Believer's Baptism (Part 3)

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Thank you.

Welcome back to You May Have Not Read. I'm Dylan Hamilton, and with me are.

Chris Giesler.

Andrew Hudson.

David Kassin.

And today we'll be wrapping up Believer's Baptism by a plethora of authors. What do you have for us, Andrew?

Okay, first, pardon me if I cough. I'm recovering from something, but we're gonna be covering the last little bit of the chapters. So we're gonna start off with baptism in the patristic writings. Patristic writings are referring to as the age post-apostolic to 595 A .D.

Now, in the patristic writings, we're gonna be covering people like Justin Martyr, the document commonly referred to as the Didache, and the Apology from Ericides. These all outline credo baptism, expressed faith of the candidate for baptism, every single one of these.

Some of the phrases that you could look to in second century writing by Justin Martyr's entitled First Apology, directed the candidate to fast one or two days prior.

That's tough to do if you're an infant.

Yeah, exactly. I was thinking the same thing. The Didache also covers that, fasting prior.

I was gonna say, tough for the parent or for the child.

Yeah.

Yes, those of you who have kids, oh yes. Yes to both.

Yeah.

However, there are burial or funeral rite records that do talk about emergency baptisms for infants. That is in the record.

Wow.

Yeah.

Why do you think that might be?

Well, you start to get into the ideas a little bit later on. It would surprise me if that was early, but.

Late second century.

Yeah, late second century. That wouldn't surprise me if they wanted to get people baptized because they were starting to get into the idea that baptism, full-fledged baptism or regeneration.

But that had already started. Yeah, because by the time the third century rolls around, origin states that infant baptism was part of the norm. So, however, Tertullian argues for those receiving or giving, conducting the baptism, to fear the reception more so than the delay.

This was because, he states, sound faith is secure of salvation. So, this is the idea here. What we believe, that your salvation is not based on being immersed.

Or sprinkled.

Or sprinkled, yeah.

There's an old saying that whatever your particular theological proclivity, you could probably find some early church father that supported it. I mean, you really can.

Yeah.

In fact, I was talking with the Jehovah's Witnesses the other day, and they cited Justin Martyr as a reason not to believe the Trinity.

So, touche. Could they tell you where it was?

No, they really couldn't.

That was not published by the Watchtower?

Yeah, the Watchtower.

I don't think they've got Justin in the app.

No, he's not there. His writings aren't either. Just excerpts, convenient, right?

So, this entire chapter is really just what the patristics said about baptism in general. Is that, what's kind of the consensus?

The consensus about?

Yeah, what's the consensus?

The patristics?

About baptism among the patristics.

Well, in this work, it's credo is the consensus.

Is there evidence, do the Paedo-Baptists have any cases at all within the first and second century of mentions of Paedo-Baptism?

Being conducted, or normative?

Normative.

Well, like I just talked about, Tertullian art.

You said, by the third century?

Yeah. Okay.

Sorry, not Tertullian, but it works. It's easy to get them mixed up. Okay, on to the next chapter. The Baptism of Confessors by the Anabaptists. So, Anabaptists, the title means like re-baptism, but really, it wasn't re-baptism, it was baptism upon confession.

And that's why this chapter is titled Confessor Baptism.

With the Anabaptists, what time frame are you looking at here?

So, in 1523, Zwingli and Hubmeier had a meeting where they both agreed to put an end to infant baptism. But I don't know if you know this, and I didn't know this, after reading Zwingli, obviously, went the complete opposite direction.

Just goes to show you that people's theology changes over time. And these two were former brothers united on going the same direction, and they parted ways, personally as well as theologically. But really, this infant baptism by 1523 really can be seen as a legacy of the papacy.

So, I'm gonna go over a couple different ideas that were developed during the time frame of the papacy's ascendancy prior to the Reformation. A faith bestowed, so the idea that baptism itself is a faith bestowed to the candidate.

That's a fides infusa. And then there's also the idea or development of the faith of others being operative, and that's fides aliena. Those two concepts were cited to do infant baptisms. Luther, I'm just going over a survey of what some of the beliefs were at this time.

So, Luther believed or stated in the early 1520s that the sacrament without faith is empty, okay? But he goes on to do infant baptism, right? But he talks about it being the faith of the candidate, a fides propria, because the candidate believes.

So, you might wonder, how can you do infant baptism and it's based on the faith of a candidate? Well, that's because confession of faith and faith itself were separated in logically, right? So, later on, it would have been operative or valid, a valid baptism if they did believe.

Well, there's some serious logical hoops to jump through just to maintain it.

So, in order to, well, I don't know Zwingli's motivations, but in order to maybe circumvent this whole talk, his system was developed that's really called it apples and oranges, external versus internal.

So, faith is one thing, baptism is another, and one's just an external sign and the other is the internal reality and they don't have to meet at the moment. So, he really put that division between the operation of the baptism as the faith of the candidate, whereas Hubmeyer went the other direction.

So, where Zwingli was taking a knife to separate the two, Hubmeyer, the Anabaptist, was using a clamp, if you will, to really reinforce the idea that, no, that they are united. In fact, he didn't even call it believer's baptism because at this time, you could be a believer as an infant and we just wouldn't know it, right?

Like, in their system, it's, I guess, logically possible that whoever you did this baptism on would be a believer. So, to them, it would be based on the belief of that candidate, even though they were an infant and couldn't express it.

Or based on, you said, the one conducting. Yeah, or others, right, yeah.

Or the infusion in the sacrament.

They're like taking faith and cutting it into three or four categories.

Oh, yeah, definitely, definitely. Whereas Hubmeyer says that, no, it's not believer's baptism, it's credo baptism. It's based on the proclamation of faith, the professed faith and the evidence repentance of the candidate.

He says that it's the outward confession and testimony of inward faith and commitment. That's how he summarized what baptism is. So, I would agree with that. You know, like, I don't necessarily draw a direct line to the Anabaptists of continental Europe to the United States, but there is an obvious connection through the heritage of believer's baptism, even aside from things like pacifism and things like that, yeah.

Which is so ironic because the Anabaptists of the 1500s were known as the Radical Reformation.

I know.

And they were, I mean, they were anarchists. And when the first London Confession of Faith was written, I mean, they specifically said, by the seven churches in London who are falsely called Anabaptists, we are not Anabaptists, we promise.

We're not the Radicals, we're not the Anarchists. Even though they were, you know, they called them Rebaptizers, but really it's more confessor.

Confessor, yeah.

Confessor baptism.

So, with a lot of these terms, are we seeing pejoratives being picked up as labels, like with Anabaptism?

Yeah, Anabaptism is definitely, well, I mean, that's what really they were doing, right? Like your baptism wasn't sufficient, that type of idea. And by that, I mean, without a proclamation of faith, what are you doing?

Right.

Is this why when some groups would catch Anabaptists, they would drown them? Because, oh, you want to be baptized? It seemed like I had read in church history where the punishment for being an Anabaptist was drowning, because they believed in immersion.

And it was like, well, we'll baptize you. And they would put them down that way. Well, I didn't know if it mentioned anything about that.

It wasn't just that they were trying to re-baptize people, is that they were seen as anarchists. They were seen as people that wanted to upend society in general. And they were treated, really, as terrorists.

There's a whole lot going on there in the 1500s, but Baptists today, especially American Baptists today, don't draw their heritage from the Anabaptists on the continent. That's really the Mennonites and the people of that ilk today, the Swiss.

Joseph Amman and, I can't remember his first name, Minow.

Yeah, Minow.

Even though we might be considered extremists today.

Nice. No, we really draw our tradition stems from the English Puritan movement.

I like the term fundamentalist.

It's sort of like when they tried to drown their witches to see if they would float. They tried to drown a Baptist. If he floated, then it turned out he was a Methodist.

Oh my gosh.

For those at home, that was Michael with laryngitis.

Oh, heavens.

Wow.

All right, now, chronologically in the book, it goes into baptismal logic of pedobaptists. I'll be honest, I couldn't really follow the logic of things, except that it was good and necessary consequence from their system.

And sure, I can understand that. But I'm not interested in the logic of their system. I'm interested in what the Bible has to say about what baptism is, what faith is, who the Christian community is. All of these little terms that like to get talked about, they're derived, or we should be deriving them in our belief about the matter, being conformed to the image by his word.

So whatever the scripture says. And so I was a little bit hesitant previously to go over what the patristics wrote about or what the anabaptists believed. Maybe I'm a little bit more iconoclastic than others, but just like you said, you could probably get a patricic to say anything you wanted them to say.

So that's why these chapters were not as compelling to me, but I think that doesn't mean that it's not compelling for other people.

Did the later chapter that you read when they talked about good and necessary consequence, did they use the analogy of a string of pearls? They use that one?

I didn't see that in this text. It was a overview of what, let's see here, Murray and Marcel and Calvin wrote, so.

I think John Murray used to maybe use that phrase or it's been used before that the way they arrive at infant baptism is the, it was a pearl of wisdom here, pearl of wisdom, and you string them together and then you get your necklace.

Or the good and necessary consequence, you don't have to have it verbatim. It's just the logical and reasonable conclusion. You pull together all these different ideas. And these were the same people who preached to us the regulative principle.

So the irony of that.

Sure, was explicitly mentioned. So that leaves us with the last chapter, which covers, well, I omitted one chapter, which was about ancient Near Eastern contracts and.

The Suzer and Vassal contract thing.

Exactly.

A little bit more esoteric. If you really want to understand about maybe some contract covenant type things of the Middle, I call it Middle East, it might be helpful for you. But I didn't see a direct connection.

Whenever I read the passage, I was like, uh, I don't really know where this is going, so.

Yeah, that whole Suzer and Vassal, as you know, that king is that one-way covenant with the vassal and that is so important to a lot of covenant theology. A lot of the.

Sure, and it was expounded by them, yeah.

So, I mean, if you want to understand their arguments, maybe go through it, but again, that doesn't necessarily mean that's the covenant that you're studying in the scripture. It's just, this is a, this is just something that has happened in history.

It would be better if you want to understand the biblical covenant. Historical context. You know, look at the biblical text.

Yeah, exactly.

And every covenant defines itself, so you should start there. But if you're interested in ancient history, maybe the Suzer and Vassal discussion might be helpful, but, you know, I get it.

And then finally, talking about the Stone Campbell or restoration movement and baptism, the way that this book set it was, it was as a response to the age. At the time in the United States, the Great Awakening and Second Great Awakening, specifically, the idea of people having to have enthusiastic conversion experiences, that they were a requirement for admission or prior to baptism, that you would have some type of, like you were, you went to a revival where you were sitting at the, like, what do they call it, the whalers, the whalers bench, where you were experiencing some type of manifestation of contrition of your sins or about your sins.

That was a large part of what was happening in this time. However, Campbell talked about how assurance was received through the promise through immersion, is how he put it. His whole goal was to bring the churches of Christ back to primitive Christianity.

The idea being, if it's not spoken about in the text of scripture, it shouldn't be happening in the churches of God. So that's where you get things like worship style, names of churches. I mean, it just runs the gamut, unless you can point to chapter and verse as a foundation for why you're doing something, then it should be subjected to as just being mere preference.

I think, to some extent, I would agree with that, but.

But no pianos in church.

Yeah, so what ends up happening is a specific form of worship or a specific form of organizing a church in a locale becomes the only way, and it's like a fractious nature where, okay, well, this church of Christ does it this way, and this is the right way, because we can point to chapter and verse.

And this one over here, even though they talk about being united, the churches of Christ, they have a lot of differences where even some of them don't even have communion with others. You have more conservative churches of Christ that see the disciples of Christ as a highly liberal offshoot of the churches of Christ where they don't have fellowship with them at all.

And I don't know if you know anything about the churches of Christ. We're here in Oklahoma. There's actually a large presence of the disciples of Christ congregations here, so.

At the place where I went to college, there were two church of Christ churches, one on the west side, one on the east side, and they were night and day. And they would, there was this friction between them.

So there was a lot of Baptist churches, and you could go to any one and be welcomed, and they would do fellowships together. The college groups from the different Baptist churches, you know, would get along.

With the church of Christ, it was like, you don't wear a suit to church? You must belong to that other one. Oh, you were baptized there, well then you need to be baptized here.

See? Wow.

Yeah, and they were both church of Christ, and they seemed to have the same kind of history. They pointed to the same things, but it was really like, if you don't, if you're not the way we are, then it's not valid.

And you know, Campbell was like that, right? At the very beginning. He was enjoying fellowship with the Baptist assemblies at one time, but that totally changed after his insistence upon certain things.

Which is interesting, because it seems like during that time, there was a lot going on, because the Campbellites, Mormonism, Jehovah's Witness, it's all in like the 1830s, 1800s, 1830s. And Joseph Smith says the same thing, like when he's talking about a vision he had, which church should I attend?

And the angel says.

They're all apostate.

None of them, they're all apostate. So you had men that were like, it's my way or the highway.

Yes.

It was called the Wild West for a reason, but there's stories in Arkansas of whole Baptist associations becoming church of Christ. They called it Wildfire. And they started with, there started to be strenuous debates between church of Christ and Baptist, which gave rise to landmarkism in Baptist life as a claim to the church of Christ.

No, we go all the way back to John the Baptist.

Oh, Baptist.

And that's where landmarkism was developed as a response to what they saw as wildfire, the Campbellites taking over all their churches.

Landmark. Was there a book or like a trail of blood or trail of tears or something like that?

It's a trail of blood of the martyrs going all the way back to John the Baptist was the idea.

Okay.

And that's where that really began to emerge.

So I only vaguely heard of references to that in church history class.

A lot of the old hard church of Christ and old hard landmark Baptist are going away. And so there's, with all of the friction and instability, it's not sustainable long-term. And you really have to talk to church of Christ, each person on their own terms to figure out what they believe.

Tell me about it.

Because things are not the way they were 50 years ago,.

For sure.

So they're probably far afield from where Campbell himself probably would have been theologically now today anyway.

Yes.

You ever heard of Max Lucado?

Yes.

He used to be church of Christ.

Okay, well, there we go.

We always called him mashed potatoes.

Used to be, he's no longer in the fold of church of Christ now. Ooh, Max Lucado was kicked out.

Oh, okay.

Well, you know.

Well, I didn't like his books anyway.

Oh, man.

Sorry.

Well, no, I remember people were, this is one of my first churches, and that's the very, very first church I joined. It was a faith community in Dover, Delaware. And my pastor there, he was a firebrand.

He was great. We had actually a lot of fun. Older guy, but he had tons of energy. And I remember somebody asking him about, well, our church goes back to John the Baptist. And he goes, well, that's Old Covenant.

So he's the greatest prophet in the Old Covenant, and that baptism isn't even valid. So you need to, you know, you were baptized into John the Baptist, you know that you need to be baptized into Christ.

And he just won't.

Truth.

Yeah, both barrels. This guy was great.

Nice.

New Testament, bonk.

Yeah.

And so this passage did go into baptismal regeneration. And it talked about the passages that they would point to in scripture. I could probably list a lot of them. But their critique was that they confuse the means of salvation versus the ground of salvation, or the instrument through which versus the basis of salvation.

In fact, there was a critique, even in this section, about people who view baptism as an optional event in Christian life, and a warning for them that they would not disobey the master and be baptized as a disciple of his.

And I did appreciate this passage, or this exhortation to those who would turn it into merely symbolism, or an optional event that has nothing to do with your salvation experience in Christ. And that's it.

So it did go into, what is baptism in the context of the local church? There are a lot of questions. Where are we gonna be doing baptism? When will we be doing baptism? Who are we going to allow to be baptized versus who's gonna be the one doing the baptizing?

How often are they supposed to say something? Is it supposed to be the central event of a congregational meeting? Is it a Sunday thing? Or is it a sometime through the week thing? Or should we do it in a pool or a trough?

Or do we need to go find a body of water somewhere that we'll do a special event? So these are all pastoral or congregational decisions. I think the Didache talks a lot about the practical implications of doing baptism.

So if there was a congregation out there that was wanting to see what some church history did with baptism, you might wanna reference that. But I'm not pushing people to a source outside the Bible. What do believers do?

They get, they're baptized, right? So is it an act of worship to the king? I don't think the Bible says that explicitly, but we can be joining with people who are being baptized and as a worshipful thing to the master in celebration of this momentous event.

So this book is an anthology. I mean, it's a collection of different essays. All the authors aren't exactly the same, but the general flow of the book itself is just a discussion about baptism, baptism throughout the histories.

It's really, it's for credo believers baptism. And some of it can get a little heady as you, and thank you for plowing through this. I read some of this. I did not read all of this book. I read some of this book.

And so thank you for doing the heavy lifting on this. But would you recommend this book to anyone, to rank and file? Is this only for scholars or is there certain chapters that you think that people, everyone should read?

If you're interested in learning more about the theological basis of believers baptism, the history of believers baptism, how it relates to the believers of the new covenant, if you have any of those questions, this book would be useful.

It's not the Bible. So if there was something in here that is against scripture, obviously reject what this book says. And that's the light that you should subject all things to is the light of the scripture.

So it is useful. It is useful. I was benefited greatly by borrowing a copy from one of the elders here, my elder. And I'm very thankful to him for the time of being able to read it, as well as being able to discuss it on the podcast.

Yeah, I think we've all benefited from these, what, three, four discussions now over this book. And if it hasn't piqued our interest at all, we've at least gone back to areas of scripture where we needed reinforcement in this anyways.

Does anybody have any other questions or interrogations? Or he's, okay.

Have you been baptized?

Yes, I was baptized quite a while ago.

All right, we're good.

Upon profession of faith, I'll put it like that.

All right, so I think we've exhausted that topic, but we're gonna go ahead and go around the horn and see what we would recommend in this episode as far as content goes for everybody else out there. And Andrew, you don't have to answer because.

Can I go ahead and just go first then? You go first. After reading this and having discussions with Jehovah's Witnesses, I really actually do want to look at what the patristic writings are. And so I had purchased about two years ago an eight volume set of history of the Christian church, history by Philip Schaff.

I may be getting the title wrong. I'll follow up on that one. But anyway, it's I believe eight volumes. Volume two is the Patristic Age. I've already jumped into it and absolutely enjoying it. Eight volumes of 400 plus page books is going to be a long, long time.

And I picked it up a long time ago because it was a hardback copy editions that were on a really, what I thought to be a good sale at the time. And I now finally feel motivated to like, okay, I'm going to do the work and I'm going to get through this.

So it's a great read so far. If you can get a copy online, a free copy, Philip Schaff's works are all on ccel .org and it's free. They're all in the public domain. You don't have to have a physical copy.

So go check it out there.

All right, Chris.

My recommendation this week would be Monsters of the Id by Michael Jones. Man, that's intense. So I'm probably gonna have to go through it another time, like take a break. But he's pulling in so many things from history, particularly the enlightenment.

He's like just deconstructing it. Like what was happening during the time, what the writings were meant to convey, kind of analyzing their mindset and what they were writing. And he's just pulling it all in.

And then he brings it up to kind of today and what we're facing and going through. It's very, I'd say scholarly, a lot of quotations from other languages, Latin and German and all that stuff. But that's what they're dealing with.

You know, the French Revolution, things like that. But it was very informative. It was very good.

And in his work, wouldn't you say the life of the auteur matters very much, the creator?

Yeah.

Yeah, that's one thing he dives into that I've noticed is anyone who creates or produces these things, he looks at the background, he looks at the history.

Well, he talks about, basically, we've kind of romanticized them, you know, with Frankenstein and Dracula. It missed the point because the writers were conveying something, even at some points, betraying some of their own beliefs in what they were putting down.

You get a glimpse into their mind by reading their diaries, reading what they were saying about what was happening to them. And then it comes out in novel form as a critique of what was going on. It is very interesting.

But author's intent, and then also some things that weren't intended by the author, but nevertheless, they're still there.

Yeah, no, good recommendation.

David?

Well, I just read a quote by someone. You let me know if this is true or not. It says that knowledge is knowing that Dr. Frankenstein was not the monster. And then wisdom is knowing that Dr. Frankenstein was the monster.

That sounds about right.

I like that, I like that.

Yeah.

So I recently finished, this is actually a third book in the Timothy Zahn series, the Thrawn trilogy. I was aware of Timothy Zahn and some more of the classic take on Star Wars, you know, pre-Disney Star Wars eras.

And this was just, it was just fun. You know, we talked about a lot of heady things and I listened to audio books. And so this was, I did the audio book version and I thoroughly enjoyed it. And I do like military strategy and I like that kind of stuff.

So I enjoy listening to those kinds of things. But one of my favorite all-time movies is Star Trek II, Wrath of Khan. And I love the, it's almost like a submarine battle in this nebula. And that's why, even though you have William Shatner screaming, Khan, you know, it's so over the top.

And some of the stuff that Zahn writes is over the top, but it's great. So I enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to going through some more of Zahn's material, but this is book three, The Last Command, book three in the Thrawn trilogy.

So I just finished that.

Michael, you have something you want to recommend?

Yeah, a book that was revised and expanded by Thomas Nettles back during when I was in my internship, I got to help proofread a little bit of it. So he sent me a copy with his signature in it. So I've read through it a couple of times.

It's a great, by his grace and for his glory, historical, theological, and practical study of the doctrines of grace in Baptist life. And I like history. And this history kind of helps root, you know, how is it that I'm a Baptist and believe these things, where did that come from?

And then not only is there a history walking you through everything, the last section of the book, there are syntheses of the different key doctrines. So you kind of get it in a linear fashion and then all kind of put together.

So it's a great read.

Does it go back to John the Baptist?

No. Okay.

No, no, not that far.

Well, I'm going to recommend this week a podcast that I was on recently talking about a children's book that I had written. It's called The Ana Money. And he goes through a lot of economics from the Austrian perspective, but also analyzes it from a biblical perspective to test to see whether a lot of the economic ideas out there, especially pushed by either conservatives or conservative-leaning libertarians are something to latch onto.

Should we be doing that as Christians? And if so, what should we throw out? What should we keep? He does a very good job of going through some Old Testament law and principles that can be drawn from that as well.

And he is a theonomist. So he

What type of theonomist? Someone that says that God's laws are the best? Or like

General equity.

Okay.

So that's what he would describe himself as general equity. We can probably agree on some of the application of Old Testament law that he puts forth. But specifically, he's read through quite a bit of Gary North, Soul, some of those guys.

So he has a little bit of analysis on current events through that lens. And it can be helpful because it's like 20 to 30 minute snippets at a time for a podcast, which for me is short form. That's a short form podcast for me, but he does a pretty good job.

And I had a fun time talking about the book with him. So we'll move on to, go ahead.

Well, I was gonna say, you said 20 to 30 minutes, but at 2X speed, it's only 10 minutes.

Yeah, right.

Short form.

Yeah, it makes the commute seem long at that point because you have to pick something else on the way.

And you said it was Theonomoney?

Theonomoney.

Okay.

Yeah.

We'll go ahead and move on to what we're thankful for. You wanna start us off, Chris?

Yes, I am thankful for the job that I have. I've been struggling recently with just wanting to be home, wanting to be with my family, wanting to work, but do it with my family. You know, I think about the cottage industry and times past and the industrial revolution coming in and crushing all that and corporations and da, da, da, da.