The New Covenant And Believers' Baptism (part 7)

(Part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six).

In this installment, we finish our review of Dr. Field's first post. Here's how he ends:

Abstraction. This all brings home that the idea of the NC in 3. above is an abstraction from the (true) doctrine of God having a certain and decreed invisible big-E elect.

8. There are, however, other ways of relating these realities. For example, let the OC [Old Covenant] = the historically observable manifestation of the CG [Covenant of Grace] pre-Jesus. Let the NC [New Covenant] = the historically observable manifestation of the CG post-Jesus. Then you are able at one and the same time to assert and understand the wonderful discontinuities between OC and NC (internalisation, internationalization, greater privileges, historical actualization, human maturation, intensive and extensive access, better motivation, greater permanence etc.) and to avoid the category confusion, disconnect, denial, and abstraction described above.

This is the same argument again, using different words. Dr. Field classifies talk of the elect as being invisible and intangible, then insists that such things can't be linked to historical covenants (which are visible). This, as we have observed, completely misses the point that there are visible fruits of election which spiritually minded and Biblically educated men are competent to make a judgment on. I think Dr. Field is one of the elect; his confession of faith in Christ, his many years labouring for the Lord, his conduct as testified to by other Christians and his godly standard of speech on his blog and so forth are not invisible. The hard and fast "election=invisible, covenant=visible" distinction that the whole argument is based upon simply doesn't work.

In fact, as a Reformed Baptist I don't have a problem with the supposedly alternative characterisation of the New Covenant given above, or see it as contradictory to the one given when viewing it from another angle. It is simply a false dichotomy that Dr. Field has set up to argue that the New Covenant can either be viewed as being made with the elect alone, or being the historically observable manifestation of the Covenant of Grace post-Jesus. Dr. Field is committing an equivocation fallacy upon the words "historically observable", which he through the assumptions of the Federal Vision defines in a very nuanced way. Baptist churches aren't actually invisible - you can observe them at work, and we know that as a former Baptist Dr. Field must surely have observed some at some stage in his theological journey!

Go into all the world!

The Bible tells us that the gospel must, and will, be spread amongst every possible people group on the earth - and that we who believe in Jesus Christ are to be the ones who get off our backsides and go and do it:

And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go therefore, and disciple all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the world." (Matthew 28:18-21)

After this I looked, and, behold, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands; and cried with a loud voice, saying, "Salvation to our God who sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb." (Revelation 7:9-10)

According to the reports I've seen on the news today (in relation to the photographing of an as-yet uncontacted tribe, e.g. here), there are believed to be around 100 tribes in the world who have not had any contact at all made with them.

That's 100 tribes that Christian's have to make efforts to reach. No doubt many will be murdered when they try. Nevertheless, Revelation 7:9-10 assures us that the effort ultimately will be a success. There's no greater privilege in the world than being the first to preach the gospel to people who've never heard it before.

The agents of tolerance strike again

Owners of large estates who open them to the public are exempted from inheritance tax, because of this public benefit. The Christian Institute is reporting that the "gay rights" group, Stonewall, is seeking to ask the treasury whether it can withdraw this exemption from Earl, because the said Earl doesn't agree with their views. The Earl in question is the Earl of Devon, and has already lost £200,000 a year in income for his estate because Devon County Council cancelled his licence to hold marriage ceremonies on his estate, because he would only allow actual marriage and not the state's newly invented "homosexual partnerships". That loss, though, was not enough for Stonewall, who want to see him hit harder, even without any apparent legal basis for doing so.

Ah, the agents of tolerance strike again. Or maybe I should say, the agents of mendacity. When their opinions were in the minority, they preached tolerance to those of different persuasions. Now that their friends are in power, they wish the state to carry out vindicative campaigns of persecution against those who don't tow the line.

Over the future years, Western secular democracies will see the continuance of an already well-advanced trend: the demand by homosexuals and other sexual deviants that they should be awarded "super-rights", trumping any other group, such that anyone who dares to disagree with them is officially persecuted at all possible levels. Arguments based on "tolerance" will gradually give way to arguments based on "intolerance": those who don't hold the "right" (as decided by us!) opinions should be punished. Christians will need to be increasingly aware of what's going on so that they can effectively resist it.

Here's a neat game to get into...

There is a class of campaigning atheists who believe that abusing science is their best propaganda tool. One of the neat tricks they try to pull again and again is the "let's do a scientific study to explain religion" game.

Once you spot what's going on, you'll start to wonder how these supposed lovers of free thought manage to apply so little skeptical thought to their own game. How so? Notice that these same "scientists" never run studies to attempt to explain the origins of atheism. Nope - it's always theism that they assume requires some explanation, and atheism gets a free pass. What's the assumption underlying the "scientific" study at the very beginning, before any data's come in? That atheism needs no accounting for, and that religion in humanity requires an explanation. Ho hum!

Here's such a study, published in New Scientist (a not infrequent offender in the "confusing atheism with science" stakes), in which the "researchers" wrote a computer program that they intended to model a genetic simulation, together with the assumption that there could be a "genetic predisposition to pass along unverifiable information". They programmed into their model some more of their curious assumptions, which resulted in the outcome that this "predisposition to pass along unverifiable information" gave a survival advantage.

What next? Ah, the conclusion. These "scientists" then declared that teaching religion (with no distinctions - as atheists they assume all religions are the same!) is a form of passing along unverifiable information, and then they concluded that this could be why religion survives amongst men. New Scientist duly published this so-called research, thus falsifying the thesis that all papers in scientific journals are the results of careful and searching peer review.

We do wonder, though, how it is that these skeptical thinkers never thought of classifying teaching atheism as a form of spreading unverifiable information? Or perhaps there was a paper we missed in a previous issue that showed that atheism had been finally verified? Perhaps it contained the still missing explanations for the mechanism as to how matter, time and space could arise out of nothing, how the complex machinery of life assembled itself, and how self-conscious thinking beings such as humans could arise in an impersonal atheistic universe?

Next time you see a "scientists have explained how religion spreads" news story, ask yourself this question: Why has there still not been one "why atheism spreads" investigation from these scientists? Once you ask that, you'll see what's going on: not science, but atheistic philosophy dressed up as if it were.

Hat tip: Uncommon Descent

The New Covenant And Believers' Baptism (part 5)

Denial. At which point the only rescue for the antipaedobaptist use of the nature of the NC is to deny that baptism is really baptism for the non-Elect. They get wet but you deny that they have been baptized. They take bread and wine but you deny that they have taken the body and blood of Jesus. At this point you have a New Covenant which dips in and out of relationship with covenant initiation, the covenant meal, covenant blessings and covenant threats.

Dr. Field's point here is that there he (he says) a problem which arises for the Baptist (or, to use Dr. Field's own polemical choice of terminology, "antipaedobaptist"), because we've got to say what happened at the baptisms of those who later turn out not to be truly converted. If baptism is only for the elect, and if a non-elect person goes through with the ordinance, what did they receive?

This is a common Federal Vision argument, but I confess that it leaves me totally unmoved. To the Reformed Baptist mind it addresses a non-problem. Is it meant to be a word game of some sort? Someone was baptised, but not really baptised - ha ha, gotcha, a formal contradiction? Dr. Field says that this leads to a New Covenant which "dips in and out of relationship", so this does indeed appear to be what he is saying: it leads to ambiguity.

The assumption that Dr. Field and other antiantipaedobaptists are making here and which is driving the argument, is that baptism must do something. Whoever is receiving it, in whatever condition they are in, whatever they understand by it and whatever reasons they ask for it: it must do something. Otherwise it would just, so the thinking goes, be in itself an empty ritual which we can't allow: maybe something more for certain recipients, but in itself a nothing. The Reformed antiantiantipaedobaptist though, here says "why can't we allow it? What's wrong with saying that the false believer got wet but didn't really receive any of the benefits which a believer who approaches the ordinance with faith receives?" It becomes clear, then, that what's driving the argument here is an assumed sacramentalism. Again, I point out that Dr. Field doesn't argue from Biblical texts, but from certain constructions of what the Covenant and its signs must be, which he then imposes upon the case.  Maybe a case for that kind of sacramentalism could be made from the Bible, and then examined and evaluated. In this post, though, Dr. Field is simply assuming his conclusions at the outset without making the arguments.

R C Sproul endorses Young Earth Creationism as the only credible interpretation of the Bible and the historic Christian confessions

"RC Sproul is a well-known evangelical scholar, an author of some 60 books and numerous other resources that have been greatly beneficial to Christians. He says:

‘For most of my teaching career, I considered the framework hypothesis to be a possibility. But I have now changed my mind. I now hold to a literal six-day creation … . Genesis says that God created the universe and everything in it in six twenty-four–hour periods.'"

Read more here: http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/5774/

A Holy Hush

‘If you endeavour to bring a holy hush upon people in a worship service, you can be assured that someone will say that the atmosphere is unfriendly or cold. All that many people can imagine is that the absence of chatter would mean the presence of stiff, awkward unfriendliness. Since they have little or no experience with the deep gladness of momentous gravity, they strive for gladness the only way they know how – by being light-hearted, chipper, and talkative’.

(Piper, John. The Supremacy of God in Preaching. 1998. Kingsway Publications, Eastbourne. P. 51.)

Is it not for this reason that many churches seem to think it is compulsory that any possible periods of silence should be covered by having someone playing music or singing? Silence is threatening - we feel exposed, so we quickly move to fill it. But in worship we are exposed: exposed before an all-seeing God, and that's how it should be. We need to lift our minds up to great thoughts of God, rather than moving quickly to remove any potential unease with the all-pervasive music.