Leaning on Jesus, his word, a creed, or the church's faith?

A month ago in an Anglican church, I heard a sermon on doubt and disappointment in the life of the believer. It included the following comments:

"We've had a couple conversations in our catechesis class this past fall. And I know a couple people in that class shared very openly, like, use the language of the dark night of the soul. I'm coming, but I feel distant from God. And one thing we talked about is every time we gather on Sunday, on the weekend, on Sunday, for us, Saturday, to worship Christ. And we stand together and we recite the Nicene Creed as most Christians throughout history have done all around the world. We say we believe in God, the Father Almighty. We go through all these words, our belief in Christ. Many of us, when we say that, we don't fully believe.

"We struggle. We doubt. We're disappointed, right? But we come back again and we trust God as best we can with, you know, our very little bit that we can offer. And Jesus is faithful to that, right? He honors that just standing up. Sometimes these aren't even words that make sense to you, but it's the church's words, right? The church carries you. The church's faith carries you. This is one of the reasons why we baptize children and infants, right? Because the true faith is not just about your individual faith. It's about the communal faith of the church. We all need each other. And if some of you are disappointed in Christ, I commend you for showing up today and standing in a couple minutes and saying the creed, just like John the Baptist is saying 'the Christ'. He's letting those words appear on his lips, even though he is uncertain and doubting."

As I hurriedly drafted this post over a bowl of Vietnamese noodles before Burmese church one Sunday afternoon in January, I didn't have access to the recording or transcript, but I summarized it from memory as:

"If you are struggling to believe all the words of the creed that we stand up and say together today, God bless you. Please know that you are not saved by your personal faith and confidence in every part of the creed, but rather you are held by the faith of the entire church, and so when God hears the voice of the entire church on heaven and earth together reciting the creed, he credits their faith to you. [Here my mind was drawing on the medieval idea of the Treasury of Merit.] This is also why we baptize our infants and young children, right? They are held by the church's faith."

This saying disturbed me. And I have thought about it ever since. I asked ChatGPT for some advice, and it reminded me of a letter that Augustine had written to Bishop Boniface (Letter 98, written AD 408), in response to questions on why the church has sponsors affirm the creed on behalf of the infant who is baptized. Augustine proposed some complicated rhetorical reasoning, saying essentially that baptism is the sacrament of the church's faith, and since the infant receives this sacrament of faith, in a sense it is appropriate to say that the infant believes, although it is only by proxy through the sponsors and the church as a whole, and the infant needs to be brought up to believe for himself or herself. 

I think there is a sense in which this is true, and a sense in which it is untrue. In the Gospels, sometimes Jesus healed children or slaves because their parents or masters asked in faith. And in the case of the paralyzed man who was let down through a hole in the roof by his friends, Jesus saw their faith and first told the man "Your sins are forgiven" and then told him, "Get up, take up your mat, and walk." Commentators think that Jesus was looking mostly at the faith of the friends, although presumably the man wasn't brought there against his will, and he at least exercised faith by standing up when Jesus told him to.

The theological question is, "What does it mean if Jesus forgave the man's sins because his friends believed?" Does that mean that proxy faith justifies? I am not comfortable with that at all, and in fact, Kevin DeYoung in The Biggest Bible Storybook tells the story with the interpretation that the man must have had faith, or else Jesus wouldn't have told him "your sins are forgiven", because he justifies those who have faith.

If proxy faith justifies, does this mean that we can pray for the salvation of those who have already died outside of the faith? Ordinarily, by that time it is too late. 

But notice too that Jesus raised the dead son of the widow of Nain -- we don't know if the son was a believer before he died. I imagine he was after he came back to life. 

And in other gospel stories, whole families believed after Jesus healed their child or servant. 

And on a plain and simple level, Jesus prayed for those who crucified him and mocked him at this death, saying, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." But at Pentecost, Peter boldly pleaded with this same crowd, "save yourself from this perverse generation!" So this forgiveness that Jesus asked for was either only for the sin of crucifying and mocking him, or it was conditional on their repentance and faith, which was mediated through Peter's preaching. Following Tom Schreiner and Ardel Caneday's arguments in The Race Set Before Us, this idea of God using means to bring about active faith leading to obedience on the part of the hearers in fulfillment of his promises makes a lot of sense to me.

At the same time, with edge cases like babies dying in infancy, or unbelievers brought back from the dead, there is a lot that we don't know.

And I'm not even going to get into stories like Augustine's friend who was baptized while he was unconscious for days with a fever -- when he finally woke up, people told him he was baptized, and he took it so seriously that he rebuked Augustine for joking about it. In his mind, he was now fully a Christian, even he hadn't chosen it when it happened. And not long after, he died, still firmly believing. This experience shook Augustine, and he wrote of it later in his Confessions (4.4.8, written AD 397-400). Maybe it was one of the things that together accumulated to draw Augustine himself to finally commit himself to the Lord. Can I say that, both in the case of the paralytic (assuming he didn't have faith until he stood up and walked) and Augustine's friend, that God brought them to faith by gently bending their will to trust and ratify a choice that others had tried to make for them?

But I want now to circle back to the way we conceive of the creeds. In a different church this morning, we sang, "My faith has found a resting place, not in device or creed, I trust the ever living One, his wounds for me shall plead, I need no other argument, I need no other plea, it is enough that Jesus died, and that he died for me."

The words rang true to me, that the faith by which we are saved, which the Holy Spirit himself gives us and grows in us, is first a heart attitude of turning toward God, and that belief in the points of the creed follow from that, because the creed summarizes God's Word given in Scripture. It reminded me further of a quote by R.T. Beckwith, which I have copied down in my journal twice in the last few weeks:

"Grace is not a quasi-physical substance but is the personal favor and goodness of God to man. Faith is not mere intellectual belief but is trust, and trust in God involves belief of what he says. Since God speaks to us in Scripture about our salvation, to trust him is both to believe that our sins are already atoned for through the cross of Christ, and to rely on him to accept us, preserve us, perfect us and glorify us for that reason." (J.I. Packer and R.T. Beckwith, The 39 Articles: Their Place and Use Today, pp.91-92)

The words of Beckwith have been ruminating in me since I read another essay he wrote in 1965 (in All in Each Place: Towards Reunion in England) on the problem of doctrinal standards in a proposed union between the Church of England, the Methodist Church, and other free churches. He argued that the Anglicans ought not force subscription to their own doctrinal standards without careful nuance and guarantees of conscience protection, because the independent churches had memories of persecution over aspects of doctrine that were only probably and not certainly proved from Scripture. And yet the Church of England itself needed reform, because it had stopped enforcing a good faith subscription to its own standards by even its own ministers, who developed a variety of private interpretations to stretch the standards whichever way they chose. 

In the end, Beckwith proposed a common subscription to the ecumenical creeds from church history in a way that carefully protected conscience and made clear that they were binding only because they accurately summarized the Word of God, and he further proposed selecting the best of the unique parts of the 39 Articles as an Anglican contribution to the good of the united church from their heritage. 

The book I quoted on the Articles, published in 1983, was a further development of Beckwith and Packer's overall project to teach a lean and life-giving heritage of doctrine for today, now that the proposed scheme of union had fallen through. The quote above was specifically from an appendix where Beckwith put forward some supplemental articles that should be added to the 39, to address issues that had arisen since the Articles were written in the 1500s. Both Packer and Beckwith are dead now, but their project lives on in unexpected ways, since Packer co-edited the catechism for the Anglican Church in North America (To Be A Christian), and since their writings are fertilizer for this blog post. 

The words of the song rang within me because I sang them in a choir twenty years ago led by Jim Schmidt, a man I truly trusted who is now with the Lord.

I am reminded again of a comment that the preacher I mentioned at the beginning of this post made during catechesis -- that the point should be not so much fencing in our doctrine as drawing people toward Christ at the center. I think this aligns with the song, too, and our catechism class as a whole was using Packer's catechism. But Beckwith's framing was particularly helpful to me, because it gets us through the problem of those who insincerely recite the creed with the congregation and think they are fine even though they persist in unrepentance. (See Deuteronomy 29:18-19, and Psalm 50:16) The very words they recited will condemn them at the last day, if they don't turn. That is why it is the job of every church member, not only to recite the creeds, not only to pray for faith and repentance for themselves and their neighbors, but also to pursue holiness and to pursue other members when they are wandering. (Hebrews 12:14-17)

And so, like Augustine (though I don't share his baptismal theology), I am led by a convergence of events and words, some I agree with and others I disagree with, both in following and in reaction, toward a place of deeper faith. 

Maybe as intended. 

Update 4/6/2026:

I'm now reading Justin Holcomb's book Know the Creeds and Councils, and found this quote explaining the relevance of the Athanasian Creed, with its disturbing anathemas for those who don't hold to it:

"We have a hard time accepting that eternal damnation is the potential result for any human being. This creed serves to remind us of that fact. Even its damnatory clauses are helpful 'in the reminder they give of the awful responsibility of making the right decision in matters of fundamental belief.' The Christian faith is not only a matter of the heart, an exercise in sentimentality, for 'Christian faith is a matter of the mind as well as the heart and the will, and as thinking persons we must give intellectual expression to our faith.' Still it does not demand blind acceptance to empty propositions. It is concerned with the direction of our souls. To paraphrase Philip Schaff, the point of the creed is not that we are saved by memorizing a set of statements, but that we are saved by trusting in the one who has revealed himself. Trusting in him, as far as he has told us about himself, is what saves, while straying from him is what condemns. The Athanasian Creed points us to the identity of the one who saves." (p.70)

I think the pastor that I quoted at the beginning of this post was trying to, indirectly, urge his listeners toward this trust. Where I am a bit uncomfortable is where he implies that we're saved by the church's faith rather than our own. I would say rather that God saves us, and he uses the church, through its relationships and the teaching of the Word to plant the Word in us in order to nurture our faith, and so we can do the same for others. 

Kevin DeYoung in his book Daily Doctrine (Days 172-173) helpfully distinguishes different meanings of faith: first, "that which is believed" (doctrinal content) vs "the faith by which we believe" (the attitude of faith, which is what saves us). Second, there are four types of faith, with only the fourth one being necessarily saving: historical faith (mental assent to some facts about God), faith of miracles, temporary faith, and justifying faith (a saving grace, wrought in our hearts by the Spirit and the word of God, whereby we are convinced of our sin and misery, assent to the truth of the gospel, and receive and rest on Christ and his righteousness). General faith means accepting God's word and trusting in the Scriptures. Special faith involves trusting in Christ and the promise of salvation, hungering and thirsting after Jesus, coming to him, and receiving him and all his benefits. Finally, at its simplest, faith consists of knowledge, assent, and trust. 

I would say that the Anglican pastor above was guarding against potential fears in the audience that they needed to master doctrinal content before faith could be justifying. And so he first praised their initial movements of trust, even if they were small, and then went back to enfold the idea of faith as the doctrinal content (the creed) in a generalized communal assent and attitude of trust which was modeled by others in the church and could be imitated by the listeners who struggled with doubt. However, the door was opened for evoking proxy-faith and the treasury of merit, which I think are dead ends unless they lead to actual justifying faith on the part of the listeners. Because it was a short sermon, it couldn't unpack everything I've mentioned above. I hope that some of these ideas can help clarify more of the full picture for others and inspire some sense of wonder at the many ways that our God uses to bring us to faith and to nurture that faith in him.

Baptizing the nations as believers, together

 This is a short post on baptizing the nations. Peter Leithart has written extensively on how Jesus's command in Matthew 28 applies to whole nations. He has been criticized for lauding medieval cases where whole nations and tribes were forcibly baptized at the request of their leaders. My way of extending the discussion is to ask whether paedobaptism is necessary for a continuing people movement. I don't think that it is.

I have several cases:

1) the Mennonites (a breakoff anabaptist group from Swiss and Dutch reformed in the 1500s, with a renewal movement in the form of the Mennonite Brethren in the 1860s in eastern Europe)

2) the Lisu (evangelized mainly by the China Inland Mission, Churches of Christ, and Assemblies of God, in China and Burma from around 1910 onward, and virtually all Christian in the Nujiang region of China and in Burma)

3) the Rawang (evangelized by the Churches of Christ, Assemblies of God, and Baptists, mainly in the 1930s-60s and now those in Burma are virtually all Christian)

4) the Kachin (mainly Jinghpaw and northern Burmic speakers) (evangelized mainly by Baptists, from the 1880s onward, with a major push in the 1960s-80s that made virtually all Jinghpaw speakers in Burma Christian)

These all are predominantly anabaptist or baptistic, and yet they have experienced gospel-ward people movements and then continued on in a tradition of baptizing their children after their children have made a mature profession of faith.

In all cases, there is the danger of nominalism and formalism, just as with paedobaptism, and the church in these groups is constantly in need of renewal, just as everywhere. But I want to point out that the cultural value of solidarity vs individualism is a different axis from paedobaptism vs credobaptism. 

John Chrysostom on agency in baptism

This Sunday morning I read John Chrysostom's two catechetical lectures. Toward the end of the second one, he has a passage affirming the agency of the ones to be baptized, that Jesus has already paid the price for them, but is waiting for them to willingly choose him as their master. 

Why I care about agency

This meant a lot me, because, while I myself was dedicated to God by my parents as a newborn, and later I willingly asked my parents for baptism at the age of seven, I have some hard memories of overly harsh discipline and pressure from my parents around ages 5-7, even to the extent of being given Jack Chick's tract "This Was Your Life" and another tract by Joni Eareckson Tada called "Joni's Story" by my mom, and being urged to pray the sinner's prayer by my dad during a discipline session when I had already done so on my own. I know that they had my best interests at heart and wanted desperately for me to know God. It just felt like a lot at such a young age. 

This meant that I reacted strongly against Calvinist teaching when I was first exposed to it as a teenager, and I still feel that there is something misordered about infant baptism. In both cases, the agency of the individual is ignored. 

An olive branch for those who disagree

In all charity, I suspect that Calvinism may be part of the truth, since we are contingent creatures in a universe ruled by a benevolent God, and I imagine that if I had been baptized as an infant I might have tried to defend it as something helpful for me to be automatically included in the external form of God's family. By calling infant baptism misordered I mean it in the literal sense of the word as the elements of conversion being out of their proper order, but I still recognize that it may play a helpful role in certain individuals' lives, and that the important thing is, no matter how we begin, that we continue in daily faith and repentance, living in Jesus and he in us. 

Excursus into family lore

Unfortunately, in my great-grandfather Harry Straub's life infant baptism played a crippling role as a barrier to repentance -- he was baptized as an infant in the Volga German Lutheran church in Russia, moved to the US in his early twenties, and had his son Henry, my grandfather, baptized on the eighth day. But by all accounts he was an angry man, prone to drunkenness and violence. He went to church only on special occasions like Christmas and Easter. His son Henry, after getting married, later was converted and rebaptized and joined the Church of Christ. Henry introduced his new way of thinking to his mother Katrina, who was Harry's sweet and peaceful stabilizing influence. She started attending evangelistic meetings at the Minnehaha Church of Christ (her husband drove her), and decided she wanted to get rebaptized. Harry told her to wait and they would do it together, but she saw it was just a delay tactic and he wasn't really going to go through with it. So she invited the ministers over to the Straub dairy farm one day when her husband was gone, and they rebaptized her in the Camas Slough. When Harry found out, he said that if those preachers ever came back to his farm he would shoot them with his shotgun. Years later, after Katrina died, he had a temporary softening, but even on his deathbed he refused to repent and believe the gospel when his son Henry presented it to him. Harry believed that his baptism as an infant was his passport to heaven, and so he apparently did nothing to appropriate to himself its true meaning. So now you see how faulty understandings of baptism can tear a family apart and keep someone from salvation. 

John Chrysostom's story, and part of his second catechetical lecture 

Chrysostom himself grew up in a Christian home, and was baptized around age 20, and yet also spoke approvingly of infant baptism. He's a complicated figure, and practice wasn't exactly consistent, nor was the rationale uniform in the early church. 

But his words here are a comfort to me:

__________

Say therefore constantly, I renounce you, Satan. Nothing is more safe than this word if we shall prove it by our deeds.

This I think it right that you who are about to be initiated should learn. For this word is a covenant with the Master. And just as we, when we buy slaves, first ask those who are being sold if they are willing to be our servants: So also does Christ. When He is about to receive you into service, He first asks if you wish to leave that cruel and relentless tyrant, and He receives covenants from you. For his service is not forced upon you. And see the lovingkindness of God. For we, before we put down the price, ask those who are being sold, and when we have learned that they are willing, then we put down the price. But Christ not so, but He even put down the price for us all; his precious blood. For, He says, you were bought with a price. (1 Corinthians 7:25) Notwithstanding, not even then does He compel those who are unwilling, to serve him; but unless you have grace, He says, and of your own accord and will determinest to enroll yourself under my rule, I do not compel, nor force you. And we should not have chosen to buy wicked slaves. But if we should at any time have so chosen, we buy them with a perverted choice, and put down a corresponding price for them. But Christ, buying ungrateful and lawless slaves, put down the price of a servant of first quality, nay rather much more, and so much greater that neither speech nor thought can set forth its greatness. For neither giving heaven, nor earth, nor sea, but giving up that which is more valuable than all these, his own blood, thus He bought us. And after all these things, he does not require of us witnesses, or registration, but is content with the single word, if you say it from your heart. "I renounce you, Satan, and your pomp," has included all. Let us then say this, "I renounce you, Satan," as men who are about in that world at that day to have that word demanded of them, and let us keep it in order that we may then return this deposit safe. 

... 

On this account, then, I beseech you to cleanse yourselves from this error [of theaters, omens, and incantations], and to keep hold of this word as a staff; and just as without sandals, and cloak, no one of you would choose to go down to the market-place, so without this word never enter the market-place, but when you are about to pass over the threshold of the gateway, say this word first: I leave your ranks, Satan, and your pomp, and your service, and I join the ranks of Christ. And never go forth without this word. This shall be a staff to you, this your armor, this an impregnable fortress, and accompany this word with the sign of the cross on your forehead. For thus not only a man who meets you, but even the devil himself, will be unable to hurt you at all, when he sees you everywhere appearing with these weapons; and discipline yourself by these means henceforth, in order that when you receive the seal you may be a well-equipped soldier, and planting your trophy against the devil, may receive the crown of righteousness, which may it be the lot of us all to obtain, through the grace and lovingkindness of our Lord Jesus Christ, with whom be glory to the Father and to the Holy Spirit for ever and ever — Amen.

Source: Translated by T.P. Brandram. From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 9. Edited by Philip Schaff. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1889.) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. <http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1908.htm>.

Saved by baptism by faith by God

Does baptism save, or does faith save? Good question. Were the citizens of West Berlin saved during the Berlin Airlift of 1948 by food or by the mechanics who fueled up the airplanes that brought the food? Or by the farmers that grew the food? Or by the United States? Yes.

So does baptism save? Yes. Ordinarily. For those who believe. 

What is salvation? Salvation is the gift of God coming into our lives and uniting us with Christ and making us whole. It comes on the basis of God's love poured out in the death of Christ and in Christ's ongoing intercession for those who belong to him, bringing forgiveness of sins and the life of the coming age. 

Salvation is applied to each person by the working of faith in us by the Holy Spirit. We can see it as a point at the beginning of our journey, as a point at the end of time, and a squiggle in the middle. 

To be honest, many of us don't see the point at the beginning, and yet in the midst of the squiggle, we look back and see that we have picked up the clustered elements of conversion along the way, even if through struggle, imperfection, and hardship -- or rather, that these have been worked in us by the Spirit's empowerment and the help and prayers of others, which spurred us on to force our way into the kingdom. These elements include: 

• faith (Rom. 5:1)
• repentance (Luke 24:47)
• confession of Jesus as Lord (Rom. 10:9-10)
• baptism (Rom. 6:3-5; Gal. 3:27; 1 Pet. 3:21)
• adoption by God into his global and local family (Gal. 4:5)
• receiving the Holy Spirit (Galatians 4:6)
• obedience to Jesus, his good news, and the truth (Acts 5:32; Rom. 16:26; 2 Thes. 1:8; Heb. 5:9)
• perseverance until the end (Mat. 24:13)

So what is baptism? A visible Word of God -- a bodily reminder of the promises of God worked out in the story of Jesus's death, burial, and resurrection, experienced by being dipped in water and having the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit pronounced over you.

If you receive baptism by faith, then it -- like prayer, the Lord's supper, and the Word -- will strengthen your faith so that you continue and grow up into salvation (1 Peter 2:2). The efficient cause of salvation is God and his gift. The means of reception is faith. The instrumental means that the Holy Spirit ordinarily uses to bring about faith and strengthen faith so that we endure to the end and so are finally saved includes baptism.

Now arise some problems:

1. Not all who are baptized are saved (because they don't combine it with faith).
2. Some who are saved aren't baptized (because God brings about faith in whoever he wants, even in some who have no opportunity to be baptized). 
3. Some have misunderstood, and said that baptism is absolutely necessary for salvation.
4. Others have misunderstood, and thought that since they were baptized, then they are saved even if they don't personally know Jesus or follow him. 

But on the other hand, there are some who say they believe, and yet have never been baptized because they're too shy to get up in front of people. This requires serious teaching and personal friendship to help their budding attender's faith turn into a martyr's faith. 

Lest you think I fell off the deep end, read the following Q&A from the 1693 London Baptist Catechism, which is basically the Westminster Longer Catechism with a credobaptist reform:

#90 What doth God require of us that we may escape his wrath and curse, due to us for sin?

To escape the wrath and curse of God due to us for sin, God requireth of us faith in Jesus Christ, repentance unto life, with the diligent use of all the outward means whereby Christ communicateth to us the benefits of redemption. 

#93 What are the outward means whereby Christ communicateth to us the benefits of redemption?

The outward and ordinary means whereby Christ communicateth to us the benefits of redemption are his ordinances, especially the word, baptism, the Lord’s supper, and prayer; all which means are made effectual to the elect for salvation. 

#96 How do baptism and the Lord's supper become effectual means of salvation?

Baptism and the Lord's supper become effectual means of salvation, not for any virtue in them, or in him that doth administer them, but only by the blessing of Christ, and the working of the Spirit in those that by faith receive them.

#97 What is baptism?

Baptism is an ordinance of the New Testament instituted by Jesus Christ, to be unto the party baptized a sign of his fellowship with him, in his death, burial, and resurrection; of his being ingrafted into him; of remission of sins; and of his giving up himself unto God through Jesus Christ, to live and walk in newness of life. 

#98 To whom is baptism to be administered?

Baptism is to be administered to all those who actually profess repentance towards God, faith in and obedience to our Lord Jesus Christ, and to none other.

#99 Are the infants of such as are professing believers to be baptized?

The infants of such as are professing believers are not to be baptized, because there is neither command or example in the holy scriptures, or certain consequence from them to baptize such.

#100 How is Baptism rightly administered?

Baptism is rightly administered by immersion, or dipping the whole body of the party in water, into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, according to Christ’s institution, and the practice of the apostles, and not by sprinkling or pouring of water, or dipping some part of the body, after the tradition of men.

#101 What is the duty of such who are rightly baptized?

It is the duty of such who are rightly baptized to give up themselves to some particular and orderly church of Jesus Christ, that they may walk in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless.

Music across cultures: between Asia and America

(originally written December 25, 2023)

When I lived on Jinmen Island, Taiwan, in 2012, my American friend Samuel had a party to dedicate his new apartment. At the dedication, the local Taiwanese pastor, also named Samuel, gave my friend Samuel and his wife Jarita a Chinese hymnbook. He said, "Americans gave us their hymns a long time ago. Do you sing Chinese hymns in America?" My friend said no. "Then bring this hymnbook with you when you go back to America, and introduce our songs to your American church, as a fair exchange."

Later that year I came to Chiang Mai, Thailand, and started studying the Rawang language. At the Rawang church, I asked the pastor why they sing hymns translated from English, rather than using Rawang traditional music. Pastor Yosep said he felt the hymns were "glorious." I was sad about this, because I thought Rawang people were losing their culture, but I didn't know the full story yet.

Aminta Arrington, in her book Songs of the Lisu Hills, tells how English and American missionaries and Lisu believers worked together to translate hymns into Lisu in the 1920s, but that their process of translation was really more like inculturation -- they adapted the lyrics to the Lisu culture, and sometimes the end result was even more vivid and poetic than the original English!

I started to see the same thing in some of the Rawang songs -- for example, the song "When I See the Blood" in English starts with Jesus on the cross and alludes to the Passover story with the words "I will pass over you", but the Rawang version starts with the Passover story in Egypt, and makes the connection explicit, maybe because the original Rawang audience didn't yet have the Old Testament translated, and so they might have been learning about Passover for the first time when they learned the song.

Another example is the song "Jewels", where the Rawang version uses adverbs like "brim brim shor" to illustrate how God's people will twinkle and shine like stars, and says explicitly that "like Jesus' body shines, we will shine", highlighting the connection between Jesus' resurrection body and ours, whereas the English version is just a little more boring to my ears, "they will shine in their beauty, bright gems for his crown." 

The 2011 Rawang version of "Jewels", in an improvement on the 1950 version, says that those who love the Lord are honorable and valuable like jade, a common precious stone in northern Myanmar, which the Rawang audience would have seen regularly and maybe even participated in mining. The song was thus connected closely to objects in their daily life, which probably explains why the Rawang church in Chiang Mai sang "Jewels" often, whereas I had never heard it in America, and according to my Facebook friends, American Sunday schools for children used to sing it, but don't anymore -- the English version is written to say that little children are the jewels, but the Rawang version says it about all believers.

Some Rawang hymns were created just for the Rawang people, rather than being translated from English. Two of these, which were used in the 1950 primer, but didn't make it into modern hymnbooks, are "Of Old We Rawang", and "Men of the Household", which tell the story of conversion from spirit-worship to worship of God, and the need to study hard in learning to read his Word, at a time when Rawang literacy was just becoming available. 

In the 1968 primer, the song "From Every Land Created" mentions surrounding ethnic groups, saying that God loves all people from north and south, east and west, Jinghpaw, Burmese, Shan, Lisu, and all others, and that if they repent, they will have eternal life.

Another song from this book, "In the Beginning", starts with the creation of the world, tells how early humans got mixed up with evil spirits, how believers have now been rescued from the hand of evil spirits by Jesus, and how they now are to trust in Jesus and follow God's path. According to the chorus, this path includes not drinking alcohol, not chewing betelnut, repenting, not sacrificing to spirits, and worshiping Jesus. Some of these rules are from the Bible, and others like the prohibitions on alcohol and betelnut were new rules that Rawang and Lisu Christians considered important boundary markers for their newly believing community.

To recap, Rawang hymns were sometimes translated from English, sometimes translated from Lisu, and sometimes created first in Rawang. The ones that were translated were often adapted to Rawang culture, and as we have seen above, were sometimes even more beautiful than the original English songs.

It is true that musical styles and tunes have been borrowed from other cultures, but the words are an authentic expression of Rawang language and culture for their time.

In July 2023 at the Rawang American conference in Omaha, one of the first songs we sang was "Shvri:ngie". I immediately recognized the tune -- it was a song first released in 1996 in Taiwan, called "一切歌頌讚美" or "Praise The Lord". As it so happens, after coming back to the U.S. from our first year in Taiwan in 2008, my sister and I did teach this song to our home church, and they loved it just as much as the Rawang, with its catchy chorus, "Praise the Lord, Halleluya". 

And so our story has come full circle. From Taiwan to America, to Thailand, to Myanmar, and back to America again, music crosses cultures in many directions, and really does make the world go round.

For more song translations and reflections, see the following posts:

Rawang songs: 

• "Rawang Land" (about missing one's homeland) and "The Greatest Love Story" (Christmas)
• The Path of Love (romantic)

Mandarin worship songs:

• Lord, I Believe
• The Path of Grace
• Precious Cross

faith is the wick

Are we saved by faith alone?

Salvation, that is, a life eternally transformed by relationship with the Holy Trinity, is like the burning of a candle.

Faith is the wick, hope is the wax, love is the flame. 

The candle burns by the wick alone. Faith is the faith(fulness) of Jesus Christ, which we join by loyally trusting in him and depending on him. (Faith as both trust and loyalty, and the faith of Jesus Christ in his Father and his faithfulness to us as the ground of our own faith response is a big topic in NT studies right now.) Our relationship with God was reconciled by his death on our behalf, and our access to continuing benefits come through this continuing relationship of trust.

The candle burns by wax alone. Hope is the strength that comes from our identity as the community who are somehow seated at God's right hand in the enthroned Messiah, waiting for him to come reclaim his world and, meanwhile, to bring us daily sustenance by his Spirit.

The candle burns by the flame alone. Love is the transformation of potential energy into heat and light, by doing good for others' benefit because we have received God's love, giving vision to other eyes and lighting other candles, and fulfilling the purpose for which we were made. 

Are we saved by faith alone?

Now, if this question is really asking, "Can I know for sure in the moment that I raise my hand in an evangelistic meeting that I am going to heaven?", our answer will be different. Because here we are asking not about the burning but about the lighting of the candle. But the lighting includes the burning, and all three elements (wick, wax, and flame) are involved, even if in nascent form. And if the lighting is done by God, then we don't know for sure if the lighting began when we raised our hand or long before, or even not yet -- but we can know that if we truly turn to him, God promises to save us. 

Now, you ask, what about repentance? To be honest, I wasn't thinking of repentance when I thought of this analogy, and would really need another analogy to incorporate it well. But I see repentance in the candle in three ways: a change from coldness to warmth, a change from reliance on other power sources than the wax through the wick, and a change from hiddenness to transparency. (Actually, this last one is more properly termed confession, but it is a part of the change.) And ultimately, there is a change of life direction from self-preservation to empowered self-giving. 

This brings me to a point I have been thinking about a lot recently. Every aspect of salvation that we "perfect" or essentialize is in a way a metonymy or synecdoche. What I mean is that we speak of one part when we mean it to stand for the whole. 

Baptism saves us, not the removal of filth from the body, but a pledge of a good conscience toward God. So baptism is a concertina word, as Jimmy Dunn puts it, including sometimes the sign only, and sometimes both the sign and the thing it signifies, and sometimes being a shorthand for the whole conversion process. 

Repentance is the same. It indicates a change of heart and mind that includes sorrow for sin, a change from unbelief to faith, a change from trusting in other things to trusting in Jesus, and specific actions that we take to repair damage and restore others whom we have wronged. A concertina that expands and contracts from a change of heart to an act to an entire process that includes both.

Faith in a way stands for all the other elements of our response to God when we hear the gospel, and yet is more than just the most prominent part of our response, because it invades and motivates every other action. And because it draws from Christ everything it needs, it truly is like a wick (or like a straw in a milkshake, to change the metaphor). 

Now back to the candle. I think I hear someone saying now, "Your definition of salvation as a life eternally transformed by relationship with the Holy Trinity is mixing justification with sanctification." Well, yeah. Because sanctification (or as I prefer to call it, transformation) is not optional. Justification through the cross (another metonymy) reconciled our relationship with God. It's a different metaphor, but let's call this restored relationship the oxygen in the room. Transformation started at the moment of ignition. Our relationship with God was reconciled in a potential way at the cross, and in an actual way when we started to believe, that is, when the wick was ignited and the flame burst forth, burning the wax stored up in the candle through the wick as it combined with the oxygen in the room.

And the burning continues. 

No analogy is perfect, and this got more and more complex as we kept talking about it. But I would rather parse out these folds of ambiguity and see more and more of the whole picture.

Inspiring this three-fold analogy is a faint echo in my memory of Deacon Braxton at the end of almost every sermon, repeating the prayer of St. Ionnikios of Olympus (762-846)...

Our hope is the Father

Our refuge is the Son

Our shelter is the Holy Spirit

O Holy Trinity, glory to You. 

Imagined gospel backgrounds

Zane Hodges says the Gospel According to Saint John was written as an evangelistic book to help people start to believe in Jesus, and yet mentions faith but not repentance, and thus repentance is not required for eternal life. John MacArthur counters that John the Evangelist was writing after the Synoptic Gospels were written, so John assumed that readers had already learned about repentance from them, and so he decided to focus his gospel on the importance of faith.

While we are conjuring hidden backgrounds and motives to the gospel writers, a much more fun story is told by Dom Gregory Dix in his book The Shape of the Liturgy. Suddenly we see the practice of the eucharist in house-churches popping up behind the text everywhere in the New Testament, and it's lovely:

One remarkable feature of the N.T. allusions to the eucharist is the rich variety of meanings they already find within the single rite of the broken Bread and the blessed Cup. It is the solemn proclamation of the Lord’s death (1 Cor. 11:26); but it is also the familiar intercourse of Jesus abiding in the soul, as a friend who enters in and sups with a friend (Rev. 3:20). It fulfils all the past, as the ‘true’ (Jn. 6:52) and the ‘secret’ (Rev. 2:17) manna, the meaning of all sacrifice (Heb. 13:10), the truth of all Passovers (1 Cor. 5:7; Lk. 22:18). But it also looks forward to the future beyond the end of time, as a mysterious anticipation of the final judgement of God (1 Cor. 11:30-32), a foretaste of the eternal Messianic banquet of heaven (Lk. 22:30), a ‘tasting of the powers of the world to come.’ (Heb. 6:5) It foreshadowed the exultant welcome of His own at that Second Coming (1 Cor. 11:26), for which those who had first lost their hearts to Him in Galilee looked so wistfully all their years after, that the echoes of their longing murmured on in the eucharistic prayers of the church for centuries. By the time the New Testament came to be written the eucharist already illuminated everything concerning Jesus for His disciples—His Person, His Messianic office (Jn. 6:33, 35, 48), His miracles (the accounts of the feeding of the multitude are obviously 'coloured' by the eucharist), His death and the redemption that He brought (Jn. 6:51). It was the vehicle of the gift of His Spirit (1 Cor. 12:13b), the means of eternal life (Jn. 6:53-54), the cause of the unity of His church (1 Cor. 10:17). This is not an exhaustive analysis of New Testament teaching about the eucharist. Nor do I suggest that all these passages are intended to be directly about the eucharist (they are not) but that in all of them the experience of the eucharist is at least colouring and affecting the author’s presentation in some cases even of other matters, which is what is significant for our purpose. They shew that the church had found in the eucharist an entire epitome of ‘the Gospel’ before our four gospels had been written.

Later in his book, Dix goes on to suggest that the image in Revelation of God on his throne surrounded by the elders reflects how a bishop and presbyters would sit in the living room of a Roman villa where the house church would typically meet, taking the seats like the father and his family members. Again, I don't know how true it is, but it's fun to think about.

It's definitely more imaginative than the Hodges-MacArthur debate.