Published by admin on 28 Jan 2008
What’s In My Head
It has been over two weeks. This is the longest I’ve gone without posting anything here, so I thought I’d just comment a little bit on the things that have been swirling around my head over the past couple of weeks.
Pride
I’ve been looking into the unitarian group called the Christadelphians. They are a rather small denomination with unitarian beliefs. Of course they don’t consider themselves a denomination, but rather the restoration of the original first century church. So what else is new? I guess that should have been my first clue, warning flag number one.
They have some beliefs that I do not hold, such as when you die, you are completely unconscious/unaware in the grave until the resurrection. Nor do they believe in eternal punishment of the wicked. These beliefs are sometimes referred to as “soul sleep” and “annihilation.” I’ve studied it and I don’t buy it.
On the positive side, they are unitarian and they also believe that full-immersion adult baptism is a necessary step in God’s plan of salvation.
They also hold an uncommon belief that surprised me because it matches a study I did on my own, along with the conclusion that my study was leaning toward. I did not complete the study thoroughly, so I cannot say that I hold this belief; a belief that I thought to be unique since I have never heard of anyone else even considering the possibility. Then, lo, I find an entire denomination that holds to it! Or at least something extremely close to it. That belief is that only believers are resurrected and judged (since only believers receive eternal life). The disobedient believers go to eternal punishment; the obedient to eternal life. There is disagreement within the Christadelphian church, which has actually caused a split in the church, based on the significance of baptism in who will be resurrected. It’s too much to get into here. Someday I may post my own study on this topic, just for information, but baptism was not an element that I addressed when I studied it.
But why did I title this section Pride? In my discussions with Christadelphians, the subject of baptism was brought up. I found out that someone joining their church would have to be re-baptized by them. Warning flag number two. When I asked why, I was told that they needed to ensure that the person believed and understood the correct things. And if someone is unsure of what they should believe, they can attend classes before being baptized. Hello? Where is this in scripture? If you preach the gospel to someone and they tell you they believe, who are you to judge whether or not they truly believe? Perhaps churches need to start using lie detectors before baptizing people. And, by the way, what they require you to believe before they will baptize you is their 30-point statement of faith. Wow.
Anyway, it is arrogance and pride that requires someone to have precise knowledge of specific beliefs, the way they think it should be understood, before allowing someone to be baptized. There are very clear and simple examples in scripture that show us what someone needs to believe before being baptized (Acts 10:34-48 is one example). Any “requirement” beyond that is an addition to what God requires. To think that you (whether a person or a group) know better than the apostles what someone needs to believe in order to be baptized is to place yourself above them, and even above God who inspired the holy scriptures. It is the epitome of arrogance.
Does It Matter?
Some things don’t matter. In an earlier entry (Nativity Tales), I commented on the number of inaccuracies in the story of the birth of Jesus; for example, that it is commonly taught and portrayed that there were three wise men or magi. Someone commented (verbally, it’s not in the comments), “Does it really matter how many wise men there were? No, it doesn’t.” With that I completely agree! It doesn’t matter. If it did, scripture would reveal how many wise men there were. But the fact that we are not told how many wise men there were and whether it matters or not was not the point of my post. The point was that we should not make things up that are not in scripture! This kind of inaccurate information gets passed on in the form of tradition and ultimately gets believed, over what is actually contained in the Bible. The number of wise men and the other false nativity traditions are only examples. Is truth important? Yes! Don’t propagate known falsehood. That’s lying. It is a lie to say there were three wise men when you know full well that we don’t know how many there were.