Baptism and politics
This post is excellent. It is being published in Ligonier’s Magazine, “Tabletalk.”
The analogy of using a wide-angle lens rather than a zoom lens comes from an impeccable source. (Not just on his blog but also in the Westminster Theological Journal and in at least one of Leithart’s many books)
It is evil that if Peter Leithart had written this essay it would have been used by the SJC’s committee to further condemn him.
It makes me angry, and want to know why God is not doing more to protect his servants. How long O Lord?
It is still an excellent essay and I commend it to everyone.
I do have a minor quibble:
Baptism represents an intrusion of the age to come into this present world, a breaking-in of the dynamic of heaven to the here and now. As the waters are applied, the sky is split and the pavement cracks, and all that we once were is forever changed.
No, the new age has come and is now our present. The earth split when Jesus died and the heavens split when he ascended or when he poured out his Spirit in one historic public event (Acts 1-2). Paul says the resurrection, the harvest, has started (1 Corinthians 15). Baptism, however, is the only way human beings can now be able to survive in it. That is why God used to overlook the ignorance but now commands everyone everywhere to repent and be baptized (Acts 17). A refusal to be baptized is an attempt to pretend that the new age has not come and that the old age is still viable. But that is an illusion. It lingers, but the new age is here.
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December 30th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
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December 30th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Mark,
Thanks for the shout-out (and for the record, I think you may be right about how the SJC might have responded had Peter written this. For my part, I would have been happy had the minority report mentioned nothing about his view of baptism at all. That section was written by another committee member).
And to your quibble, I guess I would respond by distinguishing between the historia- and ordo salutis. So I agree that the new age dawned at the resurrection, but would say that that truth is applied to me, or rather, I begin to walk in it, at some point in my own Christian life (i.e., baptism).
Cheers.
December 30th, 2009 at 7:36 pm
Well, I agree with the distinction and am glad you made it. Like I said, just a quibble.