I noticed one of the more insane of the attack blogs claiming to defend orthodoxy quoted a man recently accused of agreeing with N. T. Wright on justification as saying back in 2004

I don’t agree with Wright on everything he says about justification

Yet this same blog had earlier accused the man of inaccurately reporting that he had not agreed with N. T. Wright on justification back when he wrote at this same time on the same email list from which the above quotation was found. The attack blog had quoted stuff that had nothing to do with justification but rather with what the Pharisees believed. Notably missing from the post was the above quotation. It only slipped in later under a new topic on a different post. I have no access to this list so that I have no way of knowing how many other things are missing that might give a different picture than the one painted and framed by this blog.

Of course, the point of that blog and many others is not to be “even handed” or even pretend to look at all the evidence pro and con. It is to attack and destroy someone that all people of good will should already know is guilty. After all, an entire denomination (represented by stacked study committees rather than the actual actions of its presbyteries) could never be wrong, right?

So what if someone used information from a blog like this to try to reverse a church court ruling that there is no “strong presumption of guilt”? If they simply collect everything they can find that they think qualifies as evidence of guilt, and make no effort to collect evidence of innocence, then what are they doing?

I think what they are doing is called, acting as a voluntary prosecutor.

As I wrote on Machen’s Warrior Children Were Subsidized:

Even our Book of Church Order has a (rather anemic) appeal to the justice of Deuteronomy 19.16-19:

31-9. Every voluntary prosecutor shall be previously warned, that if he fail to show probable cause of the charges, he may himself be censured as a slanderer of the brethren.

But somehow, no one ever needs to actually man up and accuse. No one ever pressed charges against Steve Wilkins in Louisiana Presbytery. The entire process was circumvented so that there was no risk and everyone went along with it.

So by filing a complaint, culled from incredibly biased attacks on a man, one could get a free pass to only care about tearing down a man’s reputation and having virtually no responsibility for considering contrary evidence. What organization will survive a period of time in which accusers are given this kind of institutional cover? Jesus claimed that even Satan knew better than to allow this sort of internal conflict. A kingdom divided against itself cannot stand.

At this point, some of my readers are probably ready to throw this paper down: “You can’t be Reformed and believe in baptismal regeneration! That’s Lutheran, or even Romish!” But patience is needed if we are to attain mutual understanding and like-mindedness. Part of the problem is the meaning of the term “regeneration,” which has been anything but stable in the development of Reformed theology. The term has acquired a fixed and narrow meaning in modern Reformed scholasticism and its popularized twentieth century spin-offs, but it was not always so. In the Bible, the term “regeneration” is used only twice: In Mt. 19:28, to refer to the renewal of the whole cosmos, and in Titus 3:5, in reference to baptism(!) [33]. For Calvin and the early Reformers, “regeneration” usually referred to our total renewal in God’s image, including conversion and growth in Christ-likeness [34]. In Institutes 3.3.1, Calvin wrote, “I interpret repentance as regeneration whose sole end is to restore in us the image of God….[T]his restoration does not take place in one moment or one day or one year; but through continual and sometimes even slow advances.” In the early seventeenth century, the Synod of Dordt whittled the meaning of the term down to conversion alone [35]. Soon after that, Reformed scholastics developed a full blown ordo salutis, distinguishing between the implantation of new life and the first manifestations of that life in faith and repentance, nominating only the former “regeneration.” In this scheme, regeneration is often a secret, unmediated work of God, under-girding and producing conversion. Finally, some contemporary theologians have called for a return to something similar to the earlier, Calvinian meaning, though with a biblical-theological twist. Richard Gaffin argues that “in Paul, the notion of having been raised with Christ [which is usually treated as synonymous with regeneration] does not correspond more or less exactly to the dogmatic conception of regeneration…Paul writes expressly that believers have been raised up with Christ ‘through faith’…Unlike the traditional ordo salutis Paul explicates the inception of the application of redemption without recourse to the terminology of regeneration…understood as ‘a communication of a new principle of life’” [36]. The problems, then, should be obvious. Not only is there a bifurcation between the way “regeneration” is used in the Bible and dogmatic theology, but dogmaticians themselves have not agreed on the proper theological definition of this key term. So whether or not a given version of “baptismal regeneration” is valid depends largely on which theological vocabulary one has chosen to work with.

If regeneration is taken in the Protestant scholastic sense, “baptismal regeneration” is absurd, since it would mean that each and every person baptized was eternally elect and eternally saved. Obviously, the earlier Reformed theologians who spoke freely of “baptismal regeneration” did not have this kind of monstrosity in mind. Instead, their understanding of regeneration was something less specific, more open ended. Regeneration in this broader, generic (shall we say “covenantal”?) sense can be found in passages like Matthew 13:21-22 and Hebrews 6:7-8. In the Parable of the Sower, the stony ground hearer receives the seed and new life springs forth. Something living is there that was not before. But when crises come, that new life withers away. Similarly, Hebrews 6:7-8, in the context of issuing a warning against apostasy, speaks of the earth (a natural allusion to humans, in light of Gen. 2:7) drinking in rain (an obvious allusion to baptism) and producing a living plant. But the blessing of baptismal rain is in itself no guarantee of a good crop. The new life may bear great fruit, unto blessing, or thorns and thistles, unto cursing [37].

This, then, is the point: God blesses us in baptism with new life, though baptism itself does not guarantee perseverance. Thus, we must combine the waters of baptism with enduring faith (cf. 1 Cor. 10:1-12). If not, the heavenly waters God has poured out upon us will drown us in a flood of judgment [38].

All this is to show that the debate over “baptismal regeneration” is not what it appears to be at first glance. Indeed, careful definition of terms is needed, lest we simply talk past each other. However, we must remember that our classical Protestant forebears were very much at home in the strong, efficacious biblical language. If red flags go up for us when we hear things like “God saved you in baptism” (cf. 1 Peter 3:20-21) or “God clothed you with Christ in baptism” (cf. Gal. 3:27), we need to rethink our baptismal theology and bring it more in line with the teaching of God’s Word. At stake is our whole understanding of how God works salvation in the world.

Read it all at: Theologia » Baptismal Efficacy & the Reformed Tradition: Past, Present, & Future.