Bully’s Blog

What worship does to the citadels of unbelief: Sneak Peek of Grace Agenda Conference DVD from Canon Wired on Vimeo.

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“Rend your heart, and not your garments.” - Joel 2:13

Doug Wilson writes:

True repentance is frequently expressed in a state of consternation. Repentance is not just a state of turning away from sin. It is what happens when someone is given a glimpse of what that sin is actually like. Repentance is not technically turning away from something that was technically wrong. Repentance is actually turning away, with revulsion, from something that is now seen in its true colors. This is why repentance is expressed in consternation.

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Douglas Wilson and Mark Driscoll whip up a feast for critical bloggers… great stuff.

Doug Wilson Interviews Mark Driscoll | Part II - Spiritual Gifts & Cessationism from Canon Wired on Vimeo.

“The ancient Hebrews had Ten Commandments, and one slim volume of commentary on those commandments. Go to the nearest law library and ask to see the regulations that you, enlightened modern man, live under. They will show you shelf after shelf of big fat books, and the incoming regulations will, on a daily basis, far surpass the Mosaic code in volume, and what they overdo in quantity they will make up for in pettiness, hubris, and incoherence” (Douglas Wilson, God Is: How Christianity Explains Everything, p. 46).

“…sprinkling or pouring conflates the Covenant head with the Covenant body.”

Doug Wilson writes:

“God, in baptizing the disciples with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, did so by pouring out His Spirit upon them. Pouring is therefore very clearly described as a biblical mode of baptism” (To a Thousand Generations, p. 102).

God poured out the Spirit, certainly. But can we then assume that the apostles poured water on new believers and their babies? Single words are clues, but they can be misleading. The effectiveness of word studies is limited because context is crucial. And the context of the Bible is most importantly structural. Structure is the answer.

The reason is that all of God’s new creations follow the structure of Genesis 1. It’s almost like, when God speaks, the Spirit will pick up anything available, anything lying around, and arrange it into the familiar pattern. This means that the Bible Matrix is crucial in identifying the meanings of many Bible symbols. Baptism and the Day of Atonement might not look anything like each other to us, but the Bible keeps tying them together, along with some other things, to tell us the same part of the Creation story. If we have eyes to see, this method also gives us hints as to the correct mode of baptism. It’s not about the motion of the water. It’s about the motion of the one being baptized. [1]

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Doug Wilson writes: “In and through the sacraments, God winnows, divides, nourishes, establishes, and gloriously saves. He did this throughout the course of the OT narrative, and He is doing it now.” [1]

I agree with this statement entirely, except that the New Covenant body is entirely “priestly.” The Table is not primary education, but secondary. It is not the preaching of the gospel to the unconverted, but the memorial of it by the converted.

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Doug Wilson writes:

“Why do baptists not understand the covenant? The answer is not what many paedobaptists want to hear — the baptists do not understand it because paedobaptists do not understand it” (To a Thousand Generations, p. 95).

In context, Pastor Wilson’s argument here seems to be that if the church is suffering from nominalism, paedobaptism is not to blame.

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“If the Federal Vision got baptism right, they would be demonstrating the biblical dominion pattern in every individual’s life.”

Matt Caslow posted some thinking man’s questions concerning Bully’s broadband brand of credobaptism. Matt, I hope these answers help you understand my assertions. Happy to discuss further. I’ll soon be posting a page at the top of the blog with baptism links.

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Doug Wilson writes:

“As far as the Jews were concerned, the Bible teaches that because they were born into an Israelite family, circumcised in the covenant on the eighth day, they were attached to the tree. This attachment was an objective historical fact. But the sin and hypocrisy of many of them was also an objective fact, and the Lord of the Orchard consequently removed their branches, and grafted in other branches. Now the interesting thing here is that Paul turns and warns the Gentiles who had been grafted in against the very same sin committed by their fruitful predecessors” (To a Thousand Generations, p. 89).

Pastor Wilson writes that Israel is still the tree, but that the ascended Christ is Israel. I dispute the assumption that “natural branches” are still possible. The tree is now supernatural.

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Grace Agenda Conference Trailer from Canon Wired on Vimeo.

This looks like good medicine. Guess I will have to settle for the MP3s again. You know Doug and Mark. Ben preaches at Doug’s church and his messages are simple yet profound. They really stick with you. I’ve read Nate Wilson but not heard him speak. I hear he’s also very good.
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