A Time for Gathering and a Time for Scattering

A Time for Gathering and a Time for Scattering 
By Ralph Wood, Baylor University
A Meditation for the Board of Regents, July 15, 2000

My text today comes from Matthew 12:30: “He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters.” Unlike most would-be, wannabe, failed preachers-since I am one of those folks whom nobody’s ever been willing to lay hands on-I have only two points rather than three. And they are gathered under my general theme “A Time for Gathering and a Time for Scattering.” The first is that Jesus’ declaration about those who are for and against him has to do with the all-important Baptist doctrine of God’s own sovereign decision to choose and elect us as his people. The second is that Jesus’ prophecy about gathering and scattering has to do a phenomenon happening in our own time: on the one hand, it has to do with a wondrous convergence of Christians across denominational lines; and, on the other hand, with a terrible divergence that is also occurring within denominations such as our own.

I.

Our Lord’s aphorism about those who are for and against him is not nearly as obvious as it may seem. It is set amidst a passage about the casting out of demons and about the sin against the Holy Spirit which cannot be forgiven. Such a setting should give us pause. If our relation to Jesus, both as individuals and as institutions, were an obvious matter of balloting for or against him, nearly everybody would play it safe and cast an affirming vote. There would be nothing demonic associated with it, no worry about blaspheming the Holy Spirit. It should be plain that Christ’s saying strikes far deeper than that. The stakes here, it should be clear, are very high indeed. It’s a matter of who and what comes first. It’s a question of who calls and who answers, of who offers and who receives, and of who authors and finishes and who is authored and finished. Over and again, Jesus makes it plain that being “with Him” and “in Him” and “for Him” is never our own doing. In John’s gospel, He stresses repeatedly that it is He who has first loved and chosen us, not we who have first loved and chosen Him. We would not seek God, said Pascal, unless He had already found us.

No wonder that our Baptist ancestors were so insistent on using such good biblical terms as election andpredestination. These are not words to be scared of but gladly and eagerly to affirm because they lie at the heart of the Gospel. That Israel is God’s chosen people is the most fundamental biblical claim. That Jesus is God’s chosen messiah for the salvation of the world is the very essence of the Good News. That God in Christ has undeservedly chosen us rather than deservedly rejecting us is our one hope and joy. Election and predestination do not concern God’s arbitrarily choosing of the favored few or his even more arbitrary rejecting of the unfavored many. To belong to the rejected, to be against Christ, is to seek our salvation, to believe that God owes his grace because we are religious; to think that our own goodness and righteousness make us worthy of God’s honor. To belong to the elect, by contrast, to be “with Christ,” is to live and move and have our very being in total and utter reliance on God’s prevenient grace-the grace that comes before and enables all our faithful responses to Christ’s will. Salvation is not akin, therefore, to voting for a political candidate or purchasing a gift at the shopping mall. Rather is it to be given and to receive the one true Gift, the sheer undeserved gift of saving faith.

How dare we here at Baylor let ourselves be robbed of this central Christian and specifically Baptist doctrine of election because certain hyper-Calvinist fundamentalists have distorted and mangled our own tradition? For Baylor University to be shorn of its biblical and Baptist heritage, for it to have its own academic and religious life dictated by fundamentalists who despise everything this university stands for-this would not be merely an irony or an anomaly but a scandal and an outrage.

II.

Jesus speaks not only of those who are with and against him, but also of those who gather and scatter. I believe that such a gathering and scattering is occurring in our own time. Once again it is occurring around this single figure who gathers and scatters everything: Jesus Christ. Those who are with Him are gathering, and those who are against Him are scattering. We live, I believe, in an age of unprecedented convergence and divergence. Nearly half a century ago, C.S. Lewis proved prophetic in this matter as in so many others. As an Ulster Protestant himself-a countryman of those folks who wear bowler hats and orange vests and who march angrily through Catholic neighborhoods in Northern Ireland-he wrote these words to a recent Roman Catholic convert in 1955: “The world will not be converted by a miscellany of denominations,” Lewis declared, “each defining itself against the others. In the present divided state of Christendom,” he added, “those who are at the heart of each division are all closer to one another than those who are at the fringes.” Lewis discerned that he had far more in common with a believing Catholic than with many unbelieving or half-believing fellow Anglicans in his own communion. Hence my own thesis: Those who are willing and able to affirm the fundamental claims of the Christian faith are thus converging across denominational lines to form new alliances and common enterprises. By contrast, those who either cannot or will not accept the authority of the Scriptures and the bedrock doctrines of the Faith are embracing various kinds of sexual and religious paganism. There is a wondrous gathering and a terrible scattering.

Let me be specific, first of all about those who are rending and scattering the Body of Christ. Rather than cast stones at other denominations, we would be more faithful and honest to speak of our own heretics. Three examples will suffice. First, there are those Baptists who deny that Catholics are Christians. Though they are found on both the left and the right of our denomination, they are typified by Al Mohler. He has recently declared that Roman Catholicism is a false church, teaching a false gospel, and having a false leader. These words are meant to scatter rather than gather. They deny that we Protestants sprang from the mother church called Catholicism, and they would not be Christians today were it not for her witness. These anti-Catholic Baptists constitute an anti-Christian slur, not only against Catholics in general, but especially against the 1400 Catholic students and the many fine Catholic faculty with whom we practice Christian solidarity here at Baylor. And so I declare that my late Roman Catholic teacher Paul Barrus was my brother in Christ, while Albert Mohler remains merely my heretical fellow-Baptist.

There are also Baptists who reject the very clear teaching of both Scripture and Tradition that, while homosexual orientation is not sinful-any more that a native inclination to anger or the love of money is sinful-its actual practice is indeed sinful. Indeed, it requires redemption and thus it cannot be made the equivalent of heterosexual married love. Among Methodists and Lutherans, Presbyterians and Episcopalians, those who deny the sinfulness of homosexual practice are rapidly breaking fellowship with their orthodox counterparts in a dreadful scattering that, I predict, shall soon visit us Baptists.

Finally, there are Baptists who deny that the Bible is God’s written Word intended for the preaching and hearing of the Gospel. They turn it into a science and history book to be valued chiefly for its rules and regulations. They therefore deny the central claim of Galatians 3:28 that, for those who are “with Christ,” there is neither male nor female because we are all one in our common Lord. And so Amy Castello, one of my ministers at Seventh and James, and Julie Pennington-Russell, the pastor of Calvary Baptist here in Waco, are my sisters in Christian ministry and mission, while Paige Patterson, the ex-Texas heretic now ensconced in North Carolina, has scattered himself and others from our midst.

Far more remarkable than these terrible acts of scattering is the great gathering that is occurring not only in our denomination but also across denominational lines. Again, I speak personally. As a Christian, I have much more in common with certain Presbyterians and Catholics and Eastern Orthodox that I do with many Baptists. One of my best friends in the faith is Tom Currie III, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Kerrville. Because we share a deep commitment to the fundaments of the Christian faith, he recently invited me to lecture for an entire weekend at his church, where I had a splendid reception. Father Timothy Vavarek, pastor of the St. Jerome Catholic Church on North I-35 here in Waco, is another deep comrade in the Faith. He has a doctorate in Roman Catholic-Southern Baptist relations from Rome, and he is one of Truett Seminary’s very best friends-again, because he and we are gathered under the same arbor of utter reliance on salvation in Jesus Christ alone. Father Thomas Hopko, dean of St. Vladimir’s Russian Orthodox Seminary in New York, may be the deepest and most learned Christian whom I’ve ever met. He will soon be coming to lecture here at Baylor, and for the same reason: he knows that we are engaged in a great spiritual gathering and convergence that will result in a Christian university like few others.

But the chief Christian influence on my life has been a Baptist preacher named Warren Carr. It was he who first taught me that to be Christian is to be neither conservative nor liberal but radical: to have radix, roots as deep as the Cross, roots able to encircle all the dead. To be made crucified with Christ is also to have arms as wide as the Cross, gathering in all the living. Warren Carr taught me that to be Christian is to salty and angular, to be immoderate and eccentric, to be scandalous and offensive, to be comical chiefly in making fun of oneself-all because we want first and last and always to be messengers of the unsurpassable Glad Tidings of Jesus Christ crucified, risen, and returning. Holding to this radical and scandalous Gospel has got Warren Carr in a lot of trouble. He has made enemies on both the left and the right because he knows what a Friend he has in Jesus. Nor has he ever been elected to any Southern Baptist office, because his radical kind of Christianity makes conventional people uncomfortable.

III.

What are we to say, then, about this convergence and divergence, this gathering and scattering, this “with me” and “against me,” that Jesus so scandalously insists upon? How does it pertain to Baylor? I believe that our university is destined, by the grace of the triune God, to become one of the great centers of convergence within the Christian academic world. We are called, I believe, to become a mighty gathering place for Christian teachers and students who want to put their intelligence and their faith into vigorous engagement with their science and their music, their engineering and their business skills-examining viewpoints that may at first seem alien. Baylor will become such a magnet for both vital faith and rigorous learning precisely to the extent that we remain a Christian university in the Baptist tradition.

This insistence that we remain first of all Christian does not require any diminution whatsoever of our desire to make a distinctively Baptist witness here. On the contrary, Baptists must remain not only the people of God who birthed us in the beginning, but also the people of God who continue to sustain and nurture us, and therefore the people of God whom we seek first to serve. Yet we shall serve our Baptist constituency well only as we remember that we Baptists are not a church unto ourselves but rather a powerful reform movement within the church universal. Though we have our own distinctive practices-believer’s baptism and the centrality of the local church being the chief-we cannot be authentic Christians by ourselves. We are called to gather in common effort also with believing non-Baptists whose faith we truly share, far more that unbelieving or half-believing Baptists with whom we have little in common. When such gatherings and convergences occur here at Baylor, I believe that we will become a veritable wonder to behold: a university which is increasingly sought out by prospective faculty and students alike, not only in increasing numbers but also in increasing quality. Rather than being the Baptist Notre Dame, as it is sometimes said, I believe that we have the unique opportunity to be none other than Baylor University: a distinctively Christian school in the distinctively Baptist tradition.

So it is, my brothers and sisters, that I am convinced that we live in one of the most challenging and frightening times in the annals of Christian history: a time of wondrous gathering and of terrible scattering. I believe and hope and pray that Baylor will be counted among those schools that, by God’s grace alone, stand with Christ rather than against Him. If our prayer is answered and we are found faithful, then Baylor will become a place for gathering and bringing in the academic sheaves of the Christ’s Kingdom, rather than scattering them asunder

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