much in vogue, and pastor Palmer was an expert in it. He scared the hell out of me every week and Wednesday night. I believed what he was teaching, and I went “forward” in an alter call when I was seven years old and was promptly baptized (“for the remission of my sins”), but I never felt “saved.”   If you are familiar with the Churches of Christ (Restoration Movement) you know how consistently Arminian they are in their doctrine. Salvation can be lost at a whim, should a person “return to sin.” I grew up begging God’s forgiveness and fearing that I might die with sins left unforgiven due to a failure on my part to get them all confessed (1 John 1.9 was a favorite stick pastor used to beat this idea in me). When I was eighteen I left home—but really I left the church. And for several years I ran from God. I totally believed that he was real—and mean. I just couldn’t get my life together well enough to feel comfortable around him. I was tired of praying forgiveness when I knew I would immediately sin again. Did I really think that God really thought I was going to change? How foolish! I resolved not to pray to God again until I got my act together.   It wasn’t until my late twenties that I again returned to the God of my youth; this time not so much because I thought I could please him, as it was that we (my wife and I) had children of our own and wanted them to be raised in the Church. Still, though, there were problems, none of which could have been resolved had it not been for the grace of God issued to me through the loving and patient kindness of a Baptist minister.   Growing up I had never heard of “the grace of God”; the God I knew ruled with an iron fist. Sure his Son had died for our sins, but the work of Christ was lost, overshadowed by a litany of conditions that I had to meet if salvation were to be mine, not the least being that initial requirement of baptism by immersion for the express purpose of remitting sins. Since I knew of no other denomination that taught this practice, I was furthermore convinced that the only ones who could rightly call themselves “Christians” were the baptized believers of the Churches of Christ.   That belief served to separate and isolate me from fellowship with believers of other denominations, which in turn limited the possibilities that I might (1) hear about salvation through faith by the grace of God, and (2) believe in it, even if I should hear. Well, to make a long story short, I met a Baptist pastor through my work. As time went by I got to know this man; moreover I came to like him very much. And because of my concern for him, and my desire that he not be lost, I set out to convert him to the ways of the Church of Christ. I know now that God used that occasion as the opportunity I needed to hear about his grace; for the more I tried to persuade my new friend to abandon his beliefs and adopt mine, the more opportunities he had to share with me the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. I must say, I fought his teachings with every ounce of my energy. At first I thought it was too easy; there had to be something more. But gradually the truth started to soak in. And I wanted so much to believe it, to think that there was now no condemnation for those who were in Christ Jesus. Then one day it happened. I had been meeting with pastor Wayne on a regular basis for nearly a year. When I wasn’t with him I was spending a great deal of time at my mother’s home, reading God’s word and checking it against what Wayne had been saying. On that particular day I was sitting at mom’s table, reading the book of Romans, and for reasons unknown to me I started noticing for the first time that the verbs which Paul used when he referred to salvation, justification, and the like, were overwhelmingly written in the past tense. With something like a bolt of lightning it hit me. I said to mom, “You know, I think it’s true; I think we are saved by God’s grace and not by anything we do.” Beyond that I was realizing that our salvation was a done deal, that we did not need to consume ourselves with fears that we might somehow lose the race. We were saved because of what Christ had done for us, not because of things we might do for ourselves. Suddenly a great confirmation swept over me. Something was telling me that it was true! And for the first time in my life I felt what it meant to have freedom in Christ. I knew what it was like to be set free from the bondage of sin. Fear left me and in its wake an indescribable joy set in. Tears streamed down my face and splattered on the pages of my Bible. I was saved. I was saved! I was saved.  Well in any good novel that would be the end of the story, but for me the “conversation” was only just beginning. I have always been one to throw myself into whatever I am doing. I left Arminianism about as quickly as we (my family) left the Churches of Christ. That meant that I needed to know as much as I could about Calvinism. I threw myself into the writings of R. C. Sproul and Francis Schaeffer, then Van Til and Greg Bahnsen; I read a great deal from other Reformed theologians as well. Before long I was a full-blown five pointer,— and not long after that I was again doubting my salvation, this time by wondering if I really was one of the elect, and wondering if I really could trust that I really was believing, or was I deceived? Soon I was looking again to the fruit of my labors to find the evidence I needed to give me some semblance of assurance that I really did believe and that I really was saved. I had taken my eyes off Jesus. I had lost track of the truth: that fullness is in Christ—“I live, yet it is not I but Christ who lives in me.” The more I moved away from Christ and toward the inscrutable decrees of Beza’s God, the emptier was my religion and the vainer my theology. When I first learned of God’s grace, lovingly lavished upon us in Christ Jesus, I knew that I had to be teaching this stuff, so that others would not have to have the same experience that I had had. By the time I was beginning to realize that “Calvinism” presented the same problems as Arminianism, only from a different direction, I was well on my way to receiving my BA degree in Modern Intellectual History at a well-known Christian university. It was at university that the “conversation” began to take shape. I was assigned to unpack a “Problem Passage” in a Biblical studies class. Each week’s assignment consisted of an interpretation of a difficult scriptural text. The point of interrogation was Romans Chapter 7, in particular verse 9: “I was alive once without the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died.” The question at task was, What did Paul mean when he said he was “alive” once and subsequently “died”? As aware as I was that many scholars, especially in recent history, have understood Paul to be speaking of “seeming” to be alive when in actuality he had been dead in sin all along, I was struck by the contrast in Paul’s words: “I was alive … and I died.” Something about the coming of the commandment (expressed in v. 7) gave sin new vigor and with it the power to usher in a death of sorts in Paul’s life. Rather than concluding with other commentators that Paul was always dead and only thought himself formerly alive (which I knew I would need to do if I were to hold true to my Calvinist doctrine of total depravity), I found myself tugged the other direction: When Paul said he was alive, he meant it; thus the question was one concerning his death: What did he mean when he said he died? Was this a spiritual death to which he referred? Or was he referring to something else? My answer to that question has changed over the years since that study (I concluded there that Paul was born spiritually alive and later died spiritually at “the age of accountability.” I now believe the death to which he referred to be a metaphor pointing to the futility of “life” lived in animated refusal of Christ). What has not changed is the resolve with which I concluded in that study that Paul was struggling in Romans 7 not with some ineffable illusion of life, but with the irrational nature of sin and iniquity instead. Indeed he was born alive, and thus able to make a culpable digression into sin, and not the contrary: that he was somehow born dead in trespasses and sin, with no meaningful way of actually choosing to rebel, and hence with no meaningful liability in his ultimate rebellion. I knew that it was true that most evangelicals advocate a “spiritual death,” universal in scope subsequent to the Fall and, unless one be “born again,” efficacious from the moment of conception until death’s titillating worm vanquishes the soul; thus I also knew that my conclusion was therefore a significant shift away from evangelical norms, and that it would mean nothing less than insurrection within the Reformed heritage from which I wrote. Yet I believed I was right and I stuck with it. That conclusion had the effect of radically altering and expanding the edges of my theology: if all humans were born spiritually alive it was because Christ had died for them and because they had already risen in the newness of his life (see Rom. 5:6, 8). Salvation, then, was not something that we gain in an existential point or “conversion” experience. It is already ours! Salvation is ours in Christ and can only be altered or “lost” when sinners refuse him throughout their life and alienate and cut themselves off from him continually unto the point of their own natural death, at which time they may go to hell, not because God wills them there but because “they have refused the Lord who bought them.” Only then have they committed the unpardonable “sin against the Holy Spirit.” During that time the edges of my theology were expanding in other areas as well. I was beginning to question the traditional teaching on the nature of Christ. It seemed to me that the reason Christ seemed to be so far away was because we had been taught that his humanity was unlike our own. Oh I knew that all good Christians say that Christ was fully human (and fully God), but their doctrine concerning Christ’s human nature was actually having the effect of setting Christ away from them and abstracting him and obscuring him from their presence. I was seeing in Scripture that Christ had actually assumed our nature, laden with the limitations of the fall when he assumed our flesh, and that through his refusal to yield to temptation (the same temptations that we have) he defeated sin in his own nature, thereby condemning it in our nature as well. There were other breakthroughs along the way. I loved the breakthroughs and how they were helping me feel like I really knew our Lord, but I was concerned because it seemed that I was the only one to have ever come to these beliefs. That was when I met Prof. Deddo. I had graduated from university at the top of my class, which was enough to get me into a fairly prestigious seminary. I had only taken five or six classes there when I signed up for Deddo’s Systematic II theology class. I had been very pleased with my seminary experience to that point, because of its emphasis on Trinitarian theology,—but I was certainly not expecting that Deddo’s class would change my life. The thing I realize now is that God had been preparing me for a very long time to recognize Gary’s teaching as truth. I had assimilated much of the rough material along the way but my thoughts were still fragmented. When we got to the point in his class that he said that he too believed Christ to have assumed a nature like ours (see Rom. 8: 3), and that it was in that nature that Christ had defeated sin, thereby reconciling humanity to God, I knew then that I was not alone. The first book that we read was T. F. Torrance’s Mediation of Christ. Torrance further solidified my thinking. I have since read nearly all of his three hundred plus published works. Moreover I've worked my way through the Bible more than once, I think he's on to something. My seminary days are over now, but my study and fascination with Jesus Christ is still beginning. Am I a Christian? You decide. I think I've said enough.  Bill Taylor