The word regeneration is often used to describe conversion, but in Scripture it is understood as a process. God calls, cleanses, instructs, clothes, feeds and commissions us. I believe this fact is, however, abused by paedobaptists, who seem to me to be prone to throw the actual “watershed” of conversion out with their baby bath water.
I’m sure I’ve seen the same look in Doug Wilson’s eyes.
The Bible and only the Bible is the ultimate and infallible spiritual authority in the lives of believers. We have fought a series of skirmishes over the infallibility of Scripture.
But, who today believes as Calvin did? Who today treats the Bible as Calvin did? Who today thinks that the Bible opened in the pulpit is a lit stick of dynamite, one that mere mortals are ordained to just throw out into the world? How many preachers have sermons on file that they would not dare to preach without purchasing some extra life insurance first?
In the movie Collision, Christopher Hitchens relies a lot on the idea of a moral consensus, the idea that humanity has an innate sense of what’s right and what’s wrong and that we all agree on the basics. Is there any merit in this assumption? Or is Hitchens assuming that the benefits of Christianity are the result of human reason? Peter Leithart argues that Calvin, as an heir of 1200 years of Christendom, made exactly this mistake.
(I present below just the head and tail of Dr Leithart’s argument. I highly recommend getting a hold of the essay and reading his full argument and evidences.)
Peter Leithart on Middle Grace and Moral Consensus
The Bible presents a bleak view of the moral potential of the natural man. In this respect it seems to fly in the face of the facts. What are we to make of the empirical phenomenon of the “good pagan”?
Doug Wilson’s sermon yesterday at John Piper’s Calvin conference:
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