I’ve seen the example of altar calls come up a few times and I’m wondering what exactly it is and how it’s unbiblical? Just based on wiki alone it sounds like people go up and accept Christ; isn’t that what was happening in Acts 2?
37 Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, "Brothers, what shall we do? "
The rest of the chapter has them (3000) being Baptized, giving up everything and being Christian. This is not anything like the process of the RCIA and closer to altar calls I would think?
A little history on the “altar call”:
Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875) was a minister, a lecturer, a professor, and a traveling revivalist who held heretical views on the Atonment. He invented the practice which he called the Anxious Seat, and developed a theological system around it. Finney was straightforward about his purpose for this technique and wrote the following comment near the end of his life:
“The church has always felt it necessary to have something of this kind to answer this very purpose. In the days of the apostles, baptism answered this purpose. The gospel was preached to the people, and then all those who were willing to be on the side of Christ, were called out to be baptized. It held the place that the anxious seat does now as a public manifestation of their determination to be Christians”
That underlined statement by Finney is significant.
He intended the anxious seat/invitation/sinner’s prayer to replace Baptism. Which it has in evangelical/fundamentalist churches. So, in a sense, it is a ‘Baptist sacrament’ in the embryonic sense of the word, but they (Baptists) do not look at it that way. They have taken the supernatual elements (which Episcopals agree with as well) away from the traditional Sacraments and created thier own “sacrament” they insist is supernatural, though they deny this reality to Sacramental christians.
The Anxious Seat was considered to be a psychological technique that manipulated people to make a premature profession of faith. It was considered to be an emotional conversion influenced by the preachers’ magnetism.
The system that Finney admitted had replaced biblical baptism, is the nucleus for the popular plan of salvation that was made normative in the twentieth century.
It was popularized by Dwight L. Moody. It was standardized by Billy Graham.
Finney’s opponants were from his side of the Tiber. And they had good reason to be concerned. These names might mean nothing to Catholic scholars, but they should to Reformed Protestants.They included:
John Humphrey Noyes (1811–1886)
George W. Gale (1789–1861)
Lyman Beecher (1775–1863)
Asahel Nettleton (1738–1844)
Arthur (1786–1865) and Lewis (1788–1873) Tappan
Asa Mahan (18??–1889)
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834 –1892)
David Martin Lloyd-Jones.
Ian Murray’s “Revival & Revivalism” (which used to be in my library) is a wonderful resource book looking the damage Finney’s teachings have done to American Protestantism. The ‘invitation’, ‘sinner’s prayer’ are innovations that is not even compatable with conservative Reformed principals, let alone Catholicism.
