Beyond Belief (3 page)

2. CONCERNING TWENTIETH-CENTURY CALVINISTS

Our first parents, being seduced by the subtlety and temptations of Satan, sinned in eating the forbidden fruit. . . . By this sin they fell from their original righteousness and communion with God, and so became dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body.

—Westminster Confession, VI:1–2

The churches we attended belonged to a subgroup of Protestants who call themselves Reformed.
Reformed
here alludes to the Protestant Reformation and describes a motley ecumenical category that includes Baptists, Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed, Brethren, and even the occasional Episcopal outliers who see the Puritans as their spiritual forebears and point fondly to a 1646 document called the
Westminster Confession of Faith
as a summary of their core beliefs. They are, in a word, modern-day Calvinists.

Christians of most stripes believe in some concept of sin. But
Calvinists go for
total depravity,
the belief that people are entirely incapable of right action without God and deserve His wrath simply by virtue of being alive. In tandem with this bleak diagnosis is the doctrine of predestination, by which only those elected by God from before time will be saved from eternal damnation. I won’t dwell here on the myriad ways in which this peculiar and anachronistic set of beliefs played on my mind as a child. Suffice it to say that I lived with a level of terror—of death, of Judgment Day, of not being one of the elect—that years later would prove a bonanza for more than one therapist. I was also one of those hideous children who casually told playmates that they were going to hell.

For Christians of the reformed persuasion, like my parents, adherence to these Calvinistic tenets was far more important than broader denominational labels like Baptist or Presbyterian. The Orthodox Presbyterian Church was, and may still be, one of the largest networks of reformed churches around. That’s why, after the blowup at Pilgrim, we often ended up with the Orthodox Presbyterians.

I was not very clear on all this back then, of course. I remember more than one playground conversation that went something like this:

“What religion are you, Naomi?”

“Baptist.”

“Oh, do you go to First Baptist?”

“No. We go to a Presbyterian church.”

“But you said you were Baptist.”

“We are.”

“So why don’t you go to a Baptist church?”

“Because the Presbyterian church believes more what we believe.”

“Doesn’t that make you Presbyterian?”

“No.”

“That makes no sense.”

“I can’t really explain it. So what religion are
you?
”

“Catholic.”

“Oh. Too bad. You’re going to hell, you know.”

3. ON BAPTISM

Baptism is a sacrament of the New Testament, ordained by Jesus Christ, not only for the solemn admission of the party baptized into the visible Church; but also to be unto him a sign and seal of the covenant of grace.

—Westminster Confession, XXVIII:1

The only difference I could see between the Presbyterians’ and Baptists’ beliefs was baptism. My father told me that church government was another point of departure, but at age seven I couldn’t quite grasp that. (Years later I would come to appreciate this difference when the actions of a dictatorial Baptist pastor and his henchmen elders, accountable to no one, nearly destroyed my family, but that’s another story.) There was also a cultural difference I could sense even as a young child, and that had to do with volume. The Baptists were louder. Louder and more theatrical in the pulpit, in their singing, in their professions of faith. Presbyterians, on the other hand, practiced their dread faith with a certain polite restraint.

But baptism was clearly the distinguishing field mark. Baptists baptize by immersion and reserve the Sacrament for professing believers only, while Presbyterians, like most other Protestants, baptize by sprinkling, and administer the Sacrament not just to
new Christians who haven’t been baptized previously but also to the infant children of Christians.

The logic of the Baptist position, articulated by my father, seemed unassailable to me. In the Bible, John the Baptist baptized converts, not converts and their babies. And this was no misting of houseplants; it was a manly Sacrament, performed in rivers. People got wet. Of course no Orthodox Presbyterian believed that baptizing infants conferred salvation. The children of believers were as depraved and hell-bound as the most unchurched pagan of those humid places where missionaries went. But the Presbyterians argued that infant baptism demonstrated the parents’ public commitment to raise their children in the truth.

Baptism was a problem for me. I wanted to become a Christian. I prayed for this every day. And although I knew baptism wouldn’t save me, it seemed a convincing proof of one’s election. But I had never learned to swim and couldn’t even put my face in the water. Hell, I was afraid of taking
showers
. How would I ever endure baptism by immersion? If we were Presbyterian, I would’ve been baptized as an infant and that would’ve been that. What rotten luck to have been born to Baptist parents!

I did have occasion to be thankful that at least we weren’t Brethren. Once during those church-hopping years we visited a Brethren church while they were baptizing a large crop of new Christians. The Brethren, like Baptists, practice believers’ baptism. But they do
triple
immersion. The baptizee goes under three times, once for each person of the Trinity.

The service was interminable. And one of the baptizees, a girl not much older than I, had obviously never learned to swim either. She spluttered and gasped each time she surfaced and tried to say “Wait!,” holding up her arms, heavy in soaked and clinging
baptismal robes, to resist the pastor. But he kept pushing her down again: “In the name of the Father,”—
dunk
—“the Son,”—
dunk
—“and the Holy Spirit”—
dunk
. People around us tittered, but I was swallowing hard, trying not to cry.

It was a relief to return to the dryness of the Orthodox Presbyterians after that. They were a friendly lot, the OPs, frequently inviting us to their homes for lunch after the morning service. Our doctrinal differences rarely came up, but when they did, it was always good-natured.

“One day a Presbyterian pastor runs into his friend, a Baptist pastor,” began a joke told at one of these gatherings. “They begin to talk about baptism.

“‘What if a person gets in the water only up to his feet?’ the Presbyterian asks. ‘Would that count?’

“‘No,’ the Baptist minister says. ‘You have to go in farther than that.’

“‘How about up to his knees?’ the Presbyterian asks.

“‘No,’ the Baptist says. ‘That wouldn’t count.’

“‘Up to the hips?’

“‘No, no, no.’

“‘To chest level?’

“‘No.’

“‘How about the chin? That’s almost all the way in.’

“‘No.’

“‘Up to the eyes.’

“‘No,’ the Baptist insists. ‘You have to get the top of the head wet.’

“‘The top of the head? That’s what matters?’

“‘Yes.’

“‘Well, we’re in complete agreement!’ the Presbyterian pastor declares. ‘We get the top of the head wet too!’”

4. OF FAMILY DEVOTIONS

God is to be worshipped everywhere, in spirit and truth; as, in private families daily.

—Westminster Confession, XXI:6

Many evenings after dinner, my father would call us together for family devotions. Lasting about half an hour, it usually included a Bible reading, some catechism, and a closing prayer. It was torture, especially for Mari. We had to memorize our fair share of scripture verses—in the King James version, of course. Worse was having to memorize the
Westminster Shorter Cathechism.
This document, completed in 1647 by the same good people who brought us the
Westminster Confession,
consists of 107 questions and answers about doctrine presented in gorgeous seventeenth-century English. I can still perfectly recall questions 1 and 4:

Question 1: What is the chief end of man?

Answer: Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.

Question 4: What is God?

Answer: God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.

My father spanked us if we failed to correctly recite the assigned passages. I had a knack for on-demand, short-term recall, and avoided getting hit. My sister was often not so lucky.

5. TREATS OF INDIGNITIES SUFFERED AT VACATION BIBLE SCHOOL

God gave to Adam a law, as a covenant of works, by which He bound him and all his posterity to personal, entire, exact, and perpetual obedience; promised life upon the fulfilling, and threatened death upon the breach of it; and endued him with power and ability to keep it.

—Westminster Confession, XIX:1

The summer after I finished second grade, my parents sent me and Mari, who’d just finished first grade, to Vacation Bible School. It went for one week, meeting two or three hours every weekday evening at the OP church in Garden Grove, one of the many places where we’d occasionally worshipped. Mari and I had to carpool with an OP family we didn’t like very much: April was snotty, Andy bratty, their mother meek, and their father quiet except when he exploded with violent rage at one of his kids.

The theme for the week was God’s Law—always a crowd-pleaser with the elementary school set. The hymn for the week, which April and Andy’s parents made us practice in the car, was #450 from the Trinity Hymnal, the official hymnal of the OPC:

Most perfect is the law of God,

Restoring those that stray;

His testimony is most sure,

Proclaiming wisdom’s way.

O how love I thy law! O how love I thy law!

It is my meditation all the day.

O how love I thy law! O how love I thy law!

It is my meditation all the day.

Bible stories illustrated the theme throughout the week: the stalwarts who followed God’s ways, no matter how repugnant or illogical—Abraham, who showed God he was willing to kill his own child; Moses and the Israelites, rampaging their way as instructed through the Promised Land; the brothers James and John, who abandoned their father, Zebedee, at a word from Jesus. Counterexamples were also presented for our edification. Look what could happen if you didn’t obey God! Jonah, swallowed by a whale; Ananias and Sapphira, who dropped dead after lying about money in church; and poor Achan, who couldn’t resist sneaking forbidden war booty into his tent and was stoned and burned to death along with his entire family.

Mari and I were in different classes for the week, and we both had problems with our teachers. An aide in my class had big, bleached blonde hair. She wore short skirts, low-cut knit tops, perfume, and makeup. She had a distinctly un-Presbyterian name—something like Deena. But this was the clincher: she didn’t know the Bible stories. I finally accosted the head teacher and told her Deena did not seem like a Christian.

“Well,” the teacher whispered back, “she’s
not
a Christian.”

“She’s
not?
”

“We thought helping out with Vacation Bible school would be a great way for her to be introduced to the Gospel,” the teacher explained. “Can you please pray for her?”

“Oh. Okay,” I said, but I was appalled. What were they thinking, foisting an unbeliever on unsuspecting kids? What if she, you know, led us into error?

But at least Deena was nice, whereas Mari’s Vacation Bible School teacher told her that she wasn’t coloring correctly. At home this was met with more outrage than my news that one of my teachers
wasn’t even a Christian. Mari was a very talented artist. I give my parents credit for this: they took their total depravity seriously and harbored no illusions that Christians were better or smarter than other people. They gave Mari to understand that this woman who’d criticized her drawings was an idiot. “Pay no attention,” my mother said. “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

Though my notions of Presbyterian common sense and courtesy were sorely tested that week, they were somewhat restored after class on the last day. On our way to the parking lot with Andy and April and their parents, Mari said she needed to go to the bathroom. The classrooms were locked up already, but someone directed us to the main building. Mari didn’t want to go alone, so I went with her.

The heavy double doors shut behind us, leaving us alone at one end of the long, dark, silent sanctuary. We hurried to the bathroom and finished as quickly as we could, then rushed back to the doors we’d come through, but the doorknobs wouldn’t budge. We pressed our small bodies against the double doors but nothing happened. It was Friday night, everyone was leaving, and we were locked in the church.

I have some memories of trying to be brave at times when I knew Mari was scared, but this isn’t one of them. I panicked, and Mari followed suit. We cried and banged on the doors, screaming for someone to let us out. The staid Presbyterian interior, so lacking in inspiration on Sunday mornings, was, in complete darkness, as terrifying as the most Gothic cathedral.