Loading ...The Unbalanced Plan of Salvation
The five finger plan of salvation was devised by Walter Scott as he systematized the steps of faith, repentance, baptism, remission of sins, gift of the Holy Spirit, eternal life. The five finger exercise of the plan of salvation has gone through considerable revision through the years. The plan had steadily gone from a balance between God’s response and man’s response to the Gospel to a focus on man’s response only (Boring 385). The present form of the plan of salvation is typically announced as hear, believe, repent, confess, be baptized. But ever so often the sixth step is attached onto the plan which is “be faithful unto death.” Sometimes it is mentioned has live a faithful life. People have accused one another within the fellowship of baptizing people without providing proper instruction and training to live a Christian life. One should not be too shocked of this practice based on the theology of the movement. When we have five steps to be saved and only one step to explain how to live the Christian life, we are setting ourselves up for failure. The process of living the Christian life is difficult as people must be trained in godliness. The art of Christian living is not a simple matter, but a difficult road to travel for many a sincere believers. The charge of getting people wet, but not helping them to mature is seen through the plan of salvation that is advocated within the fellowship. We are seeing the results of theology which places all the work up front with little mention of the Christian life afterwards.
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About The Author
Excellent observation Matthew. Keep on writing. You have an excellent blog. Except when you write about chess. lol just kidding. kinda.
John, yea, most of the readers here are not big chess fans and they are not hockey fans either. Except one of my great elders who is growing a hockey beard with me for the playoffs and Jim Sexton who knows a lot about hockey. Thank you for reading John, you are a connector in classic Gladwell terminology.
Also, I FHU professor mentioned this point that got me thinking on this.
I wanted to comment on the blog “One in Jesus” by Jay:
Anonymous, on April 7th, 2008 at 11:54 am Said:
I am glad to have found this site as I have been looking for some good discussion regarding these kinds of matters with others around the globe.
In your arguments concerning the defintion of denomination, I am of the school of thought that there is no “perfect mirror” of the 1st century chuch, however the a capella church of christ version is the closest we’re gonna get. So the bottom line is not about discussions on this and that, but more importantly, let’s just focus on doing the right thing. I don’t go to a congregation of the church of christ (a capella) because my mommy and daddy brainwashed me to do so, I go there because I am a grown man in my 30s and have decided that it is the right thing to do.
Ultimately, faith is substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Open-mindedness is essential when studying the gospel, for sure. Without the attitude of an open mind we are doomed before we begin. However, open mindedness does not mean spirital anarchy.
Good thoughts Matthew.
which FHU professor if you don’t mind me asking?
Well said Matthew. We had a thing we used to say regarding this, “Let’s not just Dip’em -n- Skip’em.” Growing individual Christians is growing the church. I believe the success and failure ratio will to a very large degree match.
By the way, I like chess.
Tom
Ben, as the professor did not ask me to do this blog on this topic, I would feel that it would be wrong to mention him by name without his permission, but it is a fair question nevertheless.
I’m hockey fan I will read your hockey blogs.
I have often compared this topic to working 9 months to bring a baby into the world and then taking it out into the world, laying it somewhere seemingly safe, and hoping that it would grow and mature on it’s own.
People need very little to come to a decision to obey the gospel (I love that description) but then we have plenty to do to help them grow, mature, and develop as they seek a Christian walk.
The truth, I believe, is that it is often times easier to get them into the water than it is to then teach them as they grow. If you’ll excuse the comparison, it takes far more effort to mentor, teach, and grow a newborn into a mature young man or woman than it does to actually conceive one in the first place. There are a great many similarities in the effort required to bring someone to the water compared to that needed to bring them to a mature and grounded faith.
Jimbo
ps… You can’t really call yourself a hockey fan until you at least know what the little ‘H’ stands for in the middle large ‘C’ of the Montreal logo.
Keep on writing. Question though why Stone and not Scott in your pic?
Seeking Shalom,
Bobby Valentine
Good question Bobby, which I did not notice.
I really hate this so called “five step plan” of salvation. It is not that I disagree with the need to hear, believe, repent, confess, and be baptized. However, the way I have heard this so-called plan used places all of the salvation emphasis on humanity. Hearing is what we do. Believing is what we do. Repenting is what we do. Confessing is what we do. Baptism is what we do. In the worst form, we called this H/B/R/C/Bp ‘our part’ of the bi-functional plan of salvation (i.e., “God’s Part & Man’s Part) as if salvation was a collective partnership between God and man. We don’t get that from scripture. Rather that comes from reading Enlightment paradigms into scripture (it was modernism that held a high-view of humanity).
Nonsense. While we are certainly called to obediently surrender to the will of God, in both the OT and NT the redemptive emphasis is on what God is doing. And even in many of those baptismal passages we like to quote (Acts 2.38, Rom 6.3-4, etc…), we are the passive agent rather than the active agent in baptism. Can anyone guess who the active agent is in baptism?
Further, for many this has been made into a “creed” whether they will admit that or not. The problem with that is that it does just what the creeds are intended to do — define who is in and who is out. Just as with any commands of God, things like repentance and baptism are not optional. God expects and demands that his word is obeyed. But there are examples within scripture where God demonstrates that his grace is not bound to his word (ex, Mark 2). Another words, God wrote the rules and he has and can continue to rewrite the rules. That is because God’s nature is not defined by those stiff catagorical definitions from Greek philosophy but rather by his relational interaction to people within time/history.
Do I wish for the CoC to jestison the teaching of biblical commandments like repentance and baptism? ABSOLUTELY NOT! I simply wish the emphasis was placed upon God and to follow that with allowing God to be God — that is, stop using R & B as a creed.
Rex
Ithaca Church of Christ
Ithaca, NY
One more thing…
What we need is a stronger understanding of Romans 6. If we understood Paul’s discussion of baptism there in that context, rather than simply than referring to Rom 6 to prove the necessity of baptism we instead would start asking more questions about what it means to be baptized into death and raised into life in Christ. Reflecting on this is an issue of discipleship. It is God’s desired work of justification and sanctificaiton in us.
Rex
Ithaca Church of Christ
Ithaca, NY
Good post, Matthew. When I think of the “Five Step Plan” I remember the words of the great scholar Jack Lewis of Harding University Graduate School of Religion: “The reason that people reduced salvation to 5 steps is because we have 5 fingers.”
In Sunday school we were taught the 5 step plan, and taught that it should always be offered in the invitation. Moreover we were taught that the 5 steps was the gospel and that the sinner’s prayer was sinful before baptism but proper after baptism. When I became a man, I set this aside and studied the gospel. My focus did change to embrace what God did in the Messiah for our salvation. Then I studied the meaning of “calling upon the name of the Lord” and learned that it had a rich Old Testament background. This would have been the foundational understanding of the early church. In the Old Testament calling upon the name of the Lord was most often expressed in prayer. Sometimes the prayer was for salvation from danger; and sometimes the prayer was expressed as part of an offering. In offerings praise and thanksgiving was offered and blessings were sought. If this kind of seeking of the Lord, that is foundational to the meaning of calling upon the name of the Lord, is absent from the steps; then the steps are an empty shell.
Reading back over the comments made me think of something. Maybe we compartmentalize peoples lives to much. For example, instead of having categories of non-christian, new-Christian, growing Christian (which seems to be the failure) maybe we should have one goal for people and ourselves: transformation into the image of Jesus. Certainly, we would have stages or steps along the way of the journey but no step would equal an arriving point, which seems like we’ve done with baptism.
I know this paints with a broad brush but we sometimes don’t take a holistic approach to a person’s transformation and thus fall into the traps of elevating certain steps along the way or stopping on them altogether.
Just some thoughts. Thanks for the discussion.
Outstanding comments. We use these steps to help people make what appears to be a very logical decision: to become a Christian. I think for many though it is also emotional(there’s another “hot” button). When we make major life decisions, marriage, college, etc., our emotions help to quide us. Later on reality sets in. We have a wife to support, we have to study, etc. The question I ask myself is how can I help this person move from an emotional decision to lifetime commitment.
Josh,
I think there is something to be said for rethinking the way we use catagories like “non-Christian” and “Christian.” While there is certainly such a thing as a non-Christian and Christian, those labels seem to make discipleship simply into a matter of crossing the line from non-Christian to Christian. Michael Frost & Alan Hirsch in “The Shaping of Things to Come” describe this as a ‘bounded set’ approach to mission. They call for a ‘centered set’ approach which sees God in the center and each one of us as living at some point from the center (p. 47-51). They like the terms “Christians” and “Not Yet Christians” but I don’t see how that terminology is any different from Christians and Non-Christians. The point I like is that we are all at some point of distance from the center which is God and the goal of redemption is to take us from where we are at and move us closer to the center.
Further, if everyone is represented as an arrow then it is important to ask which direction the arrow is pointing. There are some non-Christians/not-yet-Christians whose arrow is pointing towards the center (God) and is moving in that direction. While at the same time, there are some Christians whose arrow is pointing away from the center and is thus digressing in terms of discipleship and life transformation. This takes us back repentance, confession, and baptism. Though the acts of each are normally only a one-time event, the realities of all three acts are to be continued, renewed, and committed more deeply each and everyday. Thus as I learn more and more what it means to be redeemed and live redeemed, I must continually surrender and confess the Lordship of Jesus, continually dying to myself so that God justify/sanctify me into the life of the resurrected Christ.
Rex
I have read here about HBRCBp being a creed, not necessarily pure scripture. This “5 Step Plan” is a way of teaching someone how to become a Christian that has evolved over time. The uniqueness of the “5 Step Plan” is that it does not conveniently include or exclude any of the essential actions we must take to become a Christian. While on the subject of baptism during Sunday School, someone commented, “But the water doesn’t save you.” I was teaching the class and was angered at the ignorant comment, but had to keep my composure. John 3:5 is very plain. It is up to the individual to accept or reject John 3:5 and following.
The water doesn’t save us any more than the Nile River cured Namaan’s leprosy. It was his obedience to God’s word that cured him. So our obedience to God’s word makes us Christians. But don’t say that the water doesn’t save, because then you are limiting the power of God.
Good stuff, Rex.
Matt,
what do you think of calling these “steps” at all? should we really consider repentance or baptism as being qualitatively distinct from “belief”? i find it dissatisfying that our presentation is of a linear set of compartments. i find in scripture that these share a far more organic sort of relationship. Have you ever read any K.C. Moser, by the way?
You are correct Guy, steps is not the best term for this. Instead of seeing separate elements, really it is one move to salvation. It is more holistic.
Pontus, I might quibble over the idea that the Nile River cured Namaan’s leprosy. Of course, I’d quibble over the idea that the Jordan River cured it, too. Personally, I think that God cured Naaman, and could have whether he had obeyed or not.
Yes, I agree that God cured Namaam just as He saves us when we are baptized. It is not a matter of the physical act as much as it is that we obey. If God says we need to get wet in order to be saved, then let’s get wet, a simple act of obedience on our part will bless us in ways we cannot comprehend.