I have to give credit to a Brother which I met in Mississippi this weekend for the title of this posting. He coined a phrase which I had never heard before, but one which perfectly describes the time salvation paradigm which has consumed many of the Primitive Baptist churches existing today. He asked me to elaborate on some of the doctrines which were taught by them, as he was only remotely familiar. Once I began, it didn’t take long before he raised his hand to his chin, cocked his head to the side, and began to open his mouth in wonder! When I was done he give a chuckle and said, “That doesn’t pass the Desert Island Test!” When I asked what I meant by it, he replied:
“Place me on a desert island, give me my Bible, and I would never come up with that doctrine.”
His reply only goes to confirm a firm conviction of mine as well as that of Brother Stephen’s. The extreme form of time or gospel salvation and all of its complementary assertions “would never cross the average Bible reader’s mind” (Time Salvation - A Novel Idea). In order to fully understand this, however, one must know what it is that this heresy teaches. Simply stated, it is a system which makes too broad a distinction between regeneration and conversion, where the latter is seen as an optional gospel experience for the regenerate family of God. A person may be regenerated but never be converted. Many doctrines in scripture are inevitably affected by constructing such a system. It is my intent to soon write on this heresy more fully in order to demonstrate how this is so, but for now let this suffice.
The average Christian reader left to himself would never see the doctrine of time salvation taught in scripture. True, he may very well notice that the word 'saved' in scripture does not always mean eternal salvation, but this is far from concluding what ultraists mean today when they publish this false doctrine. He would come to the scripture with the correct prejudice that eternal salvation is the dominant theme of the Bible, and that faith, repentance, conversion, sanctification, and perseverance are elements which go to make it up. He would never duplicate, as time salvation does, many of the virtues such as knowledge and faith claiming that there were two kinds of each: one being subconscious and mandatory, and the other cognitive and optional. When he comes to such pivotal scriptures as Rom. 1:16 and Acts 16:30, his mind would naturally be inclined to interpret those passages in the light of eternal salvation. Upon looking at them, he would never think to invent another kind of salvation that the elect may or may not get in this life and place these passages in that category, all because they contained gospel and/or human instrumentality.
It might be objected by the advocates of this doctrine that what is demonstrated above is an example of 'rightly dividing the word of truth'. I reply that such is only a mirage. Rightly dividing the Word of God never involves violating the most fundamental rules of biblical interpretation which this heretical system does. It does not involve ignoring the context or transgressing the analogy of faith. Neither does it go to the Bible with preconceptions and false premises, forcing the passages to conform to an a priori mental grid. Far from being an example of rightly dividing God's Word, this system is actually a mutilation of it, being an example of extreme eisegesis.
If I claim then that time salvation fails the 'desert island' test, then one may correctly ask how it came about? It's apparent that the doctrine is here and is advocated by not a few. An inquiry into Old Baptist history will show that it surfaced around the turn of the 20th century. It was an overreaction to the modern missionary movement which took hold in the latter part of the 1700s. In an attempt to show that this was a modern movement and therefore not part of the old paths, certain ones eventually rebelled to the opposite extreme (as human nature often does) and invented an anti-means paradigm which essentially did away with the necessity of gospel preaching altogether. Upon coming to the scripture, the task which lied before them was to devise a way to explain away those many passages in scripture which seem to connect hearing the gospel with salvation (e.g. Rom. 1:16; Acts 26:16-18; 1 Peter 1:23). And thus a new doctrine arose which stated that hearing the gospel would grant a regenerate soul an optional temporal deliverance, whereas the traditional way among Baptists had always been to claim that it was simply the means of obtaining the one great eternal salvation found in Christ Jesus.
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