Power for a Transformed Life

One last set of quotes from the New Wineskins interview cited last week in A Conversation with Edward Fudge

(Fred) I can remember my early Christian days. Like so many of us, I believed that we were the only ones going to heaven and actually spend my time using the Open Bible Study (OBS) to proselytize others. I often wondered how I was so wrong! I'm a free thinker? Yet, I believe it's an oversimplification to say this was all caused by preachers alone. What were some of the contributing factors to our pitiful legalistic bent?

(Edward) Our problem was that we confused the body of Christ with our particular historical movement. We were neither the first group nor the last to make that mistake. We also erroneously thought that “restoring the church” was the way to salvation and mistakenly supposed that we had accomplished that goal. Such bad thinking has little need for God – Father, Son or Holy Spirit. It results in a rationalistic form of external righteousness but denies the power needed for a transformed life.

Not only did we often displace Christ with “the church,” we also frequently put baptism in the position the New Testament puts trust or faith. Sometimes we insisted that a person not only must be baptized but must understand and express that understanding of baptism in just the “right” way to be saved. The New Testament sees baptism as an integral initial part of the process of discipleship but always as an outward expression of the heart’s absolute trust in and dependence on Jesus Christ and him alone as the one whose work sets us right with God. We still have some work to do in biblically relating this gospel ordinance to what Luther called “the empty hands of faith” that receive God’s grace in Jesus Christ.