By Bob Allen
A Southern Baptist scholar says a recent Pew study indicating Americans as a whole are growing less religious but that those who still belong to a religion are as faithful as ever simply confirms a “remnant” theme that recurs throughout the Bible.
David Roach, chief national correspondent for Baptist Press, who holds a Ph.D. in church history from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said in an analysis Nov. 4 that while significant, findings from the 2014 Pew Religious Landscape Study should come as no surprise.
“For students of Scripture and church history, it confirms with empirical data what God’s people have known to be true for millennia,” Roach said. “The Lord’s modus operandi is to preserve a faithful remnant amid the sinful world. It was true in the times of Noah, Elijah and the Apostle Paul, and telephone surveys of 35,071 American adults confirm it’s still true today.”
The Old Testament Book of Isaiah describes a small “remnant” of Israelites who will survive invasion by Assyria in the eighth century before Christ and one day be brought back to the Promised Land.
Other prophets, including Micah, Jeremiah and Zephaniah, take up the remnant theme, and the post-exilic prophets Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai and Zechariah consistently refer to Jews who have returned from the Babylonian captivity as the remnant.
The Apostle Paul refers in Romans 11:5 to “a remnant chosen by grace,” and Revelation 12:17, in King James English, relates “And the dragon was wroth with the woman, and he went to make war with the remnant of her seed, who keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.”
“This is how God has allowed humanity to operate since the Fall of Genesis 3,” Roach said. “He permits the sinful world to decline in its devotion to Him while preserving a faithful remnant.”
“God preserved Noah’s family amid a world flooded with sin,” he expounded. “He chose Abraham’s clan amid a Canaanite landscape that included Sodom and Gomorrah. He preserved Israel amid the violent and perverse peoples surrounding the Promised Land, Ruth and Boaz amid a Jewish population that ‘did what was right in their own eyes’ and the prophets Elijah and Elisha amid a kingdom led to idolatry by wicked monarchs.
“Following the Babylonian exile, the faithful remnant was constituted by those who anticipated the Messiah amid a culture the prophet Malachi said ‘profaned the covenant of [its] fathers’ (Malachi 2:10). This remnant later included a virgin named Mary who believed God when He said she would conceive a son by the Holy Spirit.
“In New Testament times and beyond, the church was a persecuted remnant amid pagan Roman culture. By the fourth century, Christianity had become an officially recognized religion, but faithfulness declined, leading a committed remnant to found the monastic movement, which for all its flaws was devoted to Christ in contrast to the cultural Christianity surrounding it.
“More than a thousand years later, the Protestant Reformation represented the effort of a committed remnant to preserve the doctrine of justification by faith alone amid European moral and religious decline. Later still, the Puritans of England and New England saw themselves as God’s faithful remnant, as did the missions movement sparked by William Carey in the 19th century, the student volunteer movement of the 20th century and the early 21st century’s wave of missions-driven evangelical youth.”
Remnant theology is central to the Seventh-day Adventist belief that a faithful remnant amid widespread apostasy will announce the arrival of judgment and the Second Coming of Christ.
It underpins Baptist Successionism, a theory once popular among Baptists that there has been an unbroken chain of true churches since the first century, often identified with a 1931 pamphlet by J.M. Carroll titled The Trail of Blood.
Calvinism speaks of a remnant chosen by Unconditional Election and teaches that Christ died only for the elect.
Russell Moore of the SBC Ethics and Religious Liberty Commissions echoes a remnant theme in his new book, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel, challenging believers to keep Christianity weird.
“Our message will be seen as increasingly freakish to American culture,” he writes. “Let’s embrace the freakishness, knowing that such freakishness is the power of God unto salvation.”
Roach said at each stage of the remnant story “God’s people had the opportunity to wring their hands at the decline around them,” yet God consistently encouraged them as he did with Elijah in First Kings 19:18: “Yet I have reserved seven thousand in Israel, all whose knees have not bowed to Baal.”
“That’s why Pew’s findings should neither surprise Christians nor cause us to panic,” Roach said. “Empowered by the Holy Spirit, we have the opportunity to stand firm, knowing that God has long accomplished His purposes through a remnant. And Jesus promised that neither the gates of Hell nor the rise of the ‘nones’ would prevail against His church.”