BAPTISMAL REGENERATION & THE EARLY CHURCH w/ Dr. Tony Costa @tonycostatorontoapologetic5307

Hello and welcome to The Apologetic Dog, where it's our heart's desire to contend for the gospel of grace. I'm your host, Jeremiah Nortier, and I serve as a pastor and elder at Twelve Five Church in northeast Arkansas, specifically in Jonesboro, Arkansas, where we are the only reformed Baptist church, and we love our evangelical brothers that we pray for before every service, and we gotta lock arms with the gospel of grace.

Introducing Dr. Tony Costa and the Baptism Conversation

And so I have a very special guest this evening that I want to formally introduce you all to, and I want us to dive right in. My guest is none other than Tony Costa. He is an instructor at the University of Toronto.

He's received his B .A. and M .A. from the University of Toronto and a Ph .D. in theology and New Testament from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Tony is a member of the Evangelical Theological Society.

His lectures are at various conferences, and he teaches and engages in academic debates in North America and abroad on various topics related to Christian apologetics. He has had 40 years of ministerial and academic experience.

He's an ordained minister and a pastor of Park Lawn Baptist Church in Toronto. He is the author of Worship and the Risen Jesus in the Pauline Letters and Early Christian Creeds and Hymns in the forthcoming book, No King But Christ.

Tony is also a writing contributor to various books and academic journals, including book reviews with various theological journals and the review of biblical literature. Tony is married and lives in Toronto, Canada.

Mr. or Dr. Tony Costa, did I get all that in there okay?

Yeah, that was pretty good. The fact that you can pronounce Radboud University Nijmegen,.

That's quite a feat. We'll say I love your accent. I love it. You'll have to excuse my southern drawl down here. We talk a little bit slower in the deep sound. Well, Dr. Costa, do you care to tell us a little bit more about who you are and where people can.

Find your content? Yeah, sure. As I said, I live in Toronto, Canada, and I'm born and raised here in Toronto. I am a Christian apologist. I've been in apologetics since the age of 18, so that's about 40 years now, 58 now, or going on 58.

I'm also a pastor. I pastor a church in Toronto called Parklawn Baptist Church. I'm also an academic. I do teaching with the University of Toronto in various areas, archaeology of the ancient Near East in the Bible and also gospel studies.

I'm a former professor of various seminaries in Canada and the United States. I continue to put out apologetic resources on my YouTube channel called Toronto Apologetics. There's a wide spectrum of various topics, not just one.

It's variegated. Yeah, so that's my ongoing ministry. My passion is to edify the body of Christ, to teach them, to equip them with the tools they need to not only proclaim Jesus Christ, but to defend Jesus Christ and to defend his gospel, which is so needed in our day.

Amen, brother. Well, I just.

Want to encourage people to go check out Toronto Apologetics with Dr. Costa. He has blessed my heart for many years in learning apologetics. You and Dr. James White, y 'all have been a huge influence in me stepping in to the apologetics arena.

We have so many mutual friends. I just want to give a shout out to Anthony Uvino. His channel is Reformed Rookie. Y 'all had a discussion on baptism a few years ago, I believe, and y 'all were able to talk about, is it credo baptist?

Do we baptize people in light of a confession that they profess faith in Christ, or do we baptize infants? Do you remember having that interview with Anthony?

Absolutely. I love Anthony and his family. I have broken bread with him in Long Island, and I've spoken at his church several times, Hope Reformed Baptist Church in Long Island. He's a dear brother, and I just love Anthony.

He moderated one of my debates with Roman Catholic apologist, Dr. Robertson Jenis. He's a wonderful brother.

Well, he sure is. He's had me on the Reformed Rookie. I was like, hey, I'll let you know a little bit of what I'm learning over here. What we discussed was how Sola Scriptura is the heartbeat of a Christian, how God's Word is truth.

That's what everything has to ultimately be grounded in. I want to encourage people to go check out Reformed Rookie. The reason why I had you on today is I wanted us to continue this conversation of baptism in one resource.

We might talk more about resources at the end as well. I have a few books I'd like to recommend to people. You and Anthony talked about this book right here. This is more aimed at showing the theological development of paedobaptism.

Is there anything else that you'd like to tell people about this resource? Well, the wonderful thing about.

Dr. David Wright is that he was not raised as a cradle Baptist. He was actually a paedobaptist. When he started studying church history and the various treatises written on baptism, he was struck with the fact that infant baptism was not there from the beginning.

In fact, he argues that infant baptism evolved in Christian history. It was really with Augustine that you have the catalyst for this push of infant baptism. I found it a very, very intriguing work. He's a very honest scholar, very straightforward.

It's very well documented with multiple sources.

This is a book I would highly recommend. Well, thank you so much for that resource. On my channel, I try to educate people the best of my ability the importance of baptism and how it's not merely a symbol.

It does more than that. The Spirit is involved to what degree? I get in awesome conversations with my Lutheran friends and Anglican friends, and I try to salvage, hey, something is going on efficaciously with the Spirit sanctifying the believer as a celebration to the body.

It's for those that confess faith and know Jesus and how Romans 8, quoting the Old Testament, those who have all their sins forgiven. Then the question always gets brought up, yeah, Jeremiah, but what about infants?

The promise is to you and your children. That's where you, Dr. James White, of looking at Acts 238 into Acts 239 and saying, hey, we've got to be consistent with context here. But this does kind of pertain to what I want to have you on, is I want to focus, I guess, both on the history of baptism as it relates to baptismal regeneration, and I'd like for us to discuss some of the quote-unquote proof texts of saying, how can you deny baptismal regeneration with Titus 3 -5 or Acts 238?

And so once again, on my channel, I heavily evangelize the Church of Christ. Are you familiar with that kind of restorationist movement? Yes, I am. Yes. Yes. So in my estimation, the Church of Christ, you and Anthony, y 'all focused on patal baptism and talked about that historical development.

I'd like to kind of engage a little bit with the Church of Christ. Now what's interesting with the Church of Christ is they're very anti-Creed. I would almost say anti-Church history. Now when you look at the spectrum of the Church of Christ world, this gentleman here on the screen, I've actually debated, and I have a lot of respect for, and so he is a moderate right-leaning Church of Christ that actually will talk about Alexander Campbell, will talk about Pelagius, and he will talk about historical development, and he sent me a video a long time ago.

He goes, Jeremiah, you've all been lied to, you know, saying that baptism is not necessary for salvation. That was the universal standard for all of church history for all these years until Aldrich Zwingli.

Have you ever heard of an objection like that before? Not exactly like that. No,.

I've dealt with Church of Christ folks. I even dealt here in Toronto. We were having a serious issue with an offshoot of the Church of Christ. You've probably heard of it, the Boston Church of Christ, and they were a break-off group, and they were targeting a lot of the university campuses.

So I remember I was invited to speak on this and speak to challenge them at Ryerson University, which is one of the universities here in Toronto. It's now known as Metropolitan University, and they invited me, and they had their lawyers there just ready to pounce on me if I said anything scandalous.

All I did was quote it from their sources. So a long story short, that group has kind of fizzed out, and I've dealt with Church of Christ, and you're exactly right. One Church of Christ minister told me, he says, you know, Tony, we have no creed.

I said, well, that is your creed. Your creed is that there is no creed. So it kind of went into a circular argument, begging the question and so forth. So I'm very familiar with them, the Campbellites, and yes, you are right.

They're very cult-like in that they believe that they are the only true church and that you need to be baptized in their church in order to be saved. And your baptism, if it was done in a Baptist or Pentecostal or Methodist, Lutheran, is invalid, and so you need.

To come under their authority. Yeah, and I get accused of being a meanie for using the cult word, and I kind of said, I kind of have two definitions for cult. One is historically, those that have led movements that have been led astray and capitulated on doctrines of Christology, believing in right Jesus, and compromising the gospel of grace.

And so what a leader, a figurehead that can be pinpointed with this Restorationist movement is Alexander Campbell. And so that's my historic point, and biblically, I would say 2 Peter chapter 2 talks about destructive heresies, and this is where the doctrine of baptismal regeneration, we have to be so careful, because as we look at church history, not every person that said baptismal regeneration or things close to that meant the same thing, and it's right on the cusp, and I'd love to hear your thoughts about this, of compromising justification by faith alone.

Mm-hmm, I agree. I think that,.

I think one of Luther's, I mean, we need to distinguish Luther, the pre -1525 Luther, and post -1525. Before 1525 Luther, and even Zwingli, when they were looking at the scriptures afresh, they began to look at, you know what, baptism usually follows faith, confession of faith, belief, and so forth, and you need to understand as well that the people like Conrad Grable and other Anabaptists, they came to Zwingli, and they presented the case.

They said, look, Zwingli, we love your Reformation, but you're not going far enough, because baptism, the baptism of infants is something that is unbiblical. And I think it was the rise of the Anabaptists that pushed Luther back, and Zwingli, and I think Calvin, to some extent.

But the pre -1525 Luther, very strong on justification by faith. He wrote a tract called Jesus Christ was a Jew. He was very amicable towards the Jews, and so very strong, sola fide, sola gratia, and so forth.

And then, of course, with the wars that took place when he was in the Wartburg Castle, you get these peasants revolting, they're smashing churches, and Roman Catholic churches, and Luther is so shocked by this that he, there's a change.

You could see it after 1525. He starts focusing more on baptismal regeneration. He goes ballistic on the Jews. He writes a tract against the Jews and their lies. He withholds fellowship from Zwingli over the Lord's Supper, and so I think the situation with Luther is, in one sense, he's talking from both sides of his mouth.

First, he says it's justification by faith alone, very strong election. You know, he wrote the bondage of the will against Erasmus, and then you got this baptismal regeneration. So which one is it? Is it, are you justified by faith alone, or is it justification by faith and baptism?

So that's where I find with our Lutheran friends, and I love them, I have many Lutheran friends, dear brothers in the Lord, but the one thing I just find, there's this tension that you want to hold on to the sola fide, sola gratia aspect, but then you need baptism in order to be saved.

So I see a tension between those, and the response that I always hear is that, well, it always comes down to a mystery. It's this mystery. Luther was a theologian of the heart, you know, and Calvin was a theologian of the mind.

So when you start going into these areas of, well, it's a mystery, it's mysterious, I mean, it becomes, I just find that it becomes unfalsifiable if you start arguing that way.

Yes, so true. As we continue to develop our conversation, I want to encourage the side chat, if you have any questions, send them in the side and preface it with Q or question, because this may be your only chance to ask Dr. Costa a question, and I want to integrate y 'all in along just to kind of organically develop this.

We're going to talk about church history, and Dr. Costa, I love what you said about we believe that it's faith apart from works, including baptism, that justifies a believer, and so what we're saying is baptism and faith are not, you know, identical, or they're not synonymous terms.

They relate to one another, but I would baptism demonstrates faith. It takes—baptism is faith working itself out, and so apologetically, I'd like for you to speak to this, like in debates, like I said, I've done this.

I don't even know how many debates with Church of Christ specifically, but defining terms, defining terms like faith and works, showing how they are inextricably linked, but they are distinct. Justification and sanctification relate to one another, but they are different.

You can't conflate those two categories and commit the Roman Catholic error and damage goods of how they conflate law and gospel, and defining terms like obey, obedience, and how that is not synonymous with faith.

Your faith produces obedience, but would you say that that is, you know, how important is that in terms of the debate, defining your terms like that?

Very, very important. I mean, I've always said that if a doctor does not know the difference between appendicitis and tonsillitis, it could be a matter of life and death, and if he confuses those two, you're going to be dead from a burst appendix.

Same with law. In the area of law, if a lawyer doesn't know the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony, you could be doing life for a parking ticket and be just paying a fine for murder. So if language is vital in the areas of medicine and law, how much more in theology?

This is where the Trinity, when you have all these heresies popping up in the first three centuries, it's because people are confusing categories, confusing person with being, and so you get all these confusions, and this leads to heresy.

So language is extremely, extremely important here. So faith is the means by which God justifies the ungodly. Our father Abraham was justified by faith. He believed on the Lord, and it was credited unto him as righteousness.

Genesis 15, verse 6. Hebrews 11 gives us the great hall of faith, where all of these men and women of God in the past, they were made right with God by faith. And so works, however, works is the fruit of faith.

Faith is the root, and of course works is the fruit. And so James goes on to say, look, if a man says I have faith, but he has no works, can that faith save him? Can that kind of faith save him? And the implied answer is no, because true faith generates good works, which again, God has prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.

And Christ in Titus 2, verse 14, it says that he sanctified a people for himself that are zealous for good works. So we keep those two distinct. They're not the same, and faith always precedes works, and works is the natural outgrowth of our faith.

But it's not the means of our salvation, it's the product of our salvation. So good works are not done to be saved, we do them because we are saved.

JUSTINE UNDERHILL.

Well, thanks so much for saying that. I want to encourage everybody, if you'd like to show some support to the Apologetic Dog, I will better see the Super Chats as we do every live stream. So if you want me to really see your questions or express your gratitude to Dr. Costa, I would really appreciate that.

I do have a question here before we get into some of your slideshows that you have prepared. BornAgainRN says, I have a question. When Polycarp wrote he was a Christian for 70 plus years, Pato Baptist will say that he was baptized as a baby, but does this just mean that he became a believer and lived a really long time?

So Dr. Costa, do you kind of get the essence of what's being asked here?

Yeah, I mean, Polycarp is put on trial, and he is asked to recant, to deny Christ, and he says, why would I deny my king who's done me no wrong, and I've been faithfully serving him for 70 plus years, and so forth.

So he's not talking about infant baptism here. In fact, Dr. Wright mentions this in his book. He's simply talking about how long he's been serving Christ. And so if Polycarp saw himself as God's elect, which if you look at Clement of Rome, he talks about God electing his people from the foundation of the world, then he's correct.

He could say, yeah, for these many years I've been serving God because he saw himself as one of God's elect. There is no mention in the apostolic fathers. This is important. Irenaeus, Ignatius, Polycarp, all of these men are called the apostolic fathers.

They followed the apostles. They, none of them talk about infant baptism. And so those who are paedo-baptists will read Polycarp, and they have to read this into his quote here, but there's nothing in that quote to insinuate that he was baptized as an infant.

He's simply talking about how long he's been.

Faithful to Christ as one of his. Well, hey, thank you so much for addressing that. We have a number of questions in the side chat, so I want to address them throughout our live stream. But kind of going back, Dr. Costa, to this right here, you've been lied to.

And so, like I said, I've heard this in so many different shapes and forms from Eastern Orthodox to Roman Catholics and certain strands of Church of Christ of saying, believing that baptism is necessary for your salvation, I think the implication is justification.

So tell me if this is good because this is what I try to bring out in some of my discussions. Not all baptismal regeneration is equally as bad. I do let people know it's bad, like, don't go that route.

But it's baptismal justification. If you think of the moment that you enter into the watery graves of baptism, that's a phrase the Church of Christ likes to say, well, that is the means of literally having your past sins washed away.

I'm saying that's a Galatian one heresy, and you've confused the representation with the reality, and you've conflated law and gospel. So speak to that. Has the Church for 1 ,500 years before the Reformation, was everyone in total agreement on what baptism even meant?

Well, again, whenever you hear people say, this is the consensus of the fathers, you have to be wary because if you look at the various fathers of the Church, there was a lot of disagreement on various issues.

When you look at baptism, there were debates about how do you baptize. The Didache from 112 AD says you baptize in running water, in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Or if there's no living water, that means a creek or a river, then do it in still water.

And if you can't do that, in certain cases, you could pour water on the head. And then, of course, you have people like Basil the Great, the great Cappadocian father, who said that when you baptize, you should be baptized, you should have multiple immersions in the names of the Trinity, and you should be facing east as well.

And then you have Tertullian in the year 200, saying that there's this weird practice going on where people are baptizing their children. And then he says, this is something neither the Lord nor the apostles ever commanded.

And so there you've got Tertullian basically saying that the tradition in the Church has been to baptize adults. And then, of course, you have people like Augustine, who was baptized at a much later age.

John Chrysostom was about 18 years old or even younger. Basil the Great was 34 years old when he was baptized. Constantine the Great, he waited for his deathbed to be baptized right before he died. And so when you look at some of these church fathers, these are giants.

Even the reformers went to them, like John Chrysostom and Basil the Great, even Augustine. And he is the one who really propelled this idea of baptism regeneration, especially infant baptism. It was Augustine, because of original sin, his idea of original sin.

But Augustine, in his confessions and in his various books, he chides his mother Monica, who was a very godly woman, prayed for him all his life. He was a pagan and a heretic, and she prayed for him. And he was involved with Manicheanism, which was a Gnostic heresy.

Anyway, one of the things he chides his mother for was that when he was a young boy, he fell ill. He was very ill. And he thought he would die. And he would chide his mother later on in life for not baptizing him.

Now here's the question. If infant baptism was the common tradition in the church, why did Monica not baptize Augustine when he was an infant or when he was a toddler? And so Augustine was a little cross with his mother that she didn't baptize him.

Well, that's the point. And it's not until you get to the Council of Carthage, around 418, where the Council condemns those who deny baptism to children, well, why would they do that unless people were not baptizing their children?

And so what I'm saying is there's a wide spectrum of views on baptism. There's church fathers after Augustine. There's definitely this wide spectrum of baptism regeneration. There's no doubt about that.

But then there are other fathers like Justin Martyr and Cyril of Jerusalem who show us and tell us that, no, there are cases where regeneration takes place before baptism. And they go to Cornelius in the Book of Acts where he receives the Holy Spirit before he's baptized in water.

And again, we need to be careful here too, Jeremiah, because there's views that the fathers held to that people in the Church of Christ wouldn't hold to today, like infant baptism, for example. But we need to be very, very careful here because at the end of the day, majority vote does not necessarily mean that something is true.

That's the fallacy of argumentum ad populum, arguing for the majority. The majority in Nazi Germany wanted the Jews dead and killed. So the majority never proves truth. But I'm not saying that that is inconsequential.

Of course, there was this majority view. But we need to be careful that at the end of the day, the fathers of the Church are subservient to the Scriptures. Even Augustine said that Scripture trump everything, that the Scriptures have the final say on all things.

And even Augustine was willing to admit that the councils could err. Even Luther in his defense at the Diet of Worms would say councils and popes have known to contradict and to err against each other.

And then he says, unless I'm convinced by plain reason and by Scripture, I will not recant. And here I stand to help me God. So this is where we need to be careful that there is a spectrum of various views.

You know, if you go to the Eastern Church, John Chrysostom didn't believe in original sin. He actually said children are not born sinners. He said they receive baptism so that they can receive the gifts of sanctification.

But in the West, Augustine said, no, you got to get that kid baptized as soon as possible because Augustine believed and Anselm believed and Gregory the Great believed that if infants were not baptized, they would be condemned.

Although their suffering would be light, it wouldn't be as worse as a murderer or an adulterer. But this idea of limbo came out of this Augustinian thinking that children who were unbaptized could not be admitted into the presence of God.

So we need to be careful when we study the fathers. And one more thing, Jeremiah. Perfect. We need to stop reading ourselves into the fathers. The fathers were not Presbyterian. They were not Roman Catholic.

And yes, they were not Eastern Orthodox long before the schism. They were Christians. And so we sometimes want to make them Reformed Baptists. We want to make them Pentecostals or Methodists, whatever it may be.

The one thing they were agreed on is the gospel, the death, burial, resurrection of Christ. A lot of them spoke about justification by faith alone. I'm thinking of people like John Chrysostom, who also believed in penal substitutionary atonement, which the Eastern Orthodox Church rejects.

But he was a very strong advocate that Christ sustained the wrath of God for us. So with the fathers, you need to be very careful. They said some things that were really weird. Clement of Rome believed the phoenix was a real bird, that it went back to its place of origin, and it combusted into flames, and then out of it came a new bird.

And again, we can go—I mean, the fathers were not infallible. They were errant. If you don't believe me, read Augustine's Retractions, where he goes back and says, okay, I goofed up here, I goofed up here, I need to correct myself here.

So we need to be careful. The fathers were not inspired writers, and so we need to judge them by the dictates of Scripture.

The Church, the Fathers, and the Development of Baptismal Views

JARED HOFFMAN. I love that so much, Dr. Costa, because what I try to help people think about, and maybe you can even help me articulate this, but let's think about Ephesians chapter 5. So Christ is sanctifying his bride.

That's true of the part as well as the whole, and so what we see throughout church history is the sanctification of the bride. Christ building his church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail. And so you've got God's revelation intact, that we contend for the faith once delivered to the saints.

We have the gospel of grace, that silver thread, all throughout church history. But what we see is the church being refined, and so our position as Reformed Baptists, and maybe there's some more nuance to this, but it's a taught baptism.

It's a learned baptism by immersion, and regeneration precedes faith. And so kind of on just those handful of points, we can show in part how much of the early church believed those things. Maybe they don't all believe them together at the same points in all their life, and so I'm saying that's okay.

The Reformed Baptist position, as we see growth, we see development, we see sanctification over time with the bride. So that's everything being grounded in Sola Scriptura. God's Word is the final say, so therefore the standard that I hold a Dr. Tony Costa to is the Word of God, and everything that I would want our listeners to say, okay, Dr. Costa is saying this.

Well, what hath God wrought? And my point is, that's the same standard that we hold the early church fathers to. They're not going to get everything right, and many of the early church fathers would say, hey, I don't have it all figured out.

Test what I'm saying ultimately to the bar of Scripture. So I got a few other questions. I want to let Born Again get your thoughts on this real quick, Dr. Costa, if that's okay. He asked, can you address the difference between how Catholics and Eastern Orthodox understand baptismal regeneration versus Protestants like the Lutherans?

What is the.

Difference there? Right. So in the case of Roman Catholics, like Lutherans as well, and again, you need to understand that out of all the Reformers, Martin Luther was much more closer to the Roman Catholic side of things.

You see that as well with Henry VIII, King Henry VIII. You've got this Anglo-Catholic, high Anglican, which is very similar to Rome or Roman Catholicism, and then low Anglican, more Protestant-like.

But the thing with the Roman Catholic Church is they believe that at baptismal regeneration, original sin is removed. So you've got this sin that you've inherited from Adam. You're born a sinner. Infants are born sinners.

And so what baptism does is it cleanses the soul from sin. And so you've got a tabula rasa. You've got a blank slate. And so you've been infused with grace, not imputed, very important. The Reformers argued for imputation.

The Roman Catholic Church teaches infusion, infusion of grace. So baptism is a means of grace. It infuses you with grace. The child they believe is born again at that point. He's born again or she's born again.

And so they're in a state of grace. That's why they believe that if an infant dies after baptism, they go directly into the presence of God. They don't even go to purgatory. Now in the Eastern Orthodox, they don't believe in original sin.

They don't believe that children are born with original sin. But what they do believe is that what baptism does for children, and mind you, Roman Catholics will pour water. The Eastern Orthodox, they got the right mode.

They immerse the child three times. But in their view, the regeneration opens their soul to receive sanctification, to receive the gifts of God, and so forth. The Lutherans believe that baptism makes the child a child of God.

So Lutherans, after a baptismal service, will say, this child, we welcome this child into the family of God. This child is now a child of God. And so they also believe the child receives the Holy Spirit.

And so there are some nuanced differences between those three. The only issue with the Lutherans, I believe, is that you've got this emphasis on the five solas, but then they attach this baptism regeneration to it.

So those are basically the differences. But the Roman Catholic view, in particular, says that baptism removes the stain of original sin, and therefore the child becomes a child of God, and is in the covenant.

So this covenantal language is very important. They are part of the covenant. I dealt with, here in Canada, I dealt with a lady whose son had, she said, had walked away from the faith, and they were part of what's called the Christian Reform Church here in Canada, which has gone, most of it has gone liberal.

But she said that her son left the faith, but he was baptized, and God made promises to him in baptism. And it creates this idea that, well, as long as this child was baptized and received into the covenant, that they're okay, God's going to take care of them.

Now, again, I believe that infant baptism makes babies wetter, not better. And so my view is, no, you're not in the covenant. The only ones in the covenant are those who are not only chosen by God's election, but those whom he regenerates by the Holy Spirit, writes his laws in their hearts.

So in Jeremiah 31, just named after you, Jeremiah, your namesake, Jeremiah 31 to 34, I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with them in Horeb.

In other words, it will not be like the covenant he made at Sinai. He says, I was a husband to Israel, but they violated the covenant. They were adulterous, worshiped other gods. So this new covenant is going to be different.

It's not going to be a national covenant like Israel had. It's going to be a covenant where God is going to write his laws, not on tablets of stone, but he's going to write them on the hearts of his people.

And it says, no man will have to say to them, know the Lord, for they shall all know me from the least to the greatest. And so in the new covenant, the only ones in the new covenant, Jeremiah, are those who are regenerate.

And so it's what Augustine would call the mystical church, the invisible church. Because in the visible church, there are counterfeits. There are tares among the wheat, there are goats among the sheep.

And so those two coexist in the visible church. And that's why you have Judas Iscariots in the church as well. And you can only tell when they apostatize, when in time they leave Christ altogether or leave the church.

And John tells us in 1 John, they went out from us because they were not of us. If they were of us, they would have remained with us, but their going out has.

Shown they were never part of us to begin with. Something I learned recently is there are some people within the church of Christ world that actually believe that Judas Iscariot did not go to hell, but actually repented in a genuine sense and actually went to heaven.

And I just tell, I point, sometimes you don't even have to expose the faulty logic and contradictions. You can just let them speak for themselves. And you're just like, that's all a bundle of mess. I wanted to, before I ask you another question from the chat, I've had the question from Keith Foskey and some other people that have been on their channel.

And this is always a question that gets brought up and I really appreciate it. Jeremiah, why are the church of Christ considered a cult? That some of them will use the phrase baptismal regeneration. And if they won't do it, they're really just trying to distinguish themselves from Rome.

But when you ask enough questions, they believe that you're regenerated in the waters. Why is that a heretical, damnable position as where we would not see the Lutherans as the same thing? And what I have said is not all baptismal regeneration doctrines are the same.

And when you conflate, when you bring in justification into the picture and you deny justification by faith alone, that is the Galatian one heresy. So like you said, even though I think the Lutherans are holding two things that do not comport with one another, I do not think justification by faith alone can be held onto in baptismal regeneration.

Now the Lutherans, which may reflect many of the early church thought, which I think they're kind of contradictory in some of their things too, they would fundamentally affirm justification by faith alone, where many of the restorationist groups along with Mormonisms and so forth, they deny, along with Roman Catholics, justification by faith alone.

So would you make another distinction in there to show why? Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're right,.