The Christian life is a lot like improv night at the local coffee shop. Let me explain.

When I was in seminary, there was this strange and wonderful little coffee shop near campus called City Coffee. In my first semester, I probably studied there every night. And every once in a while, the shop would host an improv night. Local “artists” would show up and do their thing. I’m actually not entirely sure I ever stayed around for it, though I do have a vague recollection of some very bad poetry. I certainly never participated. After all, I had homework to do — plus something called inhibition.

The Christian life is like improv night at City Coffee, only it’s improv night every day of the week.

Constant Word, Changing World

We might wish the Christian life were like karaoke night — in that case, you would at least have the words — but it’s not. It’s improv: the curtain opens, you’re on stage without a script, and somebody yells “Action!” after stuffing a prompt into your hand:

“What’s the Christian approach to TikTok?”
“Postmodernism”
“Post Malone” (Not to be confused with the “Mailman” Karl Malone, which would, of course, be a very different prompt.)

We know that we won’t find headings in our Bible like “Social Media” or “Paul & Public Schools” or “Jesus’s Sermon on MMA.” And we’ll search in vain for specific answers to questions like “Whom should I marry?” or “Where, how long, with whom, and in what specific ways should I engage in Jesus’s Great Commission?”

“God wants us to develop the skill needed to extend his never-changing word into our ever-changing world.”

Does the Bible have everything we need for life and godliness? Absolutely. But it doesn’t give us a line-by-line script. Instead, it asks us to improvise, to develop what theologian Kevin Vanhoozer calls “improvisatory reasoning” (The Drama of Doctrine, 336). That’s how God has designed the Christian life to work. He wants us to develop the skill needed to extend his never-changing word into our ever-changing world. He simply calls it wisdom, and, in one place — Proverbs 2 — he tells us not only where to get it but also why.

Let’s begin with why.

Learning the Good Life

Why learn to improvise? According to Proverbs 2:9, if you get wisdom — if you learn to reason improvisationally — “then you will understand righteousness and justice and equity, every good path.” Find wisdom, God says, and you’ll be able to identify and walk down “every good path.” It’s so important for us to hear this that God through Solomon says it again at the end of the chapter. Find wisdom, Solomon says, and “you will walk in the way of the good and keep to the paths of the righteous” (Proverbs 2:20). In short: find wisdom, find the good life.

Now, of course, good doesn’t guarantee you’ll be healthy or wealthy or even trouble-free — at least not yet. (Remember Jesus and the suffering faithful in Hebrews 11?) But there is a correspondence between your idea of good and the Bible’s, which is why I feel perfectly comfortable defining good as “satisfying” or “joyful” or “fulfilling.”

That’s why we should get wisdom; what about where?

God’s Words of Wisdom

Solomon writes, “The Lord gives wisdom; from his mouth come knowledge and understanding” (Proverbs 2:6). The wisdom we need — the wisdom we want — is something God gives.

Proverbs, in fact, says that God gives it to us “from his mouth.” Certainly this includes the wisdom God embedded in the world he created (and sustains) with his mouth: “In the beginning, God . . . said,” and the world was (Genesis 1; see Hebrews 1:2–3). Proverbs is full of just this sort of wisdom (see, for example, Proverbs 6:6–11). But this wisdom isn’t Solomon’s focus here. Creation isn’t the only thing breathed out by God; so too is every word of Holy Scripture (2 Timothy 3:16). And this wisdom is precisely what God has in mind here.

“The wisdom we need — the wisdom we want — is something God gives.”

Solomon makes this connection in verses 1 and 5. He says, “If you receive my words and treasure up my commandments within you . . . then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God” (Proverbs 2:1, 5). To receive Solomon’s words — to receive the Bible’s words — is, at the same time, to receive the understanding and knowledge — the wisdom — that comes from God.

Now, it’s one thing to know that Scripture teaches us wisdom; it’s still another to know where to look in the Bible to see it modeled. Here we move beyond Proverbs 2 and, as Vanhoozer reminds us, learn to “cultivate biblical wisdom by reading stories of how the prophets and apostles spoke and acted in concrete situations” (334). It’s from these stories, these canonical case studies, that we learn how to faithfully improvise.

Priceless Case Studies

Prompt: A church is struggling to believe the gospel. Presently, they’re being harassed by old friends questioning the Christian claim of a crucified messiah. (One report has it that these friends are calling that claim “foolish” and “scandalous” — another cynically wonders “how any moderately intelligent reader of the Scriptures could affirm something so implausible.”) And this is to say nothing of the bleak economic forecast facing the Christian community. Increased taxes, they suspect, might be only the front end of the bad news.

How’s that for a real and specific prompt? What if somebody gave it to you? What would you say?

In time, the prompt makes its way to the church’s pastor, who, with God’s help, traces the problem all the way to its roots — or, to borrow from Vanhoozer one more time, “sees and tastes everything about [the] situation that is theologically relevant” (334). And he responds with a brilliant and original piece of Christological reasoning drawn from the Old Testament, carefully and winsomely arguing his case using premises he knows his doubting friends can still very much affirm.

If you’re wondering, I’ve just summarized Hebrews. And it’s just one of dozens of case studies in our Bibles teaching us how to apply God’s never-changing word to our ever-changing world. You may not have thought about the apostles (or the prophets) like this before, but they are master improvisers. And we can — we must — learn from their example. It’s one of the reasons they’re in our Bibles.

Improv Discipleship

How do we learn to improvise? We attend to God’s word, not least to the model improvisers God has so generously given us. Attend, though, is probably too weak or, at the very least, insufficient. After all, Solomon uses half a dozen or so verbs, pleading with his son and with us to get wisdom. If you want it, Solomon says, you’ve got to “receive” it (Proverbs 2:1), “treasure [it] up” (Proverbs 2:1), “mak[e] your ear attentive” and “inclin[e] your heart” (Proverbs 2:2) to it. You need to “call out” and “raise your voice” (Proverbs 2:3) for it. (Ask for it and really mean it; see James 1:5–7.). “Seek” and “search for it,” Solomon says, “as for hidden treasures” (Proverbs 2:4).

Don’t you want this priceless treasure God offers you for your good? Don’t you want to get better at applying God’s never-changing word to our ever-changing world? Friends, you have to improvise. That’s how God has designed the Christian life to work. So don’t you want to get better at it? I know I do. It’s not too late, and it’s not beyond your reach. You don’t have to be super smart, creative, or outgoing to excel at it. You simply have to know where to look and go after it with all your heart.

I wouldn’t delay; I think the curtain’s about to open.

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14811424/unity-in-truth-by-love-overview

The question of the origins of the Christian tradition called Baptist has been, and to some extent still is, a much-debated issue. For example, when W.H. Whitsitt (1841–1911), the third president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, argued in the late 1890s that the earliest Baptists in both England and America did not practice immersion, he set in motion a controversy within the Southern Baptist Convention that eventuated in his dismissal as president.

Whitsitt’s leading opponents held to a position known as Landmarkism, of which a cardinal tenet was the assertion that there had been an unbroken line of baptisms by immersion (sometimes colloquially called “The Trail of Blood”) that went back to Christ and that were necessary for the existence of true churches. In other words, there have always been Baptists, it was alleged — though they might have used different nomenclature, such as Anabaptist in the sixteenth century or Waldensian in the late medieval era.

Whitsitt lost his presidency over this issue of Baptist origins, but his argument against Landmarkism was sound. In the past century or so, few historians have found Landmarkism to be a credible explanation of Baptist origins. The two major explanations today link modern-day Baptists to the continental Anabaptists of the Reformation era or the Puritan renewal movement within the Church of England.

Anabaptist or Puritan?

There are certainly similarities between the Baptists and the Anabaptists: both emphasize believers’ churches and credobaptism, and both are critical of church-state unions. But there are also significant differences. Some of the Anabaptist communities were fundamentally unorthodox on some basic issues like the Trinity and the person of Christ. The mainstream Anabaptist movement — that is, the Mennonites and the Hutterites — is strongly committed to pacifism, a perspective that has never been a significant part of the Baptist tradition. The Sabbatarian ethos of the Baptist movement is largely absent from Anabaptism. Finally, there are next to no major organic historical links between the continental Anabaptists of the sixteenth century and the English Baptists of the seventeenth century.

On the other hand, the ties between Puritanism — which emerged in the 1560s as a renewal movement within the Anglican state church — and the Baptists — who arose as General (i.e., Arminian) Baptists in the mid-1610s and as Particular (i.e., Calvinistic) Baptists in the late 1630s — are patent and multiple. All the leading Baptists of this era — men like John Smyth (d. 1612) and William Kiffen (1616–1701) — began their careers as Puritans. Like the Puritans, most of the Baptists of this era were convinced that the Lord’s Day is the Sabbath of the new covenant. And Baptists, like their Puritan contemporaries, wholeheartedly believed that a political life could be a Christian’s vocation. Finally, most of the Baptists of this era firmly rejected any connection to the continental Anabaptists.

Calvinistic Seedbed

The forebears of most modern-day Anglophone Baptists are the Particular Baptists, who emerged from the womb of English Puritanism in the 1630s. For me personally, these Puritan origins of the Baptist movement offer the best historical explanation of where the tradition of my spiritual forebears came from. I do not assert this because I, like those seventeenth-century Particular Baptists, am a Calvinist. I affirm it because the historical data leads me to this conclusion.

“The forebears of most modern-day Anglophone Baptists are the Particular Baptists.”

With the rise of interest in Reformed theology among evangelicals since the 1960s, it is not surprising to find similar interest in Baptist circles. In the last sixty years, there has developed a distinct movement of Reformed Baptist churches (though the term “Reformed Baptist” is a one that was rarely, if ever, used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) as well as similar-minded congregations within such Baptist bodies as the Southern Baptist Convention and the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Canada. Prior to this rise of interest in and commitment to Reformed thinking among these North American Baptist communities, the regnant theology in many of them was a mixture of revivalism, non-Calvinistic dispensationalism, and pragmatism.

When these Reformed or Calvinistic Baptists began to ask about the origins of the Baptist movement, they were excited to find Calvinism and Reformed theology as a seedbed of the Baptist tradition. But some Baptists, who sought to retain what had become traditional Baptist practice and thinking during the twentieth century, reacted to this new stress on Calvinist origins by asserting the non-Calvinistic Anabaptist link. And thus, the discussion of historic Baptist origins became shaped by modern-day concerns, a good example of what historians have come to call presentism — namely, the use of the past to validate present-day positions. But as noted already, the investigation of the origin of the Baptist movement must be directed by the evidence from the seventeenth century. And to this historian, that evidence is patent: the English-speaking Baptist movement has its origins in Puritanism. (See, for example, B.R. White’s The English Baptists of the Seventeenth Century.)

Why Does It Matter?

What, though, is the importance of this assertion about Puritan origins? Does it make any difference to modern-day Baptist life and thought? For some, this determination of genesis means that as it was in the beginning, so it should be now. For this way of thinking, the theological position hammered out by the seventeenth-century Particular Baptists — usually taken to be epitomized in the Second London Confession — is the gold standard by which all present-day Baptist thought must be judged.

“To this historian, that evidence is patent: the English-speaking Baptist movement has its origins in Puritanism.”

Now, this idea of going back to the past for modern orientation was a key element in the Reformation. The watch cry of ad fontes, “back to the sources,” was an important principle that directed the efforts of the Reformers. Yet as the heirs of the Reformation discovered, this principle did not mean that one tradition could claim to be the true representation and repristination of the apostolic era. Was the purest form of the church to be found among the Scottish Presbyterians or the French Huguenots or the Calvinist state church of Hungary? The quintessential Puritan Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) was forced to recognize this truth when he found his New Model Army facing the Scottish Presbyterian military on the battlefield. As he asked the Scottish Calvinists, “Is all religion wrapped up in . . . any one form?”

Personally, I think the heirs of the seventeenth-century Particular Baptists — the Baptist men and women of the long eighteenth century, figures like Anne Steele (1717–1778), Caleb Evans (1737–1791), Andrew Fuller (1754–1815), and Maria de Fleury (fl. 1770s–1790s) — are extremely helpful here. While they clearly treasured the confessional legacy that came from the lives and thought of their seventeenth-century forebears, they certainly did not believe themselves to be restricted solely to repeating the arguments and formulations of a bygone era. They lived in challenging times of revolution — intellectual, political, industrial, and even sexual — and they needed to address these matters in ways that spoke to the men and women of their day. In other words, present-day discussion of Baptist origins must reckon with the fact that we do not live in the times of our spiritual ancestors. Some of their battles are no longer our battles, and some of our battles could never have been envisioned by the men and women of those days.

Our investigation, then, of Baptist origins cannot be driven by antiquarianism — that is, a misguided attempt to live in the past. Rather, as with any study of the past, we seek to understand historical questions — in this case, what gave rise to the Baptist movement — that we might better understand some of the forces shaping Baptist identity over the centuries (for good and for ill), and also that our study of the past might help us to live as more faithful Christian disciples in the present.

So, for example, Baptists in the seventeenth century found themselves having to differentiate themselves from their Anglican paedobaptist neighbors, and sometimes they did so with a degree of vim and vigour that frankly went beyond the pale. While we can learn from this battle against an oppressive Anglican regime and state-church union, that battle is not ours to wage. Rather, we thank God for Bible-believing, faithful Anglicans.