In my last post I showed how the Charismatic “second experience” can be traced back, through John Wesley, to the Moravian conversion/justication/sanctification first experience taught by Count Zinzendorf. I also examined what seems to be a separate tying of conversion to a particular emotional experience by the English Puritans, the foundation of which (I would conjecture) was Martin Luther’s near-pathological sense of guilt. By God’s grace, his dread of damnation led to his rediscovery of salvation by faith alone, and consequent doctrine of assurance, albeit balanced with a life of continual repentance for indwelling sin.
But should his experience be universal? And how does either stream of “feelings Christianity” relate to what we read of the primitive Church in Acts? After all, a Reformed historian I heard recently pointed out that it was the Reformation that introduced an “experience of conversion” to Christian thinking. Granted, that was partly because in Catholic Christendom one was assumed to be saved through infant baptism. But even early accounts speak of whole nations being converted because their king accepted baptism, without any recorded parallel to the phenomena of Methodist revival. Which model does Scripture endorse, or is it something entirely different?
In this brief survey of conversions in the New Testament, I am focusing on Acts, because although we can surmise that the Holy Spirit enabled repentance and faith during Jesus’s ministry, the indwelling of the Spirit, on which modern experiences are justified, only came with Pentecost. But I also have to factor in that Luke’s accounts of preaching and conversion are abbreviated, and are intended to serve particular purposes in his narrative. The absence of any particular stirring of emotions is not necessarily evidence of absence. Even so, there are many clues in Acts about the “normal Christian birth,” and just as there is nothing in the New Testament to endorse any doctrine of a climactic second experience, so it has remarkably little to say about any particular experience of conversion.
Let me state first off that, despite the variations in the accounts, Paul’s testimony in Acts 20:21 shows clearly that repentance and faith in Jesus were the substance of his gospel:
I have declared to both Jews and Greeks that they must turn to God in repentance and have faith in our Lord Jesus.
This is entirely consistent with Jesus’s own preaching. Individual episodes show that Paul’s “faith in the Lord Jesus” has vital propositional content: that the Jesus they must believe in is the promised Jewish messiah who has died for sin, been bodily raised from death, and glorified as judge and Lord of all at the right hand of God.
It cannot be denied that such a faith, inextricably entwined with the need to abandon rebellion against God, will engender strong emotions. In Jesus’s own ministry, the woman who washed his feet with her tears “loved much, because she was forgiven much.” Nevertheless, her act is recorded because it was exceptional – as, it seems, was the life of depravity from which she was saved. And indeed, Acts seems to show that the strongest emotional responses are not to the speaker “preaching up the Law” so as to produce deep conviction and tears in preparation for receiving forgiveness, but are a response to specific circumstances.
For example, Peter’s audience of Pentecost pilgrims in Acts 2 are “cut to the heart” and ask what they must do. But this is in direct response to the accusation that they have actually killed their promised Messiah. Many of those hearers would not have been in Jerusalem fifty days before, and even fewer would have been in the crowd baying for Jesus to be crucified. But they realised that for the nation’s leaders to reject the messiah brought guilt on the whole nation. Moreover, there was already a deep-seated national knowledge (learned from infancy, and beyond mere emotion) that Israel was alienated from God by sin, which only Messiah’s coming would solve – and now his salvation had been brutally rejected.
In other words, the hearers were already, through their religion, familiar with their sin (as Peter seems to take for granted in v38). Their emotional anguish is a combination of corporate complicity in Jesus’s murder, and the consequent loss of hope of a saviour. The specificity of this sense of guilt is shown in Peter’s “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation” (that is, from the generation that has killed Messiah, rather than from mankind cursed by original sin in general).
In the case of the Philippian gaoler, his desperate cry of “What must I do to be saved?” is occasioned by fear of imminent judicial death for letting his prisoners escape, rather than by fear of God’s final judgement. Paul’s reply that he must believe in the Lord Jesus enables him to explain the gospel more fully to the man’s entire household, resulting in what seems a quiet and joyful celebration of baptism.
To gentiles, the appeal to repentance is often seen to major specifically on the sin of idolatry. In Lystra, mistaken for pagan gods by a rustic crowd, Paul’s message is that their religion is foolish, though up to now tolerated by the true God, who now calls on them to turn to him. Jesus is not even mentioned in this episode, though his name must subsequently have been preached to them (14:21-22). Paul’s approach is similar, if more academic, in Athens in Acts 17, where his initial appeal is to turn from false religion to the risen Jesus, as the judge appointed by the living God. In both cases, it seems that, as for the Jews, a general awareness of guilt before the gods was already culturally accepted, and Paul does not find it necessary to “preach up the Law.”
The context of most of Paul’s sermons also militates against any idea of Paul’s preaching primarily to stir the emotions. When he speaks in synagogues, his approach is to place Jesus scripturally in the role of expected messiah, sometimes in the context of his rejection by the leaders of the nation. His hearers are divided between those who accept and those who reject, but he is sometimes asked to come back next week and explain more, which would scarcely have happened if the orderly synagogue service had been disrupted by manifestations of weeping or prostration. Indeed, the strongest emotions we read about are the violent reactions of those who find the idea of a crucified, or a divine, messiah scandalous – and even they are usually stirred up by hit-mobs from elsewhere rather than by Paul’s presentations.
In short, Luke does not seem to insist on any particular feelings, or lack of feelings, as essential to conversion. What matters is the resolve to turn from sin, and to commit one’s life fully to Christ. Such major surgery on the will by the Spirit might well be anticipated to produce strong emotions, but emotions commensurate with the personality and circumstances of the individual. A quiet Jewish intellectual’s persuasion that Jesus is, indeed the expected Christ, or an equivalent gentile philosopher’s sense of confirmation that paganism is as empty as he had already believed, would be quite different from the outcast prostitute’s tearful joy at being accepted by God, or from the materialist’s breast-beating at the realisation that his whole life had been futile.
The epistles certainly show how both Jewish and gentile converts were made more aware of sin through teaching of the Law, sometimes very forcefully (for example James 5:1-6). But in becoming a Christian, the emphasis seems to be on the will to turn from sin to follow Christ. This probably explains how entire households could be baptized immediately, and why false believers like Simon Magus or Ananias and Sapphira would only be unmasked by their actions in the church, rather than by failing to provide a sufficiently “credible profession of faith” upon conversion or baptism. It’s serving Christ that counts, more than what you feel about serving him.
What I have said does not exclude preaching the Law as well as the gospel. In Acts, it appears that both Jews and gentiles had a cultural knowledge of divine disfavour. Surely that must have been the case in Christian England at almost any stage in its history. Now, however, where God has not been educated out of people’s minds, the God of judgement certainly has. As far as is possible in any generation in history, even natural conscience has been purged out of our minds (to be replaced by false conscience about unconscious bias, Islamophobia and so on). Surely the crucial initial act of repentance can only be undertaken if conscience is reawakened first, so that God’s Law must be preached as the reason why faith in Jesus is even necessary. Nothing in Scripture suggests that this understanding is unnecessary, or that it is an automatic internal work of the Spirit.
It follows that preaching for an emotional “Holy Spirit” experience of God’s love or peace is not only much like the kundalini experience of the pagans – it is, for all its deep sense of encounter, nothing to do with the biblical gospel at all. On the contrary, as Jonathan Edwards pointed out in Religious Affections, all truly spiritual emotion comes from apprehension of gospel truth by mind and heart together, enabled by a converted will and understanding. As John says:
We know that everyone who has been born of God does not keep on sinning, but he who was born of God protects him, and the evil one does not touch him.
We know that we are from God, and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.
And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true; and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life. Little children, keep yourselves from idols.
(1 John 5:18-21)
