Comments on: The Baptized Body – 4

By: Mike Bull

Mike Bull — Wed, 28 Aug 2013 00:14:37 +0000

Chris – yes, basically.
This might help, too:

Circumcision/gospel > circumcised heart/repentance, which leads to…

Faith/baptism > final resurrection.

The signs are different because they prefigure different things. Circumcision prefigured repentance, and baptism prefigures the resurrection of the repentant.

So baptism is NOT a call to repent. The Gospel is.

Thanks

By: Mike Bull

Mike Bull — Wed, 28 Aug 2013 00:11:54 +0000

Robert – is there any difference between evangelizing our children and raising them in the fear of the Lord? No. The way the FV gets around the “three kinds of people” problem is the crazy idea that infants are somehow regenerate without repentance and faith (and telling everybody that physical/social responses are direct ethical responses to God is a gross misrepresentation). I think we have covered the question of whether infants are damned or not before. What you gents think you are doing for your infants in baptism has already been done for all people. God is their judge, and He is merciful. If we trust and obey what He has revealed, rather than misusing baptism, we will one day understand. If our children are already “saved” then the Gospel is redundant. And the sun shines out of church wombs, which it doesn’t.
I don’t think Leithart misunderstands so much as gets his borders wrong. The border you guys are marking out in baptism is already marked out and it includes all nations. Your baptism is not efficacious but what it supposedly achieves is already in effect: global obligation to follow Christ. This is actually good news, and it points us outward instead of thinking we are some kind of “master race” which is where this carnal craziness, whatever its good intentions, always leads.
A mountain of biblical data? All I’ve seen is some verses from the Psalms taken out of Covenant context and twisted beyond recognition. Sorry, but that’s all there is. The requirements for baptism are plain. Trust and obey!

By: Robert Murphy

Robert Murphy — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 18:41:26 +0000

I’m left wondering how consistent you are with your separation of things. By your reckoning, we ought to evangelize our children, not raise them in the fear and admonition of The Lord. As you say, either Leithart totally misunderstands what it is to be a Christian, or you do. God never says there are three kinds of people: the saved, the unsaved, and people not yet able to make a cognitive decision at full intellectual capacity. Since that third one is not a valid biblical category, we must conclude that children who haven’t yet professed Christ are damned. That goes against a mountain of biblical data, so somewhere along in your assumptions there must be an error.

By: Chris W

Chris W — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 17:06:09 +0000

So if I’m reading you correctly, it goes something like this:

0) Conception (Physical realm) to…
1) Birth (First Baptism – entrance into Social realm) to…
2) Credobaptism (Second Baptism – entrance into Ethical realm) to…
3) Resurrection (Third Baptism – entrance into new world)