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The First Christians Didn’t Say the Sinner’s Prayer · Theology Made Podcast

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  [music]
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  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Theology Made Podcast.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm Dr. Jordan Vale.
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  SPEAKER_00: In today's episode,
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  SPEAKER_00: we're going to look at how the first Christians didn't say the sinner's prayer.
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  SPEAKER_00: The prayer that millions of people have said to become Christians did not exist
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  SPEAKER_00: for most of Christian history.
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  SPEAKER_00: The words just simply were not there,
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  SPEAKER_00: and neither was the assumption underneath them that you could close your eyes,
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  SPEAKER_00: repeat a few sentences after someone, and then you walked away saved.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you grew up in church, you probably know it by heart.
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  SPEAKER_00: Lord Jesus, I know I'm a sinner.
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  SPEAKER_00: I believe you died for me.
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  SPEAKER_00: Come into my heart.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it was probably some version of that prayed around a campfire or
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  SPEAKER_00: with every head bowed and every eye closed.
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  SPEAKER_00: I see that hand.
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  SPEAKER_00: I see that hand.
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  SPEAKER_00: For a lot of people, that prayer is the hinge a whole life turns on.
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  SPEAKER_00: The line between the before and the after.
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  SPEAKER_00: So here's the weird part.
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  SPEAKER_00: If you went back to the year 250,
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  SPEAKER_00: and described that prayer to a Christian,
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  SPEAKER_00: they would not recognize it as the way a person joined the faith.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because what they were doing took time and was far more demanding
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  SPEAKER_00: than anything you could fit on the back of a salvation cart.
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  SPEAKER_00: So here's the scene.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's a city in North Africa.
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  SPEAKER_00: Early third century, it's still dark, hours before sunrise, on the Saturday night before Easter.
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  SPEAKER_00: And a man named Felix has been coming to the Christian community for three years.
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  SPEAKER_00: Joining was not a weekend decision.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was closer to an apprenticeship.
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  SPEAKER_00: Years of showing up and being taught and being watched to see whether he really meant it.
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  SPEAKER_00: And for most of that time, Felix was not even allowed to stay for the whole gathering.
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  SPEAKER_00: There was a point in the service where the unbaptized were sent out.
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  SPEAKER_00: And they left before the shared meal and the prayers that belonged only to the family.
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  SPEAKER_00: Felix stood on the other side of that door for years.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now it's the night before Easter.
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  SPEAKER_00: He's fasted all day.
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  SPEAKER_00: He stands at the edge of a pool of water with the rest of the candidates.
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  SPEAKER_00: They take off their clothes.
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  SPEAKER_00: They turn to face the west toward the dark and renounce the devil out loud by name.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then they turn east toward the coming light,
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  SPEAKER_00: and they're lowered under the water three times while they're asked
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  SPEAKER_00: whether they believe in the Father,
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  SPEAKER_00: in the Son, and in the Spirit, answering from inside the water each time.
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  SPEAKER_00: They come up,
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  SPEAKER_00: and for the first time in three years,
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  SPEAKER_00: Felix is handed bread and wine that now belonged to him and allowed to pray
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  SPEAKER_00: the prayer reserved for the family.
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  SPEAKER_00: The two words he has waited three years to say out loud are finally his, our Father.
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  SPEAKER_00: This was how a person became a Christian in North Africa.
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  SPEAKER_00: It took years,
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  SPEAKER_00: and it ended with a burial and a sunrise in a pool of water before the city woke up.
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  SPEAKER_00: And we're not guessing about any of this, because the instructions survived.
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  SPEAKER_00: There's a document called the Didache,
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  SPEAKER_00: probably written before some of the New Testament was finished,
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  SPEAKER_00: and it walks through baptism.
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  SPEAKER_00: Teach the person first, have them fast, then baptize them.
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  SPEAKER_00: There's Justin Martyr,
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  SPEAKER_00: writing around the year 155,
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  SPEAKER_00: to explain Christianity to a Roman emperor who assumed it was a cult.
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  SPEAKER_00: He describes how a person is made new.
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  SPEAKER_00: They're taught.
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  SPEAKER_00: They commit to living differently.
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  SPEAKER_00: They pray and fast, and then they're washed in water.
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  SPEAKER_00: The washing is the moment.
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  SPEAKER_00: A century later,
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  SPEAKER_00: there's a detailed order of service often connected to Rome that lays out
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  SPEAKER_00: the whole process.
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  SPEAKER_00: Candidates were examined when they first asked to join and examined again later.
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  SPEAKER_00: The instruction could run as long as three years and
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  SPEAKER_00: the people teaching could extend it if your life did not match your words.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sponsors had to vouch for you and the community had to agree you were ready.
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  SPEAKER_00: You couldn't talk your way in.
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  SPEAKER_00: They watched how you lived,
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  SPEAKER_00: whether you stopped going to the arena,
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  SPEAKER_00: how you treated the people who served in your house,
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  SPEAKER_00: whether you would give up work the church considered incompatible with the faith.
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  SPEAKER_00: And there was a long list of jobs that disqualified a person.
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  SPEAKER_00: Becoming a Christian cost you something visible before anyone let you near the water.
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  SPEAKER_00: And underneath all of that was something that was forming, something that was happening to you.
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  SPEAKER_00: Paul had written that baptism was being buried with Christ and raised with Him,
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  SPEAKER_00: and the early church took that at full weight.
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  SPEAKER_00: Going under the water meant dying with Him,
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  SPEAKER_00: and coming up meant being born, the way a person is born once and cannot undo it.
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  SPEAKER_00: So when did all of that turn into a prayer you could say in 30 seconds with your eyes closed?
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  SPEAKER_00: The answer is a man named Charles Finney and a piece of furniture.
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  SPEAKER_00: Finney was a lawyer in upstate New York who became a preacher in the 1820s.
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  SPEAKER_00: And he did not think much of waiting around for God to move.
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  SPEAKER_00: To him, a revival was a result you could produce, the same way a farmer produces a crop.
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  SPEAKER_00: And he pretty much said as much in print,
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  SPEAKER_00: calling it the right use of the right means rather than a miracle.
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  SPEAKER_00: So, he engineered the means.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the most famous one was a bench.
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  SPEAKER_00: He set a pew at the front of the room and called it the anxious seat.
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  SPEAKER_00: when the preaching reached its peak he invited anyone under conviction
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  SPEAKER_00: to get up walk forward in front of everyone and sit on that bench as a public sign
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  SPEAKER_00: that they were deciding for christ right then
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  SPEAKER_00: the walk became
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  SPEAKER_00: the point a body moving
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  SPEAKER_00: down the aisle turned an invisible decision
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  SPEAKER_00: into a visible event you could
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  SPEAKER_00: count
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  SPEAKER_00: And in Rochester over the winter of 1830 and 1831, this worked on a scale that no one had seen.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was like the whole city seemed to turn.
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  SPEAKER_00: And Finney's methods, they spread across the country fast because they delivered numbers.
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  SPEAKER_00: Hmm.
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  SPEAKER_00: For 17 centuries,
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  SPEAKER_00: the moment a person became a Christian was a washing the church performed on them,
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  SPEAKER_00: usually after a long wait.
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  SPEAKER_00: In one generation,
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  SPEAKER_00: Finney moved that moment inside the person where it happened in an instant and
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  SPEAKER_00: the outward sign shifted from water poured by the community to
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  SPEAKER_00: a person's own feet carrying them down the aisle.
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  SPEAKER_00: What had taken years now took minutes and what the church had once done
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  SPEAKER_00: to you became something you did for yourself.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that prayer, that's the last piece, but it comes later in our story.
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  SPEAKER_00: Finney supplied the walk down the aisle.
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  SPEAKER_00: Dwight Moody,
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  SPEAKER_00: the great revivalist of the late 1800s,
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  SPEAKER_00: took the decision model and built it into a machine that filled arenas.
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  SPEAKER_00: After Moody came Billy Sunday,
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  SPEAKER_00: a former professional baseball player who told crowds to come forward
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  SPEAKER_00: and shake his hand as a sign they had decided.
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  SPEAKER_00: By then, the walk even had a nickname, Hitting the Sawdust Trail.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then came Billy Graham And the radio And
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  SPEAKER_00: the television Graham closed every event the same way
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  SPEAKER_00: With every head bowed Every eye closed And a long slow invitation To get out
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  SPEAKER_00: of your seat While the choir held a single hymn For as long as it took Millions came
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  SPEAKER_00: His team needed a way to let all those people know what to do next.
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  SPEAKER_00: Something simple enough to print out by hand, by the truckload.
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  SPEAKER_00: So the words got standardized.
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  SPEAKER_00: Campus Crusade put out a small booklet in the 1960s that ended with
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  SPEAKER_00: a suggested prayer to receive Christ, and tracts carried their own versions.
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  SPEAKER_00: The wording is a form most of us know.
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  SPEAKER_00: Admit that you're a sinner, believe that Christ died for you, and ask him into your heart.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that last line, asking Jesus into your heart,
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  SPEAKER_00: It's leaning on a verse in Revelation about Christ standing at a door and knocking.
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  SPEAKER_00: The problem though is that that verse was written to a lukewarm church,
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  SPEAKER_00: not to a single person at a crusade.
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  SPEAKER_00: But it gave the prayer a picture and that picture stuck.
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  SPEAKER_00: And by the time most of us were born,
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  SPEAKER_00: the whole thing felt like this is just the way it's always been done.
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  SPEAKER_00: In truth,
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  SPEAKER_00: Now, none of this means the prayer is empty.
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  SPEAKER_00: Like, people have met God in that moment.
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  SPEAKER_00: Like, really met Him.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Spirit does not wait for the church to follow some correct procedure before showing up.
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  SPEAKER_00: And plenty of faithful people can point to a folding chair at a summer camp as
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  SPEAKER_00: the night their life turned.
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  SPEAKER_00: However, something was traded in the move from the pool to the prayer card.
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  SPEAKER_00: The early church made it almost impossible to become a Christian by accident.
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  SPEAKER_00: You could not drift in.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because the waiting, that was part of the filter.
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  SPEAKER_00: By the time you went under the water,
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  SPEAKER_00: you had counted the cost in the open in front of people who would know
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  SPEAKER_00: if you walked it back.
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  SPEAKER_00: The instant prayer, remove the wait.
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  SPEAKER_00: And when you remove the wait, you remove the filter.
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  SPEAKER_00: Without it,
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  SPEAKER_00: a person could say the words,
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  SPEAKER_00: feel something emotional in the moment, but still be no different the next morning.
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  SPEAKER_00: And we have language that speaks to this.
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  SPEAKER_00: People talk about praying the prayer as a kid and then walking away
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  SPEAKER_00: from everything it was meant to mean.
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  SPEAKER_00: Or others, they wonder whether it counted.
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  SPEAKER_00: And they say it again just in case.
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  SPEAKER_00: In some of the Pentecostal circles I grew up in,
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  SPEAKER_00: you always had that one person who thought they had to get re-saved each week.
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  SPEAKER_00: The early Christians didn't have that anxiety.
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  SPEAKER_00: And not because their faith was easier than ours, and if anything it was not.
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  SPEAKER_00: They had simply never put the whole way to salvation on a single remembered sentence and moment.
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  SPEAKER_00: They put it on a washing the church could point to,
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  SPEAKER_00: on a community that had walked them to the water and kept holding them to
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  SPEAKER_00: the yes they spoke in it.
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  SPEAKER_00: You didn't have to wonder whether you had done it right.
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  SPEAKER_00: You had been buried in front of the whole community on a specific morning
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  SPEAKER_00: with witnesses in an actual pool of water you could walk back
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  SPEAKER_00: and stand beside years later.
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  SPEAKER_00: Put the two side by side and you can see the trade.
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  SPEAKER_00: We kept the moment of decision but lost the years that used to lead up to it.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then the decision itself slid quietly from the church collectively to
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  SPEAKER_00: the individual until the thing a community once did to a person became something
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  SPEAKER_00: a person does alone, eyes closed,
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  SPEAKER_00: Crossing Their Fingers Hoping It Took And Okay Maybe That Was A Fair Trait A Faith
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  SPEAKER_00: That Demands Three Years Before The Water Was Never Gonna Fill Stadiums And Perhaps
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  SPEAKER_00: The Door Had To Be Widened For The Room To Fill But You Do Not Have To Undo Any
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  SPEAKER_00: Of It To Ask The Question Felix Would Have Asked Standing At The Edge Of That Pool
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  SPEAKER_00: In The Dark When You Say
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  SPEAKER_00: That Someone Got Saved What Do You Actually Picture Happening To Them?
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  SPEAKER_00: A sentence they repeated with their eyes closed,
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  SPEAKER_00: or a washing they will remember for the rest of their life.
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  SPEAKER_00: The first Christians would tell you those are not the same thing,
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  SPEAKER_00: and they spent three years making sure a person knew the difference.
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  SPEAKER_00: Hey, this is the Theology Made Podcast.
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