Baptist Bloviating

Baptist Minister David McCrory wrote,

“A person must first be converted by the Gospel before they can obey the Gospel. Thus, making a person a disciple of Jesus Christ is a prerequisite to a person being taught by Jesus Christ. When viewed from this perspective, the Great Commission clearly outlines the biblical pattern for the Church to follow:

1. Make disciples 2. Baptize them. 3. Teach them to …observe all things…

Therefore, according to Christ’s command, baptism is an act of obedience, subsequent to conversion, and a demonstration of one’s willingness to live as a teachable disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ

Bret responds,

Your contention does you no good because,

1.) There is clearly continuity between the covenant of grace prior to the Christ and the covenant of grace upon Christ’s incarnation. This is seen in Jer. 31 where the promise of the new covenant includes the writing of God’s law on their hearts. What law is it that will be written on their hearts?

Why the Mosaic law — the law of the Old Covenant — of course. That law included the requirement to give children the sign of the covenant.

2.) Since God does not explicitly rescind his requirement to give children the sign of the covenant, the requirement to bring His children to be marked with the sign of the covenant remains. Also the reality of Household Baptisms in the New Testament excoriates your reasoning.

In the New Testament we see household baptisms frequently. Now, the Baptist will insist that there are no children explicitly mentioned in those NT accounts but even if there were not children there the reality of Household Baptisms utterly crushes the Baptist contention that infants should not receive the sign of the covenant (Baptism) because the principle of household Baptism teaches that all who are members of the household are baptized. So, you see, it is really irrelevant whether or not there were infants baptized in those household Baptisms in the New Testament because the principle of household Baptism teaches that if there had been infants there they would have been baptized.

3.) In Matthew 28:18-20 Christ commands us to Baptize the nations (the Greek word is ethnos – Literally peoples). He who commands all Peoples to be baptized also commands infants to be Baptized; for a command concerning a group includes all those who fall in that group (genus – species). The design of Christ in the Great Commission is to teach the manner of collecting and conserving the Church in the World until the end of time and to prescribe that manner to the apostles and their successors. Now as the Church that the Apostles are being called to collect and conserve consists of infants as well as adults (that is the way it had always consisted and there is absolutely nothing anywhere in any text that reverses this paradigm) so that manner that Christ is teaching them in building the Church has reference to both adults and children, but according to the condition of each: that adults newly entering into the Covenant should be taught before they are Baptized, while infants should be Baptized as covenanted and Christian, and afterwards be taught in their own time. If an objection is placed here that discipling of the Peoples precedes the Baptizing of Peoples we would observe that Christ speaks of discipling and teaching here first since a primeval Church among Gentiles would by necessity be first a collection of adults, therefore naturally discipling and teaching precedes baptizing, just as those strangers and aliens coming into the Covenant Community in the Old Testament would have been discipled and taught before they were circumcised. The goal then of the Gentiles entering into the Covenant as Covenanted parents wasn’t to get their seed to accept Christianity, rather their goal was to teach their children that they were Christian that they might not reject their covenant identity, conceding that if they fully and finally reject Christianity (a thing that by all rights should be uncommon among those trained in the Covenant) then their children were Gentile seed but not God’s seed (consider Esau). The distinction and concession underscores the reality that Salvation is always by Grace and not Race while at the same time maintaining that because of Grace, Grace often runs in familial lines (Deuteronomy 7:9).

We believe that in the Great Commission passage when Christ lays the emphasis on ‘All Nations’ He is doing so to firmly implant in Jewish thinking that the Gospel is not solely a Jewish concern. In this way our Lord makes clear that the Gospel is no longer provincial and in issuing the order unto Baptism we see a new sacramental sign given by our Lord Christ to replace the Old Covenant sign of Circumcision, just as He earlier gave His table as a sign of the New Covenant to replace and fulfill the old covenant sign of the Passover. The Great Commission underscores that the Church is no longer primarily Jewish. This ‘New’ thing is given a new sacramental sign to replace and fulfill circumcision (a new sign for a new covenant). But the Church is not told to exclude its children and here in Matthew 28 is the place where by all rights that should have been said if it was going to be said.

Baptist Minister David McCrory writes,

The practice of infant baptism was birthed in the Roman Catholic Church and is based on superstitious rationalistic humanism. It is a logical argument constructed from a faulty hermeneutic. While consistent, it is consistently wrong. The baptism of infants has no exegtical support for, as many respected Reformed theologians admit, it is not found in Scripture. Calvin himself confessed, “The word baptize signifies to immerse. It is certain that immersion was the practice of the primitive church.”

Bret responds,

1.) In point of fact the practice of infant Baptism was birthed in the Old Testament with the practice of circumcision. In the New Testament Baptism replaces circumcision as the sign of the covenant.

In circumcision, the organ of generation was given the covenant mark by its circumcised status, signifying that man’s hope is not in generation but in regeneration, a new life in the Lord. The reason circumcision was eclipsed with the coming of Christ is that w/ Christ the Regeneration Himself had arrived and had been bloodily cut off. There is therefore no longer the need for the symbol since the reality had come and so no longer reason for the organ of generation to be bloodily marred. Further, Circumcision is eclipsed as the covenant sign because Christ, in His Cross work, fulfills the bloody cutting off of sin that circumcision proclaimed. Because Christ on the Cross is the Church’s circumcision no more bloody rites are left to the Church and so water becomes the new sign and seal thus indicating the washing away of sin by the blood of Christ.

Christ’s command in Matthew 28 to Baptize is the Scripture where we find a new covenant sign is given for a new and improved covenant.

Baptist Minister David McCrory,

“The case for infant baptism is always built upon a series of arguments based on reason, supposedly flowing from Scripture. It is said to be a natural result of interpreting Scripture based upon ‘good and necessary consequence’. But an exegetical study of Scripture will evidence over and over again infant baptism can neither be proved to be good or necessary. The testimony of Scripture will eternally stand at odds to an extra-Scriptural practice.”

The case of infant baptism is built upon the Reformed Hermeneutic which teaches that whatever God says in the Old Testament remains true for the New Testament unless God specifically rescinds something He said earlier in the Old Testament. The Reformed Hermeneutic does not teach, like the Baptist hermeneutic, that in order for something from the Old Testament to remain abiding God has to repeat that something again in the New Testament. So, since God in the earlier scripture instructed that the children of His people were to be given the sign of the covenant, the Reformed rightly hold that children in the New Covenant should be given the sign of the covenant. The fact that the sign has morphed from circumcision to baptism is seen in Jesus words in Matthew 28:16-20. The Church in the new covenant age will have baptism as the sign of the covenant and children are to receive that sign just as they received it in the old covenant.

Keep in mind here that Baptist reasoning is saying that in the new and better covenant, the children, unlike the children in the old and worse covenant, are not to receive the blessing of the sign of the covenant.

David McCrory — Baptist Minister

“Christ’s own disciples failed to note the perceived continuity between circumcision and baptism. Peter, in the first Christian sermon, required of the circumcised men of his day, those who were already circumcised, to repent and be baptized. Their former status, and the sign of their former status, was of no avail. The old had passed away and all things were being made new.”

Bret responds,

The sign of the former status was of no avail because the reality that the former status pointed to (Christ) had come. The necessity for Baptism, even for the circumcised, was lodged in the reality that the old order had been transcended. It is really this simple. It is not because there was no relation between the old and new covenants.

At best the Baptist withholds water from the infant because he thinks he cannot know that the infant is saved. For this reason water is offered to the confessor only. Some Reformed Baptists believe infants ‘may’ be saved but that it cannot be known with any certainty until they confess Christ. They need that evidence. (Never mind that the Baptist does not know with any greater certainty that the adult confessor is saved. Witness the recidivism rate among Baptist baptized converts.) A persons confession is his ticket to the act.

The Reformed, on the other hand, [at least those that are consistent and covenantally astute] ] look to the promises of God for the condition of their children. The Baptist looks at a human confession for proof and the Reformed look to the divine promise. The most charitable view that can be given the Baptist is that his view is anthropocentric as opposed to the Reformed position which is Theocentric. A more realistic view in my estimation is that the reformed Baptist at this point has a latent synergism in his theology.

Whether or not the Baptist realizes it, his position implies a disjunctive relationship between the old and new testaments. His argument usually revolves around Moses and the law–we are no longer under the law. But circumcision is not Mosaic; circumcision is Abrahamic. The rite was given to Abraham to whom the promise of the Messiah was given and that promise was to him and to his seed and that promise came 430 years before the law. Moses is irrelevant to the discussion.

Homosexuality in Genesis 9?

22And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brothers outside. 23Then Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it on both their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father. Their faces were turned backward, and they did not see their father’s nakedness. 24When Noah awoke from his wine(A) and knew what his youngest son had done to him,

According to one understanding, we see here the first mention of homosexuality. Here Ham “saw [or uncovered] the nakedness of his Father,” and was then cursed by his Father when “Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his younger son had done to him.” To uncover nakedness is a Hebrew idiom meaning to have “sexual relations (see Leviticus chapters 18-20). In Call of the Torah, Rabbi Elie Munk cites Hebrew scholars who also interpret Ham’s violation as “an act of pederasty” (p. 220). Thus Ham becomes “Canaan,” for whom the land of Canaan is named.

One school of Jewish tradition holds that the “last straw” of human wickedness which precipitated God’s action of bringing flood upon the earth, was the advent of “homosexual marriage (ibid.), implying that Ham had been corrupted by homosexual sin in the pre-flood society, and carried the vice like a virus into the new world. Significantly, it was Ham’s near descendants who founded and populated the Canaanite cites of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Redeeming the Rainbow
Dr. Scott Lively

I Samuel 8, The Declaration of Independence, Scourging of the Shire, and Obamacare

I Samuel 8:10 So Samuel told all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking for a king from him. 11 He said, “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots. 12 And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plough his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. 13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14 He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. 15 He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants. 16 He will take your male servants and female servants and the best of your young men and your donkeys, and put them to his work. 17 He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. 18 And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the LORD will not answer you in that day.”

This proclivity of Government to be a tyrant over the people is a theme that we find repeated throughout history. In point of fact, this very kind of tyranny, that we find warned against in I Samuel 8 is listed as a reason by the 1776 Colonialists as a reason for Declaring Independence. In the list of complaints against King George III we find,

“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.”

Clearly the theme of harassment and the multiplying of offices is a link that connects I Samuel 8 and the Declaration of Independence. God warns Israel about the way of Tyrants and the Declaration of Independence complains about the ways of Tyrants.

However, we find the same thing happening in our own lives with the advent of Obama-care. Socialized Medicine parallels God’s warnings about tyrants and is consistent with the complaint denounced in the Declaration of multiplying offices. The number of regulations and the horde of administrators necessary to execute the scheme are staggering. We have only to think here of the Independent Payment Advisory Board. It is a commission of 15 members appointed by the President, charged with the task of reducing Medicare spending. Then there are the reports of the IRS needing thousands upon thousands of new employees to administer socialized health-care.

What else is this but a multiplying of offices? What else is this but the creating of swarms of Officers to harass people? What else is this but insuring that the substance of free people is confiscated and redistributed in order, in part, to feed the appetite of these swarms of new officers. The confiscatory taxation to pay for this boondoggle has a large percentage of it dedicated to pay the salaries of these swarms of officers.

God warned against this eventuality in I Samuel 8. God said the result of Israel being like the Nations around them with a cherished King would be enslavement.  God was their King but now they would have a sovereign that was human and humanistic and the result would be slavery.

Thus is always the consequence of throwing off God’s Kingship for a human one. The result is always the loss of true liberty and the corresponding presence of slavery. Whether individually or corporately a person or people cannot throw off the rule of God without at the same time becoming a slave to man.

This explains why the Calvinistic heart has always burned so red hot for liberty.   The Calvinist knows that God in Christ is His liege Lord. Christ has paid for his sins and set him free from the dominion of darkness. As such He would be ruled by God in every jurisdiction from government to self to government of family, to government of Church to government in the civil realm. Precisely because the Biblical Christian understands who he is governed by the Biblical Christian has not tolerated, through the centuries, those who would rule him in ways inconsistent with the Lordship of Jesus Christ. They learned this from Calvin who said,

“We are subject to the men who rule over us, but subject only in the Lord. If they command anything against him, let us not pay the least regard to it.”

Book Four, Calvin’s Institutes

“If princes demand that we turn from honor of God, if they force us into idolatry or superstition, then they have no more authority over us than frogs and lice do.”
Sermons Acts

John Calvin“For earthly princes lay aside their power when they rise up against God, and are unworthy to be reckoned among the number of mankind. We ought, rather, to spit upon their heads than to obey them.”

― John Calvin, Daniel, Vols 1-2

For the Biblical Christian — for the Calvinist this is a matter of the first commandment. Christ has paid for His sin and so the Christian is not His own but in life and death and body and soul belongs to His faithful savior Jesus Christ. As such the Biblical Christian’s fealty – loyalty is to God in Christ. and woe to anyone who would govern him in ways inconsistent with God’s expressed rule.

To paraphrase Kipling’s poetic advice of a King to his son who would one day rule,

"You can enslave your Methodist parsons, or abuse your
      Lutheran peers;
But don't try that game on the Calvinist; you'll have the whole 
     brood round your ears.
From the richest old Thane in the county to the poorest chained 
              serf in the field,
They'll be at you and on you like hornets, and, if you are wise,
                  you  will finally yield.

This nation, in its founding, was imbued with this disposition. It is true, there was also present contrary ideological winds in our founding. There was the presence of the Enlightenment deistic influence. There certainly was a Masonic influence as well. But however imperfectly present, Biblical Calvinist Christianity influenced the formation of this nation.

One of the Authors who I quite enjoy, Erik von Kuehnelt Leddihn once wrote,

“If we call the American statesmen of the late 18th century the Founding Fathers of the United States, the the Pilgrims and Puritans were the grandfathers and Calvin the great grandfather…. [T]hough the fashionable 18th century Deism may have pervaded some intellectual circles, the prevailing spirit of Americans before and after the war was essentially Calvinistic.”

But we do not have to take Leddihn’s word for this. The Historian Carlson informs us,

“When Cornwallis was driven back to ultimate retreat and surrender at Yorktown, all of the colonels of the Colonial Army but one were Presbyterian elders. It is estimated that more than one half of all the soldiers and officers of the American Army during the Revolution were Presbyterian.”

The Calvinist drive for Liberty against Tyranny was embodied by a Presbyterian minister named James Caldwell,

In the Battle of Springfield, Pastor Caldwell, who’s own Church had been burned to the ground by the British, discovered that Patriot troops were out of paper wadding for their muskets. Caldwell rushed to a nearby church, gathered up the hymnbooks, and brought them to the battle front.

As the Patriot soldiers tore through the hymnals to stuff the paper down their muskets, Caldwell noted that many of the hymns in the book were written by Isaac Watts. With that, Parson Caldwell rallied the Patriots with his now famous battle cry, “Now put Watts into them, boys!”

And on the influence of Calvinism and it’s thirst for Liberty upon this country we remember that Horace Walpole spoke from the English House of Commons to report on these “extraordinary proceedings” in the colonies of the new world. Walpole said,  “There is no good crying about the matter. Cousin America has run off with the Presbyterian parson, and that is the end of it.”


And these Calvinists … these Biblical Christians did not countenance political enslavement. They would not be ruled by those who would place upon them the yoke of humanist slavery. Some have suggested that the Calvinist war for Independence in the Colonies was merely a continuation of the English Civil War when there also the Puritans would not be tyrannized by King Charles.

That the Calvinists would not be enslaved is also seen by their refusal to have a Bishop named for the Colonies. This is a factor in our Independence that is seldom spoken of today. The Colonialists were dreadfully concerned that King George was going to appoint a Anglican Bishop over them. They understood that this was one more example of the Crown trying to enslave the colonies because they understood the political power wielded by Anglican Bishops for the Crown.  The Calvinists, many of whose forbears fled England in order to escape Anglicanism, were not going to have any of that.

In a political cartoon about the plot to impose an Anglican bishop over the American colonies, the patriot mobs in New England, influenced by their Calvinist Churches, throw a copy of John Calvin’s book at a bishop… The crowds shout to the Bishop, “No Lords Spiritual or Temporal in New England,” and “Liberty and Freedom of Conscience,” and “Shall they be obliged to maintain bishops who cannot maintain themselves.” John Adams later wrote that the rumor that a bishop might be appointed in the colonies was one of the first sparks that ignited the American Revolution. The Presbyterian Francis Alison stated in 1766 that ‘he did not care if the Anglicans had 50 bishops in America …. what we dread is their political power and their courts. The Presbyterians feared that this appointment would lead to religious tyranny and a loss of freedom to worship.

This aspect of the matter demonstrates how the religious and the political are always intertwined.

Christians have always believed that this kind of Tyranny they lived with then and which we are living with today is Usurpation that must be directly stood against. Because Christian have always believed this Usurper and Tyrants have always hated Christians and Christianity. Where there is a willingness to live with this kind of tyranny it is a open question how much Christianity is really influencing the people.

Well, that is where we started. Where are we today?

I’m afraid that our Calvinist and Reformed blood runs thin and anemic. No longer is there the will to resist tyrants … either in the Civil realm or in the Church. Whereas Calvinists used to live so as to bend recalcitrant Rulers to God’s revelation now many many Calvinists find themselves so far bending to tyranny as to try and defend it as “God honoring.” Or, alternately we have the effeminate Calvinist crowd who are constantly declaring that the Church has no business being concerned with what Tyrannical Magistrates do in the common realm. These current effeminate Calvinists would not be recognized by Farel, Beza, Knox, Witherspoon, and the authors of Vindication Against Tyrants, as Calvinists.

Conclusion

We live in desperate times and because of that there is reason to rejoice. The wicked create a trap for the righteous but then fall into it. A sinner’s wealth is stored up for the righteous. When the fall comes it is the Biblical Christian who will rebuild if he is ready.

Like my Fathers before me, I am weary with the habits of a bloated State. I believe it is time for vocalizing counter-revolutionary sentiments that we are no longer going to be content to allow the State to usurp the place of God. We will not continue to make the mistakes that the Israelites made in I Samuel 8.

We are a blood bought people. Christ has redeemed us from the rule of darkness and so with no God but God we will not be ruled by those who have set their face against Christ and His authoritative law Word.

Marxism and Christianity

When Marx adopted the Hegelian dialectic he stood it on its head by converting Hegel’s idealistic dialectics to a materialistic dialectics. Hegel believed that ideas were the moving forces in history. These ideas wrought change by way of the dialectical process. Marx, on the contrary held that material conditions were the moving forces in history. Hence Marx’s emphasis on Economics as Theology (Queen of the sciences). The shift that resulted is a shift from the contest of ideas to the contest over control of material things.

However Marx not only stood Hegel on his head, but he also stood the Christian faith on its head. Marx retained the historic postmillennial eschatology of Christianity and merely put it in service of the Utopian Kingdom of man. The idea of Christian conversion was kept but put into the service of delivering men from their false consciousness. The incarnation was retained but instead of a heaven sent Messiah being sent it was the socially conscious proletariat that was the incarnated Messiah sent to save mankind from the sin of the Bourgeoisie Devil. Marxism holds out a second coming as well with the promise of social revolution filling the role of a coming Messiah. As in Christianity, Communism provides a hope of redemption as man is redeemed from the bondage of Christianity replete with its sinister Capitalism, private property, familial connections and just weight and measures to the freedom of Communism with its glorious Statism, public property, sexual and gender familial perversions and redistributionist weight and measures. Marx retained eternity, but he did so by absolutizing time, and he likewise retained spirit by converting it into matter. Marxism, has it has evolved, likewise has retained the importance of justice that you find in Christianity. Only for Marxism justice is the social justice of egalitarianism where not only are all men economically the same but all men are to be socially, sexually, psychologically and ethnically the same. Marx was the “John the Baptist” of anti-religion religion of Communism, spending his life in the wilderness heralding the imminent coming of the social revolution.

Like Christianity, Marx was interested in resolving the alienation that is characteristic of fallen men. Only for Marx the alienation that man suffered was because man had absorbed the rudiments of a Christian world view. The ultimate aim of Marx’s social revolution was to end the alienation of man from himself and his true nature. Marx believed that man was alienated from himself, first by religion (read Christianity), which subjected him to mediating powers. Further man is alienated from himself by private property due to the fact that private property sets him at odds with others and so alienates him from his social nature. The alienation begins to pile up for Marx as man is alienated by the State which was a instrument of class rule and man is alienated from the product of his labor by the theft of the Capitalist. Notice in all this Marx appeals to the creation of the Commune that the individual might be set free of the alienation that results from the sin of not being rightly related to the social order. For Marx, The abolition of Christianity, and the culture it creates is the end of man’s alienation. Christianity, likewise speaks of alienation but the alienation that it speaks of begins with fallen man’s alienation from God, and Christianity likewise insists that only a conversion can set men free from their alienation, but the conversion Christianity insists upon will eventually result in the very things (free markets, private property, particular normative extended families, States that rule according to God’s standards of justice, etc.) that Marx insists is the embodiment of alienation.

Marx is just Christianity turned inside out. It is the perfect humanist religion because it so well apes Christianity. What is saddening is that currently so many in the Church today are defining Christianity with Marxist type thinking. To be sure, nobody in the Church uses the words “Marxism,” “Cultural Marxism,” “Socialism,” etc. but the policies that the Church pursues (normalizing Homosexuality, supporting Statism whether through Global warming or redistribution of wealth schemes, participating in the guilt complex brought forth by assorted race pimps, etc.) indicates that the Church is calling Karl Marx, “Jesus Christ.”

Salvation & Meaning

In the pages of Scripture we see a connection between God’s creative and redemptive work and the establishing of meaning. The drama of God’s divine work in the Old Testament moves through the creation of the world, the redemption out of Egypt, and the conquest of Canaan. Each of these three acts wrests meaning from meaninglessness: the world emerges from nothing, Israel from the grave of Egypt, and the promised land from the desert. In the New Testament the drama moves through the resurrection in the Gospels, and the need of the Gospel for the nations in Acts. Each of these acts likewise wrest meaning from meaninglessness: the seeming meaninglessness of the Cross is given meaning by the resurrection, and the nations find meaning only as they submit to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

All these acts thus interpret one another as works of divine power where the coming of salvation means the dissolution of meaninglessness. We see here that the progress of redemption is closely tied up with the progress of meaning. In these historical stages the realm of meaning grows.

What is true in the progress of redemption is true for the individual who is caught up in God’s redemption. The individual outside of Christ is without form and void — he finds no basis for meaning — but when the Spirit of God hovers over the individual in order to recreate by way of regeneration the individual, by way of salvation, is for the first time given meaningful meaning.

It is then, not only the soul that is saved in salvation, but also the mind, for in salvation the mind can find objective meaning and be delivered from the subjectivism that is so characteristic of those who are without God and without hope.