What did I do wrong? What did my spouse do wrong? How could it happen, when we have so many memories of shared Christian experience together? Did I catechize them enough? Love them enough? Was I too strict’or not strict enough? Too inconsistent in the way I lived what I professed? Could I have seen earlier where they were beginning to wander from God?
When a son or daughter abandons the faith, our default setting is to ask, "Whose fault is it?" It's often the first question that comes to mind when we encounter suffering in any form. We are all prone to a prosperity gospel of some sort, with its tidy logic of reaping what you sow. We can call it "natural law" or karma, but the idea is the same: You get what's coming to you. Or, in the case of apostasy, you imagine that your loved one gets what you did or failed to do.
Two Dangers to Avoid
There are two dangers we need to avoid at this point. The first danger (let's call it "no church") is to so emphasize personal faith that we disregard the ordinary means of grace through which this faith is created and confirmed. The public means that God has ordained for our entrance and growth in Christ can be marginalized in favor of a purely private and individual relationship with Jesus. Formal and public rites such as baptism, preaching, the Supper, corporate confession and prayers, and catechism instruction at home and at church are often contrasted with a "personal relationship with Jesus." Instead of looking for extraordinary occasions for a radical conversion experience, we should be making use of the ordinary means through which God has promised to deliver Christ with all of his benefits. A trellis can't make a vine live and grow, but it can help it grow in the right direction. Many young people today are drifting from the church more than outright rejecting it. And that is in part because they have not been rooted in the regular instruction, worship, confession, and life of the covenant community’even if they are entertained with youth-oriented programs.
Fortunately, many who take this view nevertheless raise their children in an atmosphere of Christian nurture at home and in the church. And yet by placing all of the emphasis on a personal conversion experience’often apart from the ordinary ministry of the church (for instance, at summer camp)’this approach can easily marginalize those daily and weekly means that God has provided for bringing children to their own profession of faith and admission to the Lord's Table.
The second danger (let's call it "hyper church") lies at the opposite end of the spectrum. It's the result of thinking of the covenant and the church's ministry as guaranteeing salvation simply by themselves. If the problem in the first view is to see God's saving work as independent from ordinary means, the danger in the second view is to take the covenant for granted and to treat its means as magic. It's as if the covenant works automatically: you're "in" simply because you were born to certain parents and have been exposed to certain rites. If the first view regards signs as incidental’or perhaps even detrimental’to personal faith, this second view at least tends to assume that all who are members of the visible church are united truly to Jesus Christ through faith.
This was a recurring source of apostasy in the Old Testament. It is especially evident in our Lord's ministry, as the crowds’especially the religious leaders’would not look through the sign to Christ, who is the reality. They could not see Christ in the law and the prophets. They beheld a miracle-worker and lunch-provider but failed to see these as signs meant to lead them to Christ himself. In Roman Catholic teaching, the signs are simply replaced with the reality. The administration of baptism itself effects regeneration (ex opere operato: "by doing it, it is done"). Ordination transforms an ordinary Christian into a priest who can transform bread and wine into Christ's body and blood. If one follows the prescribed regulations for dealing with sin (the sacrament of penance), one may hope to attain final justification. Obviously, then, the apostasy of a loved one provokes us to question the efficacy of God's promises and visible means of grace. Or it provokes us to blame ourselves, even though we have exposed them to the saving ministry of Christ. Remember, as U2's Bono pointed out, it's grace, not karma.
A Reformed Understanding of Apostasy
Within the Reformation traditions, there is also a spectrum of confession on this point. I can only represent the Reformed confession to which I subscribe. Our churches teach that "the Spirit creates [faith] in our hearts by the preaching of the holy gospel and confirms it by the use of the holy sacraments" (Heidelberg Catechism, Q. 65). We believe that the Spirit is the effectual agent of our union with Christ. The word and the sacraments are not the source or cause of grace, and yet the Spirit works ordinarily through these ordained means of grace to bring salvation and to keep us in faith until the end. God is the promise-maker, but every covenant involves two parties. He will bring his elect into union with Christ. He objectively gives Christ and his benefits to believers and their children, but we and they only actually receive these gifts through faith.
What this means in concrete and practical terms is that we raise our children as Christians. In the Reformed churches in which I serve, our form for infant baptism explains how each person of the Trinity is involved in this act. Though conceived and born in sin, we are taught by baptism that we must "seek for our purification and salvation apart from ourselves." As it states in our denomination's liturgy:
Holy baptism witnesses and seals unto us the washing away of our sins through Jesus Christ. When we are baptized into the Name of the Father, God the Father witnesses and seals unto us that He makes an eternal covenant of grace with us and adopts us for His children and heirs. When we are baptized into the name of the Son, the Son seals unto us that He washes us in His blood from all our sins, incorporating us into the fellowship of His death and resurrection, so that we are freed from our sins and accounted righteous before God. Likewise, when we are baptized into the Name of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit assures us by this holy sacrament that He will dwell in us, and sanctify us to be members of Christ, imparting to us that which we have in Christ.
Yet that is not all:
Whereas in all covenants there are contained two parts, therefore we are by God, through baptism, admonished of and obliged unto new obedience, namely, that we cleave to this one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; that we trust in Him, and love Him with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our strength; that we forsake the world, crucify our old nature, and walk in a godly life. And if we sometimes through weakness fall into sins, we must not therefore despair of God's mercy, nor continue in sin, since baptism is a seal and indubitable testimony that we have an eternal covenant with God.
Therefore, in baptism the Triune God teaches us our need for Christ, seals God's promise to each recipient, and admonishes us to lifelong faith and repentance. In short, a Reformed understanding of apostasy presupposes that the children of believers are the Lord's covenant seed and that the Triune God has pledged his entire estate to them as well as to us in Christ. Yet it also recognizes that, apart from personal faith in Christ, all of these blessings truly bestowed by God are never actually received. "But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring" (Rom. 9:5-7). It is from there that Paul explains God's sovereign prerogative to have mercy on whomever he has chosen in eternity. Isaac and Ishmael belonged to the covenant, but only Isaac received the inheritance. Jacob was more of a scoundrel than Esau, but Esau traded his covenantal birthright for a bowl of stew. Thus excommunication is real. "Cutting" lies at the heart of biblical covenants. In fact, the Hebrew idiom for covenant-making was "cutting a covenant," involving some shedding of blood. In circumcision, a piece of flesh is cut off so that the person himself is spared God's judgment. The whole sacrificial system involved the cutting of a covenant, representing the life of one given up for that of another. Jesus was "cut off"’excommunicated’for us. Baptism, too, is a "cutting off" from sin and death in order to be united to Christ. And those who renounce their baptism are cut off from the everlasting covenant. As Paul pointed out, it is not that the promise of God has failed. It is not that his word and sacraments are invalid until we make them effective by our response. Yet God's secret election remains just that: secret to us. We cannot determine who is elect or truly regenerate, but only who belongs to the visible church.
Let's apply this now to the difficult subject of apostasy or excommunication in our churches today. According to the first view I summarized above (the "no-church" view), the church has no authority to interfere in the personal relationship of a believer with Christ. According to the second view (the "hyper-church" view), the church has magisterial’ultimate’authority to save or condemn. But in Reformed interpretation, the church has a ministerial authority, delegated by Christ, to speak in his name. Christ himself has the last word, but the church's ministry is real. Christ gave the power to bind and loose to his apostles (Matt. 16:19; 18:15-20; John 20:22) and it continues to the ordinary ministry of the word, sacraments, and discipline (1 Cor. 5). Ministers pronounce Christ's absolution in the public service, as well as in their preaching and administration of the sacraments, and the elders handle disciplinary cases.
It can be disturbingly unfamiliar to those raised in evangelical churches to see this process actually play out on the ground. We are all accountable to the church for discipline (this includes officers as well). Pastors cannot rule and elders cannot even rule individually. We are all subject to each other in submission to Christ. Usually, this discipline takes the form simply of public instruction in church. Sometimes, private admonition and teaching are necessary, as well as attempts to reconcile parties.
Only if a member is unrepentant is there first a public censure (without mentioning the person's name) and then, after repeated failures to bring the erring member back, a public excommunication of the identified person. Even in this difficult Form for Excommunication that is read in the service, there is the recurring hope and prayer for the Lord to pursue his lost sheep. It is emphasized that the Father's arms remain open to receive his prodigals into his arms. The goal is the person's repentance and faith:
And since Thou desirest not the death of the sinner, but that he may repent and live, and since the bosom of Thy Church is always open for those who return, kindle Thou, therefore, in our hearts a godly zeal, that we, with good Christian admonitions and example, may seek to bring back this excommunicated person, together with all those who through unbelief and recklessness of life go astray.
Happily, there is another form: the Form for Readmission. After declaring publicly one's repentance and faith in Christ, the minister declares the individual, by name, "to be absolved from the bonds of excommunication," and the congregation is admonished:
And you, beloved Christians, receive this your brother with hearty affection; be glad, for he was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found; rejoice with the angels in heaven over this sinner who repents; count him no longer as a stranger, but as a fellow-citizen with the saints and of the household of God.
I have mixed emotions on those occasions of hearing the excommunication form read. With the rest of the congregation, my eyes are wet with sorrow. And yet I have seen too many instances of this godly process bearing hopeful fruit that through it Christ himself will draw straying sheep back into his fold.
Christ's promises are valid. We do not make them valid by our faith. His word and sacraments do not fail. God truly gives what he promises: Christ with all of his benefits. And he even gives us the faith to receive these gifts. Since we do not have access to God's secret election, we hold out hope to the very end for the return of apostate members. And yet those who do not repent and trust in Christ have only themselves to blame’especially when they have been given such great promises and privileges. On the one hand, the church has the responsibility and authority to determine credible membership, and its use of the keys is to be taken with utmost seriousness. On the other hand, this authority is always provisional and ministerial’the shepherd's staff to guide, protect, and lead.
Apostasy in Hebrews 6
Now let's put these three alternative views to the test with the classic warning passage of Hebrews 6:4-6:
For it is impossible, in the case of those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, to restore them again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt.
Is such a person a regenerate believer who falls away, thus losing his or her salvation? Or is the writer describing a person who was never a Christian in the first place? Actually, the passage presupposes a third category: namely, those who belonged to the covenant and even experienced what John Calvin called "the external operations of the Spirit" through the public means of grace, without being actually regenerate. How can I say this? Because the person in view is not simply a non-Christian. He or she has been "enlightened"’early church language for baptism (as in the Didache)’has "tasted the heavenly gift" (probably a reference to the Supper), "tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come," and has even "shared in the Holy Spirit" in some sense. In other words, they are heirs of the covenant who have experienced the in-breaking of the age to come through the means of grace.
In some sense, they even benefited from these gifts for a while. And yet there is a deliberate repetition of the verb "tasted." They caught a glimpse of the reality that they never truly embraced for themselves. Though outwardly united to the church, they are not living branches of Christ the Vine. They are like "land that has drunk the rain that often falls on it," but instead of bearing fruit, "it bears thorns and thistles." In fact, "it is worthless and near to being cursed, and its end is to be burned" (vv. 7-8). The writer even adds, "Though we speak in this way, yet in your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things’things that belong to salvation" (v. 9; italics added).
The people in view here are the same as those envisioned in Hebrews 4: the unbelieving generation in the desert. They beheld God's mighty works and benefited from them as covenant members, and yet "we see that they were unable to enter [Canaan] because of unbelief." "Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it. For good news came to us just as to them, but the message they heard did not benefit them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened" (Heb. 3:19-4:2).
So here is a category of those who belonged to the visible church. God gave them his promise, worked wonders among them, and even proved his promise by means of grace that allowed them to taste the realities that they never actually embraced by faith. The blame cannot rest with God, who is free to show mercy to whomever he chooses (Rom. 9:6-24) and who has even presented them with the gift of salvation through many visible testimonies of his grace.
These truths are not just theories; they make all the difference in our lives. They caution us against neglected ordained means as well as against trusting in them rather than in Christ. Some emphasize the subjectivity of the covenant to the extent that they treat their children as "vipers in diapers," pagans who need to become Christians at some later stage in life. Others (even in Reformed circles) emphasize the objectivity of the covenant to the extent that they place an intolerable burden on parents (especially fathers) as the "federal" representative of the family. If a covenant son or daughter apostatizes, the assumption is that the father has failed. Ironically, placing so much weight on the evangelist would be considered "Arminian" if we were talking about reaching non-Christians.
Conclusion
Applying these truths to concrete situations requires pastoral sensitivity to specific circumstances. Let me, however, offer a few suggestions that may have broader relevance:
- Honor the means of grace ordained by Christ. Take advantage of every means that God has provided for his gift of creating, confirming, and continuing our faith to the end. Resist the familiar assumption that children don't belong in the public service or that they cannot learn Scripture or the catechism. Then, as they mature, move out of the mere memorization phase to encouraging them to freely question things. This is not a sign of apostasy but the way that they come to understand and to own the faith for themselves. Try not to "freak out"! They're God's children, not yours.
- Cling to God's promise that he makes to us and to our children in baptism, even if your children do not yet profess faith or have wandered from it.
- Impress upon children as they are growing up the priority of God's promise, without failing to point out that just as the promises are greater in the new covenant, so too are the curses for abandoning it.
- Remember that God retains his prerogative to have mercy on whomever he chooses; ultimately, it's not in your hands. On the one hand, don't allow a loved one's apostasy to lead you to conclude that God's promise has failed’even if they never come to faith. And don't conclude that you have failed. God gives faith according to his mercy, not according to our works.
- Don't assume you know for certain that even in the case of apostasy, your son or daughter is reprobate. Both Scripture and experience prove otherwise. You do not know God's secrets, but you do have access to the promise he made in his word and confirmed in baptism. Pray in the expectation that they are elect and that in due course God will give them repentance and faith.
Above all, bear in mind that even if your son or daughter currently lives in the "far off country," there is a Father who is more merciful than we can imagine. And who knows: maybe through this dangerous sojourn, God is going to reveal himself as your child's Father in ways that he or she had never known before.
