That fascinates me in connection with the sequence of things in the Gospels and Acts. Jesus is baptized by John and immediately anointed by the Spirit. But while many others are baptized, both by John and by Jesus’ disciples, no one else gets anointed.

Jesus becomes the sin offering on the cross and completes His role of ascension offering when He ascends to heaven. It is only then, after the completion of the sin and ascension offerings, that He pours out the Spirit and the “sons” are anointed.

As one who grew up within Pentecostal revivalism, I know these matters from the inside out: My father was as anti-institutional as nearly anyone of his generation of Pentecostals. He was usually suspicious of local churches, and downright hostile to denominations.

But the problem runs even deeper than anti-institutionalism; the theology of revivalism (insofar as it has unique theology) is fundamentally problematic. Here is what I wrote in response to the forum post.

Well… I think what a lot of people suppose “revival” is just is intrinsically antithetical to anything that can carry forward. But the problem is with their notion of revival, not with institutions that can have inter-generational impact.

IMO, the overwhelming majority of revival theology is based upon serious misappropriation of biblical texts. As a key example: the events of Pentecost were a once-for-all foundational event that established something new – there has never been another Pentecost, nor can there be, any more than there can be a second Incarnation or crucifixion or resurrection of Jesus. (Please don’t misunderstand: this is not in the slightest a denigration of the Holy Spirit’s work in the Church, any more than it’s a denigration of Christ that He experienced the cross and resurrection only once. Just the opposite: the Holy Spirit has been poured out once for all and everything of Jesus now stands in His light as He continues to work. Saying there is only one Pentecost is a magnification of the Spirit, just as saying Jesus died once for all is a magnification of Jesus.)

I don’t believe that what usually get called “revivals” are found in Scripture. There are reformations (e.g. under Hezekiah, Josiah etc). There are new phases in redemptive history (Abraham, Moses, David, and of course the whole life, ministry, death, resurrection, ascension of Christ, with Pentecost as part of that complex of events). But revivalism entails other sorts of notions, such as: Every person needs a dramatic, datable conversion experience, and that God wants to start from scratch every generation.

A few questions should show the error of that.  Did David have a dramatic, datable conversion experience? No, the Psalms say explicitly that he belonged to God from his infancy and he was taught to trust while still nursing.

When, for that matter, were the disciples converted? We don’t see anything dramatic when they first begin to follow Jesus. He tells them to drop everything to follow Him, and they do. The act itself is dramatic, but we don’t see any emotional outbursts etc. Why?

Well, in part because most were probably already believers. And in part because we’ve misdefined conversion, as well….

God says that He will be God to Abraham and to his descendants, and Peter echoes that language in his Pentecost sermon. Paul likewise says that children are to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord. All of those sorts of features presuppose a kind of continuity that revivalism finds anathema.

I’m not an outsider to these issues, BTW. I grew up in a very revivalistic setting. In fact, my Dad was largely a revivalist preacher. I’d venture to say that the only time I’ve ever seen revivals do long term good, ironically, is when those affected by them went on into more stable environments that wouldn’t necessarily have been recommended by the revivalists themselves. I look at the years and tears my father invested into serving God and God’s people – and that service was well-intentioned and real, I don’t call it into question – and I can look at the outcome of those years, and the long-term results were negligible. And frankly, my Dad was far more Bible-centered than most revivalists are.

We don’t need to look for another “revival.” Revival-seeking is in some ways a form of renunciation of responsibility. God gave us His revealed will in His Word, and we need to learn that and trust the Holy Spirit to guide us. But that takes discipline, and we want to wait on “inspiration” instead.

Thank you for your question. I am glad to see that you are concerned to
follow the Bible in this way. I hope you don’t mind if I take a few
paragraphs to talk about this.

Paul mentions baptism which includes infants in 1 Corinthians 10.2. Of
course, he is referring to an Old Testament event, but as he continues, we
find that he says that the Red Sea and wilderness partaking of water from
the rock and manna were of the same pattern as baptism and the Lord’s
Supper. To be more precise: he uses the language of “tupos” in verses 6 and
11, which is more than “example;” it refers to a pattern or matrix. And this
pattern of Israel was set for “us” (new covenant believers, including
Gentiles), who partake of the Lord’s Supper (1 Corinthians 10.16-22).

The overall context of the passage has to do with faithful living, and Paul’s
point is basically this: Just as Israel was baptized and ate and drank
spiritual food and drink, and yet came under judgment when they tested
Christ, so too with us who fit into the same pattern: we are the body marked
by baptism (see 1 Cor 12.12-13), and we eat and drink spiritual food and
drink, but we must not provoke the Lord to jealousy as Israel did, or we too
will be subject to judgment.

So Israel (including the little children) experienced baptism in the event
of the exodus.

Baptism started long ago, under the old covenant. In fact, Hebrews 9.10
refers to the washings in the Mosaic law as “various baptisms.” Under the
old covenant, in the case of males, circumcision was an entrance into
cleansing, which granted one access to the tabernacle (later, the temple).
(The case was slightly different for females; instead of circumcision -
which obviously belongs to males – they were cleansed through the
purification of their mothers. I can’t go into that here, but it’s based on
Leviticus 12.) That cleansing could be lost in various ways (e.g. sin, as
well as contact with “unclean” things such as dead bodies etc) but was
restored largely by way of these washings. Part of the point of the fact
that under the new covenant there is “one baptism” (Ephesians 4.5) is that
that complex structure of cleansing is no longer necessary under the new
covenant. Rather than circumcision plus baptism after baptism after baptism,
there is now only one baptism.

With regard to your question, the point is that this one washing (new
covenant baptism) does not do away with the infant participation that had
always been the case with old covenant cleansing. That’s why when Peter
preaches on Pentecost, he proclaims baptism in the terms already known. He
says, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ,
for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy
Spirit.” And he grounds that statement with this promise: “For the promise
is for you and *for your children* and for all who are far off – everyone
whom the Lord our God calls to Himself” (Acts 2.38-39). That is an echo of
Old Testament passages such as Genesis 17:7 (where God says, “I will
establish my covenant between Me and you and your offspring after you
throughout their generations”). Peter’s hearers, familiar with the way God
worked throughout the Old Testament Scriptures, would have understood
clearly that God was continuing to work under the new covenant in terms of
believers and their children, just as He did under the old.

It is to be noted that this way of God’s working is not only for people with
Israelite ancestry. Israel was never strictly about blood; Gentiles often
joined with Israel even under the old covenant. In particular, when Israel
left Egypt under Moses, they left as a “mixed multitude” (Exodus 12.38),
meaning that many of those people were not of ethnic Israel. In connection
with 1 Corinthians 10, which I mentioned above, it is also important to note
that shortly after the Exodus, the people in the wilderness were living as
Gentiles in many basic respects. There was no circumcision between the
exodus and the entrance into Canaan 40 years later (see Joshua 5.2-5), and
even Passover was only celebrated the first year after the exodus. (Males
could only participate in Passover if they were circumcised.)

So it is no accident that Paul draws a parallel between Israel’s experience
in the exodus and in the wilderness and the experience of the Gentiles in
Corinth. They were both baptized with water, and their “spiritual” food was
bread (Israel’s spiritual food would normally include meat; for example, the
Passover lamb). As I said, while in the wilderness Israel was functionally
Gentile in many basic respects; and the inclusion of a “mixed multitude”
then pointed forward to the great “mixed multitude” that has come into the
people of God since the Pentecost after Jesus’ ascension. God is the
covenant God of believers and their children, now in the new covenant for
Gentiles, just as much as under the old covenant with Israelites.

That’s why it’s no surprise when the New Testament says that a household
head was baptized along with his/her household (for example, Acts 16.15,
33). So in 1 Corinthians 7.14, Paul describes the children of believers as
“holy ones” – “saints,” whereas the children of unbelievers are “unclean.”
You see that the term “unclean” draws from that old covenant language,
referring to those not eligible to worship God at the tabernacle; the
children of believers, on the other hand, are those who are cleansed for
worship. Which fits completely with everything we have already seen
regarding baptism above.

I apologize if that seems like a rather long and complex answer, but the
Bible is a very rich book, and must be read in terms of its own story, not
in bits and pieces. So I hope that is of some help. I can refer you to an
online essay I wrote about infant baptism if you ever wish to read more:

http://www.biblicalstudiescenter.org/ecclesiology/infantbaptism.htm

Nothing original for the blog, so here’s a bit of a piece I wrote in response to an English Baptist on a discussion forum. The overall topic was whether the Church is the new Israel, and whether old Israel was the Church. The gentleman I am responding to is focusing upon the issue of the Church not being the physical seed, which is all Israel was.

——————————————————————–

Both above and later, you’re assuming that the issue is physical vs spiritual. That is a subtle but fundamental misreading of Paul. The issue is flesh vs Spirit, which is very different, having to do with the contrast between two ages, not a contrast between two metaphysical principles.

The New Testament has absolutely no qualms about extending spiritual promises to the children of believers. Children are raised and nurtured in the Lord, not into the Lord; Peter bears witness to the new covenant gift of the Spirit at Pentecost by upholding the ancient principle that the promise is to his hearers’ children – a statement that makes sense only within the context of the ancient promises, characterized by the classic covenantal principle, “I will be God to you and to your children after you.” If Peter is not reinforcing that, he has zero reason to say such a thing; and if he believes what you do, he has every reason not to.

The hermeneutic I’m hearing from you is, at its basis, afflicted with at least a touch of dualism, because it assumes that man’s problem has to do with physicality. Everything is made to denigrate physical descent.

The Bible’s analysis of the situation is quite different.

Man’s problem is a fallenness that pervades man in every aspect of his being (not just the physical). And corresponding to that, redemption is not a sacrifice of the physical for the sake of the “spiritual” – far from it, the foundational Christian confession is the redemption of the body. If redemption cannot occur from the womb, then your system is tainted with an unbiblical dualism, and also makes redemption weaker than the fall. (In order to make up for this, generally a new doctrine called the age of accountability is created ex nihilo to save infants and young children. So one unbiblical error is “corrected” by creating another.)

When Jesus says of the littles ones that of such is the kingdom of heaven (Mt 19.13-14), He is speaking of children that have been brought to Him, and the term generally refers to infants and toddlers. Let me ask you this: Were they “of faith” or not? If not, then how can the kingdom of heaven – which is all about faith (cf Rom 14.17) – belong to such as them as its paradigmatic members?

Now, personally, I’m a bit ambivalent about saying that the Church = Israel. I think there are senses in which that is true, and senses in which it is not true. I would rather say that the Church belongs to the one company of the people of God that He began to gather from the beginning, and that the old covenant patriarchs are “our fathers” (1 Cor 10).

Strictly speaking, however, the Church was founded upon the apostles and prophets (Eph 2.20), and a building cannot be erected before its foundation is laid. This takes us back to what I mentioned at the beginning – the contrast between two ages that is fundamental to the whole structure of Paul’s thought. (Not to mention other NT books, not least John.)

The time before Christ produced real believers, but it is nonetheless the age of flesh (and outside of Christ, this is still the case). The new covenant is marked by the gift of the Spirit, and thus inaugurates a new aeon. Pentecost is thus the birth of the Church, although I would also insist that it is fundamentally wrong-headed to ignore the long gestation period that spanned over so many preceding centuries, and act as if this new work God does in the Church is (at best) tangentially related to what has gone before. Otherwise, it is nonsense to call Jesus “Christ,” meaning Messiah – nothing could be more intimately related with Israel’s whole purpose, identity and hope.

The point is that what we have at issue here is not whether the new covenant is spiritual, even in comparison to the old. Paul posits a spirituality for the new covenant that he does not grant to the old. But that emphatically does not mean that he sees no continuity, and precisely on the level of what I call relational typology.

First Corinthians 10 is a prime example of this, and of course Paul uses the tupos language explicitly in that passage twice. He speaks of the judgment of the Israelites in the wilderness and places the Corinthians (and even himself, in context; see 9.27) within that same typology. The wilderness episodes function as a warning to the Corinthians precisely because the covenantal structure is similar enough that there can be covenantal inclusion and participation in Christ, and yet have a fallout of apostasy and judgment.

In summary, it’s not so much that the Church is Israel (although again, there are senses in which that is true, and Paul says as much in Gal 6.16) as that the Church is Israel’s destiny, its goal, just as Christ is the telos of Torah (Rom 10.4). The Church is the one people of God for the new age of the Spirit, the people which God had in the works through the one long story of salvation that He began long before.