Bully's Blog

or “Nothing to see here, citizens. Go to your homes.”

Emeth Hesed blogged recently about “heads of households” meetings…

Since moving to the Land of the Free, I have enjoyed how well women are treated here. I can see that America really is a country with a Christian heritage even if it’s not a Christian nation anymore. But attending the church where my husband grew up, I have never felt so disenfranchised in my life. I have never felt so cut off from the covenant I was baptized into, from the rightful inheritance God has promised me.

Emeth makes some great points but the thing that strikes me about these “intramural” Presbyterian debates is the failure to identify the real villain.

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or A Ripsnorter Ritual

Ritual is powerful stuff. Much of modern evangelicalism prides itself in rejecting liturgy and being “open to the Spirit,” and then turns this “openness” into an uninspired (and very uninspiring) human formula, in place of the inspired Divine one. Instead of following a pattern found in every part of the Bible (worship is literary architecture), we are stuck with either erroneous traditions or off-the-cuff rambles which, although “open to inspiration,” somehow sound exactly the same each week. Human beings love repetition in every area of life, and ritual is a prime method of teaching truth and holiness.

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What is the referent of “body of Christ” in 1 Corinthians 11:29?

“For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself.”

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A Guest Post by Chris Oswald, a pastor in the St. Louis, Missouri area

Gospel Proximity: Credo- and Paedobaptism and Pneumatological Signage

In the shadow of a tall bookshelf containing all 144,000 Douglas Wilson books, next to the covenantal family sing-a-long piano which held the covenantal tea set on a covenantal doily, I sat on a covenantal couch trying to explain our credo-baptist position to some dear Christian friends who wished to join our church without getting wet.

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One of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn’t belong,
Can you tell which thing is not like the others
By the time I finish my song?

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Part 1   |   Part 2   |   Part 3

We have arrived the central cycle, the “Pentecost” of the epistle. Here’s how it looks so far:

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or What Was A Nazirite?

“A defiled Nazirite is an Adam or an Eve who has failed at holy war and thus cannot enter into God’s rest.”

Since I rave on about structure so much (and how wrong it is that we moderns regard it as merely an ornamental option rather than as the label on the tin) the fractalicious* Covenant structure of Numbers 6 should give us some clues as to what the Nazirite vow actually was in the big picture.

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An excerpt from Bible Matrix III:

Just as Esau was the line of Cain rolled into one, so Jacob was a true son of God. In fact, being blameless as Noah was, the Lord granted him a vision of the true Gate of God, a tower reaching to heaven.

In Bible Matrix, we mentioned the significance of Jacob’s “ziggurat” vision as it relates to the mountain of God. [1] Jacob was laid out on the ground like Adam. His slumber brings a “Bridal” vision.

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In Born of the Spirit, Peter J. Leithart writes:

Alan Kerr (The Temple of Jesus’ Body: The Temple Theme in the Gospel of John (Library of New Testament Studies), 71) offers this comment on Jesus’ statement that Nicodemus had to be born of the Spirit before entering the kingdom: “It is almost universally accepted that Spirit here refers to the Spirit of God. But at this stage in the Gospel there was no Spirit (7:39), because Jesus was not yet glorified. It is not until Jesus is risen and appears to the disciples and breathes on them and says, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’ that the Spirit is given (20:22). So from the point of view of Johannine timing what Jesus says to Nicodemus should only be realized in a post-resurrection setting. Properly speaking he can only be reborn from above when Jesus is glorified.”

This obviously affects the use of John 3:5 as a proof text for the doctrine of regeneration.

Is this support for the ‘giving of the Spirit’ in paedobaptism?

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or Shekinah People

“The solution here is not, as Calvin believed, to dress the New Covenant’s ethical maturity in the puerile clothing of paedobaptism.”

In The Failure of the American Baptist Culture [PDF], James Jordan, Ray Sutton and others expose the rot at the heart of baptistic theology, which is inherently man-centred. The authors call us from a view of salvation in isolation to a wider vision of the meaning of baptism, which signifies the broader realities of the Covenant of Grace. I learned a great deal about history and Reformed theology, and thoroughly recommend it to you. In my view, however, they don’t go far enough. A call to understand the vital historical connection between circumcision and baptism certainly deals with the errors of the Anabaptists, but when rightly understood, the progressive nature of revelation also exposes the use of paedobaptism as a connection with the Old Covenant as entirely bogus.

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