The Holy Spirit and the Elect

Summary

• The viewpoints of both Church and culture have a background and a context, and these need to be understood when seeking to learn how we got “here”. Wherever “here” is, the journey to “here” has a history.
• The society and culture influenced the various revival movements in Australia and during our formative years as a church, society and culture differed from that which cradled our revival predecessors.
• Along with most “revival” churches, we set out to differentiate ourselves by propagating a unique version of the “full gospel”.
• Our distinctive doctrine became "Speaking in Tongues" circa 1958 - 1963
•  We mandated speaking in tongues as a rite of passage for sinners moving from death to life.
• We judged a lack of a "Holy Spirit Speaking in Tongues" experience not just a lack of depth or commitment but a lack of salvation itself.



That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

Aldous Huxley

Forward

About a decade ago, I determined to approach my Bible reading with more analysis and rigour than previously. That decision was motivated by love for God’s life-changing Word and a drive to ensure that my church and I handle that Word faithfully, understand it correctly and communicate it accurately and clearly. I’m aware, of course, that I’m not the only one on this quest and yet, in my Revival Fellowship experience, discussing what it means to be a Christian or what salvation entails is a discussion that is constantly monitored or reviewed in the light of the Revival Fellowship Metanarrative (the “Narrative”).

If ever that (valuable) discussion enters unfamiliar territory, it’s immediately suspect. As a church, we have a fascination (bordering on an obsession in my view) with trying to fit every text, biblical teaching, or Biblical concept into our Narrative. This approach results in us using the Word, seen and interpreted through the Narrative lens, as our measure. Instead, we should be aiming to use the  Word free from those Revival Fellowship encumbrances.

Suppose the meaning of a text, necessarily derived from its linguistic structure and context, conflicts with the “way we do things around here”. In that case, as far as we are concerned, it’s so much the worse for the text. It enters the input side of our Revival Fellowship hermeneutical sausage machine as God’s Word capable of illuminating believers and sceptics alike, and it comes out like a misshapen sausage with plenty of “filler” and a good dose of Revival Fellowship additives.

Instead of increasing and developing our capacities, growing in understanding and learning to savour the truth of God’s Word, we’ve become stultified, remaining stuck behind our theological moat with the Revival Fellowship Narrative drawbridge raised and secured. This is no more apparent than when I start discussions about “speaking in tongues”.

Our Fellowship’s doctrine of speaking in tongues is a doctrine on which we stand or fall, and it’s also a doctrine about which we countenance no dissent. Excuse me while I dissent.

Introduction to Part 1.

Revival Fellowship history is enlightening as we investigate how we arrived at our remarkable Revival Fellowship position where speaking in tongues is designated as a must-have proof of the presence of the Holy Spirit in God’s elect, the “Saints”. If you don’t speak in tongues, according to us, then you are not filled with, have not “received” nor been “baptised in/with” the Holy Spirit.

Now because we define the presence of the Holy Spirit as a necessary condition for salvation (from Romans 8:9b …Now if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, this person does not belong to him), the start of our dogmatic logic is:

(1)   No Holy Spirit > No Salvation.

We also allege there is a necessary and inescapable link between the presence of the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues. Therefore we expand our assertion to:

(2)   No Tongues? > No Holy Spirit >  No exceptions.

Now, if we add to this our previous assertion (1) that the Holy Spirit’s presence is necessary for salvation, a little logic results in the Revival Fellowship position becoming:

(3)   No Tongues? >  No Holy Spirit >  No Salvation >  No exceptions.

We can then reduce (3), without loss of meaning, to a more concise:

(4)   No Tongues? >  No Salvation  >  No exceptions.

History

How did we come to believe and promulgate that view? Well, as they say, it didn’t happen in a vacuum. The great movements in society and shifts in viewpoints of both Church and culture have a background and a context, and these need to be understood when seeking to learn how we got “here”. Wherever “here” is, the journey to “here” has a history.

From a particular perspective, the original Pentecost produced all Christian churches. Additionally, protestant churches are the children of the Reformation (500 years ago, which held to "Salvation by grace alone through faith alone.”). Various holiness and revival movements have also been our surrogate parents.

• Puritanism in 17th-century England (and the US)
• Pietism in 17th-century Germany (e.g. The Moravians, whose history goes back to 1457)
• Religious Society of Friends (Quakers)
• Various Revivals in the British Isles in the 1700s including Calvinistic Methodists and the work of John and Charles Wesley)
• The First Great Awakening in the 18th and early 19th centuries in the United States
• The Second Great Awakening in the 19th century in the United States
• The Welsh Revival
• Azusa Street and its many children
• Australian Revivals, starting in the early decades of the 20th century.

Also influencing our upbringing was the society and culture in place when the various revival movements kicked off in Australia. During our formative years as a church, society and culture differed from that which cradled our revival predecessors.

So while our Church – The Revival Fellowship – emerged from the revival movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was also war, depression, and fear framing a transformational epoch. Our Revival forerunners bubbled up from the waves and foam of the “spirit of the age”, presenting to the waiting world a particular mindset, a peculiar view of salvation, and strong ideas of how we should (or should not) interact with other Christians and the rest of society.

One of our long-standing pastors has provided a history of the Revival movement in Australia called “A leaflet in a Cabbage – the history of the Revival movement” (hereafter referred to as Cabbage). Cabbage’s Revival history traces the birth of the Revival Centres and its estranged sibling, the Revival Fellowship. Cabbage is not always easy to follow, but it does paint a picture of our forerunners, our influencers, our formation and our (apparent) flourishing. In Cabbage, you will read of healings, changed lives, and many who were “Baptised in the Holy Spirit”.

However, the overall picture painted in Cabbage is of strong personalities, less than robust understanding of the Bible, dictatorial control, family dynasties, distasteful events, confusion, messages from God, schism, and the like. All of these dressed up in white robes and presented as our religious lineage.

After perusing Cabbage, I think one could be excused for being unsure about the ability and motivations of the Revival leaders and for doubting the soundness of the Revival’s foundations. Indeed, that’s how I felt, and I didn’t find it encouraging reading – quite the opposite.

Also, like the earlier revivals and holiness movements, there was significant momentum, dedication, and zeal for ensuring everyone outside the Revival (whether unbelievers or professing Christians) were aware that they too could be (should be) partakers of what God was doing.

The various organisations formed at that time (the Commonwealth/National Revival Crusade, The Christian Revival Crusade, The Church of God, the Revival Centre, to name a few) all claimed to be restoring the very Faith of the Apostles by modelling the early Church. This restorationist attitude is typical of revival movements wherever they arise, and we and our forerunners were no different, and we still make that claim now as the Revival Fellowship.

Revival Fellowship history shows we have consistently claimed to be Bible-believing and “…to contend earnestly for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints” [Jude 1:3]. However, there were (and still are) significant gaps in our knowledge, cracks in the foundations of our understanding, and some unorthodox, sometimes unsupportable, interpretations of scripture with “everyone has to speak in tongues to be saved” at the top of the list.

Having read through Cabbage with the hindsight of 45 years in the Revival, it is more appropriate, I think, to call ourselves a Bible-loving church. My observation is that our Bible-believing extends to those places where the Bible agrees with Revival fashion, our experience, and our direction. Our Bible-believing runs into trouble when asked to venture beyond the invisible, restrictive Revival Fellowship metanarrative. Suppose there’s a point where the metanarrative and the Bible clash. In that case, we use a subtle Revival way of reinterpreting or giving scripture a different emphasis to get the “proper” Revival fit.

Amongst the teachings of our heritage, there’s the Great Pyramid, which was, among other things, proof of God. (It was a favourite of the Jehovah’s Witnesses that we latched onto and recycled). Other Revival Fellowship heritage-listed topics include:

• Our Anglo-Saxon birthright
• British Israel and Lost Tribes (with subtle influences of white race supremacy)
• A raft of the-last-days-are-upon-us prophecy interpretations (in the various flavours that were fashionable at the time)
• Bible Numerics
• Bible Numerology (not the same thing)
• the Mark of the Beast and;
• A subtle, devious anti-Christ enthroned in Rome.

The Cold War also played a role in our view of Prophecy. As WWII and the memories and fears of The Great War and the Depression were receding, the Cold War loomed unrelentingly. These earth-shaking, world-changing upheavals in society and politics helped carve the Revival’s shape and influence its leaders and adherents. In a speech before the United Nations in 1961, President John F. Kennedy said that “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness.”

That nuclear threat, that Sword of Damocles was, at the time, a focus for the Revival movement in their interpretation of the Bible’s prophetic writings. The Cold War was a great talking point for fearmongering evangelists. As history teaches, fearmongers, whether in the guise of religious zealots, cults or internet netizens, always have some Armageddon-causing event to use as a weapon of fear.

Such fearmongering seemed justified as it motivated many to seek out “The Lord”. It seems that once they had found Him (never mind that it was the other way around!), fear as much as faith motivated and underpinned their subsequent Christian view.

I turned the pages of Cabbage, keeping the broader context of the revival movement in mind and remaining aware of the changes sweeping across the Western world’s post-war culture when the Revival gathered steam. In the end, an uneasiness about how it all played out dogged my thoughts. The actions of the Revival’s Pastors and the doctrines served up by them as described in Cabbage are perhaps understandable given their situation. However, in my mind, it is still true that various leaders’ actions and abilities did not help the credibility of the Revival. Reading Cabbage does not shed a comforting light on their interactions with each other and the broader Christian culture.

Similarly, as I read of the doctrinal disputes, confidence-sapping doubts surfaced in my mind about their grasp of scripture and their mastery of the tools required to delve into the Word of God. Still, it was (and is) a messy business running a church. The Revival churches were not alone trying to re-create Christianity in their image and proclaiming their particular version of The Faith as superior.



But the expected messiness of church planting, Church amalgamating, church splitting and church running were aggravated by what appears to be the Revival leadership’s drive to be different from literally any other church or creed. This drive for differentiation and autonomy from organised religion led to some decisions that seem to have been errors of judgement. Rancour and bad blood lie just below the surface in Cabbage. From my reading, no church, no group, no denomination, no aberrant theology (aberrant in the Revival Church’s view), no person guilty of some sleight or misdemeanour, is safe from Cabbage’s criticisms, patronising put-downs or damnation from faint praise. Between the lines (sometimes not so between), Cabbage pushes the line that we should be so grateful that we have, at last, the correct view of salvation. Good on us!, is the message in Cabbage. The unwritten subtext being, Such a pity about the poor unenlightened ones who went before us and our contemporaries around us…

This superior and exalted view of ourselves has a price. We quickly developed a practice of not fellowshipping with others – even those “who have received the Holy Spirit as well as we”, as Peter said in Acts 10. (In fact, we still actively avoid and repudiate whatever hints at being ecumenical). It seems the Revival’s leaders intended to create and maintain points of difference between the Revival movement and the “dead, powerless” Church that was not preaching the “full gospel”.

The Revival’s leaders wanted to lead their flock down a path where they were to “come out and be separate” from any other religious affiliations lest they catch a sin infection or fall into compromise or did both. This desire to remain isolated from church and religious affiliations is referred to and applauded by us as “The Doctrine of Separation”.

This insidious doctrine promulgated and prescribed as Revival and Christian orthodoxy put families under unnecessary pressure. The Revival’s leaders defended their often unjustifiable implementation of the doctrine as a necessary means of safeguarding the sheep from the influence and opinions of salvation-threatening relatives.



The development of our Church (and others of the time) took historic Christian doctrines, as expressed by a Christian orthodoxy stretching back 2,000 years, and either summarily dismissed them, ignored them or “Revivalised” them. Exploring the Bible’s great themes and doctrines was actively discouraged except, of course, where the Revival’s top theologians ratified such exploration. We held distinctly Dispensationalist and Arminian views of the great Biblical themes and covenants. While I’m not going to unpack our historical and present adherence to Dispensationalist and Arminian theology, suffice to say for now that it does have a profound influence on our view of the Church, salvation, and the end times.

Lat’s get back to what our history shows. Many inventive ideas (grounded on and justified by unquestioned and unexamined experience rather than biblical thinking) were born in the early days of the Revival. The Revival’s participants promoted a variety of must-have power of God signs. These included Slaying in the Spirit, casting out Demons (from Christians no less), Divine Healing (as a gospel-ratifying event), Prophecy (some quite personal), Words of Wisdom and Knowledge, Dreams, Visions and Speaking in Tongues. Various groups emphasised these as a means of differentiation from organised religion and from other groups who, of course, did not have a correct view of scripture.

As the Revival Centres emerged from the fog, I cannot help but think that this signs-driven zeal for differentiation and autonomy from “organised religion” was as much a misguided marketing strategy as anything else. That strategy was used by the Revival Centres (as they were then) to create a significant point of difference, a massive can’t-avoid-it, artificial stumbling-stone. That stone was used quite effectively to promote a “spiritual” divide. There was “us” with our monopoly on “true Christianity” and “them” – everyone else who had failed in various ways.

The number one way “they” had failed, always at the top of the list, was the misunderstanding of the events of Pentecost. The events recorded in the first two chapters of “The Acts of the Apostles” and other New Testament scriptures drove what the Revival’s hierarchy said was the correct interpretation of the way of salvation. The central point of difference for us came down to the “Speaking in Tongues” experience. As time passed and an often chaotic and sometimes less than cordial Revival progressed, a doctrine became clarified in the minds of the Revival’s leaders – all genuine Christians will/can speak in tongues.

For us in the Revival Centres/Fellowship, the necessity of speaking in tongues became our differentiating wedge. Speaking in tongues was the bedrock of the great spiritual divide put in place and wedged ever tighter between the Revival Centres (and subsequently the Revival Fellowship) and 99.9% of other Christians. While this view bubbled up over time, the doctrine became embedded in Revival Centre/Fellowship dogma circa 1958 - 1963. Our Revival position (briefly put) became and remains:

No Tongues? > No Holy Spirit > No Salvation > No exceptions.

The Revival Fellowship stands or falls on this salvation doctrine and its theological implications. We have come to promote and accept this dogma as God-given, Holy-Spirit-ratified truth, and it was (and still is) a radical stand.

However, our doctrine does not look much like the view from the trenches of 100 or 120 years ago. Sure, our revival forerunners wanted a deeper, more powerful relationship with God, and they expressed that yearning by seeking to experience God. What they wanted was to “Speak in Tongues” coming as it did as part of a “second blessing” (or a “second work of grace”) or even a “third blessing” (a “third work of grace”) in some quarters.

In the earliest revivals, their doctrine was that individuals – already saved and committed to Christ, already sealed with the Spirit – could be powered up, blessed, and supernaturally enabled for service. (This was, after all, the point of Pentecost as we read in Acts 1 -  “You shall receive power after the Holy Spirit has come upon you”. Notice that they were not receiving salvation. They were told to wait for the power, not salvation).

Our forebears did not preach that this “second” or “third” blessing brought salvation. That’s why they called it a second or third blessing: because it came after the first blessing of salvation by faith in Jesus. To quote William J. Seymour (the leader and guiding light in the Azusa Street revival):

“…a clear knowledge of the new birth in our souls [which is the first work of grace …] brings everlasting life to our souls. Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God. Every one of us that repents of our sins and turns to the Lord Jesus with faith in Him, receives forgiveness of sins. Justification and regeneration are simultaneous. The pardoned sinner becomes a child of God in justification…. So we have Christ crowned and enthroned in our heart, the tree of life…

When we have a clear knowledge of justification and sanctification, through the precious blood of Jesus Christ in our hearts, then we can be a recipient of the baptism with the Holy Ghost.”[1]

Seymour and the majority before and after him taught that salvation is by faith alone. Once God had granted redemption (or for the Arminian minded - salvation was grasped), many of the redeemed prayed for and received a subsequent blessing and added power from a Holy Spirit. Our stand was similar to our revival forebears. In Cabbage, there are excerpts of publications from our historical forerunners that use the well-known scriptures from Ephesians 2:5-8

“ even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved),  and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus, in order that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God.”

There is no space here to unpack these critical scriptures in depth. Sufficient for now is to say that the earlier revivals believed the plain reading of these scriptures as once, did we. That simple reading endorsed by us in the past declared that salvation was by faith. Further, we believed that a person's salvation and the ability to have the necessary faith in Jesus Christ as Saviour were both a gift from God.

After faith in Jesus Christ (itself a gift of God) was evident, we believed that then came power and a further blessing in the form of the much-desired encounter with God’s presence and manifest power through the Holy Spirit. So historically (Revival movement history), it was a case of faith bringing justification, righteousness, and the start of a journey of sanctification with the Holy Spirit dwelling within. Then there can be a more profound encounter. For many, the reality was (and is) a profoundly personal experience coinciding with “by grace are you saved by faith”. As I state elsewhere – this simultaneity of experience and salvation by faith alone ought not to be interpreted as “experience is necessary for salvation”.

Our error is to presume that the experience is required to prove the presence of faith.

As I will discuss in depth later, the problem with that position is that when many who speak in tongues do so for the first time, they have no idea who Jesus is and what He has done for them in purchasing their salvation. They have no one and no gospel in which to put their faith, and they are being led to an experience, not to Christ as Saviour.

You see, on our journey to enlightenment, we took the desire of the earlier revivals and holiness movements for a deeper, more powerful relationship with God and gave it an upgrade. We declared that only a non-negotiable experience could ratify that deeper relationship. We mandated speaking in tongues as a rite of passage for sinners moving from death to life.

Our revival forefathers (and foremothers) were caught up and drawn into what was an emotional, experience-driven, powerful and life-changing whirlwind move of God. The Revival’s adherents, having experienced the power and presence of God as many of their contemporaries had not, then had the challenge of explaining speaking in tongues and other “manifestations”. For example:

In about 1801, at the Revival in Cain Ridge, Kentucky, powerful sermons, singing, shouting and dancing were normal. People fell into trances, and some got the jerks, some the shakes. Some experienced holy laughter, while others spoke in tongues.

Before 1901, thousands in Holiness and Keswick groups had claimed a baptism in the Holy Spirit with various evidence to validate their experience (but not speaking in tongues).

On Azusa Street, one report says:

“This was no quiet demonstration; it was full of noisy manifestations, shouts, speaking in tongues, moaning, and singing in tongues that undoubtedly would have frightened any uninitiated within audible range”

Those who experienced “Pentecost” at the Azusa Street revival claimed that they spoke in Greek, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Zulu, “dialects of India,” Chippewa, and many more languages… the faithful at Azusa declared that God had bestowed these unlearned human languages so that they could speedily evangelise the world before the coming of Jesus Christ.

On the other hand, some were struck speechless others just shouted – all through the meeting. Others started shaking or writhing about.

Many experienced the “Shekinah Glory, “…It was believed to be a visible manifestation of the glory of the Lord … Many just breathed it in, some describing it as an experience of heaven or as breathing pure oxygen.

There was reportedly a flame that would often appear above the meetinghouse. Witnesses described it as a fire coming down from heaven to meet a fire going up from the building.

(More information is available from, as one example, Cecil M. Robeck: The Azusa Street Mission & Revival)

Sometimes there was no attempt at real explanation, and there was just an acceptance that all this came from God as a manifestation of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes though, they combed through the Bible, seeking a firm scriptural foundation for their experiences to defend them against the naysayers.

Over time “tongues” became accepted as the initial experience for those “Baptised in the Holy Spirit” with the other signs relegated to a second-rate status – though they were still considered manifestations of the Spirit. However, “speaking in tongues” was given precedence as the initial experience of the much sought-after baptism. They did not teach that “tongues” was linked to salvation.

The search for explanations of all of the manifestations was not without difficulties. One of the reasons was that many of the experiences had little scriptural backing. Even if the experience could be said to fit into a scriptural category of some sort (Word of Knowledge, Word of Wisdom, Discerning of Spirits, Speaking in Tongues), the challenge was (and is) that the scripture itself offered very little in the way of explanation.

Over time, and perhaps inevitably, the power of the experiences (genuine or not) led the revival participants to view those of their Christian contemporaries who lacked such experiences as missing something vital for an overcoming, more profound relationship with God. They felt and preached that the state of the then Church was not what it could be or should be. Everyone should have the experiences they in the revival movements had. It would revitalise the Church, renew it and align it with the New Testament church. So it was thought and taught.

We in the Revival Centre/Fellowship took that view and made the lack of experience not just a lack of depth or commitment but a lack of salvation itself.

Was that a justifiable, scripturally sound decision? It was a laudable goal to awaken the Church to the Spirit’s availability (as we saw it) and defend and teach an expanded role for the Spirit in the life of a believer and the Church, the Body of Christ.

Yet our history demonstrates that our Church’s development has at times been a case of “zeal not according to knowledge”. From my reading, we have neglected the Church’s historical perspective and lacked an appreciation of previous scholarship and the value of doing our own.

We developed and now maintain our own “fundamentalist orthodoxy” with a dogmatic commitment to and an unwise emphasis on “speaking in tongues”. This emphasis is not a result of the Spirit directly imparting some illumination. If that were true, then our dogmatism would be more widespread in the Church at large. Why? Because it seems unlikely in the extreme that the Spirit would give us such vital knowledge while withholding it from the broader (worldwide) Church.

Our fundamentalism was, and remains, a characteristic that separates rather than engages and enlightens. Historically our fundamentalism was of a dried out and shrunken kind. Even now, our fundamentalism remains, and our salvation doctrinal stance has not matured into the vigorous and spiritually nourishing outcome it could be had we pursued the rigorous study of God’s Word. If we had been willing to follow that study to wherever it led, our Fellowship could have become the powerhouse that the Revival movement envisioned.

Our analytical resources are limited, not by capability but by lack of opportunities. Enquiry is not welcomed. Instead, it is stifled, and any hint at a scholarly approach is hampered by distrust of thinking deeply (anti-intellectualism) and an entrenched commitment to emphasise experience above theology and the study of God’s Word. Our views should have been broadened, reformed and refined by the Word of God as we (allegedly) measured, corrected and developed using that standard.

Instead, we dug a theological moat and raised the drawbridge.

On raising the drawbridge, we became effective obscurantists in our thinking, approach to enquiry and when dealing with criticism. Our obscurantism was not entirely of the dictionary defined sort (striving to prevent enlightenment or the progress of knowledge). Still, it was, nevertheless, a fear-driven, doubt-riddled process of keeping the lid on questions and questioning. This attitude became prevalent as we did not want open discussion and debate about our unique stand on speaking in tongues (or any other Revival doctrine) in case we frightened the horses.

On raising the drawbridge, we became effective obscurantists [2] in our thinking, approach to enquiry and when dealing with criticism. Our obscurantism was not entirely of the dictionary defined sort (striving to prevent enlightenment or the progress of knowledge). Still, it was, nevertheless, a fear-driven, doubt-riddled process of keeping the lid on questions and questioning. This attitude became prevalent as we did not want open discussion and debate about our unique stand on speaking in tongues (or any other Revival doctrine) in case we frightened the horses.

Outwardly, our doubts were not about the salvation doctrine we advocated because we stubbornly and doggedly presented a façade that our doctrines (especially the necessity of speaking in tongues – vintage 1958) were biblically-based. But I think (based on my 45-year history with the Fellowship) that there were doubts – serious but undiscussed (at least not discussed in polite company). Doubts based on a careful reading of the Word and an uneasy feeling that deep investigation would show our position was not clear-cut and was not a scripturally correct construction. These fears were borne from a persistent nagging at our collective conscience, reminding us that it is devilishly hard to support our stand from scripture with any rigour. This undiscussed, sub-surface doubt fuelled (then and now) our fears of any open discussion, debate or investigation of different and possibly opposing views. Our prevailing ethos (historically and currently) is to present a unified front on our Revival Fellowship fundamentals at all costs. Therefore, we do not entertain any discussion of misgivings about the legitimacy of our thoughts on speaking in tongues – ever. Yet I know beyond doubt from my conversations that many in the Fellowship – Pastors, Leaders and their trusting sheep – find that the yoke of the Revival Fellowship tongues dogma is not easy to bear.

Now, if all truth is God’s truth (as it indeed is) and our doctrines and beliefs are so biblical, why the fear? Why the indecent haste to quash discussion? If, as we claim, our salvation doctrines are Spirit-ratified, then any discussion and comparison with competing views will inevitably lead all to see that we are truth-aligned and biblically secure in our theology. We should not fear to follow truth wherever it leads. Yet the fear lives on, just below the veneer of self-assurance. That’s because it is not at all a simple, straightforward task to glean unambiguous support from scripture for our salvation doctrines. Any enquiry seeking to ratify our position will inevitably lead genuine seekers-for-truth to ask insightful questions that separate our salvation dogma from biblical support.

Our approach is, however, adversarial and uninformed. We deplore or denounce other views (often publically “from the platform” ) but seem incapable of providing a well thought out and better case of our own. We seem unready and unable to prove our position’s biblical adequacy in a way robust enough to withstand rigorous comparison with God’s Word.

We’ll discuss that rigorous comparison with God’s Word in Part 2.

Endnotes

1. Receive ye the Holy Ghost by William Seymour. Https://bibleportal.com/sermon/william+seymour/receive-ye-the-holy-ghost
2. “Obscurantism.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/obscurantism.