A Courteous Pause

I've been asked by the cabal of nameless puppet masters who run Ref21 to take a time-out while Dr. Jones formulates his response to my first two parts of the "Just Add Water" series, and I'll be doing that.  I look forward to discovering a lot about the continuity of the covenant as so forth, and to a robust discussion between men of good faith.

In the meantime, Byrd, Pruett and Trueman (note the order - it is accidentally alphabetical, but we all know who wields the real power in that band) have providentially come clean on the fact that they have all been properly baptized but now they are agi'n it in the latest episode of MoS.

Let me say a few things briefly about that:

• "Not That There's Anything Wrong With That" is not a Biblical approach to the sacraments of the church.  I'm not going to wear the ribbon.
• It sounded to me that both Todd and Carl were converted to their current positions under duress -- roped into leadership in a P&R church and then sort of given an ultimatum.  I guess no one expects the Spanish Inquisition.
• Fire Truck baptismal fonts and fraudulent seed-dippings stipulated and accepted as the worst in class for those who are mostly-churchless people anyway, we shouldn't reason from the abuses to the standard - the standard should instead expose what is and is not an abuse.  Nobody is suggesting that we should shun conjugal relations in marriage because there is pornography (or worse: justifying pornography because of the married standard), and I would say that we can't decide how a multi-faceted ordinance like Baptism which is from God ought to be practiced because we don't like how those without a systematic theology or a high-church polity misuse it.
• As a father who has baptized his child (in church, before the congregation), let me suggest that a child has a spiritual authority which is logically, naturally, and biblically prior to the elders of her church: her parents, and specifically her father.  We can hash through the biblical texts (you want to bring up Abraham, Isaac and Jacob?  this would be a good time), but to extract the spiritual authority of father to baptize his child in credobaptism but demand it when it is the faith of the parent under which a child is paedobaptized seems like an argument not completely worked out.

I'm dealing with the way the Gospel remedies the problem of Racism over at TeamPyro today if you want to read about something other than a theological super-soaker fight.

Cheers!