When theological folks dichotomize, they often do it without regard to the reality of time. And this causes no end of trouble.

Given their assumptions about the political dualities of life, the anabaptist impulse to reject infant baptism is a shrewd one, because all these things are connected together. And infant baptism is a statement, among other things, about time. The tangles we get into over visible/invisible church, the City of God/city of man, kingdom of God/kingdom of the devil, heaven/earth all occur because we try to conceive of them all as static realities, and not as categories that exist in various forms of tension or battle over the course of history. Time matters; history matters. An infant you baptize is not the same person who goes to heaven, and yet is very much the same person. There is continuity/discontinuity, and much of it is revealed over time.

Read the rest at When Civilizations Are Baptized in Infancy.

This ends as a stellar response to some people who are 1) mistaken, in my opinion, and 2) acting as if their novel views are the standard of all orthodoxy and they have the right to treat those who disagree with them as unorthodox.

I loved that part.

But really, the words about the importance of time and our historic impulse to not talk about time is really much more profound than that single issue.