It Can't be True

John Piper is a Baptist, so obviously this Lutheran is not inclined to agree with him about Baptism. But I have one earnest question about Baptist doctrine that any evangelical could take a stab at: Where does the Bible teach that Baptism is a symbol -- and our symbol at that? Where does the Bible tell us that Baptism is something we do to confess our faith in Christ?

At Bethlehem Baptist Church, which is John Piper’s church, this doctrine is presented in the Elder Affirmation of Faith: “We believe that baptism is an ordinance of the Lord by which those who have repented and come to faith express their union with Christ in His death and resurrection…” (To find this place in the document, click the link and find paragraph 12.3.)

At around the 8:30 mark in the first video below John Piper says, “Baptism expresses union with Christ in His death and resurrection. We get this from Romans 6 verses 3 and 4.”

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

After reading it word-for-word Piper looks up and says, “The wider context of Romans (that’s Romans 6, the wider context of Romans) would say that it would be a mistake if you concluded from this that water baptism is the instrument or the means by which we are united to Christ. In Romans FAITH is the means by which we are united to Christ and justified. ‘Therefore having been justified BY FAITH…’” Moving over to the first 56 seconds of the second video, he goes on for a while about the efficacy of faith, which Lutherans don’t deny, and then he says, “So I don’t want to construe these verses [Rom. 6:3-4] in a way that would contradict the main message of the book… We show this faith, we signify it, we symbolize it in the act of Baptism.”

Does Romans 6:3-4 say that Baptism is a means “by which those who have repented and come to faith express their union with Christ in His death and resurrection”?

No. John Piper admits that it says something else when he says, “[I]t would be A MISTAKE” to conclude “that water baptism is the instrument or means by which we are united to Christ.”

Now... Doesn’t that go without saying? What person in his right mind would think that a ritual bath can be the thing that unites us to Christ? Well… a person who had just read Romans 6:3-4 might come to that conclusion, because that is what the text actually says according to its plain, literal meaning. And John Piper knows what the text says. He knows that it does not support the doctrine he is trying to teach, so now he has to convince his Christian flock to believe that it means something other than what it says.

When you go back and add verses 1 and 2 to 3 and 4, the plain meaning of the text becomes even more clear and emphatic. The Apostle Paul under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit writes:

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?

Did you catch that? “…WE WHO DIED TO SIN…” It did happen. We are dead to sin. We died when “WE WERE BURIED” -- past tense, passive voice -- with Christ into death. We didn’t do this thing. It wasn’t our work. It was something done to us. When? Where? How? The Scripture says, “BY BAPTISM.”

John Piper says it would be “a mistake” to accept and believe the literal meaning of the words in the text. It would be wrong to confess what Scripture says: “Baptism does those things.” We must instead say, “Baptism does those things symbolically.”

His reason? Piper says that without this modification the text of Romans 6 “would contradict” the biblical doctrine of salvation through faith alone. “It can't be true!”

Does the Bible teach salvation by faith alone? Yes, it most certainly does. Is there a conflict or contradiction between salvation through faith alone and the literal meaning of the text in Romans 6? I would say, “No,” but it is not my turn to argue. The burden of proof belongs to the one making the assertion, and the presumption of the reader must necessarily be to assume that the contradiction does not exist. When the Holy Spirit inspires language that clearly and plainly points to the efficacy of Baptism -- to that which Baptism does, what it accomplishes in salvation, we must presume the absence of conflict and contradiction between this and other clear teachings of Scripture. We must presume that the Holy Spirit did not make the mistake of giving us a contradiction.

Does John Piper rise to the occasion? Does he meet the challenge and present any kind of evidence in support of his asserted contradiction? No. He distracts the audience by comparing Baptism to a wedding ring; and it’s not a bad analogy, but it does not come from Scripture. It comes from John Piper’s imagination. To make it work he denies that the wedding ring has any kind of active or efficacious role in marrying a man and woman -- even though the ceremony says, “With this ring I thee wed.” Again, ordinary grammar would lead you to believe that the ring is participating in some active and meaningful way in the work of marrying the bride and groom. John Piper simply asserts that it doesn’t, admitting that this is just his own opinion. And all of this is completely off-topic. None of it has anything to do with the unsubstantiated claim that there is a contradiction between baptismal regeneration in Romans 6 and the biblical doctrine of faith alone. Without the contradiction this John Piper's Baptist doctrine finds nothing in Romans 6 to stand on.

When John Piper said, “We get this from Romans 6 verses 3 and 4,” it raised some hope that I might finally hear a biblical argument for the evangelical doctrine that says Baptism is something we do to symbolize and confess our faith in Christ. Instead John Piper set Romans 6 at odds with the rest of the book, so that he could add the word “symbolically” into a text where it does not appear. What we got was an anti-biblical argument. If someone so imminently qualified as John Piper cannot teach this article of his faith from the Bible, I am more convinced than ever before that there is no support in Scripture for this teaching. Those who are teaching it need to repent, and believe the Word of God.

Are you really a Christian?

My link should have started the video at around the 19:20 mark, but it didn't. The whole conversation is worth watching but this part -- the five minutes or so beginning at 19m 20s -- stood out to me. It resonated with my experiences talking to evangelicals and Baptists about Baptism -- not all of them, mind you, but quite a lot.

Guilty... of what?

Americans have a complicated relationship with the business of abortion. A majority of Americans describe themselves as “pro-life,” but a similar majority supports Roe v. Wade. When given the opportunity to establish the “personhood” of unborn children in their state constitution, the residents of Mississippi – one of the most pro-life places in America – refused to do it. South Dakota, another overwhelmingly pro-life state, turned back at least two attempts in recent years to defy Roe v. Wade and outlaw all abortions within their borders. Many people in the United States want to call themselves “pro-life,” but they are not comfortable with the implications of that confession.

Listening this morning to Albert Mohler’s podcast, The Briefing, gave me an opportunity to reflect on the causes of this complexity. He suggested that Americans have a guilty conscience, and seemed to identify the guilt as that which comes from our silent complicity in the crime of killing countless millions of unborn children. Maybe that does weigh on our consciences, but maybe there’s something more to it than that.

Abortion begins to seem necessary when pregnancies occur outside of marriage, and pregnancies occur outside of marriage when sexual relationships do. Certainly married couples have the same freedom to kill their children as everyone else has, but it is the image of the poor and destitute UNMARRIED woman, facing the tremendous challenge of motherhood ALL ALONE, that invokes our sympathy, and makes abortion only one of two evils.

And here’s the rub… How many Americans can honestly say that they have never indulged any of the licentiousness of the sexual revolution? How many men and women can honestly say they never engaged in a sexual relationship with someone who was not their wife or husband? Beyond that, how many men can say that they never let their eyes linger on a pornographic image? Were you ready at that moment to refuse intercourse with the woman in the picture? How many women can say that they never wore alluring dress in a public place? Was it for your husband, or did you want the admiration of everyone you encountered?

Americans have a guilty conscience when it comes to abortion, but I would venture to say that relatively few consider themselves complicit in abortion itself. At the same time, almost no one in America is completely clean when it comes to the kind of behavior that creates unwed mothers in the first place. Having done the deed without the consequences, how can we say that the person caught in the consequences must be forced to bear them? The sin that put her in that condition is our sin. Our desire to leave open a way of escape is intensified by our own participation in the root cause of the problem.

We must repent. Where abortion is concerned most people in America will admit that it is okay to grieve over the tragedy brought on by our sin. But when it is fornication, society will not allow any sorrow or contrition. What you do with your own body is your own business. After all, “I didn’t hurt anybody… I didn’t mean to… I didn’t think it would.” Repentance is not washing our hands so that we can take up arms against our neighbor. It is receiving the forgiveness given to us in Christ Jesus, so that we can love our neighbor – especially the unwed mother, and her unborn child.

Ships Passing in the Night

Thinking in Public with Dr. Albert Mohler

In an interview with Albert Mohler, historian Thomas Kidd said that one of the important developments coming "out of this radical fringe of the evangelical movement" during the Great Awakening was "the belief that baptism is for believers." It was refreshing to hear a Baptist admit that this doctrine comes from the "radical fringe" of evangelicalism. Indeed, that doctrine is a novel idea, never uniformly practiced or enforced in any part of the Church prior to the 1500's. But what I found striking was the expression, "Baptism is for believers."

What is that supposed to mean?

Baptists do not refuse to baptize unbelievers. They baptize as many hypocrites as any other Christian denomination. Baptists refuse to baptize babies. When they say that "Baptism is for believers," they mean for you to understand that babies should not be baptized because (it is assumed) they do not have the capacity to believe in Christ.

This begs the question that is truly germane to the issue. What is Baptism? Is it something we do to demonstrate our faith in Christ? Is it something we do to obey an ordinance or command of the New Covenant? Or... Is it a divine gift, conveying the grace of God and generating faith in those who receive it for what it is?

I am a Lutheran, and I find it hard to argue with a Baptist who says that Baptism is for believers. On its face, that it is a true statement. But the meaning behind it is completely false. It is contrary to Scripture in its confession concerning the nature of what Baptism is, and it directly contradicts the words of Christ concerning the ability of infants to believe.

To make that statement misses the point. In fact, it avoids the point; and I don't believe that is an accident.

Constrained by the Tongue

I found it interesting while visiting a Baptist church last Sunday that they invited everyone to the baptism service to be held later that evening. They said something to the effect of... "We have some people who are going to be baptized. Please come and hear their testimonies..."

It was ironic, to say the least, that in speaking of Baptism they had to use the passive voice. These people would "BE BAPTIZED." To speak of Baptism in a manner faithful to Scripture, the Christian has no other option. It's a passive event. You do not do your Baptism. Your Baptism is done to you. This is the only way the Bible speaks of Baptism, and, on some level, the Baptists know this.  Yet all the rituals and rules they set around Baptism point us in the opposite direction. You have to "accept Jesus" first. You have to demonstrate some competence in church-speak to prove that you have had this experience. Naturally, you have to achieve a certain maturity to obtain this vocabulary. You can't be an infant. You have to share your personal testimony while standing in the water -- as if this whole act were first-and-foremost YOUR WORK OF CONFESSION. That's not what Scripture teaches us about Baptism. It is God's gift -- the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit (Titus 3:5).

Try as they might, our Baptist friends can't escape the limitations of the language. Those people going to the font were not going to baptize. They were going to "BE BAPTIZED." Whether they understood it rightly or not, they were going to receive forgiveness, life and salvation in the washing of water with the Word (Eph. 5:26).

God be praised for His gracious gifts!

Three fifths of what?

The infamous three-fifths clause of the U.S. Constitution is often invoked to prove that the Founding Fathers did not believe their own immortal words in the Declaration of Independence, when they said, "all men are created equal." At the very least they would have you believe that the three-fifths clause is prima facie evidence (evidence needing no further support or argument) that the essential equality of all human beings is not the bedrock principle on which this nation was established. It seems like a slam dunk. After all, does it not say that black people in the United States are to be counted as three fifths of a person?

Actually... No, it does not. The U.S. Constitution never said anything at all in reference to people of color. Those who would prove that our nation was not founded on the conviction that all men are created equal must carry their argument quite a bit further.

What the Constitution said was that for purposes of apportionment the population of the States would be determined by "adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."

As pernicious as these words sound in our ears today, it is astonishing that this compromise was established (1) without any reference to race, (2) without any reference to slaves or slavery, and (3) without conceding that slaves were anything other than "Persons."

Let no one deny that racism was alive and well in the United States during the time our nation was born (c. 1774-1801), but it was not black people who were to be counted as three fifths. It was Persons who were (a) not free, who were (b) not bound to their masters for a finite term of service, and who were (c) not Indians. This applied only to slaves, and it just so happened, due to circumstances beyond the control of the federal government, that virtually all slaves were black. Nevertheless, the Framers of the Constitution were very careful in their phrasing of this provision to avoid giving the impression that black people are somehow inherently inferior. They did not want to repudiate the words of our founding document: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." They understood that the doctrine this nation was founded on, applied to black people as well as to white.

The Framers not only wanted to avoid any appearance of racism, but they also wanted to avoid giving any explicit sanction to the institution of slavery by naming it in their document. This provision and the one in Article IV, Section 2 dealing with fugitive slaves scrupulously avoid referring to anyone as a slave. Today we tend to regard this as willful blindness and rank hypocrisy, but we do not have an appreciation for the contingencies these men were facing. We do not understand how critically important it was for the security of all to perfect a Union of all the thirteen States. We do not understand how essential these two compromises were to the accomplishment of that goal. There would have been no Constitution, no Civil War, and no emancipation of Southern slaves without those compromises in the original charter. It was a remarkable accomplishment that those provisions were included in the document without explicitly naming the institution itself. Had it been named it would have been sanctioned, and that would have made it much harder for Americans in later generations to take up and advance the cause of abolition.

Finally, we need to recognize that in its opaque references to slaves the United States Constitution never calls them anything other than "Persons." Remember, it was the South that wanted to count slaves as whole persons. To do so would greatly increase their representation in the new Congress and give them a much greater say in the election of future Presidents. But the North recognized a fundamental injustice in denying slaves the unalienable Rights naturally belonging to all men. The North recognized the fundamental inconsistency between treating slaves like chattel on the one hand (that is to say, like sub-human creatures), and then calling them citizens for the purposes of the census. The North wanted the slaves to be counted in the same way as Indians who had not been assimilated. Indians were not counted at all unless they were tax paying members of the civil society being formed under the new Constitution. The North was saying to the South: until you admit these slaves to full membership in the human race and in the civil society of your States (as you must eventually do), it would be wrong to count them as citizens and so give the slave masters more power in the new government.

Today, we read the three fifths compromise as though it were a grotesque denial of the humanity of the slaves. Nothing could be further from the truth. The three fifths clause is in the Constitution precisely because both sections of the country understood (a) the full humanity of the persons being held in slavery, and (b) the inherent, unnatural injustice of the institution.

X Marks the Discipled

I have been discussing baptism on another blog, and one of the anonymous the adversaries engaging me on that site is now citing Josh Dryer as an authority on the interpretation of Matthew 28:19. I will only note in passing that Mr. Dryer's credentials at the time he wrote this paper were in the field of aeronautics and the source he cites for his understanding of the Greek in the Matthew text is... Strong's Concordance. Um, yeah... I rest my case.

This is how a shepherd, who reads and understands the Greek language, opens that text to the English-speaking world.

Testing video posts, laying foundations

"If you want to build a tower, you have to lay the foundation; and the foundation for a dialogue between the Reformed and the Lutherans begins with the Reformed admitting that the Lutherans are not the Reformed." - Rev. Jonathan Fisk

At first glance this seems self-evident and stupid. What person doesn't know that the Lutherans are not the Reformed? But is it as obvious as it seems? I have hardly ever met a Protestant who is reluctant to celebrate the heroism of Martin Luther, and there is hardly any Protestant who will not try to trade on that heroism by quoting Luther whenever he finds it advantageous to his cause. The Reformed are particularly susceptible to this because they imagine that Luther is really in their camp when it comes to the construction they put on election, and it is the Lutherans who somehow failed to follow their own leader into the light of the truth.

In this video Pastor Fisk explains how there are really four fellowships within the Christian Church as a whole. They are 1) the Eastern Orthodox, 2) the Roman Catholics, 3) the Lutherans, and 4) the Reformed (which is essentially every form of Protestant that is not Lutheran). Having this foundational understanding will be particularly helpful, I think, in understanding how I will discuss certain topics in the future on this blog. Lutherans aren't the Reformed. It's not just that we have an incrementally higher view of the sacraments and a marginally more reverent and formal style of worship than the Reformed have. It is that we have an altogether different view of the sacraments and worship than every other Protestant group on the planet.