From Fire Insurance to Blessed Assurance

From “Fire Insurance” to “Blessed Assurance” – A Shared History
In his book “How Then Shall We Live,” Wayne Muller talks about the importance of knowing who we are. He says, “Many spiritual traditions begin with a single question: Who am I?” I have asked myself this question many times during my life but have asked it even more at seminary. And, I have wondered many times , “Who is the Episcopal Church?” Like many people, I had little previous understanding of who began The Episcopal Church. The Church as I knew it seemed to be kind of foreign and impersonal. I could not and did not think of the church in a personal way and know who “she” was.
In John, Jesus talks about the “church as the bride of Christ. ” This imagery always bothered me with all of its sexual connotations and patriarchal language. But I understand now that John’s Jesus was thinking of The Church as a living being with whom we are all in relation. I think I have had a hard time seeing the church as a living being. However, my introduction to the history of our church has lead me to understand her in a more personal way and to identify with her better. I am learning her story and starting to find points with which I can identify with the church as a living creation and know who she is and also know better who I am as well.
One of the most interesting experiences that I have had reading Prichard’s “History of the Episcopal Church” is that I am constantly comforted in the fact that some chapters of the story of the Episcopal Church seems to be my story in many ways. Like most members of the human race, I tend to search for commonalities between myself and other people in order to establish connections with them and build a relationship. I see tensions that have existed in the church and I recognize these same tensions in my own life.
In particular, I was especially touched by the fact that within our own church we have had an historic tension between people who are aligned with “covenantal” theology and people whose theology is more of what Pritchett calls “conversion oriented. Learning these things about The Episcopal Church’s story has been a bit like getting to know someone and then feeling as if we have been friends for a long time. I find a reflection of my own struggles to reconcile who I am today with who I once was. I read in the history a story that is fairly parallel to my own in some ways.
I became Episcopalian about 13 years ago when I was 29 years old. Up until then, I had spent most of my life in the Southern Baptist Church. I grew up with a “confessional” theology that centered on conversion and avoiding Hell and recruiting others to my brand of Christianity. Little did I know that these same tensions existed in The Episcopal Church between more “evangelical” priests and believers whose theologies were “conversion” based. I was surprised when I read the following lines in a sermon by Rev. Whitefield, who preached wrote and taught in The Episcopal Church back around 1740 that had him saying to the congregation, “Now, my dear friends, did God ever show to you that you have no faith? Were you ever made to bewail a hard heart of unbelief?” This sermon sounded like ones that I heard growing up in the Baptist Church.
I was genuinely surprised that there were Anglicans who had appealed to emotion in their preaching and teaching in order to “convert” people. Prichard describes it well in his “History.” He describes “sentimentalist” approaches to theology, saying, “It was not enough to understand the basic Reformation doctrine of justification by faith; one had to ‘feel’ that doctrine on a personal level”. Now I am all for appealing to emotion in church teaching sometimes, but one of the things that I found in common with my story is that I grew up in a tradition that made regular, if not weekly, appeals using this kind of approach that asked believers to “feel” doctrine. Every service in the Baptist Church ended with urgent pleas to the congregation for people to make “decisions of faith” and “walk the aisle and come to Jesus.” Religion was based almost exclusively on emotion and not intellect.
I “walked the aisles” when I was seven years old and came to what the Baptists liked to call “A Decision of Faith.” I do not doubt the veracity of that decision, even to this day. But, I have no doubt that it was influenced heavily by the kind of preaching Rev. Whitefield did in the Episcopal Church. I remember when I decided to do this I had just been to a week-long series of revival services in the church. During one of the sermons, the guest preacher spent a long time describing what Hell was going to be like and how we who were not believers were going to go there and be separated from Jesus. He described how Jesus was broken-hearted that we were going to go there as well. I was terrified, touched and sad that this man, Jesus, was going to be sad that I would be missing from his fold, so I “walked the aisles” and joined the Church and was baptized by full immersion a few weeks later.
One thing that I have sincerely struggled with since becoming Episcopalian (and that I have reconciled, I think) is this tension between a “fire insurance” type of faith and a more “covenantal” faith. I found it profoundly moving a few weeks ago when we were talking about baptism and Bishop Whitemore reminded us that what our baptism meant was that we did not have to “do” anything to receive God’s blessing, salvation or love. In baptism God “reaches down” and “saves” us without our having to have thought out or decided upon or felt emotionallythat our faith is “real.” The God that I grew up with the Baptist church damns pretty much everyone to Hell, really, other than the Baptists (and a few other righteous folk). The God we were describing saved us all and not once in a walk down red-carpeted aisles. This God saved us over and over throughout a life lived together.
Learning about the “confessional” element within The Episcopal Church has given me the opportunity to grow closer to my church by seeing that we share some personal history. Like the church I am living within as a member and a Postulant, however, this personal history has not defined me and has been something that I have had to reconcile with the present theological realities I have matured into over the past 13 years as an Episcopalian. I appreciate the emotional and confessional parts of my history and regard them as important aspects of my whole spiritual history. They are no longer at the center of “who I am,” however, much in the same way that they have not taken over the Episcopal Church. I have been able to move (like my church, I think) from a theology of “fire insurance” to “blessed assurance” and learned that I am, (to paraphrase Rev. Temple) saved “today, was saved yesterday and will continue being saved tomorrow.”