In the land of “Other things I’ve been contemplating lately,” I’ve spent the last year or so of my life chewing, rather heavily, on the concept of the “Baptist Box” that many American Christians, at least, live within - and what’s beyond the bounds of it.
What Is The Baptist Box?
This is going to be a rather personal post, because I can’t speak for other people - but, also, I can speak about the conversations I’ve had with people on the matter, and what they’ve been willing to share. If some of this applies to you, great. If none of it does, great! But hopefully it’s something that will at least pose some questions that may be interesting to contemplate.
I grew up in a Lutheran church, ELCA synod, that was not “rigorous” in their beliefs. If the Bible said something that was weird, well, it was probably just made up (I distinctly remember a sermon message in which some particular category of angel was written off because “We don’t know what that is”), and the teaching, in general, obeyed the Prime Directive: Services shall be 60.00 minutes, no more. Nothing was more important than that the service not exceed an hour. I didn’t learn much there, unfortunately.
Since college, I’ve mostly been in churches that are “non-denominational” - but in the sense that they’re “Baptist, without the name.” And, perhaps, without some of the restrictions on dancing and drinking that don’t actually show up in the Bible (IMO, the Bible is clear that drinking is not a problem - but being drunk is). The messages are typically expository preaching (teaching through books of the Bible), are generally 45 minutes or so, and services are an hour and a half, with something resembling “modern worship music,” though I’d prefer hymns. This is what I’m used to, it’s comfortable, and it’s what I look for in a church.
But I’ve realized that this particular style of church often enough leads to some outcomes that I’m not sure are the intended outcome. At least for me, I’ve ended up with some beliefs out of this that I’ve had to really chew on and correct over the past year.
Knowing About God vs Knowing God
At the core of a lot of this, I’ve realized, is a particular confusion that I know is at least somewhat common, because I’ve talked to plenty of other people about it. It is easy for a certain type of person (and I am certainly one!) to confuse “knowing about God” with “knowing God.” Both are fine - but the problem comes when you fail to distinguish between the two. Knowing about is academic knowledge about the Bible, about God. It’s study in the disconnected, academic sense, without then fully applying it to your life. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the sort of dense, academic sermons that I tend to prefer (I admit I tend to measure sermon quality based on “inches of notes taken”), but it’s also entirely possible that this can fail to penetrate to one’s heart.
At least for me, this is partially driven by what I’ll admit is some “translation snobbery.” I’ve preferred, for years, more word-for-word translations - ESV has been my standard for a long while. About two years ago, in an attempt to break out of this habit, I decided to try something a bit different, and started in on the NLT. NLT is a more modern though for though translation, and it makes a number of handy conversions that I find useful for general purpose reading. Yes, I know a cubit is 18 inches, and I mentally do the math every time I run across it. NLT simply does the translation for you, so you don’t have to think about it. The same goes for weights, volumes, time of day, money, and other thins that normally require mental translation. I’ve become aware of just how disruptive “decision points” in reading are, as Carr points out in The Shallows, and NLT removes a lot of those. It’s simply a smoother reading translation, and while I wouldn’t make an incredibly detailed point without checking a few other translations, I think it’s entirely fine for regular reading. Even more distractions get removed with the Immerse Reader’s Bible format (no chapters, no verses, no footnotes, just the text), which I’ve talked about before.
But I’ve realized, in the past year or two, that God doesn’t simply want us to know about Him. He wants us to know Him. That’s very different, and it’s been a massive transition for me. How do you get to know someone? You spend time with them. How do you get to know God? You spend time with Him. You spend time in prayer - more than just the sort of “formal spoken requests in group settings” that have characterized a lot of my prayer life in the past (if you could call it that). It involves learning to silence the worries of the world, and be with God. To allow His presence to come through. This has been difficult to allow to happen at times, and I’ve certainly fought it. Or, more often, I simply lack the mental control to shut up the chatter and just be. But I can only say, there is a massive difference between understanding the concept of God’s love for humans, in an abstract sense, and knowing that God loves me. Russ.
It just takes a lot of time, and seems to also involve more familiarity with His Word than we tend to put the time in for, as American Baptists.
What is Prayer?
Related to the above, how do you think about prayer? Is it simply making requests of God, or is it bidirectional? We see throughout the Bible that God communicates with His people. It’s mostly through the prophets in the Old Testament, but in the New Testament, believers have the Holy Spirit that allows us direct communication with God - see the first few chapters of Acts.
Most of the prayer time I’ve been part of over the last few decades has been broadly similar: It’s been unidirectional. It is people, often together, talking to (at?) God, making prayers, petitions, etc. This is perfectly fine, and we’re told to do it: “… but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” (Phil 4). But it misses the other part, which is being still, being silent, and letting God respond to us. Again, this takes time, and I think it also requires some decent amount of recent time in God’s Word. We are to test the responses against the Bible, because it’s also clear that humans are pretty easy to deceive in this realm. But we need to take the time to “Be still, and know that I am God.” (Ps 46). We need to learn to listen for God’s voice - which, while it can be loud and booming (“All of Mount Sinai was covered with smoke because the Lord had descended on it in the form of fire. The smoke billowed into the sky like smoke from a brick kiln, and the whole mountain shook violently. As the blast of the ram’s horn grew louder and louder, Moses spoke, and God thundered his reply.” in Exodus 19), can also be quiet. When God appeared to Elijah in 1 Kings 19, “And after the earthquake there was a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire there was the sound of a gentle whisper.” God was in the sound of the low whisper, not the ripping wind, the earthquake, or the fire.
Modern life is noisy. Endlessly, perpetually, always noisy, and the only question many of us have is “How can we add more noise to our lives to drown out the other noise?” Look at how many people you pass on the street have some sort of electronic earplugs in. It’s hard to find silence in life, and I’m the first to admit that silence is uncomfortable and unpleasant. But God will not come in the roar to get our attention - usually. We need to learn to be still. When was the last sermon you heard on how to practically learn to do this, and get through the cravings for some distraction, any distraction?
I’ll also suggest that, for reasons I don’t understand, location matters. I’ve heard plenty of arguments that the location of prayer shouldn’t matter, that “praying for each room in the house” is silly, and… I’m not sure I agree with that anymore. Where you pray matters, and I’ve also run into cases where “a location is fouled out,” prayer-wise. They can be healed, but that also seems to require being done from the location. There’s a concept of “thin spaces,” of areas where the distance between the physical and spiritual is less, and I’ve certainly seen this sort of thing in practice. Why? I have no idea. It seems there are some thin places that are “global” (work for everyone), and others that may be personal (a particular state park I like works this way for me, I’ve no expectation that’s true for everyone there).
The World is Supernatural
This may just be a quirk of me, but I’ve, over the years, lost my practical grasp on the concept that the world is more than just the physical. I like the certainty of the physical world, and have spent a decent chunk of my life, either explicitly or implicitly, living as though “If we can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist.” It’s nice, neat, sterile, and as far as I’m concerned, entirely wrong. There is a spiritual realm. It’s large, messy, and filled with things we don’t understand, with their own interests and goals. They do interact with the world we live in, and quite a few would rather we believe they don’t exist.
The Bible was written by, and to, people who believed in the supernatural. It simply wasn’t a question to the Hebrews in the Old Testament, or to the writers collected into the New Testament. They don’t spend any time on the question of “Does the spiritual realm exist and interact in the world?” because it wasn’t a question that needed asking in the first place. It was simply the way that the world worked.
Heiser’s The Unseen Realm seems a good starting point for expanding out this worldview, though I understand his book Supernatural is a “lighter version” of the same concepts that reads less like an extended PhD thesis.
One key point to remember in this space is that “lack of explanation for a mechanism” does not imply “lack of a mechanism.” Just because I can’t explain how or why something matters or works does not mean that it doesn’t. It just means I don’t know - and, I expect, in many cases, won’t know. I don’t like that, certainly - but I’ve also become quite a bit more okay with it.
Spiritual Warfare
Another thing we don’t like to talk about in Baptist circles is the world of spiritual warfare. That’s one of those charismatic things, and because they can get a bit nutty about it at times, clearly there’s nothing true in it. Of course, this is quite wrong, and I can’t say it any better than CS Lewis did in his preface to Screwtape Letters: “There are two equal and opposite errors in which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or magician with the same delight.”
Agreeing in the academic sense that, “Yes, some sort of adversary exists, and could potentially have some impact, somewhere,” is far different from sorting through the actual details of what this looks like in daily life - and, for whatever reasons, this has gotten rather more present in my life lately. I do wonder if it has something to do with some odd hobbies I’ve picked up lately of shipping Bibles and study materials into jails and prisons… but, in any case, the reality of this has become quite a bit more apparent to me as of late, and I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading trying to better understand the realm. For lack of any better approach, I’ve taken my normal style of “Get a bunch of books on the matter and read them all.” This usually gives me at least a tolerable starting point for understanding a topic, and if the books are recommended by people who know what they’re talking about, so much the better!
So far, The Bondage Breaker by Neil Anderson seems to have a lot of reasonable things to say on the matter. He also has some various points that disagree with the “general wisdom” on the matter, based on his experiences in dealing with the reality of all this for some long while. Check everything against Scripture, of course, but his writings seem to be fairly well grounded in the practical aspects of this world. He’s had a long ministry “in the trenches,” and writes based substantially on his experiences with a lot of people dealing with a lot of different things - so it’s not simply an academic survey, it’s “lessons learned.” One has to be careful with that, but it does align reasonably well with Scripture as well.
America Isn’t That Important…
All of this is hard coming from a western, American, “materialistic world” sort of viewpoint - and I understand that. We like our mechanistic systems. Apply input A, get result B. Repeat until the desired amount of B has been achieved. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t always work this way. We see it in our approach to international politics: “We do X, they must therefore do Y.” Unfortunately, that “they” would rather not do Y isn’t really considered. Other nations are not machines, as much as that would be convenient. They have their own desires, own goals, and will react accordingly, even if that’s not our preferred response. How’s that quick little skirmish in Ukraine going, again?
I’ll suggest that we, broadly, are prone to attempting to live “in the world as we would prefer it to be.” Not “the world as it actually is.” It’s certainly a human enough trait, and it reliably doesn’t work. We make our mental maps of the world, and then assert, blindly, that the map is the terrain. That the model is the reality. And when reality objects, we insist that, no, it’s reality that is wrong - and suffer the consequences.
The same problem happens in these spiritual spaces. We confuse “what we would prefer things to be” and “what things actually are” - to our own detriment.
What is the Holy Spirit?
One of the biggest differences between the Baptists and the charismatics that I’ve found is the difference of opinion in what the Holy Spirit can do. We are, as believers, indwelt with the Holy Spirit - but what does that mean? I’ve seen arguments that very much limit the Holy Spirit to almost irrelevance. I’ve seen arguments that allow for a lot more. Where’s the truth? Probably somewhere in the middle. But you can only hear so many stories about the workings before you start realizing that there’s probably some power there we, as western Baptists, are uncomfortable with. What do you make of stories where people will come up to a Christian, tap their chest, and say things like, “You’re glowing. I want what you have!”
I’ll simply state here that the opposite of one bad idea is another bad idea. Just because some charismatic churches, to be polite, “tend disorderly,” doesn’t mean that they are entirely wrong about everything - and setting oneself entirely opposed to that is probably not the right space to stand in either. We are entirely too isolated in our denominations as American Christians, and there’s a lot to be gained by cross denominational conversations that largely aren’t happening. I suggest firepits.
That Smashing, Shattering Sound
I’ve ended up with a model of the Baptist Box as a moderately sized wooden box sitting on a raft in a very large sea. Think of your standard “wooden shipping crate.” On the inside, we have painted a very pleasant set of peaceful horizons. They’re simple, understandable, safe, and entirely artificial. Outside is… well, a lot more that we don’t see. Every now and then, something “weird” comes poking through the box. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s only a small hole. We can patch it up and carry on as though it never happened.
Or… at some point, those weird things start splintering the box. We can try to patch it up, but we won’t succeed. The wood is splintering, smashing, and there is more and more that’s visible beyond our nicely painted horizon. It’s distant. It’s dark. It’s scary. And it isn’t safe. So what do we do? Do we keep trying to patch up the box? Or do we start trying to figure out what’s actually out there?
I don’t have good answers. But, man, the past year has been interesting…
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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.sevarg.net/2025/05/11/the-baptist-box