To question conversion is not the same thing as favoring dead orthodoxy or nominalism. A middle position may actually exist between my original essay, "The Evangelical Narrative: Getting Rid of the Church" (Modern Reformation, November/December 2008), and Donald T. Williams' gracious response, "Getting Rid of Conversion?" That position answers one of Williams' concluding questions with a measure of ambivalence. To his first question, "Do evangelicals need the church with its ministry of Word and Sacrament?" I respond "of course" and I am glad Williams agrees. But to his second question, "Do good Presbyterians need to be born again?" I have reservations and this is likely the place of our disagreement. I understand that to say someone does not need to be born again sounds unbiblical. If by the new birth we mean regeneration and effectual calling, or if by conversion we mean our response of repentance and faith, then clearly all Christians need to be born again and converted. But conversion is a contested term and, despite meanings attached to it through 250 years of revivalism, one can plausibly argue that not every Christian needs to be converted even if all believers need the sovereign grace of the Spirit in regeneration. Conversion is especially tricky if it means turning from previous patterns of life to follow Christ. For some believers, telling them they need to be converted could be very bad counsel.
Take the case of Princeton theologian Charles Hodge. He grew up a pious boy, remembers never cursing and always praying to God in the course of daily activities, not to mention that he regularly attended the means of grace on Sundays and worshiped with his family in the home. But when he went to Princeton for college, he believed he needed to convert and did so during one of the college's revivals. One of Hodge's friends reported the news by saying that Charles had "enlisted under the banner of King Jesus." If I had been alive, I would have liked to have asked the reporter, "Was Hodge really an enemy of Christ before his conversion?" Did his baptism, religious practices, and pious convictions count for nothing? Hodge gave every indication that he was trusting in and fearing the Lord prior to his experience of conversion. But without that experience, he was supposedly outside the kingdom of Christ. That is not what Reformed Protestants believe about children who have been baptized and are submitting to the instruction and rule of their Christian parents and church officers. Even more troubling is the idea that by converting, Hodge would forsake his previous way of life for one of service to and love for the Lord. If he had been a pirate, liar, or philanderer, maybe the young Charles would have needed to change course. But he was leading a Christian life. From what sordid past should he have converted?
So whether he intended to or not, Williams has raised a bigger question than simply the desirability or necessity of conversion for each and every Christian. He has broached subjects such as infant baptism, church membership for baptized children, the means and timing for non-communicant Christians coming into full communion-in other words, how does conversion (of the evangelical kind) fit with the ordinary means by which children of the covenant grow up and inherit the faith of their parents? Even more significant is that the ideal of conversion as a dramatic experience may send the wrong signal to baptized children growing up in Christian homes and the church. Do we really want these children to convert and reject their previous way of life? Sure, we want them to profess their faith, and yes, sometimes covenant children do not profess faith as readily as they might. But what if they are like Isaac or Timothy, that is, like those biblical saints who did not undergo a conversion in the modern evangelical sense because they never knew a day of their life when they did not trust in and fear the Lord?
Williams' language of being a "good Presbyterian" as in "Do good Presbyterians need to be born again?" clarifies our apparent disagreement. I cannot fathom why a Presbyterian who needs to be regenerated would be called "good." I know of no "good" Presbyterians who are at enmity with God, who go to church and reject (when they do go) what the minister preaches, who refuse to receive instruction and counsel from elders, and who read the Westminster Shorter Catechism and think it is the stupidest and most boring Christian manual known to man. This sort of person is a bad Presbyterian. Although he may have been baptized as a child, reared in the church, and constrained by a host of social and personal factors to continue to go to church, his obstinacy in refusing to submit to the teaching and discipline of his church runs directly counter to good Presbyterianism. Such a person should come off the church roll and be treated as a nonmember. He is a prime candidate for the gospel. If and when the Spirit uses the Word to convict this person of sin and to trust in Christ, and if Williams wants to call the outworking of this person's faith and repentance a born-again experience, I will not object. I do object, however, to calling an unbelieving Presbyterian "good." Christianity, in whatever form, cannot abide unbelief.
Truly "good Presbyterians" fall into two classes: communicant and non-communicant members. (This is not simply a Presbyterian idiosyncrasy but the nature of every confessional church that practices infant baptism.) Communicant members are those who have been examined by a local body of elders regarding the profession of their faith and have been observed to be living a life that conforms to this profession. They truly trust Christ and are willing to submit to the oversight of the church, as near as human eye and ear can discern the state of a person's heart. These professors are communicant church members in the sense that they commune with the rest of the body in the Lord's Supper, arguably the highest expression for now of union and communion among Christ and his people.
Do these communicant members need to show evidence of a conversion experience? On the sessions where I have served, church members do not necessarily give such a testimony. Some have. Others have talked about their growing up in Christian homes, going to Christian schools, worshiping in the church their entire lives, and eventually determining that the promises of the gospel were true and that they desired to commune with Christ and his people in a fuller way than their baptized non-communicant status. This suggests it is possible to be a "good" Presbyterian without having undergone what evangelicals understand as a born-again experience.
To ask whether conversion (in the evangelical sense) is necessary for non-communicant members is redundant. I have already remarked that many members of the congregations to which I have belonged grew up as non-communicant members who eventually professed their faith without the experience commonly called conversion. To be sure, they may have encountered certain hardships or come under conviction for certain sins that may have prompted their desire for closer communion with Christ and his church than what they had as non-communicant members. And non-communicant members need to display faith and repentance in response to regeneration and effectual calling the way any other Christian needs to. But no session or consistory on which I have served has ever had a personal narrative in mind or a set of requisite peaks and valleys in personal devotion for determining who is and who is not converted and, therefore, worthy of church membership. Instead, elders and pastors have looked for a credible profession of faith: whether someone believes the Bible to be the Word of God and the only infallible rule of salvation; whether someone receives and rests upon Christ alone for the righteousness that God demands; whether someone lives a life characterized by repentance; and whether someone shows a willingness to submit to the church's oversight.
I also wonder what Williams thinks of the older Reformation sense of conversion. When looking through the Three Forms of Unity or the Westminster Standards, for instance, a reader will see little if anything about conversion as a dramatic experience of new birth. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, conversion was synonymous with sanctification. This is why the Heidelberg Catechism (Q. 88) speaks of conversion as "the dying away of the old self, and the coming-to-life of the new." In this sense, all Christians do need to convert. I may even outdo Williams here because I would say that Christians do not experience conversion once but do so constantly over the course of their entire lives. I suspect Williams has in mind the Great Awakening sense of conversion-a reorientation at a specific crisis period from an ungodly to a godly way of life. Again, not all Christians have such an experience, and to demand it of them is to set into motion real problems for the classes of church membership practiced by virtue of infant baptism. The demand for conversion may cause good Christians to doubt their faith if they do not have experiences similar to adult converts.
If Williams worshiped in any of the congregations where I have been an officer and became acquainted with the members of these churches, he might likely concede my point that conversion (in the evangelical sense) is unnecessary. And I will certainly admit his contention that those who attend the means of grace need to do so sincerely; Christianity is inauthentic if a person simply goes through the motions of church life. Dramatic experiences of conversion arose in the eighteenth century precisely to counter such insincerity. But heightened experiences of God or dramatic conversions are no more reliable in revealing the true state of a person's heart than going to church and reading the Bible and praying at home. People do and have faked encounters with the Holy Spirit, from conversions and speaking in tongues to walking down the aisle. Sometimes Christians even recognize at a later point in their lives that the experience they had and believed to be so earth shattering was really just a blip on a much bigger screen of gradual growth in grace and dependence on Christ. Ultimately, only God can see whether a believer's experience, profession of faith, participation in worship, or memorization of the catechism is sincere. Which is another way of saying that drama is no guarantee of authenticity.
If Williams could expand his notion of conversion to include the experience of covenant children who never have a dramatic encounter with Christian truths, I am fairly certain he would abandon an insistence upon conversion of the evangelical kind. I am also rather confident that if Williams considered the plight of pious boys like Charles Hodge, he might understand why some believe telling a child to repent of submitting to parents in the home, of attending the means of grace, of praying and worshiping with parents in family worship, and of memorizing the catechism is precisely the wrong thing to tell a baptized young person who has yet to make a profession of faith. I agree with Williams that a pagan needs to convert (in both the evangelical and Reformation senses), and I concede that some of the testimonies I heard as a child in a fundamentalist church were indeed remarkable and moving-especially the ones involving a former life of drugs, sex, and rock 'n roll being transformed into a life of godliness. But I would bet (if betting were godly) that Williams would not want every child of a Christian home to live a life of wanton disregard for God's moral and civil law in order to know his need for a savior. In fact, William's good sense and concern for genuine faith will likely allow him to make room for those whose testimony is neither exciting nor extraordinary, but boring and routine because they have continued in the faith and walk in which they were reared by their parents, pastors, and elders.
