Repost: That pesky fellow!

I posted this way back in October of 2008. I love the penitent thief. It could be just a throwaway account, something in the background of the crucifixion narrative but I always assume everything recorded in Scripture is there for a reason. Here is a man who is justly being crucified under the law of the time and in light of that, rather than demand Jesus save him from his fate on the neighboring cross, he instead pleads with Jesus to remember him when Jesus comes into his Kingdom. What faith! And his faith is not in vain because Jesus makes him a promise that he would be with Jesus that very day in Paradise. There is no mention of him being baptized or attending church or receiving any sacraments or going through new member classes. His simple profession of faith gained him entry into Paradise. He is a troublesome fellow for those who would add works to justification but I imagine that is precisely why his words to Jesus are recorded for us.

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One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, "Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!" But the other rebuked him, saying, "Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong." And he said, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." And he said to him, "Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise." (Luke 23:39-43)

There is probably no figure that causes more trouble to those who buy into doctrines like works salvation or baptismal regeneration quite like the repentant thief on the cross next to Christ. He really confounds those who believe in some version of works based righteousness. We see a man who does nothing to merit paradise, just condemnation, one who is justifiably being punished hanging next to one that merited no such punishment. There are many ways he confounds those who insist on works for all or part of their salvation.

His simple declaration of faith

His faith is simple, it is a faith of one who places his hope on the One who can save him. His hope is in spite of the life he lived up to that point, not because of it. When a Christian is saved, he or she is saved despite the utter sinfulness of their prior life. We are saved not by our litany of good works, we are saved by Christ.

His recognition of his own sin

He sees and realizes his own sins, and Christ's sinlessness. It is a recognition of sin that must precede salvation. We cannot be saved until we see why we need to be saved. That flies in the face of a faith+works salvation. The image of the thief is little different than the image of the saved Christian. We are that sinner, a lowly criminal hanging next to His King. We bring nothing to our salvation, we add nothing to our justification but the sin that Christ atoned for.

His salvation

His salvation requires no action on his part, only His blessing. Nothing else needs to be done. Indeed I think the reason we see this account is to show us that this thief, like us, is utterly helpless. He cannot get down and go do righteous works to show himself worthy of salvation. All he brings is all God demands: a penitent heart, changed by God, that declares Jesus Christ as Lord. That is all we need, and when we seek to add our works to His work we put the cross to shame and deny the Lord.

Something else I love about this guy: He is anonymous. We have no idea who this guy is or what his name is or what kind of life he lived. He was a thief, we know that and that is about all we know. The conversation is not about him, it is about Christ, about Christ being merciful on an undeserving sinner. In a day when “me, me and me” is the new Trinity, when we wonder what God can do for us, when we seek to stand insolently before God and claim our reward based on our works and our righteousness , this anonymous thief reminds us all that each of us has a cross we should have faced, but that in the case of redeemed Christian He faced it for us so that we wouldn't have to.

Whenever you hear someone say that it is our works that save us, remember this lowly thief who brought nothing to the cross but his sin, but today dwells with the Lord in paradise and remember that we can do nothing to save ourselves. That's O.K. though, because Jesus has paid for it all with His blood and that was good enough for this thief and it is good enough for us. Praise God for His mercy and praise God for recording the story of this thief in His Word to set to rest the question of who and what saves us!

Imprisoned For Sixteen Years For The Faith

Check out this video from James White, filmed while visiting the hole that Fritz Erbe, a 16th century Anabaptist who was, like so many others, imprisoned and tortured for the "crime" of refusing to baptize his children, was held by ostensibly "Protestant" men. What a cruel place to be imprisoned and what great faith he must have had to hold fast to the Scriptures in the face of such cruel torture because of his holding firm on a subject we consider today to be of secondary importance. There are men who say in error that water baptism saves us and those who, also in error, think that a days old infant incapable of professing faith should be baptized. On the one hand it is a sign of some maturity in the church that we don't put one another to death over these issues anymore but on the other it makes me wonder just how firmly we hold to any position in the church. Think about being lowered into that hole with no hope of escape and ask yourself just how strong your convictions truly are.

The error and grievous sin of fencing the table

There was a day when I would have had no problem denying what I understood as the Lord’s Supper (i.e. a bit of bread and a sip of grape juice) to someone who was “baptized” as an infant. They were not properly baptized, they were in rebellion against Scripture and until they repeneted and were properly baptized they had no place at the Lord's Supper. I had a great deal of sympathy for those who “fenced the table” and loved, like all of my other Reformed brothers, the story of John Calvin bodily throwing himself over the elements on the Table to keep the Libertines away. My stance here has changed profoundly.

I admire Russell Moore in many ways. I appreciate his stance for a Biblical understanding of gender and look forward to his leadership as the new President of the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. Few Christian leaders have done more for the cause of parentless children through adoption than Dr. Moore. Even on issues where I disagree with him I find him to be thoughtful and not impressed with himself. That is why I found his essay on closed communion, Table Manners, so distressing. No one is a stronger advocate of a true credobaptist position than I am but I also see that the Christian who was “baptized” as an infant is still my brother and I have no right to deny him the fellowship of the broken bread and the fruit of the vine.

Dr. Moore’s first reason for a closed communion position is both unpersuasive and insulting.

First of all, open communion usually rests on the all-too-typical Evangelical presumption that the Lord’s Supper really isn’t that important. Communion is, as Flannery O’Connor’s infamous socialite conversation-partner once put it, “a wonderful symbol” but that’s about it. The issue isn’t the event itself, but the insult of the exclusion, in the same way that 1950s and 1960s civil disobedience wasn’t about how great the food was at the Woolworth’s lunch-counter.

Too often in our contemporary Evangelical church culture, the act of barring a member from the table seems quaint or even meaningless. After all, who really cares if he is deprived of a wafer and a splash of grape juice?

That is dead wrong. Not that the Lord’s Supper is meaningless in the greater part of the Evangelical church because it is. Likewise it is somewhat true, who cares if they are barred from a wafer and grape juice? That isn't what the Supper looked like in the first century and it is not what it should look like now. That isn’t the point. It is dead wrong because for many of us who see the Lord’s Supper as incredibly precious it is far too important for us to bring division to the Table. I would say that infrequent, ritualistic observances of the Supper in place of a meal are more indicative of a low view of the Supper than an open communion stance. Then Dr. Moore makes another erroneous statement.

This is why many low-church Protestants have shared historically with their high-church brothers and sisters the conviction that the Supper must be tied to discipline (1 Cor. 5:11). The table is not just an individual reminder of the gospel; it is the very locus of church fellowship, the place where we experience Christ present in proclamation and in one another. It is here that we experience a foretaste of the wedding supper to come, and where we announce those we hold accountable to struggle with us until then. The church is “recognizing the body” of Christ (1 Cor. 11:29) by defining the boundaries of communion at the table in terms of those who are in union with Christ and who are able, should they deny him, to be disciplined.

Here Dr. Moore is comparing not being an official member of a particular local church or having been baptized as an infant with having illicit sexual relations with your step-mother (1 Cor 5: 11 and corresponding context). The assumption here is that unless the authorities in the church are able to monitor you (something that seems pretty hard in a church the size of the one Dr. Moore serves in), you are presumed to be guilty of sin and barred from eating with the church until proven otherwise. I think he completely misrepresents what Paul is saying in 1 Cor 11:29. The entire context Paul is speaking of there is self-examination, not a clergyman determining which Christians are or are not worthy of eating at the Table. Then the capstone: denying the Table is not divisive, it just means we “take the church seriously” (and by implication those who don’t practice closed communion do not take the church seriously).

This doesn’t mean we don’t receive each other in Christ. It doesn’t mean we make ultimate our differences. It means we take the church seriously. And it means we long for the day when we know, face-to-face, what Jesus means when he says the word “baptize.” We hope patiently for the glad eternal morning when we’re seated at one table with one Lord and one communion, and where there isn’t a fence in sight.

Actually that is exactly what closed communion means. We don’t receive one another in Christ if we refuse to share the Table with one another. You are welcome to sit in a pew and listen to me talk and you are welcome to drop money in the offering plate but when it comes to nibbling some bread, you are prohibited?

The early church devoted themselves to the breaking of bread (Acts 2:42). Not just the mere ritual we have turned the Supper into but a full fledged meal among the Body of Christ. When Paul gathered with the church in Acts 20: 7-12, they weren’t gathered to listen to a sermon, they gathered to break bread. The sharing of the Lord’s Supper among the church is one of the most precious expressions of our shared salvation. To turn it into something else, to deny the fellowship with other believers because of a disagreement over baptism that has divided the church for hundreds of years, is a perversion of the intent and purpose of the Supper. How incredibly disappointing to read this from Dr. Moore.

I have friends and brothers in Christ who I disagree with over issues like: church membership, baptism, paid clergy, soteriology, ecclesiology, gender roles and on and on. Not one of those brothers in Christ will ever be denied the fellowship of the Table by me. I have no right, none whatsoever, to declare a fellow Christian ineligible to share the Supper with me. God Himself has decreed who belongs to His Son. Who am I to relegate some of those redeemed sheep to second class citizenship over secondary issues?

Does the Bible restrict who can baptize?

Felicity Dale penned a brief post about who can baptize (part of a series of short post regarding baptism): Who can baptize? . Several people have linked to it so I gave it a read. I don’t always agree with Felicity on everything, especially regarding gender relations and roles, but she has the right of it here.

In most legacy churches, only the trained professional baptizes new believers. There is nothing in the Scriptures to indicate that only a trained professional or a leader can baptize.

Can a “layman” baptize a newly converted Christian? Absolutely!

This notion that baptism, like the Lord’s Supper, must be “administered” by a “proper authority” in the church is one of the most perverse holdovers from Roman Catholicism retained by the Reformation. The idea that somehow the benefits and blessing of the Supper and the waters of baptism can only be experienced because someone holding an official ecclesiastical title permits you to has zero, I mean ZERO, basis in the New Covenant church. Under the Old Covenant the case could be made easily but we are not under that old covenant that is obsolete and passing away, we are under the New Covenant, a covenant that is better and not like the Old.

Baptism and the Supper are some of the means God uses to bless His people, not a mechanism He put in place for some in the church to control others.

Inconsistency in hermeneutic

OK, I wasn't going to post on baptism anymore but I saw this on the MCTS Blog from an interview of Dr. W. Gary Crampton by Richard Barcellos. The interview pertains to Dr. Crampton's new book on why he moved from a padeobaptist position to a credo position. What I found interesting was this exchange regarding the inconsistency in the paedo hermeneutic:

Q3: What are some of the main problems you encountered with paedobaptism that caused you to keep studying?

A3: There were several issues that bothered me about the doctrine of paedobaptism. I will mention only one, and that is there is simply no text in the New Testament (NT) wherein there is any mention of the baptism of infants. This is admitted by some of the finest paedobaptist theologians that have written on the subject. This means, as admitted and taught by these same paedobaptist theologians, that we must go back to the Old Testament (OT) to establish the doctrine. When it comes to the other NT sacrament of the Lord’s supper, however, the paedobaptist theologians do not apply the same hermeneutic principle. That is, the recipients of the Lord’s supper are determined by the NT teaching rather than the OT teaching. The inconsistency here is glaring. Another problem here is that the OT does not mention baptism of infants at all. What this hermeneutic assumes is that the Abrahamic covenant, wherein the male infants were circumcised, is still binding on the NT church on virtually a one-to-one basis, and therefore the infants of believers should be baptized. There are so many difficulties here (which I write about in my book) that they are far too numerous to deal with in an interview like this. The most serious error committed here is that of overstressing the continuity of the Old and New Covenant to the detriment of the discontinuity between the two. The Reformed Baptist doctrine is not in any sense dispensational; rather, it is fully covenantal. It recognizes that there is most certainly a continuity between the two covenants, but there is also a discontinuity that must be seen (see Jeremiah 31:31-34; compare Hebrews 8:6-13).

I think that is dead on especially regarding forcing a one to one correlation between circumcision and baptism.

OK, no more posts on baptism (for now)

Be careful who you declare to be cut off

Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in again…

Ah, my old friend paedobaptism. I try, I really do try, to let sleeping dogs (or infants who are suddenly dribbled with water) lie. Then all of a sudden, minding my own business, I run across something and just have to speak out. Les Prouty posted two essays on baptism, one from Dagg on the Baptist perspective and one from Benjamin Shaw of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary on the paedobaptist perspective. Mr. Shaw’s essay, Thoughts on Infant Baptism, ponders the question of what value is there in baptizing an infant

A question often asked of those who argue for infant baptism is, “What good does it do the infant?” Those who ask this question generally think they have nailed the defender, as there is no obvious benefit to the infant. The infant hardly seems to be aware of what is transpiring, let alone being aware of any benefit. Many who were baptized as infants, coming to faith as adults, desire to be baptized as adults, rationalizing that their baptism didn’t mean anything to them.

Mr. Shaw then launches into an explanation of why that perfectly valid question misses the “true meaning” of baptism. The truly disturbing part of the essay comes a few paragraphs later and it was this doctrinal stance that prompted me to write this post.

God takes the covenant sign seriously. Thus a child, who would otherwise be a member of the covenant people, God considers him to be no part of the covenant people if he does not have the sign of the covenant. So a child of believing parents who is not baptized is considered by God to be none of his. It matters not how much care the parents may lavish on the child, or how much they may teach him the Bible. They have disobeyed God on one point, and their children are cut off.

Wow. Isn’t that a dangerous line of reasoning? God cuts them off based on the action or rather inaction of their parents? It seems that Mr. Shaw is creating a division here between the elect and the covenant community. In other words, you can be elect and not be part of the covenant community one the one hand and on the other hand one can be part of the covenant community and not be in the elect. I really don’t understand how you can seriously say that someone is part of the New Covenant community and yet that person will spend an eternity in hell.

I have to wonder though, if a child is one of God’s elect, is that child elect based on receiving baptism as an infant? If an infant that is born of believing parents is not baptized, are they “cut off” from the covenant community regardless of being born-again later? The language Mr. Shaw uses sounds very sound and reasonable but when you start to dig into it, you find that there are troubling implications when faced with the stark reality of the New Covenant.

The argument is that circumcision is the sign of membership in the Abrahamic covenant and baptism is the sign of membership in the New Covenant. Mr. Shaw points to Colossians 2: 11-12 as evidence of the linkage between circumcision and baptism. There is of course a problem with that argument as evidenced by what the text actually says.

In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. (Col 2: 11-12)

Now a cursory examination of this text might give one the impression that circumcision=baptism more or less. Is that what is going on here? Certainly not. I would argue that there is a linkage here that is unwarranted. It is pretty clear that even when the New Testament is speaking of circumcision, when it comes to the New Covenant community it is speaking of the circumcision of the heart. That is Paul’s point in Colossians 2, not that we should treat physical circumcision and baptism as one and the same. Physical circumcision was a type and shadow of the inward change that would be wrought in believers. In fact, physical circumcision is spoken of in an almost negative light (see Galatians). Likewise, we were “raised with him through faith”. That is not indicative of water baptism at all but rather baptism of the Spirit. Water baptism does not correspond neatly to circumcision as the paedobaptist would argue, instead physical circumcision corresponds to circumcision of the heart (see Ezekiel 36: 26-27).

What is the basis for covenant membership in the New Covenant (you know, the one that is called “New” and “not like the old” for a reason)? It is not water baptism. We need to of course look at the New Covenant, originally prophesied in Jeremiah 31 and affirmed as being mediated by Christ in Hebrews 8:

But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” (Jeremiah 31: 33-34)

The overall error here is failing to recognize that while the covenants have many similarities, they are not the same in purpose, mediation and administration simply by virtue of being a covenant. The covenant with Adam is not the same as the covenant with Abram. The covenant with Moses is not the same as the New Covenant. They are all part of the grand scope of redemption but they cannot be viewed as being virtually indistinguishable other than name. The heart of the New Covenant is the forgiveness of sins. There are none who are still in their sins who are in the New Covenant community and there are none who are forgiven of their sins who are outside of that community, water baptism not withstanding. The defining mark of the New Covenant community is not parentage or physical signs, it is faith that stems from an internal change. What is really ironic is that infant baptism flies smack in the face of the core fundamentals of Reformed theology, the idea of election, monergistic regenerations and effectual calling. My Reformed paedobaptist brothers will stand firmly for the core doctrines of Reformed theology on the one hand and then essentially sidestep them in defending infant baptism. When Christ “instituted” the Lord’s Supper, He was quite specific about this:

Now as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is my body.” And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, “Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. (Matthew 26: 26-28)

The New Covenant is in His blood, a blood that is poured out for the forgiveness of the sins of His elect. There are clearly non-elect children of believers and if you follow Reformed theology, especially particular or limited atonement, it naturally follows that His blood was not shed for them. As such, they are not beneficiaries of the New Covenant promise and in no way should be given the sign of that very covenant. Galatians 4: 21-31 seems applicable here as well regarding the idea of two covenants, one physical and one spiritual. Paul is directly dealing with the Jewish influence in the churches in Galatia who are insisting on applying the sign of physical circumcision to Christians. Paul is adamant about this:

For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love. (Galatians 5:6)

If you are saying that water baptism corresponds to circumcision, then you might as well say neither baptism nor unbaptism counts for anything. In Christ Jesus, the Savior and the mediator of the New Covenant, what counts is faith. Not water baptism, not physical circumcision, not parentage, not church membership.

This is so pivotal. I would not argue that this should be a point of separation between brothers at all, but baptism is an important and hotly contested doctrine. What is being described here by Mr. Shaw seems to be, taken to its logical extreme, a cutting off of people from the covenant community of God not based on their status as one of the elect or based on being born-again, but instead based on the action or inaction of their parents. That certainly was true in the Old Testament (see Genesis 17:14) but it has no warrant in command or example in the New. Those who are, following the admonition of Genesis 17: 14, not circumcised will be cutoff but again, the defining characteristic of the New Covenant is that we are circumcised in the heart, not a circumcision made with hands and baptized by the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit, not by water baptism.

We are not saved by water baptism nor are we in or out of the New Covenant community of Christ based on being water baptized either as an adult or as an infant. This idea of two churches, one a “visible” church with people in the covenant community who are not elect and another, “invisible” church, is an error and has no place under the New Covenant administration. I remain convinced, ever more so the more I study it, that infant baptism is a holdover from Rome, one of the areas that the magisterial Reformers left “unreformed”. Taken as a series of unrelated proof texts, infant baptism can be marginally defended but when you examine the role of water baptism in the grand scope of Scripture, especially in light of the New Covenant and the contrast between the external “types and shadows” that prefigured the New Covenant and the New Covenant internal changes (circumcised hearts and baptism of the Spirit), there simply is no Scriptural justification for “baptizing” infants.

When the symbol becomes a sacrament

Paula raised an interesting question. If we change something from a symbol to a sacrament, does that completely change the purpose for observing it?

First, I don’t even care for the word “sacraments”. It is a word that reeks of religious ritualism and making the Lord’s Supper and baptism into mere rituals we observe so we can mark a box on a checklist: “Yep, we’re a real church” is a grotesque mockery. That doesn't mean we shouldn't engage in these symbols of the gathered church because Rome and others have turned them into something they were never intended to be. Just the opposite. We should baptize new believers as a glorious expression of the change that God has wrought in them. The Supper should be an integral part of our regular gatherings, not because that makes us more pious but because it is such a wonderful expression of fellowship. It shouldn’t be something that is done as a ritualistic passing of crackers. The Supper is a time of fellowship and an act of proclamation. How can we truly say we are “proclaiming the Lord’s death until He comes” by nibbling a cracker that is passed around in a room full of relative strangers?

Both the Lord’s Supper and baptism are symbols of something else. They are not the end in and of themselves, nor is there a magical transformation based on an incantation made by an ordained clergyman. Pagans eat bread and drink wine and they bathe on occasion so the elements are not inherently the “main thing”. It is what they represent and the place that they hold in the community of believers that is the “main thing”. This is a potential issue in a lot of areas. For example, if you cover your head because you consciously recognize it as a Scriptural command with real meaning and purpose that goes beyond just an external, that is great. If you cover because it is just a cultural thing you do or just for the sake of covering, that is replacing what it symbolizes (submission) with the symbol itself (the covering).

“Do this in remembrance of Me” becomes “Do this for the sake of doing this”. The symbol becomes the place of emphasis. This is why we have endless fights over the mode and recipients of baptism, over the frequency and form of the Lord’s Supper in spite of the utter lack of specifics on mode in the New Testament. We are never told to ritualize the Lord' Supper. That is again a holdover from Rome, a means of separating the clergy from the laity and controlling people through the threat of withholding the Eucharist.

When we use terms like “means of grace” and “real presence”, we lose focus on where Christ placed His focus. Was the focus of the Last Supper on the bread and the cup? No, it was on the upcoming cross and the call to the disciples to love and serve one another. Does Paul focus on the form and the (non-existent) liturgy? No, Paul is concerned with the nature of the fellowship and the purpose for gathering. The “real presence” is in the fellowship of God’s people. Where two or three are gathered in His name, He is there among them (Matt 18:20). Not where two or three are gathered around a table with the elements, there I am among the elements.

The same holds true with the other “sacrament” of baptism. Baptism is done in response to being born again, symbolic of the internal change that has happened. It represents the renouncing of sin and the desire to walk as He walked. Baptism is not a rite of passage or an inherently effectual ceremony. As Alan Knox has pointed out, the emphasis in the New Testament is not on water baptism at all. It is on the spirit baptism of Christ.

If we gather for the purpose of "sacraments" instead of the "sacraments" being something that is part of what we do when we gather, we have the order backwards.

Circumcison and baptism

I wanted to direct you to an excellent study of circumcision and baptism over at The Gospel in Real Life. Very clear and concise, good stuff that you should check out. It seems that there is a linkage many people draw between physical, Old Covenant circumcision and New Covenant baptism that needs to be looked at. Check it out!

A call for unity and a call for disunity

Eric Carpenter has written an excellent blog post titled Unity and Baptism: A Possible Solution as part of a series on unity in the church dealing with breaking fellowship over issues of doctrine and practice. Eric asserts that baptism is not an issue we should divide or break fellowship over.

Eric first makes the case that baptism is not a Gospel issue, not a first order issue that would necessitate separation:

First, Christ's church should be united around the gospel. This is commanded and easy to understand in the bible. Therefore, we should only separate from those who reject first order (gospel-centered) doctrines.

Then he closes with this statement:

The point is that we don't stop fellowshipping over third order doctrinal differences. If we treat baptism in this way, we will remain united while at the same time holding some differences in interpretation over the meaning of baptism.

I would agree with Eric on this (there is a lot more than those two sentences, you should read the whole series). What makes that even easier to agree is that I don't think that baptism is something that should define a local congregation, nor do I think it is something that is even a function of the local congregation necessarily. If someone chooses to dribble water on a baby, that is their business. We can always properly baptize the child later! Having said that, I would say that sinful behavior is a Gospel issue. I will come back to that.

On the other hand, we have Greg Gilbert writing at the 9 Marks Ministries blog Church Matters. Greg wrote a blog post called Don't Comprise on This and in what appears to be a contrast with Eric, Greg says that some issues like gender roles are a hill to die on. Indeed for the health of the church, you not only can but must separate over this issue.

To put a very fine point on it, to compromise in this case is to lose your church. That's because the question of the roles of men and women in the church is fundamentally a question of Scripture's authority. And if you decide that obeying those parts of Scripture in your church's practice is not worth dividing over---or if you call a pastor who thinks that---then you've really taken out all the stops between your church and full-blown theological liberalism. You've allowed your church's practice to be determined by those who would deny Scripture's authority, and history shows us that once you deny Scripture in one area, other areas quickly follow.

I must say that I agree with Greg at least as far as the facts (I would likely disagree with Greg on his view of the church). Denominationally speaking, the ordaining of women in leadership roles in the church, specifically pastoral roles, has almost always been a precursor to general theological anarchy. Once you reject restrictions on women in ministry, it becomes pretty hard to restrict it from anyone including homosexuals (see my post on this issue here). You need to look no further than the so-called mainstream Protestant denominations. Virtually all of them have embraced women in pastoral ministry and they are all on a downward slide: the Episcopal church, the United Methodist church, the Presbyterian Church-USA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church. If they have not embraced open, unrepentant homosexuals yet they are at least having conversations about it. I draw the line back to an issue of authority and once you start carving out the parts you don't like, it is hard to keep it all together. I am not suggesting that every Christian fellowship that allows women to teach or be elders is invariably going to embrace homosexuality but I do think it is hard to be consistent if you say "this" applies and "that" does not.

Here is the difference in my mind. I don't consider infant baptism to be a sin. I think it is wrongly applying baptism without command or example, but I also recognize that there is not a Biblical prohibition against infant baptism. There is an utter lack of evidence to support infant baptism but no express prohibitions against it (possibly because it wasn't practiced so there was no need to speak of it). So infant baptism in and of itself is not a sin. Believing adults who refuse to be baptized Biblically later might be but that is a different issue. On the other hand, although some disagree with me quite strongly, I believe that the Bible speaks very clearly of gender roles in the church and that rejecting those roles is an act of sinful rebellion. I could fellowship with people who baptize infants. I cannot fellowship where women are teaching and exerting authority over men.

For example. If a group of believers in the local assembly decided to drink a fifth of Jack Daniels during the fellowship time and get stone drunk, that would be an issue of discipline. But what if the ones involved were elders in the body? Should you stay in fellowship? I would assume no one would say yes. That seems an extreme example, but we must be careful not to set aside sin in order to foster unity. Ignoring sin for the sake of unity is not what Christ had in mind. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 5: 11 that we should not be in fellowship with those who bear the name of brother if they exhibit sinful behavior. In cases where there is a rebellion against the teaching of Scripture I would argue that fellowship is not possible. I firmly believe that women teaching and having authority over men is a sinful practice and an usurpation of roles restricted to male believers and as such I would consider fellowshipping under a woman teaching to be participation in her sin. That is something I simply cannot do.

(As a side note, I wonder what my brothers who are paedobaptist would do with this. If you believe that the Bible commands us to baptize the infant children of believers, do you think parents who don’t are in sin? If so, should you be in fellowship with them? If not, why not?)

Are baptism and the Lord’s Supper (exclusively) a function of the local church?

Well of course they are!

Aren’t they?

It is a settled matter in most church traditions that baptism is carried out under the auspices of the local church by clergy or at least by ordained men. The same holds true of the Lord’s Supper. Designated “the sacraments”, these two activities have been given a special place in the life of the church. Why is that? Yes they are vitally important but are they restricted Scripturally to a ceremony in an officially recognized and defined organization?

Saying that “It is our tradition” does not mean that it is proper and especially does not mean that other expressions are inherently wrong. Does the command and example of the Bible demonstrate to us that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are functions of the local church? Or is it the case that people hear the Gospel in concert with the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit, repent of their sins and are baptized. After they are baptized they begin to fellowship in community and joy with other believers and that includes the breaking of bread.

Let’s look first at baptism.

When we are baptized, who are we showing our relationship with? Each other or with Christ? With the Church, the Body of Christ, or a local church organization? Is it not the case that when we are baptized it is into the one body, that is the Body of Christ, and not into a local body? We don’t read that we are baptized into two bodies, the universal/invisible church and the local/visible church. Rather, in Ephesians 4 we read…

There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. (Eph 4: 4-6)

Also there is this…

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit. (1 Cor 12: 12-13)

Keep in mind here that 1 Corinthians is addressed to the church in Corinth but has universal application to all Christians everywhere (and I would say for all time as well). I would argue that the Scriptures indicate that baptism is into the one Body and we are members of that same Body, and that therefore baptism into a local church and membership in a local church are extra-Biblical traditions. Baptism is an identification with Christ, with His death, burial and resurrection (Romans 6:4). We are all baptized into one body, whether you are baptized as a 12 year old in Topeka or an 80 year old in Tallahassee.

What other examples do we see in Scripture?

Acts 2 is the best example because it has both the breaking of bread and baptism in the earliest days of the church. By earliest days, I mean basically the first day! We read in the latter half of Acts 2…

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?” And Peter said to them, “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. 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.” And with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation.” So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls. And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. (Acts 2: 37-47)

So what does this tell us? It says that some 3000 men repented of their sins and were baptized. How and by whom we have no idea. Maybe in the river and probably by Peter and the other 11? There was no local church to be baptized into, at least not in the sense that we think of a local church. There were about 120 persons meeting in the upper room of a home (or maybe an inn?), devoting themselves to prayer. That doesn’t really qualify as a local church by our contemporary standards. We read that after these 3000 were baptized, they gathered regularly with other believers, “attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes”. They also had all things in common but defenders of a sacramentalist view rarely espouse that! There are no local churches mentioned.

We also see the example of several baptisms of households where all of the members of a given household believed and were baptized and in none of those accounts does the local church play a role. In Acts 10 we see Cornelius and his household believe and be baptized. Peter was in his house along with some of the other brothers who travelled with him to Caesarea. There is no indication that this was done in conjunction with a local church. In Acts 16 there is Lydia who was baptized along with her household. No mention of a local church. Later in Acts 16 there is the conversion and baptism of the Philippian jailer, and he was baptized the same night: “And he took them the same hour of the night and washed their wounds; and he was baptized at once, he and all his family.”(Acts 16: 33) There was no examination by the consistory or new member classes or a vote before the congregation. They believed and were baptized. Acts 18 Crispus is baptized. No mention of the local church.

We see the most detailed description of a person being baptized in Acts 8: 26-39. Um, what church was the Ethiopian eunuch baptized into? The eunuch lived in Ethiopia and was on his way to Jerusalem. No mention from Phillip that the eunuch should find himself a good Bible believing church to become a member of. We don’t know much about him but it seems likely that he went up to Jerusalem and fellowshipped with other Christians there, but then he went home. Perhaps he planted a Baptist church in Ethiopia? Or more likely he went on his way with joy and preached Christ when he got back.

Presumably all of the people who were baptized gathered with other believers afterward. That does not mean that they were baptized by or into a local organization. I don’t think we find the identification of baptism with the “local church” anywhere in Scripture. Maybe I am wrong and I missed something but I don’t see it. That is not to say that we can’t be baptized at a local church by a pastor, but I certainly can’t see where we must do so. I don’t see that it is required and normative, nor do I think that baptism is restricted to a local church organization and can only be performed by an ordained individual. In fact, the more I think about it, the more it seems that these traditions and restrictions have at their core not the Scripture but Rome. Control baptism as an entry in the local church, mandate membership, blur the distinction between the Church and the local church and you have a pretty effective control mechanism. This control mechanism was used in medieval times by Rome to control monarchs and other wayward individuals and it seems that the form, if not the function, has survived the Reformation and lives on today in evangelical churches.

So what about the Lord’s Supper? Certainly that is a function of the local church, to be presided, administered and protected by those with the proper authority!

Maybe not.

In Acts 20:7, we see the words “On the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread”. Does that imply a formal church meeting? It was on Sunday, so it must be a church meeting! In fact they probably started promptly at 11 AM and finished by noon so everyone could make it to Cracker Barrel. So what if they talked together all night to the point that Eutychus fell out of the window and that afterward they talked with Paul even more and broke bread and ate. Does that sound like the last Lord’s Supper worship service you went to? If you read the account, I am sure Paul did most of the talking but we read that he “Paul talked with them” and “he conversed with them a long while”. At your local church, does anyone but the one administering the Supper speak?

What about 1 Corinthians 11, the most detailed exposition on the celebration of the Supper? That is certainly an intentional, purposeful meal but there is no mention of officiating in a local church, no mention of a particular person overseeing it. It is a meal among the gathered church, not a ceremonial ritual as part of the liturgy of a local church. The only way that a liturgical ritual officiated by clergy can be implied is if you approach the text with that presupposition firmly in hand.

Even when the Lord’s Supper is instituted in the Gospels, on the night when Christ was betrayed, it was an intimate gathering and a full meal with Christ and His disciples.

Many of our brothers seem to take more interest in “fencing the table” to keep people away from the Lord’s Supper than they are in examining the Scriptures and following the form and mode we see there. “Fencing the table” is great sounding Reformed rhetoric and has a great example every good Calvinist has heard about Calvin throwing himself in front of the table to keep the Libertines away, but a great story and a church tradition shouldn’t dictate our practices.

The problem is, yet again, that when we read things like “gathered together” and see references to “breaking bread”, we automatically have a picture in our minds of what that must have looked like based on our contemporary experiences. When we read about baptism, we see in our minds a preacher in waders with a microphone over his head immersing a new believer or a minister in robes sprinkling water on a baby. Our contemporary experiences, the traditions we have seen over and over again in church gatherings, is what is comfortable for us and it is all we know. We read things like 120 people gathering in an upper room and that doesn’t register to us. As I have mentioned before, it is the phenomena of “recency bias”, where what is most fresh in our memories becomes how we view history.

So what are the practical ramifications here? Is a meeting in a home, an intentional and purposeful gathering of believers, where the Lord’s Supper is celebrated an invalid expression of the Lord’s Supper and a meeting in a local church organization valid? Is a father who has Biblically raised up his children who then baptizes his children overstepping his bounds but a pastor in a church who has a cursory knowledge of a child exercising proper authority in baptizing those same children? We read often, especially in reformed circles, about fathers leading their family in family worship and making the home a “little church” but when it comes to the “sacraments”, we have to bow to tradition and abdicate the administration and practice to the duly authorized professionals. My four oldest children have all been baptized and they were all baptized by men in the clergy with only a passing relationship with my kids. That won't happen with the other four. The only prohibition I can sense that prevents small groups of believers from intentionally gathering for the Lord’s Supper or one Christian baptizing another is tradition.

(I am certain that all of this has received better treatment by others already, these are just my ideas that I jotted down.)

Good News!

Baptisms drop in the Southern Baptist Convention!

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Southern Baptist churches baptized fewer people in 2008 for the fourth year in a row to reach the lowest level since 1987, and membership in the country's largest Protestant denomination fell slightly as well.

Baptisms dropped just over one percent to 342,198 last year, compared with 345,941 in 2007, according to an annual report released Thursday by LifeWay Christian Resources, the Southern Baptist Convention's publishing arm.

Total membership of Southern Baptist churches was 16,228,438 last year, down nearly 38,400 from 2007.

Why is that good news? After we came to Christ, we spent the majority of our church life in Southern Baptist churches and by and large they were baptizing enormous numbers of people, many of them small children (essentially late infant baptism) based on decisions garnered through altar calls and in deceitful luring of children to repeat a prayer that they don't understand. With rolls full of "members" who haven't shown the least sign of regeneration, it it little wonder that the total numbers of "members" keeps declining.

The whole "church membership" thing leads to churches that see the Great Commission being fulfilled by preaching an invitation and getting people to make a "decision" for Christ.

"The numbers simply tell us that Southern Baptists are not reaching as many people for Christ as they once did," said Thom S. Rainer, president and CEO of LifeWay.

Actually Thom it probably just means that SBC churches baptized fewer unregenerate people last year. Many, many SBC churches are not "reaching people for Christ" or preaching the Gospel, they are preaching decisions aand getting people to repeat rote and unBiblical "sinners prayers". When the SBC won the battle over the inerrancy of the Bible, unfortunately many of the old guard were replaced by a new old guard that is just as implacable. For every Al Mohler there is a Johnny Hunt, men who don't seem to understand how men are saved and what Christ has done. One can only pray that the men being taught by Dr. Mohler and others can impact the SBC so that the focus is no longer on numbers: decisions, baptisms, "members" and instead is on preaching Christ crucified for sins. Faithful preaching of the Gospel accompanied by the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit leads to people that are truly Christians. Getting people to "make decisions" leads to false converts with a false security.

Ruh roh!

There are a couple of very interesting articles on Church Matters, the 9 Marks Blog (Mark Dever’s ministry) that caught my eye. Normally the blog posts are pretty innocuous but when the titles of the posts read: “"The Sin of Infant Baptism", written by a sinning Baptist”and “The unintentional yet damaging institutional sin of infant baptism.”, you know that is going to cause a stink. When I go off about baptism, it can be dismissed as the rantings of a loony. When Mark Dever, of Together for the Gospel and 9 Marks Ministry does, ruh roh!

From the first post by Mark Dever…

Nevertheless, as I understand the words of Christ in Matt. 28:18-20 Christians are commanded to baptize and to be baptized, and the practice of infant baptism inhibits the obedience of what I take to be a quite straightforward command. I understand explanations that have been given about the practice of infant baptism (Orthodox/Roman, Lutheran and Reformed) but am sincerely persuaded that none of them line up with God's own Word. This does not cause me to doubt the sincerity of my reformed paedobaptist brethren, nor even their judgment in general. It is simply that on this point they've got it wrong, and their error, involving as it does a requiring of something Scripture does not require (infant baptism), and the consequence of a denying of an action Scripture does require (believers baptism) is sinful (though unintentionally so).

I have made it no secret that I consider paedobaotism to be a serious error and I agree with Mark that Scripture does not command or imply the baptism of infants. But is it a sin, even an unintentional one? Those who baptize infants, by and large, are sincerely doing what they believe the Bible teaches. But being sincere and believing in what you are doing is never the measure for truth, otherwise an awful lot of errant teaching would be considered orthodox. Infant baptism is applying a command to something the Bible does not command, and so does that qualify as a sin? I think it does (ducking my head).

The second blog post by Mike Gilbart-Smith links infant baptism with a lack of church discipline, using the example of the Church of England.

The problems are multiple:

1) baptism is seen as having nothing to do with church membership. And when there is no church membership, church discipline becomes impossible.

2) infant baptism itself tends to separate baptism from church membership and discipline. One doesn't want to publicly disicpline a 2 year old for poking his sister in the eye and showing no signs of repentance. All paedobaptists I know rightly recognise that such matters are better dealt with within the family.

The problem there of course is that a) there is no command for formal church membership in the Bible and b) credobaptist churches have many of the same problems when it comes to discipline that paedobaptist churches endure. I am not sure that poking your sister in the eye as a baby would be grounds for church discipline in any church setting anyway. You kind of have to read both posts in their entirety to get a flavor for the full argument.

I am certain that this is going to reignite the firestorm over baptism on the blogosphere. The comments on the posts themselves are already getting snippy. Baptism is kind of the elephant in the Reformed room, and whenever it comes up people get wound up. I may have to wear a disguise next weekend at the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology in Grand Rapids so as not to be attacked by angry mobs of Presbyterians and Dutch Reformed types.

So what say you: whichever side of the baptism debate you come down on, is the giving of the sign of baptism to an infant or the denying of that sign to an infant on the level of a sinful act?

Acts 2, necessary inference and infant baptism

OK, so I am back on this kick again. Infant baptism just gets under my skin. It used to be something I just shrugged off for the sake of peace among Reformed, confessional brothers but baptism is so important for the body of Christ and when it is misapplied, especially to infants, it seems to me to be an issue we need to really get some clarity on. I recognize that this is an issue that has divided the church over the years, in fact it may be the issue that is the most divisive in terms of fellowship among Christians and that the ground I am covering has been covered thousands of times before.

Let’s look again at the “proof text” offered for infant baptism in Acts 2, verse 39:

Acts 2: 39 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.”

This is the most inexplicable verse used to defend infant baptism. Taking that verse from a paedo worldview, it says that the promise is for these men and their offspring, i.e. their children, so in response they should be baptized and so should their infants. The problem is two fold. First, it doesn’t say or even imply that. Second, the surrounding context before and after doesn’t support that view. You can’t get to “…your children” and stop reading. Let’s look at the verse itself, taken in a vacuum before we look at the surrounding context.

What does verse 39 say? It says that the promise, fulfilled in the cross and described in Peter’s sermon in verses 14-36 was for them (those listening), and also for succeeding generations and for people in far away lands. Indeed the promise is for, and this is important, “everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself”. So the recipient of the promise are these men, succeeding generations, people in far away countries, all of whom are united by one thing: they have been called by Christ. It is no longer just a Jewish faith, it is a faith that is universal in the sense of being for all people, Jews and Gentiles, rich and poor, free and slave. What unites them under this promise is their election and effectual calling. Just as Peter is not saying that people are saved merely by being in far away lands, he is not in any way saying that infants are saved or that they should be baptized because of who their parents are. We shouldn’t take Acts 2:39 to mean that we should baptize people in Thailand just because they are far away from Jerusalem nor should we baptize infants just because of having Christian parents.

Let’s look now at the preceding and successive verses that add light to verse 39 and demonstrate even more fully that Peter did not intend his statement in what we know as Acts 2:39 to advocate infant baptism. First the verses immediately preceding verse 39.

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?” 38 And Peter said to them, “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.

These men were cut to the heart by Peter’s preaching of the Gospel. In response to that Peter tells them to repent and be baptized. So we have here the first of many examples of proper baptism: the preaching of the Gospel accompanied by a changed and penitent heart, a call for repentance and finally baptism. Contrast that with the paedo view: start with baptism, preach the Gospel through church and catechism and hope that they are elect. Kind of like growing into their baptism, even though countless numbers of infants that are baptized end up never being regenerate. This is the problem of making the argument of “necessary inference”. There is no need for inference here because we are already given explicit command and example of the proper recipients of baptism. Infant baptism is not a “necessary inference”, it is a reversal of the clear teaching of Scripture which tells us and shows us that the proper recipients of baptism are people who profess Christ. Not only is there no example or command to the contrary, but the writers of Scriptures go to pains to demonstrate just the opposite.

What of the verses immediately following verse 39?

Acts 2:40-41 And with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation.” So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls.

So who was baptized that day? See again verse 41: “So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls.” (Acts 2: 41)

Not those who received his word and their infant children. Those who received his word were baptized. It is a statement that is inclusive of those who received his word and exclusive of anyone else. This is where infant baptism falls apart in my eyes, you can go so far but no further. It is like the missing link or the lack of transitional forms in evolution. You have fossil A and current creature B, but there is no link between the two so you just make one up. Again, it certainly seems that the Scripture writers go out of their way to point out who is being baptized. Those who received his word were baptized.

There is simply no teachings at all in Scripture, NONE, that refers to, describes, commands or even infers that infants were or that infants should be baptized. So proponents of infant baptism are left with arguments of silence (well it doesn’t say we shouldn’t baptize infants) and invalid continuities between the Old Covenant community and the New. Given the importance of baptism, I will take the explicit commands and examples of Scripture over tradition and the Westminster Confession any day of the week.

(Up next, there is an online article on Jeremiah 31: 31-34 from a paedo perspective I am going to address.)

Connecting all of the dots

(This is my final post dealing with Dr. R. Scott Clark's On Churchless Evangelicals )

So let’s put these pieces together.

First we are told that if you do not practice infant baptism, you are not in a valid church.

This rejection of the status of Christian children as such introduced (and continues to perpetuate) a principle of radical discontinuity between Abraham and the Christian, i.e. a radical principle of discontinuity in the history of redemption and in the covenant of grace. This principle of radical discontinuity, this denial of the fundamental unity of the covenant of grace as symbolized in the administration of the sign and seal of the covenant of grace to covenant children, is serious enough to warrant saying that any congregation that will not practice infant initiation (baptism) into the administration of the covenant of grace is not a church. The Protestants criticized the Anabaptists on these very grounds. Denial of infant initiation is a denial of the catholicity of the church stretching back to Abraham and it is too much like the Gnostic denial of the unity of the covenant of grace in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.

As such, wouldn’t your “membership” in a non-infant baptizing church be an invalid church membership (assuming for a second that “membership” per se is valid at all)? How can you have a valid church membership in an invalid church? That would be no different than being a member of the mormon church in good standing. It is a valid church membership, just not in a valid church.

Then we are told that if you are not in membership in a church congregation, you are not part of the visible body and therefore not part of the church invisible.

By analogy, the church invisible is composed of those who are, have been, or shall be, members of a visible church. if you’ve never sworn membership vows and confessed a common faith with a congregation, you are not a member of the visible church and if you’re not a member of the church visible, by definition, you are not a member of the church invisible. The former is a prerequisite for the latter.

If you are not part of the invisible church, well then you might be in trouble. Let’s look at Dr. Clark’s definition of the invisible church:

“When we speak of the church invisible, we’re speaking of that great congregation of the elect considered across time and space. It’s a way of speaking of the holy catholic church, that church in all times and places... It transcends congregations and denominations but is composed of elect who are members of congregations. It includes people from every tongue, tribe, and nation.”

I happen to agree in substance with that definition. The invisible church is comprised of all of the elect in all time, and all of the elect by nature will be regenerate and come to faith in Christ as part of the body of Christ. No one who is a Christian is not also elect, and no one who is elect fails to be a Christian. So let’s stop and very carefully put these two pieces together. If you aren’t in the visible church (defined by sworn membership vows in a congregation), you are not in the invisible church and you cannot be in the valid, visible church with a valid “sworn membership” in a church that doesn’t baptize infants. So it is logical to assume that since Dr. Clark considers non-paedobaptist churches to be invalid churches, we can assume that membership in those invalid churches is invalid as well. Therefore if you don't baptize infants you are not part of a legitimate visible church, and not part of the invisible church and therefore not part of the Body of Christ.

So is Dr. Clark stating in a roundabout fashion that if you are not a member in a paedobaptist church, you are not a Christian? That seems to be the argument taken to its logical extreme. All Christians are part of the elect. All of the elect are part of the invisible church. Only members of the visible church are also members of the invisible….

I really can’t believe that is what Dr. Clark is suggesting. I would assume that he considers people like Ken Jones, one of the hosts of the White Horse Inn and a Baptist, people like Al Mohler, people like John Piper to all be Christians. But when you lay out an argument you need to think through the implications, especially when you are teaching in a Christian seminary, and the implications here are troubling when you connect the dots. If you aren’t in an infant baptizing church, you are not in a real church and if you aren’t a member of a real church, you aren’t counted by Dr. Clark among the elect throughout the ages.

Fortunately I rely on the Word of God in matters like these. What matters is having your name in the Book of Life (Revelation 20: 12-15; Revelation 21:27; Philippians 4:3), and not whether you have your name on the membership rolls of a Presbyterian church.

The sum of his argument is taking church traditions of the Reformed flavor and trying to cram Scripture into those traditions. Not all church traditions are terrible things and many of them are not found in Scripture explicitly or even implicitly. But to imply that this particular brand of church tradition is the only possible expression of the church and that this claim is supported by Scripture, when often it is not, is arrogant and damaging to the Body of Christ. To paraphrase Dr. Clark, he can have his church traditions as he desires, and I don’t want them, but he shouldn’t declare himself free to state that only those who subscribe to his traditions are legitimately Reformed or even taken to an extreme that only those who follow his church traditions are even in the Body of Christ.

I have issues with much of evangelicalism, but to assume that the problems we see are limited to those “evangelicals” that Dr. Clark scoffs at and that by being more “Reformed” in church practice those problems are mitigated is both foolish and has in practice not been borne out. The problems that have decimated “real” churches like the Christian Reformed Church and the various Presbyterian groups like the PC-USA had less to do with not affirming the Belgic or Westminster Confessions strongly enough, but instead stems from the church becoming more and more institutionalized, more of an organization and less of a church. In fact, I would and have argued in the past that the reason that the PC-USA and the CRC have gone down the path of liberalism irreversibly and the Southern Baptist Convention recovered is precisely because the PC-USA and the CRC are highly organized, hierarchical organizations. While the Southern Baptist have a myriad of problems and are primarily “evangelical” instead of “confessional” Christians, at least they are not ordaining women and homosexuals and the Bible is still sort of preached in most of their churches.

So let’s see who this sounds like: Highly liturgical. Focus is on the institution. Stringently authoritarian and hierarchical. Formal membership in the visible church a requisite for being an in the invisible church. Infant baptism a prerequisite for being a “real” church. Appeals to traditional confessions.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: Roman Catholicism!

Funny that the guy who claims to be the true blue Reformed guy (and arbiter of who is allowed in the Reformed club) espouses a series of beliefs that sound a lot more like institutionalized Roman Catholicism than like New Testament ecclesiology. Kind of makes you wonder what they Reformed themselves from? In essence we have Roman ecclesiology coupled with New Testament soteriology (maybe not really, but since we are making grand, sweeping generalizations I wanted to get in on the action).

Now I don’t really think that what Dr. Clark is espousing is tantamount to Roman Catholicism. I don’t think we would see Dr. Clark declaring himself to be Cardinal Clark and wearing a mitre. But the slavish adherence to confessions and institutional Christianity, and rigid self-imposed definitions on who is or is not Reformed, from a group that has failed to reform it’s ecclesiology, hardly makes one the champion of being Reformed or reformational. If you buy into the narrow definition of Dr. Clark’s hyperconfessionalism, I guess I don’t qualify as “Reformed” nor would I want to. But since being Reformed is defined by more than Dr. Clark’s checklist, I will gladly claim and retain the title of “Reformed”, a “Reformed” theology that is Biblical and not traditional, a theology grounded in Scripture and not in empty formalism.

Members only?

Moving forward with Dr. Clark’s case…

Where the argument from Dr. Clark strays into really dangerous territory is the application of his beliefs on the requirement and validity of church membership in the right sort of church.

Basically this comes down to submission, not to Christ, but to those who have gone thought some sort of ordaining process which varies from church to church (although no doubt Dr. Clark would assure you that his denomination is the one that does it right and all others are in error) who administer and oversee the membership process. According to Dr. Clark, that apparently only occurs in rightly structured institutional churches. Never mind that the modern ordination process does not appear anywhere in the Bible. We are given qualities to seek in men who are called to be elders, but we see nothing about seminary education, ordination interviews, etc.

What are the marks of a legitimate church? Correct teaching and preaching the Word of God. Observing the sacraments properly. Fellowship among the saints. Prayer. Praising God through hymn signing perhaps? Church discipline.

Do any of these require an institutionalized organization? Does any of this require a seminary degree? Does any of this require that the individual has gone through an ordination ceremony?

Dr. Clark seems to think so…

“If Jesus did institute the Holy Sacraments, however, if he really said, “This is my body…take, eat….do this in remembrance of me” and if he commanded the visible, institutional church to administer baptism to converts and to their children (Acts 2:39), then these are not mere options or second blessings but essential to the life of the Christian and to the life of the Christian Church.”

When it comes to theology, Dr. Clark has in basketball parlance “mad hops” because he makes pretty impressive leaps of logic. Acts 2:39 commands THE INSTITUTIONAL CHURCH to BAPTIZE INFANTS? He just slips in stuff like that, stuff that is completely unwarranted by the text assuming perhaps that people will not check into it.

Before I fly off the handle, what does Acts 2:39 say?

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." (Act 2:39)

So where do we get from that a) an institutional church or b) infant baptism? The people Peter is preaching to are not an orderly assembled Reformed/Presbyterian congregation. They are the people Peter preached to on the day on Pentecost. Indeed in verse 38, which paedobaptist conveniently leave out normally, we read…

And Peter said to them, "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. (Act 2:38)

Repent and be baptized. Not join a local Reformed congregation and baptize your infants and catechize them (although I am in favor of catechizing children). Repent and be baptized. Peter commanded them to do this after they “were cut to the heart” (Acts 2:37) and convicted of their sins, a necessary condition that is impossible for an infant or even a very small child. The promise is not just a present promise, but a promise for future generations as well but it is not guaranteed to infants just because their parents are Christians.

So what we have from Dr. Clark is simple prooftexting, plucking a verse out of its natural context and applying his own theological bent to it. When you start to look before and after verse 39, you see a far different picture than the one that Dr. Clark is portraying to defend his church traditions. But that doesn’t dissuade Dr. Clark in his quest to prove that not only do you have to be a member, on the membership rolls of a church, it must be membership in the right kind of church, i.e. one that baptizes babies.

Likewise the Lord’s Supper. Where is the Scriptural evidence that the Lord’s Supper can only be rightly administered in an institutional church? If Christians gather in my home and we break bread and drink wine in observance of the Supper and in declaration of the Lord’s death until He comes (1 Corinthians 11:26), is that somehow less legitimate if it doesn’t happen in an institutional church, by a guy who has gone through an ordination ceremony, with a table and white tablecloth? All Paul says is that we should observe the Lord’s Supper when we come together as the church, and from that we have created a system where that means in an institutional church, a leap of logic unsupported by the text.

The really disturbing part of this whole argument pops up in this quote….

By analogy, the church invisible is composed of those who are, have been, or shall be, members of a visible church. if you’ve never sworn membership vows and confessed a common faith with a congregation, you are not a member of the visible church and if you’re not a member of the church visible, by definition, you are not a member of the church invisible. The former is a prerequisite for the latter.

Read that again slowly. If you are not a member of a congregation, by necessity you are also not a member of the invisible church. You will see in my final post that Dr. Clark defined the invisible church as: When we speak of the church invisible, we’re speaking of that great congregation of the elect considered across time and space. So in essence, failing to be in a local congregation is tantamount to being outside of the Body of Christ, His elect.

Now I agree that we are commended as believers to not forsake gathering together, to be in fellowship and communion with other believers for teaching, fellowship, prayer and breaking bread. But the assumption that we have to be formal members (a concept absent in Scripture) in an institutional church (also absent) is taking enormous liberties with the text.

The radical implications of this view are the topic for my final post on Dr. R. Scott Clark’s “On Churchless Evangelicals”

The fruits of hyper-confessionalism

I have been reading through a particularly painful series of blog posts this morning by Dr. R. Scott Clark at the Heidelblog. His series "On Churchless Evangelicals" is full of unwarranted assumptions and false equivalencies. The sort of equivalence that assumes that any mention of "church", "congregation", "fellowship" must by implication mean the institutionalized church. I am slowly picking apart what he has written because it is a great example of the prevailing thought in some circles that the early church had services that resembled modern, confessional, Reformed, institutional church services. It is taking me some time because there is so much that is wrong to unpack.

But then I ran across this little blurb and had to interrupt what I was doing to point it out...

On the Christological and soteriological issues alone the Reformed were warranted in describing the 16th-century Anabaptists as “sects.” There was, however, another issue which the Reformed mentioned consistently as providing grounds for such a label, i.e. the Anabaptist denial of infant baptism.

However orthodox modern Baptists are on the other issues, they continue to share with the Anabaptists this fundamental conviction that however valid infant circumcision was prior to the incarnation, the New Covenant is such that there is no place for infant baptism as a proper recognition that the children of believers are members of the covenant of grace just as much today as they were in Abraham’s day.

This rejection of the status of Christian children as such introduced (and continues to perpetuate) a principle of radical discontinuity between Abraham and the Christian, i.e. a radical principle of discontinuity in the history of redemption and in the covenant of grace. This principle of radical discontinuity, this denial of the fundamental unity of the covenant of grace as symbolized in the administration of the sign and seal of the covenant of grace to covenant children, is serious enough to warrant saying that any congregation that will not practice infant initiation (baptism) into the administration of the covenant of grace is not a church. The Protestants criticized the Anabaptists on these very grounds. Denial of infant initiation is a denial of the catholicity of the church stretching back to Abraham and it is too much like the Gnostic denial of the unity of the covenant of grace in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.

Did you catch that? If you won't baptize infants, you are not only not "Reformed" in the eyes of the self-appointed arbiter of all things "Reformed", you are not even a real church. I knew that Dr. Clark would be unable to avoid taking potshots about baptism. So now not only are you unworthy in Dr. Clark's eyes to carry the label "Reformed" if you don't baptize infants, now if you are in a church and it doesn't baptize infants, it isn't even really a church at all. That takes his flawed premise to it's logical conclusion. I made the opposite argument some time ago in this post Maybe Landmarkism has some of it right? and I stand by that today. The Scripture is plain in both example and command that baptism is reserved for professing believers. What is old (infant circumcision, the Old Covenant, temple sacrifice) is fading away, replaced by what is new. Infant baptism is a misapplication of an Old Covenant sign in a New Covenant church, and is unwarranted.

That is only one place where Dr. Clark's premise is flawed. There are so many places where I disagree with him, which is why I am working on a separate post to deal with it. I would agree however in part with his assessment here:

What happened to me in 1961 was, for them, nothing than mere magic or sentiment but it was not baptism. Therefore, I and all such persons are, in their view, unbaptized. For most of Christian history to say that someone was unbaptized was to unchurch them. In other words, to call me unbaptized is to say that I am not really a Christian.

On the one hand, I would agree with part of his statement above. Whatever the ceremony he went through in 1961, I assume as an infant, it was not baptism which can only rightly by Scriptural command and example follow profession of faith. So in that he is "unbaptized". I would say that at worst he is a Christian who, in this very vital area, is being disobedient to the plain commands of Scripture. He needs to repent and submit to baptism. But does that mean he isn't a Christian? Does any rational Baptist suggest that he is not a Christian? I have doubts about the validity of a church that holds to infant baptism, but I have never suggested that those baptized as infants are not Christians. He is being a bit hysterical here and indulging in more than a little hyperbole. I don't equate church membership with being a Christian, so I can recognize Dr. Clark as a brother in Christ even if he is a member of a church that engages in a unBiblical practice.

This is what happens when you become hyper-confessional (not sure if that is a word, or if I just made it up but it fits). The confession becomes the end in and of itself, practically speaking. I love the great confessions, the Westminster and the London Baptist Confession. They are great tools and can help lead to greater understanding of the Word, but they are just tools. I have the confessions on my shelf, and I have expositions of the confessions. All great stuff. But you can know the confessions forward and backward and not know Christ. It is in His Word, and His Word alone, that He is found. The Word is more than a series of footnotes in the Reformed confessions, it is the lifeblood of the church.

(I am working through the rest of his three post series, but that comment required an immediate response.)

Maybe Landmarkism has some of it right?

Is there a difference between a church full of Christians and a Christian church?

A VERY interesting conversation between Dr. Tom Ascol of Founders Ministries and Dr. Tom Nettles of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Dr. Nettles has written a number of books on the history of Baptists and Baptist distinctives /identity and I don’t think it would be a stretch to say that he is one of the, if not the, preeminent Baptist scholars on being Baptist alive. In the second of three podcasts, Dr. Ascol asks some pretty pointed questions of Dr. Nettles that focused at first on Landmarkism in Southern Baptist churches. I generally dislike the hyper-separatism of Landmark Baptist churches but they do have some valid points regarding the validity of a church that is operating in opposition to the Biblical command to baptize only believers.

What constitutes a church? Is it the presence of Christians? What of properly administering the sacraments? Let me ask this question as delicately as I can: if the Biblical teaching on baptism, as Baptists would hold, is that only believers are to be baptized and indeed as Dr. Nettles states ceremonies involving infants should not even properly be called baptism, then does it follow that by definition churches that baptize infants are not rightly administering the sacraments and as such are not valid Christian churches? In other words, is the baptism of believers alone merely a Baptist distinctive or is it indicative of a right administration of the sacraments of the church

A follow-up question revolved around a dilemma many a Reformed Baptist such as myself faces. Which is preferable: a church who has given up on core confessional truths but has the correct ecclesiology or a church which holds to the traditional orthodox confessional standards but has a faulty ecclesiology? In more specific parlance, would you rather go to a Baptist church that has a watered down doctrinal stance but only baptizes believers or would you rather go to an Orthodox Presbyterian church that toes the line on the Three Forms of Unity and has a liturgical service, but willfully baptized infants who are unable to show any sign of repentance?

This is a real dilemma for a lot of Reformed Baptists because there frankly aren’t a ton of Baptist churches that are also Reformed, or even committed to Baptist confessional truths. Many a Baptist church has drifted so close to the emergent/seeker-sensitive model that they have become indistinguishable from those heresies. Some would point to that and use that as a reason why Presbyterian/Reformed churches are preferable. I would argue that by trading one erroneous system for another, you really aren’t gaining anything. Dr. Nettles made the salient point that the Baptist church in our example is better because at least with the Baptist church, they are historically orthodox in their confession so you have the opportunity to restore confessional faith. In the Presbyterian church, they are institutional and confessionally wedded to the error of infant baptism. The opportunity to reform, in other words, is more realistic in the Baptist church.

What this should really indicate for us is that Baptist churches need to really return to their confessional truths. No one should be welcomed into full membership in a Baptist church who is not at least somewhat familiar with Baptist distinctives. If their reason for joining in membership is that they like the music or it is convenient or the pastor is nice, they need to look a little deeper at their motivation. Baptists shouldn't hide from our heritage and our confessions.

Why bother being a Baptist anyway?

The news from Minnesota, not Lake Woebegone but Bethlehem Baptist, is that they are revisiting the issue that caused so much controversy a few years ago: will they admit into membership people who were baptized as infants but don't want to be properly and Biblically baptized as adults. Traditionally, in most conservative Baptist churches, that was the case. If you were baptized as an infant and now wanted to join a Baptist church you had to undergo baptism. Not be rebaptized as infant baptism is rightly seen as illegitimate and not a true baptism anyway, but to be Biblically baptize after repentance and a public profession of faith in Christ. Now Bethlehem Baptist is questioning that practice.

The Issue: Church Membership
The issue was: How should our church relate to those who are born again, and deeply committed to the Bible and to Christ, but are not yet persuaded that their infant baptism is unbiblical and invalid? Should such believers be admitted in some cases to membership at Bethlehem? Or to put the question in the larger general way: Should the front door of the local church be roughly the same size as the door to the universal body of Christ? In other words, should we say to any person: We know you have truly entered into membership in the universal body of Christ, but you may not enter into membership in this local expression of the body of Christ?

How Important Is Membership?
Or another way to put the issue is: How does the seriousness of exclusion from local church membership compare with the seriousness of not being baptized even though, after studying the Scriptures and trying to be obedient, the unbaptized person believes that he is baptized? In the real world where genuine, Bible-believing, gospel-loving, Christ-exalting, missions-minded Christians do not agree on the meaning of baptism in the New Testament, how should we relate to each other?

Piper states that Bethlehem Baptist is concerned not with baptism per se, that they hold to an orthodox Baptist position on believers baptism. Their statement of faith certainly does. They claim this is a separate issue, an issue of membership not baptism.

But if you believe so strongly in believers baptism as Biblical, why would you admit into membership someone in rebellion against the Word, who refuses to submit to the authority of the Bible and be baptized as professing faith? Someone who apparently is relying on the act of getting sprinkled as a baby, before conversion to fulfill a very specific Biblical command? I think not and I am not sure what would motivate this.

On the other hand. what is the motivation of those seeking to join a Baptist church and not hold to Baptist theology? I fear it is based on a desire to be a member of Piper’s church, a name brand pastor. Why else would you seek to fellowship and join in covenant membership with a Baptist church if you refuse to follow one of the key distinctives of a Baptist church? I would hope that people would not join a church for such self-serving reasons, but I am cynical enough to assume that it does happen.

Should this be a conversation we should have? Certainly. We should be clear on what Biblical baptism looks like and what cchurch membership entails. But should a Baptist church abandon one of it's core convictions to bring in more members, to make rebellious Christians more comfortable, to allow some who refuse to be Biblically baptized to say "I belong to John Piper's church? I don't think so and I hope that the elders of Bethlehem Baptist agree.

(HT: Voice of the Sheep)