Note: This is an old version of this story. To see the "2nd edition," please visit The Cheshire Christ: Second Edition.

Making Calling and Election Sure

I don't care if you know the Bible,

I don't care if you speak with tongues,

I don't care if you say you love me,

With every song you've sung.

It doesn't matter that your sacrifice of praise is loud enough to raise the dead,

What I really need to ask you,

Is have you done the things I said.

-- "Steeple Song," by Don Francisco.

I had never been a church guy in my life. I didn't have the foggiest idea what a nave was, or whether you called the big part of the building the sanctuary, the meeting hall, or what. I was a bull in a china shop when it came to church stuff. My training had been in forthright, aggressive, no-nonsense Christianity. If someone sinned, you pulled him aside privately and told him about it. If you sinned, you confessed to the person you had sinned against, and if you had sinned against a lot of people, you confessed publicly.

Needless to say, that's not the way things are usually done in American churches. In GCC, you simply weren't allowed to be grumpy and have an attitude problem. People didn't accommodate you when you acted that way -- they rebuked you! There was simply no tip-toeing and sneaking around and walking on egg shells at GCC, so all the politics and concessions to un-Christian attitudes in "regular" churches shocked and appalled me. I wanted to say ...

Take your mind off your election and try to get it straight.

-- "Lick Your Fingers Clean," by Jethro Tull.

So when I left GCC, there was a lot of adjusting to do, and it was not all for the good.

There was no question in my mind which church I wanted to join. I was staunchly predestinarian, and that meant Presbyterianism. (So I thought. There are other predestinarian denominations.) I had sympathy for the Presbyterian position on the Lord's Day, they took the law of God seriously, which many modern denominations don't, and I could tolerate their church government. All in all, it seemed like the right place to be.

But the first time I visited a Presbyterian Church I came in about half way through adult Sunday School. A boring guy was lecturing in a boring voice to a crowd of bored people who looked like they were awake only from caffeine and force of will. It was about as appealing as diving into a puddle of spit.

Fortunately I persevered and discovered that the pastor and a few of the elders were a little livelier and wanted to pick up the pace. I might be able to help them with that, they thought, which made the prospects a little nicer. A man needs something to do, after all -- a goal to meet, an enemy to slay, a kingdom to build. So I ended up joining a small, conservative, Presbyterian church.

One thing I love about the Presbyterian Church is that they have confessional standards. There's none of this "we just believe the Bible" silliness. They believe the Bible, but they're honest enough to say what, exactly, they mean by that. GCC never had anything like that. They claimed to have "no creed but Christ," as the saying goes, and no standard but Scripture, but that's naïve; or, in some cases, bordering on dishonesty. Lots of people claim to believe the Bible, but they believe it teaches different things.

For example, GCC took the "believer's baptism" position. I had been steeped in it, and, quite frankly, I don't think I ever seriously questioned it. One time on campus I read a tract from the local Lutheran church on infant baptism, but it was incoherent pablum. It did nothing but entrench me further in the "believer's baptism" camp. After all, now I had considered the other side! There's truly nothing like a little knowledge to puff a man up in his own opinions.

Anyway, the Presbyterians I'd fallen in with were no ordinary, run-of-the-mill, "be nice to your neighbor" Presbyterians. These guys were from a teeny, tiny, hard-headed denomination called the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. They were nothing if not doctrinaire, and spoiling for a fight. Which was okay by me. I like a good fight.

So they loaded me up with literature on infant baptism, the Lord's Day, Presbyterian government and so forth.

You might suspect that a guy like me, who loves a good argument, is reluctant to admit when he's wrong. In fact, there's one thing I love more than a good argument, and that's being right. Sure, it's no fun finding out that you're wrong, but it's better than staying wrong. I know some people cling to things for sentimental reasons, but when I hold an opinion, I'm telling myself (and others, who are, of course, entitled to my opinion) that my opinion is right. Not convenient. Not necessarily pleasant. Not easy. Not comfortable. But right. That requires shifting allegiances when you discover that -- oops -- you weren’t.

Believer's Baptism

In GCC, believer's baptism was always defended by the chronology of the command and examples in Scripture. "Believe and be baptized," the apostles preached, and that's what we saw, in case after case. First you believe, then you are baptized. People who hold to that position like to point out that there is not one unambiguous case of an infant being baptized in the New Testament.

In addition to this, there was the testimony of experience, which is often the more important authority for modern folk. I've never once met a person who said the baptism he received as an infant was a moving, spiritually significant time. But I knew scores of people who were radically transformed by a public, serious profession of faith at their baptism. Including me.

At GCC, we didn't baptize people in sissy swimming pools, or pour a little water on their head and wipe it off with a fancy, embroidered towel. We went down to the creek, pushed the sticks and the crayfish (and sometimes the ice) out of the way, and dunked 'em all the way under, accompanied by guitar music and joyful singing. It was a tremendous, life-changing thing.

Taken all in all, the "believer's baptism" position was very appealing. The Baptist argument has the simple, seemingly plain reading of the text on its side, as well as the confirmation of experience. It's very hard to tell someone, schooled in the priority of feelings and experiencing his relationship with God, that the baptism he can't even remember, back when he was a baby, was his real baptism.

Try, for a minute, to picture the contrast in your mind. Over on the left you have a bunch of college-aged kids, some with guitars, all of them smiling and happy, loving each other, loving life, heading down to the creek, or the pond at the golf course, for a baptism. Got the picture? Now look to your right. There's a dark building with a bunch of old folks in it, dressed in suits, and not very comfortable. The pastor, wearing a funny-looking dress, and somewhat distracted, is reading the same old words you've heard a hundred times. The congregation does their part with about the same enthusiasm. A little bit of water is dabbed on the kid's head. There's a muttered, "isn't he cute" somewhere in front of you, and that's about it.

Which one sounds more appealing?

Fortunately, however, Mr. Spock trained me better than that. We don't make important decisions on the basis of feelings and emotions: we consider the arguments. So, on we go.

The Baptist case sounds pretty persuasive until you consider circumcision, which was the "initiation rite" in the OT, and unquestionably administered to infants -- or, more precisely, to adult converts and to the male children of believers. In fact, if we were to rewrite the book of Acts and pretend that it was the record of Jewish evangelists, there would be no record of infant circumcision either, because the focus on the book of Acts is on the spread of the gospel into new people groups -- first Jews, then Samaritans, then God-fearing Gentiles, then into Europe, and so forth. Where we see examples of baptism in the canonical text, we'd see adult circumcisions in our fictitious text about Jewish evangelists. There would be no infant circumcisions in the whole book. So would that prove that circumcision shouldn't be administered to infants?

That example shows the weakness of an argument from silence. Infants are simply not in view in the narrative strategy of Acts, so it is unreasonable to expect to see examples of infant baptism. NT silence on infant baptism tells us exactly nothing.

Okay, my still-Baptist brain thought, but that's a long shot from positive evidence. It's one thing to say that they may have baptized infants, but it's another to say that they did and we should.

Here we run into one of the most important pages in the Bible: that divider page between the old and new testaments. Some people interpret that page as if it were a brick wall. "Everything you've read up until now is pretty neat and interesting, but from here on out forget what you've learned and start over again. It's all new now."

I didn't believe in such radical discontinuity between the testaments (for various reasons, which should become plain later), so when I started examining the arguments for infant baptism, I tried to put myself in the shoes of the Jews who listened to Peter's sermons in Acts. They were still thinking the way Jews had been thinking for centuries: adult converts and their children receive the sign of the promise. So, when they heard Peter say, "Repent and be baptized ... for the promise is for you and your children," what would they think? "Promise. Hmm. God gave a promise to Abraham, and the sign of that promise was given to him and to his son, Isaac. C'mon, kids, down to the river you go."

In other words, the presumption would have been exactly the reverse of what I had been taught to expect. Rather than requiring New Testament evidence for infant baptism, we really should look for evidence that infants were excluded. They were included before, in the Old Testament. What's changed? And where's the evidence for this change?

Of course I believed there had been a change: circumcision was just a fleshly, external rite -- almost a branding ceremony -- while baptism signifies faith and a change of the heart. So, I thought back then, baptism should not be applied until the heart has been changed -- until faith is present.

The trouble with that reasoning is that circumcision also signified a change of heart, and even faith.

And [Abraham] received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had while uncircumcised. Rom. 4:11

From the start, circumcision had a spiritual connotation. It was supposed to signify the faith of Abraham. This is why Moses could say, ...

Circumcise then your heart, and stiffen your neck no more. Dt. 10:16

... and again ...

Moreover the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul. Dt. 30:6

Clearly circumcision has a spiritual meaning in these texts -- a meaning closely associated with personal faith -- and this rite was applied to infants!

My perspective in my GCC days was that baptism signifies faith, and children don't have faith yet, so they shouldn't receive baptism. But circumcision also signified faith, and it was applied to children.

Another road-block to my acceptance of infant baptism was my very limited view of God's blessings. I believed that the only means of grace and blessing is personal, intellectual faith. If a person doesn't believe in an intellectual way -- i.e., in a way I could understand and examine -- "If you were to die today and stand before God, and He asked, 'Why should I let you into heaven?'" ... that sort of thing -- anyway, the person who can't answer questions like that can't receive blessings. At least not in the ordinary way.

But didn't Jesus take little children in his arms and bless them? Why did he do that? Was He just being polite? Was He engaging in a little social white lie? "Of course we all know that this blessing doesn't mean anything. After all, the kids can't be blessed unless they have personal faith. But just to make the moms and dads happy ...."

We have to believe, on the basis of Jesus' integrity, that his blessing of the children imparted a real spiritual benefit. It wasn't just a show. And if it imparted a real benefit, then children can receive spiritual blessings irrespective of their personal faith.

Another passage that pushed me away from this purely intellectual understanding of God's work and blessing is the Aaronic blessing that is required in the law.

Speak to Aaron and to his sons, saying, "Thus you shall bless the sons of Israel. You shall say to them: 'The LORD bless you, and keep you; The LORD make His face shine on you, And be gracious to you; The LORD lift up His countenance on you, And give you peace.'

So they shall invoke My name on the sons of Israel, and I then will bless them. Num. 6:23 ff.

What? God will bless them simply because the priests say the blessing? What about the faith of the people? It's not even mentioned.

Now, lest you get the wrong impression, I'm not saying that God imparts the benefits of baptism apart from faith. Baptism is the sacrament of faith, and without faith -- whenever that faith is wrought in the heart by God, by the way, it doesn't have to be before the baptism -- well, without faith it's just water. But the point from Numbers 6 is that we can't limit the means of God's blessings only to intellectual faith that is present at that very moment. There's more to it than that. A man can grow into a better understanding of God’s gifts and blessings.

As I considered the meaning of circumcision and the covenant, I saw that Scripture clearly teaches that the sign of faith and repentance is to be applied to children, and that children can receive blessings from God.

But there was one more thing I had to get over, and that was the assumption that children can't believe. Nothing in Scripture says that a person must believe before he is baptized, but that sequence, "believe and be baptized" kept me thinking that way. Of course the sequence means nothing -- a Jewish evangelist would have said "believe and be circumcised" to an adult, but not to a child -- but it was still an obstacle.

Evangelical Protestants tend to see faith in terms of intellectual content. It’s hard for them -- it was hard for me -- to conceive of John the Baptist leaping in his mother's womb for joy, or David saying that God made him believe when he was on his mother's breasts, or Timothy knowing the holy scriptures from infancy. But Scripture doesn't say that children can't believe, in their own way, and at their own level. I don't think God expects adult faith from a child (nor do I think he accept a child's faith from an adult), but a child can believe, in his own way.

To prove that, let's consider the incarnation. When Jesus was a fetus, did He believe? We'd have to say that to whatever extent a fetus can believe, the incarnate Son of God did. And since whatever is not of faith is sin, we have to believe that Jesus, even as a fetus, had some measure of faith.

And so, that little leap of the Baptist knocked the last vestige of Baptist thinking out of my head. Infants can believe. But even if they don't, there is no Scriptural reason to say that a sign must correspond in time to the thing signified. The Israelites were given the Old Testament sign of faith, circumcision, whether or not they had faith at the time. They were supposed to grow into the faith and recognize the significance of their circumcision. And Paul seems to call Baptism the New Testament equivalent to circumcision.

In Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh in the circumcision of Christ; having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised up with him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead. Col. 2:11-12.

And so we took our two children to be baptized on the day we joined the Presbyterian Church.

The Lord your God is in your midst,

A warrior who saves.

He will exalt over you with you,

He will renew you in His love,

He will rejoice over you,

With shouts of joy.

-- Zeph. 3:17, a rousing rendition of which was commonly sung at GCC baptisms

Having said all this about infant baptism, I should point out that GCC had one thing right on the money about baptisms. They should be joyful celebrations, and we need to focus our attention on adult conversions and baptisms -- baptizing the heathen out there. I thank God for every child who is born and raised in a Christian home, but even if every Christian family does a perfect job with their kids and raises them in the faith, there's still a whole world of the unwashed. And when we bring them in, we need to remember ...

I tell you that in the same way, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. Luke 15:7

We need to get that joy back in our baptisms -- for infants and for adults.

Rote Prayers

I learned a lot in those early days in the OPC. The residual influence of non-denominational, Evangelical thinking kept tugging at my brain, and the Magisterial Reformers -- Luther, Calvin and their ideological heirs -- were tugging in a different direction. The part of me that still longed for guitars and prayers on the living room rug and bread and grape juice had a hard time adapting to the formal nature of some Presbyterian devotions and worship.

Again He went away and prayed, saying the same words. Mark 14:39

It is traditional in most mainline churches for the congregation to pray the Lord's Prayer in unison, out loud, during the worship service. Evangelicals (of the non-denominational variety) don't like that sort of thing. To the Evangelical mind, in order for a prayer to be sincere and genuine, it must be spontaneous. Repeating a prayer over and over again is the kind of "vain repetition" Jesus warned against. He wasn't instructing his disciples to say this particular prayer, they argue, but to pray in this way.

This preference for spontaneity affects a lot of things in the Evangelical church. David Wells has summarized some of them in No Place for Truth: Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?

But we’re talking about prayer. The first thing I realized was that "spontaneous" prayer isn't really that spontaneous. If you listen to the prayers of the members of a particular group, you'll find repetitive phrases and patterns. This is especially true in prayers for a particular circumstance, e.g., grace at meals, putting the kids to sleep at night, or the prayer before or after a sermon.

It seems that we fall into patterns whether we like it or not. The question is then how to deal with that. Are patterns a bad thing that should be avoided? Are they some fleshly (unspiritual) habit of the mind that we have to be on guard against? Or, are we fighting against God's design -- or our own nature -- when we fight against patterns? (Thomas Howard's book, Chance or the Dance, is very instructive on this issue.)

As a Presbyterian, the answer to this dilemma had to come from Scripture alone, and it is there that I found the solution.

Scripture itself uses repetition. Look at Psalm 136, which begins ...

Give thanks to the LORD, for He is good, For His lovingkindness is everlasting.

Give thanks to the God of gods, For His lovingkindness is everlasting.

Give thanks to the Lord of lords, For His lovingkindness is everlasting.

To Him who alone does great wonders, For His lovingkindness is everlasting ....

"For His lovingkindness is everlasting" is repeated in every verse. Almost -- gee, this isn't very Evangelical -- almost as if it were used in a litany, with the leader saying one part and the congregation repeating the refrain.

I've already mentioned Numbers 6, where God tells the priests to bless the people with a specific blessing: "The Lord bless you and keep you," etc. They weren't supposed to improvise. They were to use that particular blessing, in those words.

As I continued to study this subject, I realized that the Evangelical view focuses too heavily on the individual. It's very hard for lots of Evangelicals to get together and have a prayer meeting, because, basically, they just have a lot of individuals praying. (The ultimate manifestation of this is a charismatic prayer meeting, where everyone is praying at the same time and nobody knows what anybody else is saying.) It's not quite coming together to pray. It's more, I pray, you say amen, then you pray and I say amen.

Now Peter and John were going up to the temple at the ninth hour, the hour of prayer. (Acts 3:1)

I wondered what were they doing there. What kind of prayer happened when the whole multitude came together?

Now it happened that while he was performing his priestly service before God in the appointed order of his division, according to the custom of the priestly office, he was chosen by lot to enter the temple of the Lord and burn incense. And the whole multitude of the people were in prayer outside at the hour of the incense offering. (Luke 1:8-10)

The whole multitude was in prayer. What did that mean? Were they all praying silently? Was one person leading them in prayer? (Which is another thing some Evangelicals have a hard time with.) Or, perhaps, were they all reciting a prayer -- maybe a Psalm, or a special prayer that was used for that occasion?

It doesn't take much research, or, for that matter, much thought, to realize that the Psalms were used for corporate worship and prayer. I don’t think I ever thought about it, but I suppose that as an Evangelical I had this picture of David, Asaph and those other guys writing down their prayers, and other individual Jews reading them, just like I was in my morning devotions. I didn't think too much about how the community used them.

But the community did use them. They prayed them. They chanted them. They sang them. And that's why they're in the Bible in the first place. The Psalter was the collection of hymns and prayers used by the people of God.

The more I thought about this the more unreasonable my Evangelical/Fundamentalist perspective on prayer seemed. How could we object to praying the Lord's Prayer when, after all, we sang the same songs over and over again? (And some of the choruses that are popular nowadays are very repetitive.)

Clearly there was nothing wrong with the congregation praying the Lord's Prayer any more than there was something wrong with us singing Zephaniah 3:17 at every baptism. But was there anything right about it?

Most definitely so, and here I learned a lesson about prayer and worship that has turned a "rote" repetition into a very meaningful experience of worship.

Jesus did say to "pray this way," that is, to use the Lord's Prayer as a model for prayer. So, imagine for a moment an entire congregation that takes Jesus at his words and prays, in their personal devotions, using the pattern of the Lord's Prayer, i.e., as a kind of template.

“Our Father,” he begins, and then reflects on the fact that God is a father; he tries to learn to be a better father by God’s example; he realizes that a “father” implies a family, and that’s why we say “our”; that we pray to God with others, who are our brothers and sisters.

“Who art in heaven,” he continues, realizing that our citizenship is in heaven; that we have no lasting city here on earth; that the goal of our life is to go to our heavenly home.

And so he continues through the Lord’s Prayer, using it as a guide to daily prayer.

Then, when the congregation assembles for corporate prayer, they say the Lord's Prayer together. And what happens? First of all, the “our” in “our father” takes on a new meaning. But more than that, all those individual prayers that have been offered throughout the week in bedrooms and in cars and with head bowed over a bowl of cereal have now been brought together and presented to God by means of the common template.

The "repetition" is not rote, it is a very meaningful summary of each individual's entire prayer life, united by a common bond with the rest of the congregation, and, indeed, with the whole Christian church. The Lord's Prayer is now every prayer. It is the model prayer, not only in the sense that we pray that particular prayer, but that other prayers are formed around it, and it becomes the center of prayer.

Structure and form and liturgy aren’t a hindrance, but an aid to devotion and worship.

Form and Structure

Thirty days have September,

April, June and November,

Some Evangelical groups don't have a formal "confession of faith." Their fellowship accepts certain theological opinions and rejects others, but they haven't formalized these rules in a confession. They believe that their opinions are straight out of the Bible.

Of course that's an implicit stick in the eye to other groups with different beliefs who believe that their views come from the Bible. And the lack of a formal confession isn't quite fair to converts, and to people who are interested in the church, because they have no easy way to find out the official position on all the issues.

“We just believe the Bible,” they say. “Sure,” says the visitor, “and so did the last five churches we visited, and they all believed different things.”

GCC didn't have an official confession or catechism. Of course we had one, it just wasn't official. It was somewhat vague and amorphous, but some theological ideas were clearly consistent with GCC beliefs while others weren't. We all got used to the accepted answers to typical doctrinal questions, and we all knew the standard proof texts.

In some cases these proof texts were systematized in Evangelical study aids like the Topical Memory System. The TMS consists of a series of small cards with a topic, such as "life in Christ," or "assurance of salvation," with an accompanying proof text. Of course it's the Navigators, and not Scripture itself, that says that particular verse applies to that particular subject. The verse may be out of context -- it may seem to mean one thing when it's printed on a card that says, "Assurance of Salvation," but in the flow of the text it may mean something else.

(By the way, the Topical Memory System is an excellent tool for memorizing significant passages of Scripture and I recommend it highly.)

What the Navigators have done is taken the unwritten (and rather general) catechism of the Evangelical world and put all the proof texts on little cards. It's a good system, and a good idea, but those who use it shouldn't pretend they have "no creed but Christ." They've introduced their own system for understanding Scripture -- it's just in a different form.

So the Evangelical's objection to form is really only an objection to certain forms, and once you see that for what it is, you take a more objective look at other forms people have used as devotional aids, or helps for church government.

For example, a catechism is a very practical thing. It establishes a basic understanding of the content of the Christian faith, and a frame of reference for doctrinal discussions and further study. But a catechism is formal, and formal is often a bad word to Evangelicals.

And yet the virtue of the catechism is obvious once you try to use it. Being against a catechism is somewhat like being against an alphabet. "We'll learn all the letters, but who says we have to learn them in that particular order?"

"But," the Evangelical complains, "lots of people learn the catechism and never knew the Lord, so obviously the catechism doesn't do any good."

Okay. Lots of people know the alphabet and can't write a decent business letter. That's not the point. The catechism is not meant to be a guarantee that a person will be converted and know the Lord. The catechism instructs a person in the content of the faith. (Faith, of course, must have content. It's not just faith in faith.) The individual still has to assent to that content and place his trust in it, but that's not the role of the catechism. That's the Holy Spirit's job, working through the word -- primarily through preaching.

When I was a non-denominational Evangelical I always wanted to dig deeper into the faith, but in Evangelicalism there isn't that much to dig into. In fact, such digging can be frowned upon. "Knowledge puffs up," they say. "But love edifies." (It's not loving to study, you see.) "Just get out there and witness."

I was witnessing. A lot. But I wanted to love God with my mind, and I felt that I wasn't. Presbyterianism satisfied that desire. First of all, there was a set content that I could study and know that I had mastered. But it's not as if you were done when you'd finished the shorter and larger catechisms. There was plenty more to dig into. For a time I made a habit of reading one of Jonathan Edwards' sermons every Lord's Day. Edwards alone supplies more than enough to keep a mind busy for a lifetime, and he's just one of the princes among Reformed theologians.

In short, there's a lot of theological meat out there, and Evangelicals are only hurting themselves by living on milk.

Clergy and Laity

Another curious thing about Presbyterianism is the doctrine of the ministry. At GCC, anybody could preach, or baptize, or hand around the bread and grape juice. The elders had leadership roles that other people weren't supposed to transgress, but there were no religious ceremonies that only the elders could perform.

In the OPC, the pastor has something like a priestly role. For example, only the pastor can bless the congregation in the second person ("the Lord bless you and keep you"). An elder has to use the third person ("the Lord bless us and keep us"). And only the pastor can raise his hands during the blessing. It's only a symbol, but it's charged with meaning.

This bugged me because it took me right back to the problem I had at GCC -- if only the pastor can do it, and if it's only valid when the pastor does it, then who's really a pastor? At GCC the sacerdotal office had to do with authority. God led through the elders. In the OPC it had to do with sacraments and ceremonies and blessings. But in each case certain functions were only legitimately performed by the pastor.

Once again, it was back to the Good Book, and once again, Numbers 6 provided a clue. God promised to bless the children of Israel when a certain blessing was said, but only when it was said by the sons of Aaron. Does that mean that the sons of Reuben couldn't say the blessing?

I guess we don't know. God is free to act outside of His ordinance -- certainly he can bless people when somebody else says the blessing -- but the promise attaches to the words spoken by the sons of Aaron. In other words, we know that God will bless the people when the sons of Aaron say the priestly blessing because God has promised to do it, but we can only hope and guess that he'll listen to anybody else.

This watered those dormant seeds of doubt about apostolic succession and church government. It took a while for them to sprout into full-blown trouble.

Which Commandments are from God?

Thou has ordained thy precepts,

That we should keep them diligently.

-- Psalm 119:4

GCC taught (correctly) that obedience and holiness of life is a prerequisite to having a good understanding of the faith. (See Ps. 111:10.) I take that to mean that all the study in the world won't give you a correct understanding of God unless you are willing to do what God demands. (See John 7:17.) Obedience is a necessary condition to good theology. Unfortunately, GCC seemed to believe that obedience was a sufficient condition for good theology, and that’s not right.

In any event, people who don't obey, or aren't willing to obey, will never understand God's teachings. This means that whenever you study an area of Christian discipline or a moral requirement, you'd better be willing to do it. Jesus said, "If any man is willing to do his will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it is of God, or whether I speak from Myself." (John 7:17) This makes it very clear that obedience, or at least a willingness to obey, is intimately tied to religious knowledge.

Several times I observed that dynamic at work in my own life. Where I was unwilling to do what God required, I sought to justify my actions, but when I submitted my will to His, the issue was no longer clouded by my passions and self-justifications.

The lesson is that if you are unwilling to obey a teaching, you are not fit to evaluate whether or not it’s true.

One practical test of this was the Presbyterian church's view on the Sabbath. At GCC we didn't believe anything special about Sunday, but the Presbyterians did.

In light of what Jesus says about being willing to obey, how was I going to evaluate the arguments for the moral requirement of Sunday-keeping if I was doing my own thing on Sunday? By my own principles I had to be willing to obey, and, maybe I'm stupid, but the only way I know to be sure that I'm willing to obey is to go ahead and obey. It's easy to say, "I'd be willing to do it if I knew God requires it," and while in some cases that's the only practical option, talk is cheap, and the heart is deceptive.

Of course this doesn't mean that I felt obliged to obey every crazy moral requirement that anyone has ever proposed. For example, I haven't given up buttons so that I can decide whether the Amish are right about them. There has to be a threshold of reasonableness. The case has to be more than possible -- it has to be plausible.

That's a judgment call, of course, but there comes a time where you can no longer claim to evaluate an issue objectively while your conduct is squarely on one side. It is safer to obey, and then from that position, where you are confident you are "willing to do" the teaching, decide whether or not the teaching is of God.

So I began a serious study of the Christian Sabbath by making sure I was living according to that rule.

I’ve sketched out some of the arguments for Sunday-keeping in the discussion about Sunday worship.

Remember the Sabbath Day, to Keep it Holy

The biblical justification for Sunday-keeping is rather simple. First, the moral law that we are to set aside one day in seven to rest from our work and worship God was established at the creation. This is important because some people believe the Sabbath was part of the Mosaic covenant and passed away along with prohibitions on eating pork and that sort of thing. But since the Sabbath was instituted before Moses’ covenant, a change in Moses’ covenant doesn’t change the Sabbath.

Almost, that is. The moral obligation, set at creation, is to worship and refrain from worldly labor for one day every seven. The Mosaic covenant applied that moral law to the nation of Israel. We are still under the moral command, but we are not under the particular application of that command as it was given to the Jews.

The Jewish Sabbath celebrated creation and the exodus and looks forward to a greater work of redemption in the future. The Christian Sabbath looks back on that redemption, which has been accomplished in Christ’s resurrection. Of course that implies Sunday worship, and when we look at the history of the church, both in Scripture and in the writings of the early church, that’s what we see: they met on “the first day of the week.”

After studying the subject for a few weeks, we embraced the Presbyterian view that God had transferred the Sabbath obligation from Saturday to Sunday.

Training for Ministry

But your new shoes are worn at the heels and

your suntan does rapidly peel and

your wise men don't know how it feels to be thick as a brick.

-- "Thick as a Brick," by Jethro Tull.

Or perhaps they do. You can never quite be sure what Ian's trying to say.

In any event, New Life Christian Students/GCC was the only church I'd known for several years, and I was with them through college, marriage and two kids. Although there were lots of positive lessons and examples, there were a few negative ones as well. One of these was the danger having a leadership with no theological training. But while GCC had missed an important part of the content of training for spiritual leadership, they had the right method -- discipleship.

And he appointed twelve, to be with him. Mark 3:14

A pupil ... after he has been fully trained, will be like his teacher. Luke 6:40

So, in my own pursuit of ordained ministry, I wasn't at all thrilled with the idea of taking a bunch of classes to satisfy a curriculum somewhere. I would rather have been examined, passed on what I already knew, and sent to study where I was deficient. But that's not the way the educational system works. It's a cookie-cutter approach. The fact that I had done tons of personal witnessing, street evangelism and even open-air preaching meant nothing to that sheet of paper that said, Requirement: Evangelism 101.

Much as I hate to admit it, I suffered from the lingering cultural effects of the 60s. "Formal" things had a tendency to bother me. Taking classes in seminary helped cure me.

One of the nitwit ideas we hear from time to time is that "everybody has something to contribute," so discussions are better than lectures. The professor has no right to impose his views on the class (since nothing's "true" anyway). Rather, we're all supposed to come together and have a meeting of the minds. We all have something of value to add.

At GCC, it really worked that way, and the reason was that nobody was that much more clever than anybody else. Okay, there were exceptions, like the guy who visited one of our Bible studies and said clothes were the problem in society, and if we all went back to being naked, peace would reign. But generally speaking, the participants in our Bible studies were just as likely to have a good insight on the text as the leader, because nobody, the leader included, really knew how to study the text in any depth. We were all dealing with the Bible on a very superficial level.

And let me tell you, it sure was fun. Everybody learned and everybody contributed. It was so ... egalitarian.

Seminary taught me that egalitarianism gets awfully irritating when the professor really does know more than the students. You learn to dislike the fact that useful class time is taken up with all the contributions and sharing of the ignorant. (My Presbyterian pastor used to call it "pool your ignorance time.") You feel cheated. After all, you signed up for the class to learn the subject, not to hear a bunch of half-baked ideas from your fellow students.

This experience pushed me even deeper into the conviction that the church needs a trained, intellectual ministry. Evangelicals tend to distrust "scholarship," and with good reason. A lot of scholars say a lot of very, very stupid (and sometimes wicked) things. (Remember John 7:17.) But there are good scholars too, who say very helpful and useful things. My seminary professors combined scholarship with sincere devotion. They had done their homework, and their depth of study paid off. It was exciting to hear what they had to say.

Evangelicals like to emphasize zeal -- getting "fired up for the Lord," and all that. I know what that's about. GCC majored in "fired up." But there comes a time when pep rallies lose their pep unless the heart and mind are strengthened by an ever-deeper penetration into substance. After a while, "fired up" is just an empty, emotional thing. A five-year old gets excited about riding without training wheels, but you wouldn't be very happy if your teenager showed the same enthusiasm.

The excitement of the first-time experience wears off, but our culture seems obsessed with that version of excitement. We want the ever-new experience. We want the thrill of falling in love instead of the deep, settled pleasure of being in love. We want every kiss to be like the first kiss. And in religion, we want the giddy feeling of the convert instead of the tested, firm confidence of the old saint.

The worst of it is that when the convert confronts the saint, he thinks that godly man is "dry," or, frequently, "spiritually dead" because he's not sufficiently giddy. Since the convert believes that his brand of excitement is the real, genuine, authentic love of God -- the "fired up," giddy kind -- he despises the calm, serene, tested faith of his more mature brothers.

I was that convert. I can remember many times having judgmental thoughts about people whom I later discovered were far more spiritually mature than I. But I regarded them the way a love-sick teenager regards his parents: "they can't possibly love one another as much as I love my sweetheart."

It's a sick, socially destructive attitude, I know, but I had it bad. Seminary was the beginning of my cure, I think.

The way to keep that fire in the bosom without resorting to experience for its own sake is to keep the content flowing. It’s not good enough to love the Lord with your emotions, you must love him with your mind as well. We don't abandon the emphasis on holiness and obedience and mission and service, we add study and devotion and art and contemplation.

See there! A son is born -- and we pronounce him fit to fight.

There are black-heads on his shoulders, and he pees himself in the night.

We'll make a man of him

put him to a trade

teach him to play Monopoly and

how to sing in the rain.

-- "Thick as a Brick," by Jethro Tull

"Fit to fight." That's the name for it. After being born again and assured of his salvation, an Evangelical is almost immediately put into training for the only other significant duty he'll have for the rest of his life: helping others to be born again, attain assurance of their salvation, and witness.

You hear this frequently from Evangelicals. "After I got saved, God could have just taken me straight to heaven, but He didn't. He left me here, and the only reason is to help bring other people to faith."

There's a good insight there, but it can also betray a limited view of our mission in the world. Jesus has all authority in heaven and on earth, and he claims lordship over the whole planet, every person, every culture and every institution. We need to work to redeem them.

The Evangelical usually doesn't think about transforming the culture. "Why polish the brass on a sinking ship?," he wonders. Rather, he is immediately trained for evangelism. But sometimes, unfortunately, "trained" is a bad word. There are good training programs available, like Evangelism Explosion, but more commonly the Evangelical is simply convinced that he is up to the task. After all, he knows God. He has his own story to tell. He's ready. All he has to do is get out there and do it.

... do not worry beforehand about what you are to say, but say whatever is given you in that hour; for it is not you who speak, but it is the Holy Spirit. (Mark 13:11)

The Evangelical applies this to himself. When he's witnessing, God will give him the right words. This confidence results in extraordinary arrogance. This poor soul has been convinced that the Spirit in him will give him the words to say in any and every situation. This means, of course, that he can't be stumped. If someone asks him a question, it’s not he who responds, but the Holy Spirit, who can’t be stumped. Therefore he must give the right answer. God must give the right words -- He promised, didn't He? -- so the Evangelical comes up with whatever answer he can, confident it must be the right thing to say in that circumstance.

I remember one time when a friend and I were going door-to-door in our neighborhood. We had to come up with some mechanism to justify the intrusion, so we cooked up a survey. "Do you attend a church in the neighborhood?" (If we approved, we'd say great, thanks, and move along. If we disapproved, we'd invite them to ours.) And, of course, "Have you come to the point in your life where, if you were to die today, you'd be sure you'd go to heaven?," and the companion question, "If you were to die today, and God asked you why he should let you into heaven, what would you say?" To all of that we added a few of our own, which I don't remember, except for the last one. "If you could ask God one question, what would it be?"

And we, untrained, young pups who had hardly started living life ourselves, were going to answer these questions!

Yes, the arrogance is breathtaking, but that's what we were about. We had the solution to all the world's problems, and we were out there spreading the word.

But one day I had a good object lesson in just how unknowledgeable I really was. We were having some sort of meeting, and I mentioned that I had been reading Psalm 81, which reads in part, "But I would feed you with the finest of the wheat, and with honey from the rock I would satisfy you." I mentioned how God isn't limited in how he can bless us. After all, you don't get honey from a rock.

Well, it turns out that you do, as a friend told me privately afterward. Bees sometimes make nests in rocks -- in fact, in some environments that's the best, if not the only place for a hive.

Needless to say, I was embarrassed and committed to getting some education after that.

The seminary I chose was the perfect thing for me. Classes were offered part time, in the evenings, and they generally tried to accommodate the needs of men who had a job and a family. (I could say a lot about that! Since elders are supposed to be the husband of one wife, with believing children -- see Titus 1 and 1 Tim. 3 -- what in the world are seminaries doing focusing their attention on 20-somethings straight out of college?) The classes were rigorous and I learned a lot -- that is, when we weren't sitting in a circle and "sharing." I did have to endure a few of those touchy-feely sessions.

At first, I focused on the "ministry" classes -- the ones I needed the least, to tell the truth. I'd learned that stuff at GCC. But as time went on, I was exposed more and more to the meat of Reformed, covenant theology. Little bits of things that I'd picked up over years of Bible study were beginning to fall into place in the context of that larger, more comprehensive view of salvation history. I began to see a structure to revelation that was completely missing from the theological perspective of my friends at GCC.

The only real "structure" to theology at GCC was evangelism and eschatology: we'd better save the world now because it's not going to last for long. But covenant theology had a sweeping, comprehensive view of both testaments of Scripture. It didn't have the disjointed "dispensations" that are so common in modern Evangelical theology -- God followed one plan for one group of people, then a different plan, then, oops, guess we'd better try this until such and so time, then back to that other thing.

No. Reformed theology teaches that there is a consistent theme of a covenant between God and his people, and the earlier versions weren't set aside or eliminated, they were subsumed into ever greater manifestations of the that one, over-arching covenant of promise in Christ.

The common metaphor used to describe this approach is of the acorn and the oak tree. An acorn doesn't look like an oak tree, but there is an organic unity between the two. In the same way, the biblical covenants are organically one, growing into maturity in Christ. The promise of life given to Adam was clarified, not set aside, in the covenant with Noah. It was further refined and elaborated in the promise to Abraham, and then sharpened even more in the covenants with Israel at Sinai, and with David. The revelation of the promise became more and more clear, and its themes worked their way through different external circumstances, sometimes seeming to go in odd directions, until they were manifested perfectly in the final revelation of God's redemptive plan in the person of Christ.

"Out of Egypt have I called My Son."

There's a sign on the wall,

But she wants to be sure,

'Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings.

-- "Stairway to Heaven," by Led Zeppelin

Evangelicals like to say that one of the best evidences for the truth of Christianity and the Bible is fulfilled prophecy. Isaiah spoke of the virgin conceiving, and there you have it: Mary, a virgin, conceives. Or Hosea would say, "Out of Egypt have I called my son," and Jesus was called back to the land of promise from Egypt.

Wow, huh?

Well ... I didn't think so. I'd go back and read the passage in Isaiah, and it didn’t sound like Isaiah was speaking of Jesus. Rather, he was talking about a young woman back in his day who'd conceive and bear a son before certain political events occurred. If Isaiah meant "virgin," then were their two virgin births -- one in Isaiah's day, and one in the reign of Caesar Augustus? It’s somewhat hard to see any “prophecy” there, in the sense of “predicting” future events. And Hosea? He was talking about Israel coming out of Egypt in the Exodus, not some future trip of the Holy Family coming back to Israel after Herod had died.

The Evangelical attempt to use these passages as amazing predictions of the future seemed like a stretch to me. Other evidences had persuaded me of the truth of Christianity, but some of the claims to "fulfilled prophecy" didn't do much for me, and I didn't use them as evidence in my evangelism. (Except, as I mentioned before, the thing about Daniel's 70 weeks, which really impressed me.)

But covenant theology, which I began to learn and appreciate in the Presbyterian Church, planted a seed in my mind that has led to a better understanding of this issue. Redemptive history is organic, or, as Mark Twain is supposed to have said, “history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.” Certain patterns and images keep coming up, each time a little fuller and richer than the last. Take, for instance, the "God with us" theme. God walked in the garden with Adam and Eve. But after the Fall, God withdrew and dealt with people at a distance. But then God promised to be with Abraham and to be his God. There is even a tantalizing passage where the angel of the Lord, along with two other angels, visits Abraham. God actually came and visited Abraham.

We can follow the development of this “God with us” theme throughout Scripture. We see it in the cloud of smoke and pillar of fire; in the tabernacle and the ark, where God's presence was manifested; and, of course, in the temple. All of these things are a foreshadowing of the ultimate expression of "God with us" -- the birth of Immanuel, who "tabernacled among us." (In John 1:14, "dwelt" is "eskanosen," which can mean "tabernacled.")

So Christmas is a continuation of the theme. From this perspective, the very existence of the tabernacle in the wilderness is a prophecy of Christmas -- it is an earlier manifestation of the theme that has its fulfillment in the incarnation of the Son of God. It's not a mechanical prophecy, the way modern folk would have it, as if knowledge of the tabernacle would make you know that there would be a Christmas. Rather, having studied the growth of the "Immanuel" theme, Christmas makes sense. "Yes, this is what God has been preparing us for." It’s like another line in the song. It scans with the rest of the lyrics. We’re not supposed to read Scripture and history the way a lawyer reads the Federal Register. It’s more like a poem. It takes a well-tuned ear.

“Roses are red, violets are blue. Some poems rhyme and some don’t.”

Covenant theology attempts to track these themes as they work their way through the various phases of redemptive history. It doesn’t look for mathematical precision or legal accuracy. It look for correspondences -- rhyme, if you will. An example would be the correlation between circumcision and baptism that which I've already mentioned. And when the early church spoke of the church as the bark of Noah -- the only hope of salvation from destruction -- they were using the same principle.

This approach to Scripture resolves a lot of the tensions I found in a wooden, literal reading of biblical prophecy. Of course "Out of Egypt have I called my Son" is a prophecy of Christ, because Israel is a picture of Christ. Following the same pattern, when we read that all the nations of the earth will stream to Mt. Zion to hear the law of the Lord (Is. 2), we don't interpret that to mean that they will go to a literal mountain to learn the kosher rules. Mt. Zion was point of focus for the people of God in that time. In the New Testament, the church is the expression of that same theme. So we read Isaiah’s prophecy in its new setting and we look forward to a time when the nations will come to the church to hear the Gospel.

This is the way St. James interprets the prophecy of Amos 9 at the Jerusalem council. Amos spoke of the fallen tent of David rising again to possess the remnant of Edom. In Amos's day, the "tent of David" was a monarchy that ruled from Jerusalem, and "possessing the remnant of Edom" meant defeating them in battle. But James doesn’t call for a jihad. He updates the text and applies it in the new situation. Amos’s prophecy is a mandate for the church to extend the message of salvation in Christ to the Gentiles! (Acts 15:15 ff.) James gives Amos’s prophecy a face lift. The Davidic king is Christ. The war of conquest against Edom is the spread of the gospel to the Gentiles.

This perspective on prophecy shows that those eschatological systems that look to a restoration of an earthly temple with animal sacrifices at the hands of a Levitical priesthood are reading prophecy out of its covenantal, redemptive-historical context. Prophecy is not so wooden. It's dynamic. Christ has fulfilled the office of priest and put an end to animal sacrifice by entering the true tabernacle in heaven, where he offered himself as a perfect and final sacrifice for sin (Heb. 9:11 ff.).

I admit, this approach to prophecy isn't quite as exciting as a tool for winning converts. A modern man is more likely to be impressed by a precise, unambiguous, strict prediction. But seeing prophecy in terms of redemptive history is more faithful to the flow of biblical history, and, in my opinion, has far deeper spiritual significance. First of all, God wasn't simply interested in proving that he can tell the future in a mechanical way. (He has done that, as, for instance, in Daniel's prophecies about the kingdoms that will succeed the Babylonian empire, in Ezekiel's prophecies concerning Tyre and Sidon, and in Jesus' prophecies of the fall of Jerusalem.) Rather, he wanted his people to reflect on what he has done; to meditate on the themes and concepts of redemption. Second, this view of prophecy teaches us to trust. We can't always see the exact details of the future, but when God's plan comes to pass, we can see the hand of the one who has been guiding and directing the events of history. (Chaunticleer the rooster had a similar experience with the prophecies of the dun cow.)

Coming “Under Care”

Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, knowing that as such we shall incur a stricter judgment. James 3:1

At GCC, the leadership didn't exercise a monopoly on ministry. They trained promising men by putting them in appropriate ministry situations, or by encouraging them when they stepped out in faith on their own. Anybody could baptize. (I baptized a few people in the creek.) Anybody could pull out the bread and juice and start the ... well, I hesitate to call what we did the Lord's Supper, but you get the drift.

I liked that philosophy of ministry back then, and I still like it -- with some heavy qualifications. Today, I see the need for keeping a tighter control on who leads in the church. A lot of goofy ideas have been spread by untrained, unsupervised zealots who are charismatic enough to attract and keep a following. In other words, there is some wisdom in the traditional pattern of study and testing first, ministry later.

But one trouble with seminary is the emphasis on knowledge in a vacuum. Knowledge has to be put to use in love. God wants the strong to protect the weak, the rich to give to the poor, the healthy to give aid to the sick, and the intelligent to teach the ignorant. God’s gifts are for service to others, and we have to use them in that context.

Book learning is good and necessary for the church. I know, because I've seen the results when pastors don't have it. But learning without an attitude of humility and love is not a good thing.

I don't believe that intellectual humility can be taught in classrooms -- especially to young, zealous men who aspire to spiritual leadership. The lecture will just bounce right off those hard foreheads. But humility and love can be taught in ministry, through discipleship. And this, I believe, is where the "call" to ministry is tested.

Why let a man spend a fortune on tuition and three or four years of his life in seminary only later to discover that he is absolutely lousy with people, or proud? Instead, he should be watched and guided. And rebuked! That is very important. How many pastors do you know who can't take correction? It’s an occupational hazard.

My perspective on preparation for ministry made me chafe under the Orthodox Presbyterian Church's stated and un-stated assumptions about pastoral training. Their model struck me as unbiblical and exclusively intellectual. But that's what I was stuck with, so I tried to make the best out of it: I attended a somewhat non-traditional seminary, and the pastor and board of elders at my church gave me some ministry responsibilities, like leading the singles' group, and preaching from time to time at the evening service.

Another part of the process towards ordination was to come “under care” of the Presbytery. That put me in contact with some wonderful men on the candidates and credentials committee, but it also made for some trouble later on.

Christian Liberty

Go then, eat your bread in happiness and drink your wine with a cheerful heart; for God has already approved your works. Let your clothes be white all the time, and let not oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the woman whom you love all the days of your fleeting life which He has given to you under the sun; for this is your reward in life and in your toil in which you have labored under the sun. Eccl. 9:7-9

At GCC, the official line was that drunkenness is wrong, but drinking is not. Alcohol is okay, in moderation and in the right circumstances. That was the official line. But any discussion of alcohol immediately led into that horribly restrictive Evangelical idea that is curiously called "Christian Liberty."

The Evangelical version of Christian Liberty goes like this: I am free to do whatever is not prohibited by Scripture, but in love I will give up my right to do those things that cause my brother to stumble. That’s fine, until you learn the Evangelical twist on just what constitutes “stumbling” your brother.

We all know that some people have persnickety consciences on some issues. Some people are against movies, or the theater. Some are against dancing. Some are against drinking. Some are against caffeine. And that's okay. They're free to have their own opinions on the matter, and nobody is going to force a cup of coffee down their throat.

But what does it mean to "stumble" a person who has a conviction against one of these things? Among Evangelicals, "stumbling" is usually equated with "offending." In other words, if Joe is the type who believes that a drinker can't go to heaven, then if I drink in front of Joe I have “offended” him. Therefore, in love, I should refrain from drinking in front of Joe.

That's what we used to hear at GCC.

I always had trouble with that. For one thing, you can find somebody who's against just about anything you can think of, which ends up making for a lot of restrictions. Even worse, the GCC practice on this matter was to abstain from things presumptively, e.g., don't let yourself be seen in a liquor store, because there might be a Christian there who might know that you are a Christian and might be offended.

My problem with this was very simple. Paul asked, "why is my freedom judged by another man's conscience?" It is supposed to be Christian "liberty," after all, isn't it? But it sounded like the most horrible form of bondage -- being afraid that some weird Christian somewhere might see you doing something that he has some strange hang-up about.

Things weren't quite that strict. Ever since high school, I've had recurring headaches. (A friend used to tell me that it was from thinking too much.) It's just part of my life and I've learned to deal with it. Some times a beer helps. So one night I called the head pastor and talked to him about this. He said, "I have a verse for you."

No longer drink water exclusively, but use a little wine for the sake of your stomach and you frequent ailments. 1 Tim. 5:23

He reasoned (correctly) that if Timothy could use some wine for his stomach problems, there's certainly nothing wrong with me using some beer for my headaches.

I felt as if the chain of "Christian liberty" had been cut. But only for a while. What if I didn't have a headache? Was it wrong to drink a beer just because I wanted one? And what difference does it make if I have a headache? If there's some guy at the liquor store who sees me buying a beer, does he know that I have a headache? Do I have to wear a sign or something?

This sounds ridiculous, I know, and of course it is. But why is it ridiculous? How did “Christian liberty” get so fouled up that it has become such a joke? After all, the Paul who says "why is my freedom judged by another man's conscience" also says "if food causes my brother to stumble, I will never eat meat again, that I might not cause my brother to stumble." (1 Cor. 8:13)

The error is in a simple misapplication of the word "stumble." Paul does not mean "offend," in the sense that the old priss in the back row is offended when the groom kisses the bride for more than one second.

"Stumble" means to lead the other person to violate his conscience, i.e., to do something that he believes to be sin because of your example. Conscience is a precious gift from God that helps us to avoid evil. We must always listen to our conscience, even when it is misguided, because when we disregard our conscience we silence its voice, which is a horrible thing. A misguided conscience should be instructed, but it should never, ever, ever be ignored. As Luther said at Worms, "it is neither right nor safe to go against conscience."

If my conduct causes my brother to violate his own conscience, then I have done an evil thing to him. I am not acting in love. If my drinking leads another man to drink, in violation of his own conscience, malformed as it may be on that issue, then I am sinning against that man. In that respect, and in such cases, we should give up drink rather than cause a man to stumble.

Needless to say, most cases of "offense" are not like that. A fundamentalist pastor may be against drinking, and he may be indignant at the fact that other so-called Christians do, but he's not going to be led to drink because he sees me in the liquor store picking up some Porter. He can think what he likes about my commitment to Christ, or my bad interpretation of Scripture, or whatever he wants to think, but my example is not going to cause him to violate his conscience.

The trouble is when we equate "stumble," which means leading the other person into sin against his own conscience, with "offend," which, in the modern sense, means that some other person wants desperately to mind your business for you. Besides, Christians are not supposed to take offense. (1 Cor. 13:5)