“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.

Fractal Nature

We have discussed the process of maturity as consisting of physical, social and ethical. This occurs at many levels. In each case, one is given being, then one is given authority by Covenant (a legal and relational contract, consisting of Law and Love), and finally one is called to nurture and protect those in one’s care. We see this threefold pattern in the Garden of Eden. Then we see it multiplied (as a 3 x 3) in the three domains of Garden, Land and World. Each domain has a “horizontal” progression and a “vertical” one. [1]

In the chapter “Calvin’s Covenantal Response to the Anabaptist View of Baptism,” Peter Lillback notes that Calvin rejected credobaptism because it classified circumcision and baptism as “carnal” and “spiritual” signs respectively.

Since this rejection demanded that the Old Testament covenant be made into a material or carnal covenant – circumcision was not a spiritual symbol – several important doctrines associated with the covenant were as a result severely injured. If the Anabaptist basis for rejecting infant baptism prevailed, then there would be no Old Testament progressive revelation and preparation for the Messiah. Since the Old Testament covenant was only material, Christ would be never present before them, and so God would in essence have mocked them by withholding salvation from them. Just as serious, there would have been no Old Testament counterpart of the grace of justification which was founded upon Christ. If such a carnal covenant were correct, Paul’s argument on the example of Israel’s punishment for disobedience supported by the equality of sacraments of the Old and New Covenants would be utterly in error. And every bit as unthinkable, the Word of God present in the covenant formula would be severed from eternal life. It is because of these resulting errors that Calvin can speak of infant baptism as a safeguard of Scripture and doctrine. If it is taught, the continuity of Scripture in the one divine covenant of grace is affirmed. For Calvin, there is one covenant which is constant throughout Scripture. To reject infant baptism is to deny the unity of the covenant and thus to result in such confusion. (p. 193) [2]

How can I maintain that, even before the Fall, nature and “supernature” were distinct elements and avoid the severance of the Old Covenant from the New? It seems to me that the problem lies in a failure to understand organic growth. At every point in my life, I am complete, and yet, throughout the process of life, there is progress, there is continuity. A male is a boy, an adolescent and then a man. But a man is not a boy, and a boy is not a man. The prelapsarian world, the Old Covenant world, the New Covenant world, are all stages in a single process, growing like a body. At every stage, the Covenant is complete. Each stage is physical, social and ethical. And yet, like a human life, the early stages are predominantly physical, the middle stages predominantly social, and the final stages predominantly ethical. The solution here is not, as Calvin believed, to dress the New Covenant’s ethical maturity in the puerile Mosaic clothing of paedobaptism. That is not continuity; it is retardation. In this respect, paedobaptism is like the modern habit of men dressing as boys to express their shirking of adult responsibilities.

So, the key is to understand the fractal nature of the life of the Covenant, which brings us to the real solution to the problem.

Ray Sutton rightly makes much of the objective standard of the Covenant being the fix for the subjective spirituality of fallen human beings. Forming always comes before filling. The hard edges of the walls of the house make for the comfort, safety and freedom of those within. But the hard edges of the Mosaic Law have been replaced by the Law of the Spirit. The letter of the Law, written on stone under Moses, then written on flesh after the captivity (Jer. 31:31-34 [3]), is now alive in the Spirit. If this is the case, what exactly are the hard edges of the New Covenant house?

Excommunication as Architecture

One thing I have really appreciated from these authors is their revival of an understanding of New Covenant excommunication. The problem is, according to them, one can be born physically into the New Covenant and then excommunicated “spiritually” for an unwillingness to repent of unethical behavior. Conflating generation with regeneration might appear to solve some problems that credobaptists have, but it causes untold problems elsewhere.

The walls and gates of the New Covenant are Spirit-filled people. The dividing line between those inside and those outside is ethical maturity. It is the understanding that I am sinful and Jesus Christ is righteous. This can only be revealed by the Spirit. More than that, however, it goes beyond this objective legal truth to a subjective relational truth, completing the Covenant process, and uniting Old and New as necessary parts of the whole. Church membership requires an ethical response, which begins with repentance and confession. In confession, I stand with God, legally, and in His court, against myself and against the devil.

This means that excommunication is simply identifying someone who has wittingly or unwittingly masqueraded as an angel of light. It means they are bread that is not cooked through and must be returned to the oven, put once again under the sound of the Gospel: repent and believe. If they will not be cut ethically (“cut to the heart”), then they must be cut away socially. If they still do not repent, God will cut them off physically.

Guarding the Spring of Life

The New Covenant gathering is an ethical gathering. It is all of the previous Covenant eras snowballed into one. It is most certainly physical, a visible body of gathered people. It is most certainly social, because we are to be mediators in prayer and care for each other, for our children and for the helpless. But it is predominantly ethical and the change in the Covenant sign communicates that progression. This means that baptism to circumcision is as a judge’s gown to a family likeness. Each of us was formed to be filled. The fact that there are truly retarded people who may not be able to understand or confess is no excuse to retard the process of Covenant maturity. We minister to them as God’s mediators and leave them to His mercy, because, believe it or not, He is merciful. We must not lower the bar for the New Covenant to mere physical attendance or social interaction. The divisions of flesh are torn away and God is after our hearts.

Still Cutting the Flesh

We see this threefold process in the Tabernacle and in the sacrificial rites. The animal “is” (being), then it is “set apart” (sanctified) and cut (social – circumcision), and finally the holy fire descends to “transform” it. If we maintain a “social” baptism, our understanding of Covenant is no better, typologically speaking, than the priests of Baal or the first century “mutilation.” Paul wished that they would go the whole way and emasculate themselves. I don’t believe that paedobaptists are like these godless people. What I am saying is that our use of the New Covenant sign should clearly reflect the ongoing ethical maturity, received by faith, which we are teaching and preaching.

The Ark Carried on Human Legs

Israel’s festal calendar, like the Creation week, moved from physical light to social light to ethical light. [4] The final step is Sukkoth, Clouds, God’s people as miniature glory clouds, with bridal fire visible from within. God’s law has been satisfied and He is now pleased to dwell within each individual and gather them as His cloud, a corporate dwelling. He smells a pleasing aroma and feels at home. Only the regenerate person is on the same page as God. The only baptism that makes sense of all the biblical types and patterns is credobaptism, a rite that makes one a righteous judge, one of the elohim, who have the mind of God and are therefore many but one. Under the New Covenant, it is our “ethical” (spiritual) sameness which brings about our physical and social unity, not the other way around. We meet with the saints because, like God, we discern a spiritual likeness. That, and only that, is the sociology of the New Covenant. Baptism is for the Shekinah people, those with permanent access to the Cloud. A New Covenant saint is a union of heaven and earth, of flesh and of Spirit, a living sacrifice. To divorce these with either baptistic gnosticism (Spirit) or paedobaptistic carnality (flesh) is to put asunder what God finally joined together in Christ.

The Two Births as Architecture

Finally, here is another diagram which I hope explains the “fractal” nature of the Covenants, and allows both a continuity and a discontinuity.

When I explained my position to a friend recently, he commented that it is “the Federal Vision on steroids,” which describes it perfectly. The Federal Vision has understood the Old Covenant structures but applied them as an inherently social sign rather than an inherently ethical sign. In the diagram on the left, the blood is the blood of the sacrifice applied to the four horns of the Altar. The altar symbolized Israel, a single nation, and in that case it was the blood of circumcision. You might notice the correspondence between the firstborn male (corners) and the firstborn animal (horns). Circumcision divided Israel from the other nations. When Christ came, that division was torn down. The four cornered altar gave way to a round laver. But the altar was not removed, only displaced and enlarged. All nations are now being offered to God in Christ.

This brings us to the second diagram, where the four horns are now the entire social world, Jew and Gentile, all nations. The blood is now the blood of Christ. This means that, and please listen here, all nations are now under Covenant. All men everywhere are commanded to repent. All children in every nation are Covenant children. All men, women and children across the world are now under the obligations of the New Covenant. The New Covenant sign marks out the priesthood within this new global “Land,” the regenerate within the merely “generate.”

For the Federal Vision crowd, this means that your baptism is redundant. It also means that the Covenant realities you have unearthed for us from the Old Testament put both baptistic and paedobaptistic errors to death. And yet, it is Good News.

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[1] This chart is from Bible Matrix III: The House of God. It shows that the threefold Ethics stage of the Covenant is a microcosm of, and contained within, the fivefold Social Covenant and the sevenfold Physical Creation. (This also destroys Covenant Creationism, which conflates the physical and social rather than the social and ethical, but that’s another story.)
[2] Lillback does in fact go on to share Calvin’s many reasons for the obvious discontinuities, and they align in with what I have presented here. Yet in all this he fails to grasp the individual experience as an expression of the macrocosmic history, an observation which would unite all of his isolated observations together as descriptions of a single organism, and also explain why there was no “Covenant sign” required before the circumcision of Abraham. It also leaves him with no sound explanation for the move from one Covenant sign to another.
[3] Calvin mistakenly sees the citation of this text in Hebrews as interpretation rather than application. Its context is clearly the Restoration Era.
[4] This supports James Jordan’s assertion that Adam and Eve sinned on Day 6, failing to enter into God’s rest on Day 7.

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.

Calvin writes: “We assert that the whole guilt of sin is taken away in baptism, so that the remains of sin still existing are not imputed. That this may be more clear, let my readers call to mind that there is a twofold grace in baptism, for therein both remission of sins and regeneration are offered to us. We teach that full remission is made, but that regeneration is only begun and goes on making progress during the whole of life. Accordingly, sin truly remains in us, and is not instantly in one day extinguished by baptism, but as the guilt is effaced it is null in regard to imputation.”

With this I wholeheartedly agree. Within the process of regeneration there is a continued process of repentance. Yet, as we read through the Old Testament and become familiar with the methods of God, it should become clear that there is always a watershed, a “Day of Atonement” which cuts into history, buries the past and secures the future, all by Covenant.

As I’ve written elsewhere here, the Federal Vision attempts to import all the gravity of biblical baptism into a distorted shadow of the rite. What they are importing is the truth. What they are cramming it into is an errant practice that cannot contain this truth without contradicting the gospel.

I don’t believe any of these theologians misunderstand the gospel. For instance, Doug Wilson was invited to speak at one of John Piper’s events because “He gets the gospel.” I believe Pastor Wilson gets the gospel better than most baptists. So, what is my problem?

My problem is that infant baptism is not consistent with the gospel, and is actually foreign to the process of regeneration. At the shallow end, it sends a “double-minded” message to the world. At the deep end, it rides against the most fundamental structures of the Bible.

I’m a postmillennialist. I believe the New Covenant will succeed, in history, because all God’s people are now prophets and witnesses. We are still being regenerated, even as we take part in regenerating humanity, yet the New Testament puts a watershed at the beginning of this mediatorial ministry for each person.

Old Covenant Israel’s “watershed” wasn’t water, it was blood. They were a distinct people, a genealogy set apart (sanctified) for a special purpose. Though there were prophets and witnesses within Israel, the people itself was not “converted” in a New Covenant way. The Old Covenant became obsolete by design. Israel was meat set apart, lifted up, placed on the Altar and awaiting the fire of the Spirit to cleanse her. The Old Covenant is a history of knives.

The antignostic direction of the Federal Vision is commendable. Before I read these authors I didn’t even understand what gnosticism was. They teach that the Church is the flesh and blood Body of Christ. But their adherence to the practice of paedobaptism causes a severe misunderstanding of this rediscovered truth. Baptism identifies us with Christ, joins us to Christ’s Body, includes us in and puts us under the authority of the Covenant. But the “water” boundary is never the first contact with the outside world as it comes in. The first boundary is always blood.

For the paedobaptist, the “blood” boundary is not a cutting of the heart. The blood boundary is the genealogy of the parent/s. It’s the wrong blood. The first contact with unregenerate flesh is not the water of baptism. The first contact is the knife of the gospel, the Old Covenant history, all Israel, honed into One Single Event, a shattered Jew stretched out on a Gentile frame.

Faith comes by hearing. The Federal Vision’s act of reviving a gutsy, biblical baptism is wonderful, but conferring this “sainthood” upon infants manufactures another gospel, a carnal one that is in conflict with the true gospel they preach. They preach the gospel from the pulpit, but preach another gospel at the font. It’s just not apparent because they don’t carry this baptism to its logical conclusion. But their enemies do.

The Old Covenant was never going to succeed in bringing the nations–the Greater Bride–into the House of God. The house was not yet clean. There was a continual need for blood, and circumcision drew a line, in blood, in the sand. Paedobaptism does exactly the same thing. It draws a line around flesh that is set apart, awaiting the fire of the Spirit. The claim that an infant can be identified with Christ by the Spirit in baptism is a sophistry made up out of whole cloth. It’s an ugly, man-made Frankenstein of a doctrine that has no basis in Scripture.

The move towards a new understanding of the Church as the City of God on earth is just what the Church needs. But paedobaptists, who lead in this area, are hamstrung by this practice. They preach the process, but they misunderstand the process. Yes, the Church throughout history has been and will always be flesh and blood, but it is now Spirit-filled flesh and blood. This is where all the types in the Old Testament butt horns with paedobaptism. The cleansed lepers were obedient lepers.

The New Covenant people is a nation of chosen, qualified, Covenant-administering mediators, of angels. The “Covenant boundary” of this city is not the water of baptism. It is an ear willingly bored by the gospel, a heart cut by the gospel, a head bowed in submission to a Church invested with the gospel, and a converted man, woman or child who is then invested with the gospel in baptism. The “first contact” is the hearing of the gospel, and baptism is not the gospel. [1] The disempowered paedobaptism of most paedobaptists doesn’t claim to be the gospel. But the reimpowered baptism of the Federal Vision is, in practice, another gospel, because it is administered to those who do not qualify.

Paedobaptism and postmillennialism are incompatible. The goal is not a world under the sound of the gospel, marked out by a misapplied baptism. The world is already marked out by the blood of Christ. That is the first contact. The goal is a world converted by the gospel, with the converts marked out by baptism.

I’m not against the Federal Vision theologians. This is my way of cheering them on. The simple fact is that they haven’t gone far enough.

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[1] When it comes to church discipline, is such discipline a call to baptism? No, it’s a call to hear the gospel and repent. The gospel is the first contact.

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?

More preachers ought to ascend into the pulpit with the look that Wylie Coyote had on his face when he was just handed the anvil.

Spurgeon used to walk up the stairs to his pulpit, and every step he would say “I believe in the Holy Spirit”, “I believe in the Holy Spirit”…Now why was this? Is this because Spurgeon had butterflies? Why is Saint Paul after many years in ministry asking believers of his day to pray for boldness so that he could preach the Word? Why his he praying for boldness? It is not because Paul struggled with stage fright. That’s not why. He knew what happened when he preached the Word.

There was an Anglican cleric who said famously, “you know wherever the Apostle Paul went, there was either a revival or a riot. Everywhere I go they serve tea.”

-Douglas Wilson, from his talk, The Sacred Script in the Theater of God, given at the 2009 Desiring God National Conference. Thanks to Passion For Preaching blog.

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.)

Excerpts from Did Plato Read Moses?

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”?

Though Christians can agree that pagan goodness is insufficient to gain entrance to the kingdom of God, the fact that the good pagan exists at all seems to undermine the New Testament’s assertion that the “flesh is hostile to God” and that unredeemed sinners approve those who break God’s commandments. How, moreover, can a Christian explain the moral consensus that is said to exist among all cultures and religions, a consensus ably summarised in C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man?

I am very skeptical that any such universal moral consensus exists. Reformed discussions of this question have generally been highly nuanced. At a very general level, Calvin said, there is a consensus of moral principle, but when one gets down to specifics the consensus disappears. This argument is confirmed by history and experience. Every society says murder is wrong. But is killing an unborn child murder? Many, perhaps a majority of groups, would say no. Seneca and Zeno say no, and even advocated infanticide and exposure of infants. Everyone says murder is wrong, but are human and child sacrifice wrong? Many cultures have practised such rites. Every people says murder is wrong, but is it murder to befriend a member of a neighbouring tribe, win his confidence and trust, invite him to your hut for dinner, and then fall upon him and beat him to a pulp? Don Richardson, a missionary to the Sawi people of Irian Jaya, reports that in the tribe among whom he worked it was considered a badge of honour to befriend and then betray a member of a neighbouring tribe.

Nuanced as he tried to make his formulation, I believe Calvin was too sanguine. Living in Europe as an heir of 1200 years of Christendom, Calvin observed that everyone, whether Protestant or Catholic, heretic or Jew, held to the same basic moral perspective, and he apparently took this as a universal phenomenon. In late twentieth century America, we should not be so blind…

…on the contrary, the Bible indicates that special revelation was transmitted through the ancient world in written form, and no doubt in oral tradition as well. Extra-biblical evidence supports this conclusion. I would thus generalise Augustine’s final conclusion about Plato: It is impossible to determine whether whatever moral or theological consensus existed in the ancient world was the product of general or special revelation. The evidence shows that ancient cultures were exposed to both.

What is true of the ancient world is even more obviously true of Western civilisation. The Word of God has been so intertwined with our civilisation that the two are nearly impossible to separate. Distinctly biblical moral precept seem to the Western mind to be precepts of nature, accessible to every reasonable man with a modicum of common sense. Nature has been permeated and therefore transformed by grace. The God in whom Western atheists disbelieve is the biblical God (not Baal or Kronos), and many relativists claim that the one absolute is that preeminent Pauline virtue, love. One ancient near eastern flood myth recorded that the gods sent a flood because the people swarming over the earth were so noisy that the gods could not sleep at night. To the extent that moderns find this quaint or appalling, to the extent that biblical religion–not some abstraction called “common grace”–has shaped our conception of what conduct is proper to God. What the West has held in common is precisely what is, theological speaking, special.

The practical conclusion of the argument presented here is that the moral foundations of civilisation as opposed to barbarism are the product of the working of God’s grace as it is distributed through His Word and Spirit, not the product of some vague and abstract general grace of God. Or, to put it differently, the general grace of God is not a constant, but is directly proportional to the spread of the special saving grace of God. If this is the case, then any moral consensus in American civilisation will increasingly vanish as people abandon the Word of God. Romans 1 says that God abandons idolaters to moral confusion, so that they approve what they know to be evil. This is our future; increasingly, this is our present.

If this is true, encouragement to virtue is a paltry and ultimately foolhardy response to the crisis of Western civilisation. The only answer is to be found in the universal and uncompromising proclamation of an undiluted gospel.

The Sacred Script in the Theater of God

“Why does the world not believe? When was the last time we commanded it to? When was the last time we spoke with authority and not like the scribes?”

or listen to audio here.