The fire spreads throughout the blogosphere, but here is the trail of smoke I most recently noticed (thanks Steve!). Sam Storm asks, regarding the participants in Together for the Gospel,

My question, then, is this: How can we claim to be “together” or “united” for the sake of the gospel and turn away a brother or sister from the very expression and proclamation of that gospel that is so central to the life and testimony of the church? What does this prohibition say to the world around us? What must they think of our professed “togetherness” or “unity” when the elements of the Eucharist would be withheld from a brother such as Ligon Duncan?

An Excursus on Ecumenical Appearances
First of all, I want to admit, even though I think Lig Duncan clearly has the moral high ground here, that I have seen situations where the situation seems reversed. If you are in a church that allows young children to participate in the Lord’s Supper, if is only a matter of time before you encounter a baptist family who holds firmly to the ideas that

1. Junior is not old enough to be baptized, and
2. It is cruel exclusion to not allow Junior to partake in the Lord’s Supper so why are you being so cruel as to exclude him?

I suspect, however, that in the case of the men involved in this discussion that they would see the obvious oxymoron in those two points and not attempt to use it.

The Real Difference
I want to argue that the division separating the brethren here is not the difference between paedobaptism and credobaptism. The sooner we see this the sooner we can discuss the true difference which, as should be obvious to us all by this debate, separates credobaptist from credobaptists and maybe even paedobaptist from paedobaptist.

The debate, remember, is not over paedobaptism but over whether a credobaptist church can allow those baptized in infancy to join their membership and take communion. Pay careful attention to that sentence! Remember, the issue is not over whether a paedobaptist could join and receive communion. As far as I know, I would be welcome at the table since I was baptized by immersion on the basis of my confession of faith.

WHAT THE ISSUE ISN’T?
The issue isn’t whether babies should be baptized or not, because this debate is between people who agree with this premise.

The issue isn’t whether baptism should be immersion, because this debate is between people who agree with this premise.

The issue isn’t over whether people must believe in infant baptism as a condition of church membership, because this debate would allow paedobaptists to be members of a church if they happened to be raised by baptists or were converted as older persons and then baptized in even a paedobaptist church.

WHAT IS THE ISSUE THEN?

The issue is over whether baptism is a signal enacted by a believer to dramatize a truth or if it is (also) God’s act designating His reception of the person baptized.

Notice the also in the statement. It is not enough to show that baptism can be a profession of faith. One must show that it is not a once-and-for-all act on the part of God that can never need repeating.

Notice also, there is no reason why a credobaptist could not accept that baptism is God’s act and still think that it ought only be done to a professing believer with adult-like faith. That is a perfectly understandable position based on exegesis of the Bible (thought totally wrong, in my opinion).

A Marriage Analogy
Say you were a missionary pastor in some other culture and had a Christian couple join your congregation with their believing children. But later you discovered that this couple had been “married” when they were both four-year-olds on the authority of their parents and thus had simply been shacked up together as soon as the reached the ability to procreate.

Would you tell this couple that they were never married? Would you insist that their children are bastards and that they are living in sin until and unless they got remarried for the first time? If you refused to make them get (re)married, would it be just for someone to accuse you of not upholding the Biblical institution of marriage and being compromised with the principles of child-marriage?

No. The fact is, no matter how wrong their marriage was, they are now husband and wife and they should be exhorted to live as the Bible directs husbands and wives to act, not shunned from the Church.

Rite of Passage or Profession of Faith?
When the Bible talks about marriage it constantly talks about it as an objective fact that involved a new beginning in a person’s life. Whether or not one is supposed to be a professing believer is an important question. But it is not the question in this debate. The real question is whether, if one is supposed to be a professing believer, disobedience to this requirement invalidates the baptism. And the way some easily assume that it must invalidate the baptism indicates that, for them, baptism is primarily a profession, not a rite of admission into the church.

I don’t think this justifies any of the language used to describe baptism except perhaps First Peter 3.21. I won’t argue about that passage because, as noted above, positive evidence that baptism involves a profession does not count as evidence that it is not primarily and entrance rite.

If I see more interaction on this issue, I might feel the need to rehearse the Scriptural evidence. For now I will simply point to something I have observed among Baptist believers as prima facie evidence that we all know it is an entrance rite and, whether or not one is supposed to be a professing believer, the baptism is not invalid if the person is not one.

The Revolving Door
Very simply, as one travels away from the Reformed Tradition and finds Baptist believers and Baptist churches that have forgotten their British Reformed heritage one finds a disturbing phenomenon: One finds people who have been baptized several times. Their logic is impeccable. The Church is full of hypocrites. They were probably one the last time they were baptized–not truly understanding the Gospel or truly being repentant, etc. Therefore, having now truly converted, they must be baptized properly the first time.

Repeat as necessary.

But I think that the participants in this conversation know better. They know that baptism is only supposed to be done once. They know there is no evidence whatever in the NT that people who turned out to be false Christians and later truly came to faith had to be baptized again. They know that all the typology of the OT is against such a practice.

So that is the question.

If someone were baptized on a profession of faith that turned out to be false–that is, he was truly converted later in life–would he be denied membership in these churches and not permitted to take part in the Lord’s Supper?

I suspect that if anyone thinks about the revolving door this would establish, and how far this revolving door would be from what we see in the Bible, he would know that this cannot possibly be the right way to practice baptism.

But it follows pretty closely from premises of barring the paedobaptized from membership. The only way to avoid it would be to have an exegetical argument for a specific age requirement that invalidates the baptism if it is violated. If one only has the principle of requiring a profession of faith, then some number of credobaptists will also be barred.

And that is simply not how the Bible shows us the NT Church (or the OT Church) operating.

Baptism is a rite of admission into the Church. If paedobaptist believers should have received the rite when they were older, it remains true that they were admitted.

Excellent commentary. Here’s a hefty portion:

When the Auburn Avenue Conference dealing with covenant theology, called “The Federal Vision” merely as a title, was held in January, 2002, the first people to attack it were Joe Morecraft and his tiny hyper-theonomic denomination. This is hardly a surprise. These people have a very flat view of covenant history, and object to the notion that the New Covenant is the resurrection form of the Old. They also see themselves as “Southern” Presbyterians, which means they dislike Charles Hodge and the kind of open catholicity he represented. Hodge wanted American Presbyterians to make use of the liturgical riches of the Continental Reformed and of the Book of Common Prayer. Morecraft and his “Southerners” are “bapterians” who want no liturgical forms at all. So, they reacted with anger at the covenantal-historical notions presented at the 2002 pastor’s conference.

Next came the Clarkians at Knox Theological Seminary. They, and they alone, actually spoke to the “FV” people that they disagreed with. This, I’m horrified to recount, is unique. None of the other committees and people who have investigated this “FV” stuff have ever bothered to email or phone anyone they are evaluating. At least the Clarkians did talk to us.

But the Clarkians don’t like the FV. Well, is that a surprise? The followers of Gordon Clark say that faith is notitia and assensus, but not fiducia. They have been objecting to historical Calvinism ever since the 1930s. They object to the so-called FV for the same reason: We say that faith involves loyalty, fiducia. Nothing new about that; it’s the standard Calvinistic position; but in the minds of Clarkians standard Calvinism is teaching salvation by faith plus works (fiducia). Hence, it’s hardly surprising that the Clarkians don’t like the FV. They don’t like Cornelius Van Til. They don’t like historic Calvinistic understandings of faith.

Then came the PCA Mississippi Valley Presbytery and its report. Well, they don’t like the FV. That’s no surprise. They don’t like Continental Reformed theology at all. They like Thornwell and the other Southerners, who said that baptized children are just little heathen until they have a “baptistic” faith experience and come to Jesus. They don’t like Hodge. They don’t like Calvin, save as filtered through a “bapterian” mysticism. They are happy with a mix of scholasticism and mysticism, and don’t like the kind of covenant-historical thinking of the Liberated movement and of Cornelius Van Til.

These people have repeatedly said that Presbyterians who like the Federal Vision ideas should leave the Presbyterian church and join a Continental Reformed body. We believe that it is they, with their American revivalistic individualistic mindset, who have departed from the Reformation and from the perspective not only of the Continental tradition, but also of the Westminster tradition. We claim that Westminster is not that much different from the 3FU, and that we stand with both. That’s not acceptable to Southern Presbyterians, who have been described as “baptists who sprinkle babies.”

The OPC chimed in next. No surprise. The OPC is full of Klineans who hate any type of cultural transformation. The whole Reformed “world and life view” tradition is rejected by the Klineans. They want a “spiritual” church that might as well be an invisible church, holed up in this wicked world and waiting for Jesus to come back. Not exactly the robust Calvinism of our postmillennial and “optimistic amillennial” forebears. So, the OPC report (from a stacked committee) rejects the FV. No surprise there.

Finally we come to Mid-America Reformed Seminary, and here I must confess that I was genuinely shocked and saddened. I expected the Southerners, the Clarkians, and the Klineans to dislike what we have been saying. That’s nothing new. They’ve objected to historic Calvinism for two generations at least. And it’s no surprise that the heirs of Kohlbruegge in the RCUS also dislike Norman Shepherd and the FV — after all, if you are suspicious of the whole Reformed doctrine of sanctification, you are not going to welcome people who say that faithful Christians are obedient Christians.

Reading the MARS report, however, I realized that what the MARS faculty dislikes is precisely the Schilderian/Holwerdian thinking that is found in the FV. I don’t know anything much about the politics in the URCNA, but it sure looks to me as an outsider that the MARS report is not really aimed at the FV at all, but at the Canadian Reformed. The things the MARS report criticizes about the FV are mostly Liberated ideas, which we FVers embrace.

To be sure, those of us being grouped into the FV are not on the same page with the Liberated at every point, but we certainly do have a lot of things in common: preferring not to speak of the church as visible and invisible, rejecting the notion of a meritorious covenant of works, treating baptized children as Christians, etc. We who have been put together in this FV Myth have all benefited greatly from the Liberated movement. I have on my shelf a complete file of Almond Branch magazine, which I received from 1971-79. (How many of you readers are old enough to know what that was?) Some “FV” churches use the Canadian Reformed Book of Praise as a hymnal.

Anyway, I guess your magazine will be a place where “FV” notions and scholastic/mystical notions will fight it out. I thought, though, that your readers might want to see how things look from one “major player” in this nonsense.

The worst aspect of this whole debacle is the fact that neither the OPC committee, nor the PCA committee, nor the MARS faculty ever made any contact with the “FV” people they criticize. Had they made even one phone call, they could have found out that we don’t believe most of what they accuse us of believing. I find this behavior appalling.