1504

Because my pride should be shattered every day, and this video reminded me of that when my pride was welling up.

HT: Mrs. Dr. Warhead

1503

I know you were all dying to know this, but I am now a public figure at facebook, and you can just click here to become my fan.

1502

I got this via e-mail today, and I thought it was hillarious.

Post 1501

Just a post to let you know that I now have a FaceBook account.

Separation anxiety (boc)

As I alluded to in the meta, I'm going on vacation this weekend, so the Best Of Cent comes early this week. The flip-side of the baptism thing going on here lately is the question of separation -- a doctrine for which we baptists are somewhat infamous. This is an excerpt from a two-part series on that notion from 2006.

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Listen: at the core of the doctrine of separation are a couple of things which the reactionary, the zealot, and the bigot (which are not all the same things) ignore pretty strenuously – that is, they have to exert a lot of energy to ignore these things.

The first thing is this: every mistake is not apostasy and sin. Can we agree on that? For example, when Paul separated with Barnabas over Mark, neither man was falling into apostasy. Barnabas may have made too much out of the necessity of bringing the young man along, and Paul made have made too much out of leaving him behind, but neither man was violating the Gospel over that matter of tactics.

We all make mistakes. Some of us make bigger mistakes than others – because some of us work on a bigger canvas. You know: a guy with a blog that pulls in 500 readers a day can make a bigger mistake than a guy with 5 readers if they both express the same opinion at the same time over the same subject – like demanding that Joel Osteen is a rank heretic. I don’t think Osteen is a rank heretic: I think he’s a pastor who has made some grave tactical errors, and he’s unable to demonstrate that he can express or defend the Gospel on national TV. What that means is that he’s poor evangelist, and he doesn’t have a lot of experience in apologetics. On those grounds, you’d have to call a lot of pastors in America today heretics. Does that sound reasonable to anyone? It doesn’t sound reasonable to me to call a lot of pastors “heretics” because they aren’t skilled in arguing and facing arguments about the doctrines of the faith.

So every mistake is not apostasy. Sorry! If it was, it would be a lot easier to exercise separation, but it would also probably leave you personally as a person from whom we need to be separated.

The second thing is this: choosing to separate is a matter of conscience. In the post Nate made which elicited this response from his reader, he (Nate) cites Spurgeon’s willingness to separate from his church association as a fine example of separation in practice, and in doing so quotes John MacArthur as saying this:

Spurgeon did not actively seek to pull others out of the Union, but he could not understand why men who wanted to remain faithful to the Scriptures would continue to belong to an organization that was so obviously barreling down the down-grade

Certainly, Spurgeon was withdrawing for “principle” – but he did not condemn those who did not withdraw as heretics but as brothers who were making a faulty choice. They have joined to what Spurgeon himself calls a lost cause, but that doesn’t mean they are themselves lost.

In that, the example of Al Mohler “cooperating” with the Billy Graham Crusade is significantly misused. Dr. Mohler has chosen to do something, frankly, I would not choose to do – but that doesn’t make Dr. Mohler a person of theological disrepute. Dr. Mohler has made the choice to go where there are lost people (along with his church) and seek to deliver the Gospel to them. Is there some question of whether or not they will be confused by seeing Catholic, Reformed Baptists and Finney-esque “evangelicals” all lined up together? Why yes: I think there will be some confusion, and there may be some equivocation.

But what is worse: standing next to a Catholic or a wobbly evangelical and preaching the Gospel to the lost, or sitting in at your desk someplace typing on your computer demanding such a stringent form of separation that we have no opportunity to ever see a lost person, and we studiously avoid events where the lost are bound to be. I think the latter is an offense to Christ, and the former is not.

Last (for the sake of the blog this week) is this, which I have eluded to, above: it’s not a sin to preach the Gospel. Um, Duh? It’s not a sin to preach the Gospel – it’s the #1 thing we are called to do. In that, we don’t, for example, become strip-club owners to preach to strippers and their oglers, but we do have an obligation to preach the Gospel to strippers and their oglers. We don’t become murderers to preach the Gospel to murderers. We don’t become thieves to preach the Gospel to thieves, or drunks to become a preacher to drunks. But we must engage our faith in some way that preaches the Gospel to murderers, thieves, drunks, oglers, and strippers.

You know: the sin is in actually being the servant with the single talent. You know that story, right? Mat 25:14-30? The one servant gets one lousy talent, and rather than do something with it for the sake of his master, he does nothing with it for the sake of his master and is frankly punished severely.

Don’t be that servant. That’s the guy who is going to have a very long and uncomfortable time in front of Christ in the final account because he had received the mercy of the Father (allegedly), and then he did nothing with it or because of it.

That’s where I’m going to stop this week, and just as a reminder to myself, this actually has something to do with the alcohol stuff I’ve been posting, so think about that as you try to keep your grass from spontaneously combusting this weekend.

And, of course, be with the Lord’s people on the Lord’s Day in the Lord’s house this weekend. Don’t pretend you’re alone in this world: there are plenty of other hypocrites and sinners just like you who this week will turn towards their savior and worship Him for what He has done. You can join together in the praise. Go do it, and stop pretending that you’re a better person for using separation from sin as an excuse for failing to be obedient to God.

Just to say it out loud

Welty on Baptism.

Who doesn't love him some Welty?

Have a second helping because you're looking a little peaked. (that link's a PDF, so right-click to download)

dreadfulness

One of the things I omitted yesterday (I had an engagement problems, is in, “I couldn’t really get engaged in anything yesterday as I felt worn down”) from Dr. Piper’s sermon is this:

There are godly, Bible-believing, Christ-exalting, God-centered followers of Jesus who fail to see the dreadfulness of not being baptized as a believer. And there are godly, Bible-believing, Christ-exalting, God-centered followers of Jesus who fail to see the dreadfulness of excluding such people from church membership.

Now, Dr. Piper's concluding benediction aside (which I think is the right prayer to make in this case), the problem is not intransigence on the part of the credobaptists -- because we want these people of good faith, these people who have a faith we credit as good and from God and as a miracle of the Holy Spirit, to join us as a church. The question is simply not whether we call them to join us: please, in the name of the savior, join us!

But join us by being baptized. You say you were baptized as an infant, but the New Testament says that baptism is for believers and not merely those whom we hope will someday be believers. Baptism is a plea for a good conscience before God.

I want anyone who has good faith to join with my local church. I want none to be excluded. What I don't want is to do that apart from the obedience of faith, either on my part or theirs.

I honor Dr. Piper's zeal to be visibly in union with other believers. That is a goal which must be unity in truth or else it is a superficial and false unity.

First up, the Lutherans

Over at BHT, John H ponies up this thought about Dr. Piper's sermon on baptism:

However, while for you that is a link setting out an argument which supports the intellectual and theological position you hold concerning the subject of baptism, for me it’s a link telling me why I’m not actually baptised (and why I shouldn’t listen to Jesus when he tells me I am). So you’ll appreciate I’m not rushing to print it out and read it carefully over a coffee. (jn)

Snark aside there at the end, the underlined part is where John goes south. John -- where exactly does "Jesus" say your sprinkling as an infant equals baptism? Name one infant in the NT who was "baptized" by drizzling his forehead with water.

Seriously: before anyone goes ballistic over me calling John "not christian", or that I have labelled his view of this rite "heresy", all I am saying is that what John says he got doesn't look anything like what was presented in the NT as baptism -- not in sequence, not in call, not in process, and not in purpose.

One of the things, historically, that the average baptist preacher has done in this matter is bury his head in the sand and not review what the presbyterian or the lutheran means by baptizing an infant. My opinion is that historically, even the most erudite presbyterians and lutherans are guilty of the same sin but to a lesser degree when dealing with the credobaptist case for what baptism is.

So go get your coffee and a print-out of Dr. Piper's sermon, and read it again -- and then formulate something a little more compelling than "Jesus told me" when in fact Jesus doesn't tell you: you tell you. What Jesus says about this doesn't really enter into it.

Seriously: from a Lutheran point of view, making the validity of baptism dependent on whether there was enough faith and enough water present at the ceremony completely negates the purpose of baptism, which is to assure us that – whatever our own doubts and uncertainties may be about the strength and quality of our faith – we belong to Christ by his own word and according to his own promises.

That, of course, is ludicrous. The question is not whether there was enough "faith" present -- because even a lutheran would confess that an agnostic hobo can't sprinkle the guy in the next trash can who has never heard the Gospel with water from a public fountain and that be called a valid baptism.

And this is the classic paedo dodge: the atomization of faith in order to say that the credo makes baptism about faith rather than about Christ. The problem is that the credo -- the confessional credo -- says everything the paedo would say about baptism except when it comes to the transferrability of the faith of one's parents. Doug Wilson says that one baptizes rather than circumcises in order to prove the New Covenant is better than the Old Covenant because it is at least as inclusive; The WHI guys say that we baptize infants on the promise of faith, overlooking that their foundational passage there in Acts 2 doesn't just say "and your children", but also "for all who are far off" -- and none of them would baptize every person they see on the street on the promise that those who are called will then come.

What the NT demonstrates for us is that faith precedes baptism in order that our baptism can testify to our faith. Faith causes obedience, and baptism is the first act one can make in obedience to God's call to repent and turn away from our old life of sin and rebellion.

Not just the promises which are made generally in the Bible and in preaching: for us, what happens in baptism is that Jesus (through his minister) declares those promises to us personally, as individuals: “I baptize you…”.

That's your spin on it. That's not what the Bible says happens.

Never mind the issue of whether (and/or which) infants should be baptised. This is the real difference: does our faith assure us that our baptism was real, or does our baptism assure us that our faith is real?

And that, John, is the phony dichotomy that all paedos retreat to in the end. Our faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not yet seen; our baptism is evidence of our faith. It can be both: it can be that our faith causes our baptism, and our baptism improves out faith.

In fact, I would argue, it must be both.
____________________

UPDATED: John H. has declined to engage this post as he has better things to do. Like Ministry, I am sure.

More classic: baptism

Dr. Piper explains he is actually a baptist.

Let the further merciless beating on this topic continue.

Come Together

But in the following instructions I do not commend you, because when you come together it is not for the better but for the worse. For, in the first place, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you. And I believe it in part, for there must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized. When you come together, it is not the Lord’s supper that you eat. For in eating, each one goes ahead with his own meal. One goes hungry, another gets drunk. What! Do you not have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I commend you in this? No, I will not. [1 Cor 11:17-22]

The question has come up regarding what Paul is talking about in 1 Cor 11 here, and for your Friday pleasure I thought I'd hammer out a couple of pages on the subject, especially as it relates to this comment recently proffered in the meta:

Since there is no biblical instruction that the table must be conducted in a "local assembly of believers" (I assume you mean a local church), then I posit that any group of believers who is gathered together (a family, a small group, a church, a gathering at a religious camp) may share the table.

Now, just for the record, the LBCF says this on the subject:

The supper of the Lord Jesus was instituted by him the same night wherein he was betrayed, to be observed in his churches, unto the end of the world, for the perpetual remembrance, and shewing forth the sacrifice of himself in his death, confirmation of the faith of believers in all the benefits thereof, their spiritual nourishment, and growth in him, their further engagement in, and to all duties which they owe to him; and to be a bond and pledge of their communion with him, and with each other.[XXX, 1]

And to be sure we reckon what the underlined part there means, consider this:

A particular church, gathered and completely organised according to the mind of Christ, consists of officers and members; and the officers appointed by Christ to be chosen and set apart by the church (so called and gathered), for the peculiar administration of ordinances, and execution of power or duty, which he intrusts them with, or calls them to, to be continued to the end of the world, are bishops or elders, and deacons. [XXVI,8]

That doesn't really have anything to do with 1 Cor 11, but it does point out that the historic Reformed Baptist view of the church, its officers, and the ordinances is that the church is right to call forth "officers" (we might say "ministers") by which the ordinances are administered, and that these ordinances -- particularly the Lord's Supper -- is to be administered to the whole church and not just smaller assemblies in fellowship. This is undergirded by the LBCF's stress on the use of the sabbath for Christian worship.

But that said, is this what Paul would have required? I mean, LBCF and all that stuff, but is it biblicious enough for us to have to follow it today?

Well, the place to start is that Paul wasn't happy with the Corinthians. He says, "I do not commend you, because when you come together it is not for the better but for the worse." Now, what does he mean by "come together"? "Here come old flattop he come grooving up slowly"? I am pretty sure he means "when you come together as a church", because that's what he says in the next sentence. The Greek actually says, when you-all are gathered "ἐν ἐκκλησίᾳ" -- which doesn't mean "whenever a couple of you are around". It means when you are gathered together for the purpose of worship as God's people. That doesn't mean "as smaller groups". It means "as the body of Christ; as one body; when you all come together as one assembly".

So as Paul continues his anti-commendation to the Corinthians here, consider that what he is criticizing is what the practice and what they ought to be practicing as a body together.

"When you come together," he says, "it is not the Lord’s supper that you eat. For in eating, each one goes ahead with his own meal." And to this, Paul says specifically, "What! Do you not have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing?" Notice the contrast he draws between the "houses" of each one verses the "church of God" -- that whatever you do at home, it should not be that way when you come together as the church of God.

"yes, well cent," says one, "we come together as the church of God in many ways, and one of them is that we, in my neck of the woods, come together in our homes as smaller groups to worship God. And when we do that, we sometimes take the Lord's supper -- nobody in the group gets excluded. We come together in a different way than Paul describes here, but it's not disqualified by Paul."

Dude, that's hooie. That's simply wandering around the text rather than reading it. Paul says explicitly here that the church ought to come together specifically for the Lord's supper, and come together specifically without any divisions. When your church goes out to smaller groups in homes to occasionally have the Lord's supper, it's doing in fact what Paul here excoriates -- only it actually goes out to the homes to make the divisions rather than clique up even though the church is all in one place.

Let me say this: there's nothing wrong with small group fellowship. It's great for prayer and real spiritual intimacy. But the gathering in one body specifically has the charge -- seen here as said by Paul -- to remember the Lord's death in the ordinance of the meal.

See: Paul's point here is that if you were in your own home having a select few people over, that's a division which has nothing to do with the assembly of the believers -- it's your party, and you can cry if you want to. But when the believers are actually assembled, your private party time is over. Taking the Lord's Supper out to those smaller groups doesn't sanctify the smaller groups -- it only makes completely obvious that the church is not coming together for this act.

The believers are to assemble for the Lord's Supper, not merely meet up in little coffee claches. Paul says if you assemble but do not treat each other as one body, you are doing something unworthy. How can you then say that if you just don't meet up as one body but instead meet up as smaller units of one body you can get past the criticism that you haven't united?

Paul says come together, right now. I say he's got a good point -- and it's up to you to be in God's house with God's people on His day. You're not coming together if you're not actually with all of those people.