Make disciples, and baptise them

Peter Leithart is very, very, very clever. He's someone whose learning makes me feel that I need to return to nursery school and try again to see if perhaps next time I could reduce the distance between us.

One of the dangers, though, of being so clever, is that you can talk yourself into believing all kinds of things, which a lesser mind would never be able to accept because they're too preposterous.

Which brings us to this Tweet:

Baptize nations, Jesus says. That is: Do for all nations what Yahweh did for Israel at the sea.

Chosen nation status isn't here cancelled, but universalized, as one people after another is incorporated into the chosen nation, each receiving a new political identity by baptismal death and resurrection, each called to its unique historical vocation.

Concerning the grammar of the Great Commission "make disciples of all the nations, baptising them in the name", much ink has been expended (and if we're going to expend ink on anything, I can think of few better places, so no complaints there!). How do these clauses correlate? Are the nations baptised and then discipled? Must one be a self-conscious disciple to be baptised? Are the disciples called out from the nations, or do nations each themselves become some sort of corporate disciple, nationally brought under the tutelage of Christ?

As with many such questions, the grammar can actually bear more than one construction, and the syntax isn't finally determinative (even whilst we can argue about which is the more natural or likely meaning)....

.... but on the other hand, what the disciples actually went out and did in response to this command is recorded in great detail and is as plain as the proverbial pikestaff. And no less plain is what they then instructed those disciples to carry on doing, and also what they entirely omitted to ever make mention of in their teaching.

So plain, that only someone very, very clever and very decided upon using that cleverness to believe and uphold a doctrine that appeals to them, could fail to register. (It's somewhat akin to arguing about Jesus' words to Peter, "upon this rock I will build my church" - if by this, Jesus was telling Peter about an unbroken line of universal pontiffs based in Rome, succeeding from him to all generations, then Peter never afterwards appears to have known anything about it, and that stubborn fact remains no matter what you can argue that the better syntax-level understanding of the words is or isn't).

The New Testament has a nation in it. That nation entirely supersedes and relativises all other nations. The kingdom of God is not a collection of nations, beginning with the apostate 1st century Israel and then one-by-one progressively assimilating one more nation at a time; and if it were, it has not yet begun, if the New Testament's teaching about discipleship means anything at all. The New Testament's actual teaching gives no countenance to the fever-dreams of some post-millennial theonomic Presbyterians, who hold that once your nation is covenanted, it's always covenanted, end of - and nations never really cease to exist, or come into existence, so there's always an ever-growing number of covenanted nations. The New Testament explicitly and directly redefines the meaning of nations. There are the old nations, which are passing away. They still exist as this old age still endures, and they certainly still have much relevance to our lives; but they are nevertheless passing away. (Analagously: my marriage to my wife endures and is deeply important, notwithstanding my membership of the bride of Christ - it will continue until death do us part, and nothing about Christ's espousal to his eschatological bride can reduce the importance of this relationship in the here and now; and yet, at the same time, human marriages are already passing away, from the New Testament's viewpoint - 1 Corinthians 7:29-31). The kingdom of God is the one nation that will remain, and it exists where there are real disciples of Jesus, who have been born again of his Spirit and are then pass through baptism as individuals and who now belong to his glorious Body. Other nations are around: but also already fading.

If Jesus was telling his apostles to assimilate old-order nations, one-by-one, into his kingdom, as the constituent parts of his kingdom, then they utterly misunderstood, failing to either do it, or tell anyone else to do it, or explaining a theology that would ground it. More than that, they were false teachers, who openly, clearly and pervasively taught in its place a new theology of nationhood that was simply wrong, because Jesus was actually still asserting the old theology of nationhood.

Peter Leithart is very clever. This is a great gift. But his postmillennial/theonomic beliefs, on this subject, have blinded him to what the New Testament does straightforwardly and explicitly and pervasively teach, both at a doctrinal level, and in terms of what program the apostles of Jesus actually implemented.

(So note, in the screenshot above, John is correct, not specifically because of the syntax, but because of the New Testament's sufficient and authoritative record of what was actually then done and taught by the apostles).

Christians' children are worse off if not baptised during infancy?

"Those who claim that Hebrew infants should be circumcised, but that ours should not be baptized, make God more gracious to Jews than to Christians." - Peter Martyr Vermigli (Commentary on Romans, chapter 4 verse 11)

This is, of course, an archetypal supporting argument within circles that teach infant baptism for children of believers. And on the surface, it has an immediate plausibility: if Jews' children received the sign of welcome into the covenant family, then why would Christians' children no longer possess that sign? Has this privilege been withdrawn from them?

It is, however, not truly an argument at all. It is not an argument, but a re-wording of the conclusion. It is a statement that only follows if the actual argument has already been accepted. If the actual argument has not already been accepted, it does precisely nothing to advance it.

How so? Lying behind the statement is the belief that circumcision and baptism are not only divine ordinances with similarities as well as differences, but are fundamentally and essentially the same thing. Any differences are of strictly limited import and finally of no real weight in any practical matter, for they are both "the outward sign of the covenant of grace", signifying and sealing the recipient's membership of that covenant.

And note there that another concept has been admitted which must be viewed in a certain way, in order for that equation to work: there must be a "covenant of grace", and this covenant of grace cannot merely be a unifying concept for understanding God's overall plans throughout salvation history. It is absolutely required that all actual historical covenants (or, at least all those after the fall) found in the Bible, again, despite all their differences, are in the end found to be essentially the same thing, and these differences all found to be of no final weight or import. All Biblical covenants in history do not simply flow from, reflect or advance the purposes of the covenant of grace.... rather, they are "administrations" of this covenant of grace. Note specifically that what cannot be the case is that the New Covenant is the one actualisation in history of an eternal covenant, i.e. the New Covenant is "the covenant of grace" with all the preceding covenants being entities that should be approached firstly upon their own terms, whilst still being intended to ultimately reveal, lead to, and having a deeply important underlying continuity with it. That position (i.e. the Reformed Baptist position) is not enough; all covenants must fundamentally be the covenant of grace. There is really, in practice, only one covenant, under different names and times. The signs and outward accompaniments may change, but the covenant is always one and the same. Jews and Christians must, at the root of it, be the same thing: members of the one-and-only salvific covenant. Again I repeat: we are not talking here about underlying unity, but of to-all-intents-and-purposes identity.

Only then, if all this is accepted, can you speak as Peter Martyr does. Only then can we say that the immediate offspring of a descendant of Abraham according to the flesh before the coming of Christ has received "more grace" than an infant born to believing Christian parents, if the former (assuming that it's a male child) is circumcised on the eighth day, whilst the latter is not sprinkled with sacramental water. But as I say: that's actually the thing to be proved. In and of itself, "but then that means God has been less gracious to Christians than he has been to Old Testament Jews!" is not any sort of argument. It is merely the re-statement of the thing to be proved, but using different words. And as such, in all honesty, it ought to be struck out of the canons of paedobaptist argumentation. It has no actual content that is specific to itself. It simply re-labels the other, real arguments. It is not a supporting sub-argument: it is merely the begging of the question.

The world's foremost false teacher

Tim Challies rightly reminds us that Pope Francis was the world's most well known and influential false teacher.

If your doctrine of showing kindness and respect forbids you to point out the sort of thing that Jesus and his apostles regularly pointed out concerning the particular danger of false teachers, and the need to clearly identify them, avoid them, and warn others against them, then it can't be the practice of the Son of God and those who told us to imitate them as they imitated him (1 Corinthians 11:1) that needs adjusting.

If you don't know in what points the published, official teachings of the Roman Catholic church - the ones that it is their stated aim to propagate, and which they do put vast resources into propagating - differ at essential points from the gospel of Jesus Christ, and at which they undermine and deny it - then the kindest thing you could do for the world's Roman Catholics is to study so that you can understand and clearly articulate that. There are said to be over a billion Roman Catholics in the world, so you're very likely going to meet a lot of them during the course of your life.

Postmillennialism - a theology of hope? On the contrary, a theology of hope misplaced

Postmillennialism is the doctrine that says that, before his second coming, Christ will establish clear outward supremacy amongst the nations, for a prolonged period of time (likely to be centuries at least). Not all people will be converted, but you will be able to say that "the nations have been converted"; the nations in general (or perhaps all of them) will acknowledge that Jesus is Lord, and will order themselves to live under his rule, and will willingly and gladly effectively abolish competing ideologies from public expression. In other words, the gospel's visible triumph is of the sort that means it comes to outwardly dominate over all other alternative beliefs, clearly and conspicuously, throughout the earth.

Postmillennial theologians routinely describe the attractions of their belief in terms of it being a theology of "hope" or "optimism"; a theology that means that we can live in this world with hope/expectation, and know that our labour is not in vain in the Lord. Other views are said to be pessimistic, depressing, lacking hope, and draining their adherents of motivation to serve Christ today.

One - in my view, fatal - problem with this description is that the New Testament clearly teaches Christians that they can, indeed must, live with hope, and know that their labour is not in vain in the Lord, upon different grounds. We look forwards with joy and expectation, because Christ has conquered sin and death, sat down at God's right hand, rules over all things, and is coming again in glory. That is to say, the New Testament explicitly provides other grounds for hope, and portrays those other grounds as entirely sufficient for the outlook that postmillennial theologians say that we need their doctrine in order to arrive at.

Or in other words again, in the New Testament outlook, we live with hope because of the gospel of Christ's death and resurrection, and return. Throughout, the accomplishments of Christ through his cross and empty tomb, through which the dark powers have been defeated, are declared by Christ's messengers to his people as the grounds of their joy and hope; and the culmination of these things is in his second coming to which we look forward with eagerness, as the night will soon be past and the dawn is at hand.

Inasmuch as postmillennial theologians tell us that it is the further announcement (if we, for the sake of argument, grant that this announcement is made somewhere) of the certainty of Christ's clear victory over opposing ideologies consisting in the (vast?) majority of people abandoning them that we find joy, hope, and reason to work for him, they have an irresolvable problem, which is as follows. Either the reasons that the apostles everywhere emphasised were a mistaken emphasis, or they were insufficient reasons for our rejoicing, or the extra reasons provided by postmillennialism are unnecessary.

i.e. We have the horns of a dilemma. Upon one horn, the constant New Testament emphasis upon hope, joy and victory in Christ's resurrection and return was apparently not enough. Any and all passages in which this reason is given need further supplementing by other reasons, and the apostles were mistaken to leave out those reasons in those passages. Christ's ascension and return are, apparently, only enough to rejoice in if you also supply the missing "in between" that during the period from one to another, the proportion of those who will voluntarily submit to him will also reach the threshold that postmillennialism requires (it is not enough that he has a representative number that cumulatively, across the ages, when assembled from across all their different tribes and countries, is the vast Revelation 7 multitude). Or alternatively, upon the other horn, it was enough, meaning that in fact we already have a "theology of hope" without having to accept the beliefs of postmillennialism. Postmillennialism is either false or redundant. Inasfar as you base your joy upon belief about what percentage will be converted before Christ's return, you fail to base your joy upon a foundation that Paul, Peter et. al. already saw as fully sufficient, and you either miss out, or you hold that they were incorrect to do so.

It is my view that a comprehensive study of what excited and motivated the apostles in their preaching and teaching reveals that postmillennialism answers a question that didn't interest them, and which they didn't teach anyone to ask, and which they would have highlighted as a mistaken question if someone had decided to. "Will the greater part of humanity be saved?" belongs to the category of things that God has chosen not to reveal and which are not our business. It is not for us to know the numbers and seasons which God has set in his own sovereignty. On the other hand, certain other spiritual realities, the dawning of the last times through the resurrection and exaltation of Christ, were entirely transformative for the outlook of the apostles and those whom they taught. Those things are revealed, and make all the difference. They make all the difference: they are what constitute the grounds of our certain hope of glory. Anyone who teaches that we must work in a certain way because God has revealed what proportion of humanity will in future recognise him during a substantial period of time teaches people to place their hope somewhere other than where we're meant to put it, and damages the spiritual lives of the hearers. He teaches them to not make his primary way of looking at reality to be the "two realms" scheme of the New Testament (the old realm of Satan, sin and death, and the new realm, which has already invaded history, of Christ, resurrection and life).

False motivations - ones which didn't interest the authoritative declarers of Jesus Christ and his will for his people at all, and which teach people to look at history and space-time reality using a different fundamental lens to that of the New Testament - are not good things, and are not indifferent things. It's not OK to say "oh, but wouldn't it be wonderful if it were true?" We are not called to be wise above what is revealed. It is not wonderful to decide to self-consciously adopt such a viewpoint as ones fundamental outlook on reality. God didn't make a mistake with the viewpoint that he told us to adopt. But here is another fatal problem for advocates of post-millennialism. If they can't say "you should adopt this set of beliefs, because it will give you hope and optimism for the future" (since it's clear from the Bible that we're already meant to have that for other reasons), then what can they say? What now is the marketing point to get people excited?

Further recommended reading; "Paul and the Hope of Glory" - https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B085XNC5QS?psc=1 . It's not about post-millennialism, which gets a tiny mention at the very end. As I'm trying to say, that is the point.

Bodily searches

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/apr/17/trans-women-uk-railways-strip-searched-male-officers

Trans women arrested on Britain’s railways will in future be strip-searched by male officers in an updated policy

i.e. People with male bodies (i.e., men) will in future have bodily searches carried out by men.

This is how the Guardian chooses to put it. For some reason they preferred not to also say the fact that it much more relevant to the great majority of people (though female sex abusers do exist): in future, women will not have to endure bodily searches carried out by men (or in Guardian-speak, "trans-men will in future be strip-searched by women"). Your wife and your daughters will not be subject to a man carrying out a bodily search. I wonder why the Guardian chose to direct us in a different direction?

The British Transport Police said same-sex searches in custody would be conducted “in accordance with the biological birth sex of the detainee” under updated guidance for public bodies.

Which makes sense, because a bodily search was something to do with your body, rather than whatever you believed your "internal sense of gender identity" was.

N.B. saying your "biological birth sex" is a way of trying to make something simple sound complicated. In this case, it sounds like that practice beloved of erring officialdom: obfuscating with unnecessary jargon in order to pretend that you previously weren't in gross dereliction of your duty. Your "biological birth sex" can just be called your "sex", with zero meaning either lost or gained.

Under the force’s previous policy, officers had been told that anyone in custody with a gender recognition certificate would be searched by an officer matching a detainee’s acquired gender

i.e. Previously, physical bodily searches were carried out as if they weren't something primarily to do with your body, but primarily to do with your non-physical inner beliefs about your internal "gender". So, men who claimed that they had an inner "female" orientation, could, on that basis, carry out bodily searches of females.

That policy could make no sense to anybody (because there's no sense in it). It was merely the desire of rabid ideologues who prefer their ideas above the real-world consequences of those ideas. (i.e. They're rabid ideologues, who lack humanity).

The world has plenty of such rabid ideologues, of course. There are all kinds of people suffering all over the world because people prefer their ideas to the flesh-and-blood human beings that their ideas hurt.

So the question then becomes - who in the British Transport Police is going to resign for failing to perform their duty of preferring real people over socially-preferred but actually harmful ideas?

The same question, of course, is now in play (following yesterday's court ruling) for many people in many domains and organisations. "Oops, it just slipped my mind for a moment that girl's bathrooms, women's changing rooms, women's refuges, etc., exist because of the differences of physical bodies, because of physical reality, rather than because of their users' abstract ideas - a subtle mistake anyone could easily make!" It's not really, is it?

The origins of Easter

The Daily Telegraph reports this, concerning a booklet on Easter produced by English Heritage:

Under the heading The Origins of Easter, it states: “Did you know Easter started as a celebration of spring? Long ago, people welcomed warmer days and new life by honouring the goddess Eostre, who gave Easter its name!”

It adds: “Fun Fact: Some traditions for Eostre included dancing around bonfires and decorating homes with flowers.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04/12/english-heritage-claims-easter-isnt-originally-christian/

With C S Lewis' Professor Digby, I find myself shaking my head, and wondering what they do teach them in schools these days.

The above could go straight into a textbook of lexical fallacies, confusing completely the lexical origins of a word, and the actual referent of the word as used. i.e. it slides over between and confuses where the word came from, and what people are talking about when they deploy it.

When people say "Easter", they're almost always referring to the time of the year when Christians observe the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and that celebration itself. That's what they're talking about; thus, that's what the word means.

Along similar lines, when someone says to me "Monday", they're referring to the first day of the working week. It's generally the day on which they go back to work or school, or begin whatever their regular activities again after the weekend. They're not implicitly informing me that they worship the Moon or any other heavenly bodies. The fact that long, long ago people named these day in reference to the Moon can tell us something about those people; it doesn't tell us anything about anything that is being talked about if someone today says "I don't like Mondays!".

English Heritage, thus, have confused what "Easter" is with the possible long-distant origins of the word in the English language. In French, it is called "Pâcques", a word whose origins go back to the Hebrew Passover. Does this mean that "Easter" in England and France are fundamentally two different things? Once you cross the Channel, Easter "is" something else entirely?

So, the thing is what the word is used to refer to. Where the word came from is something else, and no doubt interesting. People all other the world re-deploy existing words, after swapping out the content. Sometimes they do this deliberately (because they want to supplant, replace and ultimately eradicate the memory of the former content; for example, the swapping-out of the meaning of words like "tolerance" and "diversity" during my life-time); sometimes it is done without any particular intent. It may be done quickly, or gradually. You could say that on our current trajectory, for a lot of people, "Easter" is "that time when the kids get a break from school because of the traditional Christian calendar, we give and eat Easter Eggs, and generally feel thankful that winter is gone and spring is here". Yes: in practice, quite not too dissimilar to what English Heritage says the festival that 8th-century Bede refers to was about ... though, it seems English Heritage there also may be projecting back their own beliefs. What Bede actually said is less secular: the Anglo-Saxon pagans of a period before his held religious feasts in the honour of the goddess Eostre. Bede is the only source we have that makes any reference to this; we do not know what sources he himself was drawing upon, and what other information there is about these feasts that would impact our understanding.

There is, of course, no real connection between pagan festivals to West Germanic gods observed by Anglo Saxons, and the festival of Easter as observed traditionally by Christians; there is no sense in which the events of an empty tomb in the near east and the preaching of a risen Messiah by disciples of Jesus in the first century and following, and the traditional beliefs about gods of parts of Western Europe, have anything to do with eachother, except in that the people of Europe in general decided to stop paying any respect to the latter, and instead give all respect to the former. i.e. The only connection is a decision to consciously carry out an entire replacement with something obviously different. So, "Easter" has no more to do with Germanic pagan gods than a Protestant family giving eachother "Christmas" presents means that they have decided that their salvation requires participation in the Catholic Mass after all.

All in all, we learn a few things about English Heritage from this, but essentially nothing about the origins of the thing that people call "Easter", as it's been present in our country's traditions and culture for the last millennium and a half or so.

Jesus, the heavenly bridegroom

It is well known to Christians that in the Scriptures, Jesus the Messiah is revealed to us as the bridegroom of his church. It is a theme well attested to in the prophets (e.g. Ezekiel 16, Isaiah 54:5, Jeremiah 2:2), Psalms (Psalm 45), gospels (Matthew 9:15, John 3:29), letters (Ephesians 5:22-33, 2 Corinthians 10:2), and Revelation (chapter 21 - and note the contrast with the great whore of chapter 18).

I think, though, that I'd either overlooked or forgotten the presence of this theme in John chapter 2, in the account of the first miracle at the wedding at Cana. Jesus is, of course, not the literal bridegroom at his wedding; he, his disciples and his mother were invited guests. His time has not yet come (v4). When Mary urges him to do something about the lack of wine, the reader should understand that this is one of the tasks of the bridegroom. Jesus' time had not yet come to reveal himself fully; and yet, it was already time to reveal himself to his disciples, those who trusted in him. He is a partially hidden bridegroom. The Jewish era brought wine, but it had run out. It was wine in finite and static water-pots (which we may contrast with the flowing waters of the Spirit proceeding from all believers, in John chapter 7). The Old Covenant was wearing out, but its promise remained unfulfilled, leaving people spiritually thirsty. But Jesus fills the water-pots with wine - the true wine, the best wine, and they are satisfied.

The wine was taken to the master of the feast, who was astonished by it. He did not know where it had come from. This is also a repeated theme of John's gospel; people do not know where Jesus has come from, but the reader knows, because this is the very first thing that he has been told in the first verse: he is himself God, who is eternally at the Father's side, and has been made flesh. The master of the feast calls the bridegroom, because it was the bridegroom who brings in the wine. But of course, the master of the feast has identified the wrong bridegroom. The one who has actually produced this wine which was the very best, and yet brought at last, was not the man he had called; that was Jesus. Jesus is the true bridegroom. Some know his identity (the servants and disciples) but others are in his very presence and see his miracles, and yet do not know who is amongst them.

This was the beginning of signs, and Jesus manifested his glory. But he wasn't merely helping people to have a good time; he was not only declaring that the time of Old Covenant water-pots had ended; he was also revealing that he was the hidden bridegroom, ready to feast his guests. The glory revealed includes the glory of being the true bridegroom.

In the very next scene, he goes to the temple - his "Father's house" (v16). Of course he does; for as Isaac brought his long-sought-after bride into his parent's tent, so Jesus must cleanse the divine house to make it a fit place for his bride to be taken home to. The false whore of Babylon must be driven out so that the chosen bride can be brought in. The temple must be cleansed so that God's people can dwell in the very holiest place in God's presence (a theme fulfilled finally at the end of Revelation).

I'm sure there's much more to be seen; I was studying a related passage rather than this one and so that is all I currently have. I hope will be able to return to it. But I can't help noticing too (and this was prompted by hearing a sermon on the fetching of Rebekah for Isaac recently) that there are at least 4 places in Scripture where a bride is found at a well of water:

• The first is Rebekah; we see that the bride is chosen and provided in God's foreordination and sovereignty.
• Then there is Rachel; in this account, the emphasis is that the bride is the kin of Jacob; they are of like nature. The deceiver (Laban) seeks to keep Jacob from his true bride.
• Thirdly, Zipporah: Moses comes far, from a strange land, to marry her. He is an outcast and enemy of the land's evil and tyrannical ruler, but is destined to bring redemption to God's people in that land. He takes up home in a far land and there he marries his bride. (He is, however, a "husband of blood" to Zipporah; the Old Covenant ministration if experienced without faith in the Christ that it foreshadowed ultimately brings death, not life - that had to await the one to come).
• Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well, which is the clear fulfilment of all of the above foreshadowings. She has had several other husbands, but none of them were the true husband who has now come to find her. What is in Christ is not more static water that must be laboriously fetched, time after time, but living water, which flows joyously forever. And it is not the blood of another that has to be spilt to establish or maintain the covenant; he freely gives his own.

It seems to me, though, that in chapter 2, John has reported a further partial accomplishment of this motif. At the wedding in Cana, Jesus is again found by the wells of water, and is revealed as the bridegroom; however, he is not recognised. He reveals his glory: but the principal actors at the wedding fail to see him (though the lowly servants do). He is unrecognised at a Jewish wedding; but later, a Samaritan woman (and village) recognise him. As at the end of the book, where the net is cast out "on the other side" to bring in a great catch, so it is here, with John's revelations of the heavenly bridegroom. Those who should see don't see; to those who were far off and lowly, he is graciously revealed. Some do not know who he is and where he has come from; they can only pose astonished questions and marvel without understanding. But some, without any right to such blessings, do know; they believe, embrace him, and receive life. Their bridegroom has come and found them where they were humbly and endlessly toiling for a finite supply of water; and he gives them eternal wine.