Baptists are worse than Papists

It suddenly dawned on me two days ago why the Reformers were so hostile to the Anabaptists, and why the various Confessions repudiate both Rome and the Anabaptists.  The Anabaptists are even further away from the right view of justification by faith alone than Rome.  Yes, that’s right, the Bible believing Anabaptists and their heirs the Baptists and Evangelicals have corrupted sola fide far more than the Pope ever has.

Now that I have your attention, for those that are still here, this is the reason, from a recovering evangelical and Baptist.  

For Martin Luther, the Father of justification by faith, a man accounted an apostle by John Calvin, justification was inseparable from baptism.  To the last one left reading, it is because baptism is the usual mode of delivery for the remission of sins, the sacramental means of grace.  The controversy against Rome was that it undervalued and degraded the gift of justification given in baptism.  Justification is a full, perfect, and sufficient pardon and remission of all of our sins, past, present, and future, for those that believe.

By selling indulgences the implication is that the Christian man only has a partial remission, or, a remission that endures only a little while before needing topping-up and refreshment.  In other words our justification given in baptism is deficient, and Christ has fooled us by giving us a deficient pardon that must be added to by the works of the Church and the individual himself.  

The Bible teaches us, in utter opposition to that, that our justification is for the whole of our lives, to those who do not fall away.

The Baptists take their corruption of sola fide to a far greater extreme.  They deny that our baptism as infants is baptism at all, and they deny that we received anything remotely like a full pardon in it.  They take away completely what God has given, and say to baptized Christian people that they are outside of Christ and outside of his kingdom, that their churches are not truly churches at all.

At least the Pope did not take away the name of Christian from the baptized, and deny utterly their justification.  Compared to the Anabaptists he is a moderate.  He merely said that it was deficient, not that it did not exist at all.

The Baptists tell baptized Christians that they may not enter into membership of the Baptist’s churches, or eat the Supper, until and unless they have been submerged as conscious believers, and that justification is unrelated to baptism except by pure coincidence.

Therefore the Nicene Creed is wrong to assert that we acknowledge one baptism FOR THE REMISSION OF SINS, and the Apostle Peter must get true learning and doctrine from the submariners, and amend his misleading teaching that baptism into Christ is for the remission of sins, and the Apostle Paul wrote confusingly by saying that all who have been baptized were baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection and newness of life.

Applying this to the present furore within Reformed and Evangelical circles about the Federal Vision, it now becomes clear that those who are persecuting the FV men for corrupting full justification by faith alone are, in fact, the real heretics, because they are, almost to a man, baptistic in their theology and deny that justification is imparted and conveyed in baptism.

They are Anabaptists who deny the justification of the justified, who demand and require a mystical conversion experience, or a decision of some kind, IN ADDITION to simple faith and baptism.

William Tyndale’s Federal Vision

William Tyndale was the first man to translate the Bible into English from the Greek and Hebrew texts, instead of the Latin, which is itself a translation.  His introduction to his outstanding New Testament is intended to give the reader a way into the scriptures.

The right way, yea and the only way to understand the scripture unto our salvation, is, that we earnestly and above all thing, search for the profession of our baptism or covenants made between God and us.

Unpacking this just a little, is is clear that our baptism enters us into a covenant with God. Tyndale wishes his reader to grasp the fact that our baptismal covenant involves action both by God and man.  On God’s part he freely and graciously forgives us all our sins and promises us every blessing and gift for the sake of Christ, and on the basis of the cross alone; and for our part we are obliged to forsake evil and turn towards God, to keep his laws and fight against our corrupt nature perpetually, that we may do the will of God every day better and better.

The first part of the covenant, namely, God’s free gifts, are acknowledged by all who identify themselves as Reformed or orthodox Lutheran.

The difficulty for many lies in the second aspect of the covenant – our obedience.

Now if any man that submitteth himslef not to keep the commandments, do think that he hath any faith in God: the same man’s faith is vain, worldly, damnnable, devilish and plain presumption.

Those who apply the law/gospel distinction as extremely and as foolishly as the folks at Green Baggins and their friends will have a little difficulty with Tyndale here, because he goes on to assert that God offers a man mercy on condition that he will mend his living.  Those who have received mercy and grace but refuse to come under the covenant will lose the same mercy and grace.

Where he strikes to the heart of the present controversy is to assert that our continuance in grace is tied directly to our faithfulness to God’s laws:

And let us arm ourselves with this remembrance, that as Christ’s works justify from sin and set us in the favour of God, so our own deeds through working of the Spirit of God , help us to continue in the favour and the grace, into which Christ has brought us; and that we can no longer continue in favour and grace than our our hearts are to keep the law.

So then, our continuing justification is linked to our continuing obedience!  When this simple law is grasped the letter to the Hebrews and James’s epistle become intelligible.

 

 

Remythologizing

“Succinctly put, Scripture does not need to be completely demythologized, we need to be remythologized.”

Dr. Robert J. Sanders

How to do theology from Genesis

James Ussher’s A body of Divinity has excellent examples of how to unite biblical history with theology, or, teaching.  He notes that the plants were created before the sun, moon, and stars, and concludes from this that God is not bound to means, and the sun and moon are not essential to life on this planet.

That helped me to better understand the teaching in the Revelation that in the New Jerusalem in the new earth there is no sun, because the glory of God present here on earth makes it redundant.  We see here a perfect tie in between the beginning of the present age and its end.

It also solved the problem of the distance of the stars from the earth:  if they are thousands of light years from the earth – many more than the six thousand of the age of the earth – how is that we can see their light?  Their light should not be visible to us, being still in transit, as it were.

Ussher says that God took the existing light and concentrated them into the sun, moon, and stars.  Working from that I conclude that the light that is now in the stars was present on earth at the beginning, was then removed to the heavenly bodies, and must therefore have been visible at all times from the earth.

No problem.

Six day Creation is orthodox

Any other explanation of creation is heretical.  The plain reason is that the Bible itself knows no other version, acknowledges no other version, and bases its entire theology and history upon it.  Without an historical six day creation the rest of the Bible falls, having been deprived of its reason to exist.

All of the teaching of the Bible is based upon its own version of history, and apart from that history its teaching is meaningless.  Thus we see the closest link between sacred history and sacred theology.  One cannot exist without the other.  Nothing could be simpler.