Moments earlier, I had been lifted out of the water after having been baptized for the second time in my life — the third if you count my Evangelical "dedication" sprinkling as an infant. It seemed that every church we attended required something slightly different in order to secure my salvation. Getting saved was important to me. Getting wet a few more times was a small price to pay.
My previous baptism in the Free Methodist Church (Evangelical) was not recognized by the church we were now attending, Bethesda Missionary Temple (an independent Pentecostal church currently known as Bethesda Christian Church). The principle difference between the two churches was that Free Methodists believed that praying in tongues was not something Christians did, and Bethesda didn't think you were a Christian unless you did speak in tongues — at least once — hopefully right after you were baptized.
So, as soon as I dried off and changed into my regular clothes, I was hustled into a second floor prayer room, where the other 200 or so that were baptized that day were already praying. I was told to sit in a chair, and soon two elders approached, laid their hands on my head, and I was instructed to pray for the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. According to Bethesda's theology and practice, I could not be confirmed in the faith unless there was evidence that I had experienced the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. And the conclusive evidence was that I "yield and speak in tongues," the unintelligible words of angels. In short, while justification was something separate, speaking in tongues became a requirement in order for Bethesda to confirm you in the faith.
Bethesda's theology is thoroughly documented in two large catechism books consisting of questions and answers and accompanying Bible quotations. Understanding God by Patricia Beall Gruits (Whitaker House, 1975, Springdale, PA) is a 422-page, 852 question and answer book that was used for the first year catechism students. It was the most thorough exegesis of Christianity I had seen up to that point in my life. Following that up was the year-two text Laying the Foundation: Achieving Christian Maturity by Gruits' brother and senior pastor of the church, James Lee Beall (Logos International, 1976, Plainfield, NJ). This was a 389-page textbook also laid out in Q&A format, but also with written exercises and tests.
As we prayed, the hands on my head became heavier. One of the elders was praying in tongues, and the other in plain English: "O, Lord God, come down mightily on this young man and fill him with your Holy Spirit." Now up until this point in my life (I was 30 at the time) I considered myself to be a pretty good Christian. I cannot remember a time when I was not seeking God or trying better to understand His truth about my life and the world around me. Don't get me wrong. I wasn't a saint. I had my problems, and I was frequently seeking God's forgiveness for my sins. But I had an active and real prayer life and had just left a part-time stint at the Taylor Free Methodist Church as their Youth Minister. Why did I leave? Partly, because they had rejected the gifts of the Holy Spirit that I had concluded were still active in the present-day church. Not that I necessarily wanted a gift I didn't already have, but it bothered me that a church, which proclaimed to take the Bible so literally, so readily excised certain chapters from their lexicon of faith — in this case 1 Corinthians 14. And that's why my wife Pam and I went through the eight-month catechism course at Bethesda, where we were both re-baptized, and where I was now sitting in an upper room waiting for the Holy Spirit, a few yards from where Pam was doing the same thing.
As I sat there with my hands firmly clasped in prayer, I pondered an earlier understanding: that the Holy Spirit was in my life, and had been since I had first accepted Christ. As much as I disagreed with the Free Methodists because of what Paul wrote in First Corinthians 12-14 about the Gifts of the Holy Spirit ("Do not forbid speaking in tongues…" – 1 Corinthians 14:39), neither did I fully agree with Bethesda's conclusion that tongues were required as evidence of the Holy Spirit. To my way of interpreting the Bible, Paul was clear as he argued against the idea that all members of the church should have the same spiritual gifts — or experiences. ("Are all apostles? … Are all teachers? … Do all have gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues?" – 1 Corinthians 12:29-30).
Still, I sat, respectfully, and let these dear men pray over me. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps I would speak in tongues. I was trying to be obedient to those under whose authority I had placed myself. But nothing was happening, and the prayers became more urgent and insistent. In their eyes, I am sure, I was like a pagan bump on the log, a hollowed out knothole into which only slimy toads would dare to dawdle. I wasn't jumping up and down. I wasn't crying. I wasn't even sobbing. A wretch was I. A hard case, indeed! At last, a third prayer warrior came and put her hands on my back and shoulders. They would have pushed me over onto my face except that I was sitting in a steel chair, bent forward, with my elbows firmly planted in the hollow of my knees.
Several times during the eight-month catechism instruction, after Patricia Beall Gruits' lecture to the class of 300+, we broke into small groups, each led by a married couple who engaged us in discussion and answered our questions. Except rarely could they answer mine. One thing that had attracted us to Bethesda was their attempt at thoroughly explaining the Christian faith. Unfortunately, their thoroughness lacked consistency. Often I had difficulty understanding how the Scripture passages that were cited in Understanding God backed up the answers that Gruits had written. More than once I was asked to meet with a group of elders in a room set apart. It was like being sent to the vice principal's office, something for which I have so much experience I should list it on my resume: "Willingly bucks authority…over 274 hours of 'special' instruction. Can touch toes without bending knees."
It was in these meetings (with the elders, not the vice principal) that I began to see a problem between faith and reason. Bethesda's leadership had brought a lot of reason to bear on the Christian faith by logically laying out the Gospel in their two catechism volumes. The vast majority of those two volumes still make sense to me. After all, they're filled with explanations of basic Christianity that are rational and consistent. They even hint at a Catholic upbringing in the distant Beall past. But there were holes. But deep pungent holes caused me to conclude that Bethesda's theology was based on personal experience with scriptural passages assigned to justify the experience. I argued that the exegesis should be the other way around, since we should have more faith in the Bible's teachings and less in our explanations of the events in our lives.
When I asked my small group leaders or the elders for explanations of those scriptures that didn't seem to match their answers, I was told that I had to take their answers on faith. I explained that I had no trouble taking on faith my understanding of what the Bible was saying, but that their understanding of the Bible left me bewildered at times. That didn't sit well with them. After all, they were the elders and I was the student — and an unconfirmed one at that. My frustration was rooted in the limits they placed on reason. Now reason has limits for sure, especially in the light of supernatural revelation. But what I faced in this particular Protestant experience was that where reason and faith seemed to be at odds, reason had to be disregarded entirely, and blind faith took over. That made me uncomfortable. I reasoned (oops) that faith and reason had to have come from the same place, and if handled correctly they would have to agree.
Back in the upper room, the elders, probably having given up on my Baptism in the Holy Spirit, had now retrograded and were praying instead for my salvation. There was a real need, I'm sure they concluded, for the Holy Spirit to send faith searing through my soul. The problem was that each of us was defining "faith" differently. It was much later when I understood that the linguistic fallacy facing us was something called "equivocation" — a term that means "equal vocalization". It's when a word, term or concept sounds the same, but the underlying definitions are different. Here, Bethesda was defining faith as trust in Ms. Gruits' understanding of the Bible, and I was holding out for my understanding of the Bible, although we both thought we were having faith in the Holy Spirit. At the time I didn't recognize the equivocation going on. I did not understand that we were not disagreeing on what the Bible taught, but rather with our interpretations of what the Bible taught. And what good was that? It was almost comic, like melancholy clowns in baggy pants chasing each other around a three-ring circus honking horns and squirting seltzer at each other, trying to scare each other into submission.
All of this was twirling around in my mind as the hands and the prayers pressed upon me. Finally, the humor of the situation got to me, and I started to chuckle, if not giggle a little. What a mistake that was. Quickly I realized that equivocation was at work again. Even my laughter was subject to being interpreted two different ways. I was humored, but they were convinced that I was going to burst forth any moment in wild angelic utterances. I tried to control myself and quiet down. But it was no use. The more I laughed the more serious they became. Finally, I just had to rise up, catch their eyes, smile, and tell them I was laughing at the situation and that it was not the Holy Spirit descending with "holy laughter."
They were not amused. That did it. No salvation for me that night.
And so it was that the elders of Bethesda Missionary Temple became convinced that I was not a Christian and they refused to confirm me in the faith. Pam, however, experienced things a little differently. She's always had a more adaptive nature. I doubt she ever saw the inside of the vice principal's office except to collect for Girl Scout cookies. Evidently she gave forth a convincing utterance in the upper room. Later she was confirmed in the faith, and furthermore was asked to publicly give her testimony at the graduation banquet.
Years earlier, by faith, I had embraced Christ as my Savior and I had labored well since then to secure my place in the Kingdom, although I frequently fell short. Finding forgiveness, rallying again to obedience, continually working, studying, and getting excellent counsel from pastors and friends, I slowly matured in the faith, thanks in a large degree to the Evangelical-Fundamentalist Christian Community.
But such wildly dividing experiences and interpretations of the Bible gave me great pause and confounded my pursuit of truth. Much later my understanding of logical and linguistic fallacies, along with what constituted a "good" argument, was to play a significant role in my discovery of what was true and what was false. At the center of that journey was the relationship between faith and reason, the topic of my next article.
