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Tuesday, January 31, 2012

The altar-call racket


I'm going to quote and comment on this post:


There are Calvinists who disdain the evangelistic use of the "altar call," or "public invitation," to come to Christ Jesus. For example, Steve Hays, of Triablogue infamy, insists that the "altar call system is unscriptural." I have to wonder what "scriptures" Hays is reading, because the Christian New Testament grants an ample amount of examples of public invitations for sinners to repent and follow Christ Jesus.

Birch’s argument trades on key equivocations. But let’s begin by describing what the altar call is and how it functions in modern mass evangelism.

Prospective converts are told that performing this ritual, this is how they are saved. Performing this physical formula action is salvific.

On a related note, they are told, not only that this is how to be saved, but how to know that they are saved. Their assurance of salvation depends on a past action which they performed.

If you ask them 5 years later how they know they are saved, they will point back to the altar call.

A classic version of the altar call is for the evangelist to ask, if you were to die tonight, do you know if you’d go to heaven? The evangelist then assures the potential convert that if he performs this ritual, he will go to heaven if he dies tonight in a traffic accident on the way home from the revival (or whatever).

That’s what I’m opposing.

One must wonder also why any Calvinist would disdain the altar call since 1) God meticulously foreordains all things, according to Calvinists, and that would, by necessity, include the altar call;

i) By the same token, God’s meticulous foreordination necessarily includes Calvinists who “disdain” the altar call. Hence, my “distain” is entirely consistent with predestination. Calvinists who “disdain” the alter call are fulfilling God’s decree rather than thwarting God’s decree. God predestined Calvinists to “disdain” the altar-call.

ii) We don’t know in advance what God has decreed. We discover God’s plan by living through time. We learn God’s plan by experience, by watching his plan unfold minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, year-by-year.

iii) God sometimes uses error as a foil to highlight truth. Error stands in contrast to truth. The predestined contrast between truth and error clarifies the nature of both. Like light and shade, they are mutually interpretive.

But there’s also an asymmetry between the two. Error is, at most, a means to an end, whereas truth is an end it itself. Error can have an instrumental value whereas truth has intrinsic value.

2) God can bring His elect to Christ through the altar call;

i) Which ironically illustrates the fact that an Arminian method can only work under Calvinist assumptions.

ii) To take a comparison, God can use false prophets like Balaam and Caiaphas. They do his bidding in spite of themselves. Yet that doesn’t prevent God from condemning false prophets.

3) The altar call is merely a public invitation to trust in Christ;

i) To the contrary, it’s a factory or assembly line to mechanically produce converts. And it thereby confers false assurance on skin-deep converts.

ii) I don’t object to ministers (or laymen, for that matter) issuing a public invitation to trust in Christ. What I object to is when they promise members of the audience that if they perform a ritual, that’s equivalent to saving faith.

 4) Jesus Himself called people publicly unto Himself;

That’s equivocal. For instance, he called the disciples to accompany him. But that’s not equivalent to saving faith. Did Judas exercise saving faith when he accompanied Christ? No. That’s just a physical action.

 5) Christ's disciples also called people publicly unto repentance and faith in Jesus;

Fact is, the altar call is a substitute sacrament. A counterfeit ordinance. We already have a biblical ordinance by which adult converts publicly profess their faith in Christ: baptism. That’s the divinely-authorized rite of initiation–not the altar call. That’s how a convert is supposed to publicly testify to his faith in Christ.

(Of course, as time goes on, there is also the witness of his life.)

and 6) ministers can just as easily manipulate people through their sermons -- they certainly do not need an altar to accomplish that!

A red herring.

Birch then quotes a chapter from a book defending the altar call.

Most Calvinists oppose the use of a public invitation or altar call at the end of sermons.1 They think such practices tend to be confusing at best, spiritually dangerous at worst, and certainly a hindrance to true evangelism. Strict five-point Calvinists criticize the invitation on three grounds. First, they believe it has no biblical support. Second, they believe its origin can be traced back only a few hundred years. Third, they think it is incompatible with their understanding of total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, and irresistible grace. . . .

Instead of Alan Street putting words in my mouth and telling me why I oppose the altar call, I prefer to speak for myself.

i) A general reason I oppose the altar call is because the alter call presupposes a particular theory of how we acquire our beliefs. The technical term for this is direct doxastic voluntarism.

On this theory, we enjoy direct voluntary control over what we believe or disbelieve. We can instantly believe or disbelieve something by a sheer act of the will.

I reject this theory, in part, because it’s a paper theory that’s totally at odds with human experience. We don’t simply choose to believe or disbelieve something. There are many things we can’t help believing, just as there are many things we can’t help not believing.

As a rule, we simply find ourselves believing something or disbelieving something. We have a predisposition to believe or disbelieve certain things. When we’re exposed to perceived evidence or counterevidence, in conjunction with our predisposition, we form a corresponding belief.

Sometimes we can do things to cultivate or undermine a belief. If that succeeds, that is, at best, a delayed effect. And even that’s hit-n-miss.

Belief is an act of perception (or apprehension) rather than an act of the will. It’s an empirical fact of human experience that we don’t simply believe or disbelieve at will.

This confuses belief with action. We can will ourselves to act in certain ways, in accordance with our beliefs. To act on or act out what we already believe.

ii) One needs to distinguish between conversion and faith. Conversion can occur at a subliminal level. In his autobiography (Sometimes Mountains Move), Everett Koop describes his conversion experience. He began attending Tenth Presbyterian Church. When he started, he was not a Christian. He heard the sermons from the viewpoint of an outsider. An unbeliever. But one day it dawned on him that he was now hearing the sermons as an insider. At some point he had indiscernibly crossed over to the other side. He wasn’t conscious of the underlying process. He wasn’t aware of the transition. He only became aware of the result. It occurred to him that he was now hearing the sermon with the ears of faith.

Saving faith is the conscious effect of a subconscious event.

Some folks go to church all their life, but it never clicks. For other people, they can’t remember a time when they didn’t believe. There was a time when they were too young to believe. But saving faith was a spontaneous part of their emerging awareness.

Some folks may attend a church service for the very first time and immediately believe what they hear, as if God prepared their hearts in advance.

Some people are nominal believers until they hear a clear presentation of the Bible, at which point they turn against the faith. The message hardens them.

Some people hear the message, but it has no immediate impact, or they may initially resist. Yet it has a delayed effect–like planting a seed that slowly germinates just under the surface, until it emerges. It takes hold and grows on them.

Jesus called people to follow Him publicly. He promised, "Whosoever confesses Me before men, him will I also confess before My Father in heaven" (Matt. 10:32). Conversely, He warned, "But whoever denies Me before men, him I will also deny before My Father who is in heaven" ([Matt. 10:33]). Jesus offered little hope of salvation to those who wished to remain anonymous.

That’s about the potential cost of discipleship in the face of persecution. Not about conversion. It’s a test of faith, not a source of faith. That’s not what makes you a believer, but what proves you to be a believer–or not.

Responding to an alter call, where you’re surrounded by a sympathetic audience, where there’s peer pressure to go forward, where you’re rewarded by social affirmation, is precisely the opposite of what Jesus is describing-–where you will be punished for your faith, where the incentive is to openly deny your faith.

One of His favorite words of exhortation was "Come."

Which begs the question of how we come to Jesus.

The apostle Paul reminds us "that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus Christ and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes to righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made to salvation" (Rom. 10:9-10). However one cuts it, this text links public confession to salvation. One must both believe and confess the facts of the gospel in order to be saved (v. 9). Just as the heart believes "to righteousness," so the mouth confesses "to salvation" (v. 10). . . .

i) Which illustrates the lethal deficiency of the altar call. The altar call is a deceptive half-truth. For it separates the lips from the heart. Doctrinal profession falls fatally short of saving faith unless that’s undergirded by heartfelt conviction. A “circumcised heart”–in OT usage. For instance:

This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me (Mt 15:8).
 
And the Lord said: “Because this people draw near with their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their fear of me is a commandment taught by men" (Isa 29:13).

To be a saving profession of faith, verbal profession must be in the heart before it’s on the lips:

But the word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it (Deut 30:14).

Rote recitation of an orthodox creedal statement is not saving faith.

ii) Keep in mind, too, that Paul’s parallelistic structure in Rom 10:9-10 is a rhetorical device. He’s not suggesting that verbal profession is independently salvific.

11 comments:

  1. "I don’t object to ministers (or laymen, for that matter) issuing a public invitation to trust in Christ. What I object to is when they promise members of the audience that if they perform a ritual, that’s equivalent to saving faith."

    This is a KEY distinction. Thank you.

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  2. I have been in various Baptist churches my whole life and alter calls are never spoke, thought of of or treated like a ritual or ordinance. They always are an invitation or challenge to people to think about their sinfulness and Christ's work. The gowning forward is always followed up with a private, one on one, presentation of the gospel.

    God be with you,
    Dan

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  3. Dan,

    You're not the only person with direct experience of what goes on. I've seen lots of Billy Graham crusades on TV. I've personally attended two Billy Graham crusades, as well as one by Franklin. I've also attended a number of other services at churches where a guest evangelist issues the altar call.

    It functions just the way I said it functions.

    Sure, in some revival contexts, it's also an opportunity to "rededicate" one's life to the Lord, but in a specifically evangelistic setting, responding to the altar call, saying the sinner's prayer, &c., is the way to get saved and know that you are saved.

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  4. In my Pentecostal days the altar call (especially from roving evangelists) would culminate in the car accident hypothetical and then go on to, "Do you know? Do you know that you know that you know!?" Then the altar call.

    Even if I weren't a Calvinist I would say the problem with the altar call is generally that it is a form of crowd manipulation almost any capable public speaker can accomplish, which makes it difficult to prove that the conversions are anything other than people responding to a competent-to-great public speaker

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  5. Steve,

    If you had targeted the free grace movement specifically, I wouldn't have any objection. But your objection seems broader than that.

    As for the reason for your objection (i.e. that beliefs are not a choice), I would say that somewhere along the line of the conversion process, men make a choice, even if faith itself is not a choice. Denying this seems inconsistent with the reformed view. As Hodge says:

    “The Protestants did not deny that men cooperate in their own conversion, taking that word in the sense in which the Romanists used the term (and the still broader term justificatio), as including the whole work of turning unto God. No one denies that the man in the synagogue cooperated in stretching out his withered arm or that the impotent one at the pool was active in obeying the command of Christ, “Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house.” But the question is, Did they cooperate in the communication of vital power to their impotent limbs? So Protestants do not deny that the soul is active in conversion, that the “arbitrium a Deo motum” freely assents”

    link

    So your basis for objecting is either too narrow to be relevant or it's hyper-Calvinism.

    God be with you,
    Dan

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  6. Personally, I'll never forget the fruits of this "direct doxastic voluntarism".

    My wife and I were presented with an opportunity to host an evnagelistic "puppet show" in our yard for a group of neighborhood kids. It was about 30 minutes long, and honestly, was pretty awesome.

    Awesome, that is, right up until the "altar call." The emcee invited the kids to come up and "receive Jesus", and when most of the kids stayed right where they were, he offered them a bag of candy to come up.

    Guess how many kids didn't go up.

    Yup. 0. Zilch. Nada.

    Worse - one of the parents turned to me and said "Sheesh - those kids don't even know why they are going up there. All they want is the candy."

    Worse yet - the puppet show people were talking amongst themselves as to how great the turnout was and how many kids got saved.

    But worse BY FAR - each of those kids got a nice little postcard welcoming them to God's family with the assurance that now they were a child of God.

    So yeah, I am revolted and I despise what "evangelicalism" has done to the evangel.

    I was physically repulsed and told them as much. I didn't even thank them for coming out and ruining a perfectly good gospel presentation.

    Here's what I like - preach the gospel. When finished, let everyone know that if they were wrecked by that message, I and other people will be available afterwards to answer any questions, pray any prayer, whatever. Let their wrecked spirit and broken pride be their assurance, not the pats on the back they get after they decide that Jesus is worth a shot.

    Sorry for that rant - this is a HUGE hot button for me.

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  7. A classic version of the altar call is for the evangelist to ask, if you were to die tonight, do you know if you’d go to heaven? The evangelist then assures the potential convert that if he performs this ritual, he will go to heaven if he dies tonight in a traffic accident on the way home from the revival (or whatever).

    That’s what I’m opposing.


    I'll give you a Boo-yah on that one. That's totally routine for Charity revival meetings.

    There was something that was inadvertently revealing about how the coming forward process was really so empty. People who came forward (usually women, for some reason) would talk about the pressure they were under and how they were so adverse to accepting the invitation that they made a mental deal with themselves that they would go up to kneel in front of the pulpit if their friend or sister did. That just gives you an insight into the "spiritual" aspect of the message. But people would go home feeling momentary relief that they were saved and could sleep soundly that night, and that's what mattered.

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  8. Something to add to this:

    "... Everett Koop describes his conversion experience. He began attending Tenth Presbyterian Church. When he started, he was not a Christian. He heard the sermons from the viewpoint of an outsider. An unbeliever. But one day it dawned on him that he was now hearing the sermons as an insider. At some point he had indiscernibly crossed over to the other side. He wasn’t conscious of the underlying process. He wasn’t aware of the transition. He only became aware of the result. It occurred to him that he was now hearing the sermon with the ears of faith...."

    That to me is about as good as it gets explaining the death to Life experience and those words really puts a death blow to the altar call phenomenon, which, I suppose, will be with us until time and people are no more.

    I was years ago a part of the Volunteer Fire Department personnel of a small community I had moved too. We were on call 24/7. We had pagers that toned us to drop everything and get to the firehouse when necessary. A lot of our calls were medical.

    One of the things we discovered was just how some people manipulate circumstances to draw attention to them self; wasting our valuable time and resources, mind you.

    We would do a simple test when first on scene with an "unconscious" person, someone who truly was not in control, non responsive and indeed needed our assistance to bring them back from the unconscious state of being.

    If they were indeed unconscious, in some danger and needed our assistance we would know soon enough by this test. We raise their arm up right over their face and drop it. If they were unconscious their arm and hand would drop straight down. Conscious people pretending unconsciousness, when we drop their arm, would not allow it to hit them in the face.

    I point that out because I see Dan has touched on "choice" which is a synergistic way of saying, without my involvement I would not be saved; and as this article points out, when something comes up with a challenge to their salvation and to their assurance of it, they can point back to their involvement in choosing to receive the Faith.

    "...On a related note, they are told, not only that this is how to be saved, but how to know that they are saved. Their assurance of salvation depends on a past action which they performed.
    If you ask them 5 years later how they know they are saved, they will point back to the altar call."


    I know I am saved, not because of anything I have done or will ever do. I know I am saved by the Word of Faith that was spoken to me and having been given ears to hear, I heard and believed and continue to believe and so I confess the Faith I was given:

    2Co 4:13 Since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been written, "I believed, and so I spoke," we also believe, and so we also speak,
    2Co 4:14 knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence.

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  9. Having grown up in Baptist churches and being very accustomed to altar calls, one year-long experience at an EFCA church pretty much changed my view.

    My church at that time was celebrating its 50th year and so near the beginning of that year the Sr. Pastor felt led to pray for 50 conversions. Now that in and of itself is something a church should be constantly praying for. That God, by His grace, would reach down and save those who come under the preaching of the Word in and through the church. And my (ex) Sr. Pastor has a genuine heart for seeing people saved. The problem is that he tended to be pragmatic at times and I felt that he wrestled with a poor self esteem as evidenced by the fact that he so often looked for external measures of success.

    So the challenge was issued. This would clearly show God's special favor on us in our 50th year, as well as the supposed spiritual vitality and maturity of the church. So at just about every opportunity altar calls were extended; church services, funerals, Sunday School classes, you name it. We tallied up every hand raised and every person who came forward. And what do you know, at the end of the year we had fifty conversions.

    Amid all the congratulatory activities at the first elders meeting the following year, I asked if there was a list of these fifty people who had been added to the church and if it was our duty as elders to connect with them and to play a part in their discipleship. Apart from the Sunday School children apparently only one actually started attending the church. Did we know who the others were? Had we formed relationships with them and were we following up with them? Uh, No. (Incidentally this does tell you something about our dysfunction.)

    The truth is I am sure that people are saved even during altar calls, but in reality if each hand raised or jaunt down the aisle actually resulted in conversion, our world would be a radically different place. What with all the reports of the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, across the world, ahem, ahem, raising their hands and walking the aisles. Looking back I realized that the vast majority of the altar calls I've witnessed were simply smaller versions of my year long experience. I know of very few of my contemporaries who walked the aisle and prayed the sinner's prayer who are still serving the Lord. (Please don't respond that this is not your experience. Okay granted. But this is mine.)

    I now attend a church, a Calvary Chapel at that, that doesn't 'do' altar calls. There are always people in front after a service should anyone wish to ask questions or want someone to pray with them. Once a quarter a baptismal service is held for those who have been saved to publically declare their faith and trust in Christ.

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  10. There are currently more baptists in the world than there are people.

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  11. GODISMYJUDGE SAID:

    “If you had targeted the free grace movement specifically, I wouldn't have any objection. But your objection seems broader than that.”

    Even if we confine ourselves to Billy Graham crusades, that supplies the template for how the altar-call is generally observed and understood.

    “As for the reason for your objection (i.e. that beliefs are not a choice), I would say that somewhere along the line of the conversion process, men make a choice, even if faith itself is not a choice.”

    Needless to say, Calvinism doesn’t define conversion in terms of direct doxastic voluntarism. You’re trying to recast the issue. But here’s how A. A. Hodge puts it:

    “That the subjects of it [i.e. the effectual call], while they have freely resisted all those common influences of the Holy Ghost which they have experienced before regeneration, are entirely passive with respect to that special act of the Spirit it whereby they are regenerated; nevertheless, in consequence of the change wrought in them in regeneration, they obey the call, and subsequently more or less perfectly cooperate with grace.”

    http://www.mbrem123.com/creeds/wcf_10.php

    “So your basis for objecting is either too narrow to be relevant or it's hyper-Calvinism.”

    i) Your terminology is eccentric. Reformed theologians hardly define saving faith as a sheer act of the will. Traditionally, they speak of a divinely-implanted habitus, which dovetails with what I said about a predisposition to believe or disbelieve certain things.

    Hypercalvinism typically takes the position that the unregenerate have no duty to believe the gospel; likewise, that it’s wrong to preach the gospel indiscriminately, calling on everyone to repent and believe.

    That’s not the position I took. An evangelist ought to preach the same message to everyone. The preaching of the gospel will, in effect, automatically select for the elect. It can also serve a corollary purpose in aggravating the guilt of the reprobate.

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