The Great Paedo-Bapti-Trans Dispute of 2022

Greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is James Blunt coming to you live from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Arrived less than an hour ago and we threw everything together. And I start doing this while you start getting to know folks, get to know campgrounds.

And I stayed at this campground a couple of weeks ago on the way up to Colorado. And there is a cat here at the campground named Marvin. He is the chillest cat you will ever meet. He just is unperturbable.

And he just sits on the counter when you check in and lets you pet him. And I did get a little reaction on when I gave him some kitty treats today. But to make a long story short, I wrote a review for the campground when I left and said that everybody needs to come so they can see Marvin at the Santa Fe KOA.

And so on the way in today, I had already had some exchanges and had requested this slot that I'm in because it's super easy to get into. The 5G tower is right there. It's just right there. And so I called and I said, so could I just skip the check-in thing and just pull into E2?

I know right where it is. And I said, Marvin said I could do that. And the guy then expressed to me how all the employees are very jealous because Marvin is always the employee of the month because he gets all the positive comments on the reviews.

And so they're thinking about changing his name. So Marvin got me in here and got me in here quickly so that we could do this program because it's sort of necessary to do so. As you know, I've been traveling and really I'm on my way home, but I'm only gonna be home long enough to sort of switch out clothes and head right back out for a much longer trip.

And so that makes it a little bit more difficult to respond to sudden developments as what took place over the weekend. And so if you're not aware of that, I'm not sure what rock you live under, it must have a lot of lead in it or something.

The CrossPolitik Comments and the Baptist Theology Controversy

But this past weekend, all the discussion of the great tradition stuff and Thomas Aquinas got shoved off to the side. And all of a sudden Reformed Baptists were back to being united as Reformed Baptists.

Because the first I saw was a meme, as I recall. The memes have been flying. But a meme quoting Mr. Jason Farley, who is a poet. And he was a guest on CrossPolitik. Now, it wasn't a long episode. I guess it was daily ones instead of weekend ones or something like that.

And Toby Sumter wasn't there. Jared Longshore took his place. And Mr. Farley was on Zoom, whatever they use as the guest's software. Anyway, what's called the backstage after show, which I guess is just for subscribers, was titled, The Failure of Baptist Theology.

And the first meme that I saw was the statement that Baptist theology is responsible for transgenderism. And there were immediate responses, obviously. Because the first thing that crosses your mind is I can't possibly see where any connection there is at all.

But I realized, okay, I guess I'm gonna have to take the time to track these programs down. And that took a little work to do. And one of them was on YouTube, so I was able to grab the transcript. And so I listened to everything in the original show and then to the backstage discussion that continued after that.

They're not super long programs and the material in the first show only made up a portion because they did stuff from the Psalter. And what they had done is they had started with quotations and materials and clips about the horror that is the transgender movement, the mutilation of children.

It almost makes you wonder if the phrase, there is nothing new under the sun may not be false. There has always been cross-dressers and sexual perversion along those lines. But only in modern times have we had the medical and scientific capacity to mutilate children, primarily to make sure that they will never have children themselves.

And primarily to fulfill the adult fantasies of other people. The current transgender craze is only a decade old and it is completely dependent upon TikTok, YouTube and social media. It would not exist without those things.

It cannot exist without those things. It taps into the angst of the teenage years, those hormonal imbalances. It arises out of a combination of ungodly concepts and beliefs that are now becoming ingrained in the next generations.

And it's happening very quickly because our society has become disconnected from its past and from any foundation that can keep it stable. Those influences begin with secularization, with the abandonment of any logical or rational understanding of the origination and purpose of man.

The door to where we are today was kicked open by the so-called enlightenment and then given rocket fuel by Charles Darwin. The current embodiment of this is just the, what hopefully has to be end stage cancer of a society that hates itself because it hates God.

And when you have finally convinced everybody in your circle, people around you that God doesn't exist, then you have to turn to express your hatred of God to that which reminds you of God, which is mankind that bears his image.

And so transgenderism is an active rebellion against God that is based upon a rejection that there is a creator, that he has a law, that he has revealed his law and that there will be a day of judgment.

And therefore, if there's no creator, there's no definition of who I am. Therefore I get to define who I am. There is in a sense a level of rebellion, even against naturalistic materialism because from a strictly Darwinian perspective, transgenderism is idiocy because the ultimate good in Darwin is the passing on of as much of your genetic material to the next generation as possible.

When you use puberty blockers, which stop the development, mental development, brain development, they are poisons. They're absolutely poisons. Any doctor that would prescribe these things except in most extreme situation of some type of rare cancer or something like that is going to be judged worthy of hell fire for eternity for the actions that they undertake.

The evil, if Mengele was still alive, he'd be sitting back going, man, I'm an amateur in comparison to what we're seeing today. So the sources of transgenderism are more than sufficiently documented. The people that have labored for decades to lay the foundations in the educational system, the takeover of the educational system, the gutting of the educational system, the creation of generations now of secular minded people who are as a result very weak in their understanding of who they are because secularism can't give you a grounding of who you are, why you are who you are.

These people were themselves deeply influenced by Rousseau and the philosophical influences are many and contradictory, but this is a manifestation of being given over by God in judgment to self-destruction.

We don't have to look much farther than the sinful heart of man, the utterly rebellious heart of man who has been given over, professingly wise, but they became fools. We don't have to ask what other sources could we look for?

Transgenderism is based upon the idea that man is an autonomous, random creature that can define his own nature totally separate from God and that that definition actually has no objective reality, which is why it can change, which is why you can have 142 different genders, why you can change tomorrow because there is no objective reality to which to refer.

What “Baptist Theology” Means and Why the Charge Needs Specificity

Now, as a Baptist, and let me just mention that that is not an overly descriptive term, Baptist. The fact is Presbyterian is a much more specific term than Baptist is because Baptist, I mean, all that does is refer to a form of one of the ordinances of the church.

It doesn't tell you anything. There are non-Trinitarians who practice baptism by immersion. So the very phrase Baptist theology is a vague, undefinable term. It really is. It really has no meaning. And even if you say Presbyterian theology, well, okay, there's some basic elements to that, but all you have to do is look at OPC, PCA, PCUSA, and all the other alphabet soups, and you will know that today there are people who call themselves Presbyterians who have female ministers in rainbow frocks.

And then you've got your pipe-smoking, Calvin-quoting Presbyterians who want to hunt down the people in the socks. It's just, you've got a wide variety. And so, especially though, Baptist theology, it's so vague, it doesn't contain anything.

And so when we talk about the failure of Baptist theology, there needs to be some specificity. What exactly are we talking about? Well, when we looked, when I listened to the programs, there is now some dispute and some disagreement as to exactly what the intentions and the statements were.

Let's start with what actually happened on the program. After Mr. Farley made his argument that the radical individualism illustrated in the Baptist denial of baptism to children until they make a profession of faith, that assertion was that there is a fundamental and essential element of radical individualism in Baptist theology, in American Baptist theology, but that it is illustrated in Baptist sacramentology regarding baptism itself.

Now, one of the reasons that, despite the fact that I'm pretty fried after driving as far as I did today, and if anyone's sitting there going, well, it's only six and a half, seven hours. When you're 44 feet long, you cannot relax.

You cannot have an easy drive. There's lots of stuff that you have to be doing to keep everything working and not destroy everything in the process. Anyway, the reason that I'm pushing myself to do this in this context, many reasons, but one is that I have, within this past year, engaged in a debate with Doug Wilson on the subject of sacramentology, and it was specifically in regards to paedo-communion.

And issues relevant to this came up, both in this and then in the debate afterwards, and we recorded that after program right where I'm sitting. Doug sat right here, I sat right over there. So we've been talking about this stuff for a long time, and I've been on the program a number of times, and as all things work out, we'll be by the end of the week, cross-politic, that is.

And so we have sought to create a consensus movement, a unity. It's been very costly. By the way, I have spoken with both Gabe and Chocolate Knox for 50 minutes and 35 minutes, I think, or 25 minutes, respectively.

So we have communicated, and there seems to be some differences of opinion, even from all the guys associated with cross-politic, as to exactly what the purpose and intention of the statements were, because in those conversations, there's been some confusion expressed as to why there's such an offense on the part of Baptists, that someone would say that Baptist theology is responsible for transcenderism.

And the idea is a couple-fold. The idea is, well, look, we take on Presbyterians all the time. You just need to have a little thicker skin. And my response to that is, but when you take on Presbyterians, you're saying they didn't live up to true theology.

What you're saying here is, the problem is with Baptist sacramentology, and that is we don't baptize infants. And when we don't, the idea is you're saying to your young people that you get to choose your identity.

It's up to you. Now, in talking with some of the guys, they've defended that. They haven't gone, oh, no, no, we weren't talking about you guys. We know you reformed Baptists. We know that you understand covenant theology, and you don't get it quite right, but you're better than the Armenians are.

And the whole idea there is based upon, and this is what almost no one has responded to. Almost no one has understood, lie in here, I hate that. He's heading right for my face. Almost no one has responded to the real background context of what was being said.

Let me deal with that while it's fresh in my thinking. There is a concept that is regularly expressed on cross-politic, that culture flows downstream from the church. Culture flows downstream from worship.

And fundamentally, the application of that is that if there's something wrong in culture, it's because there's something wrong in the church. And so the idea here is Baptists are missing it, all Baptists, whether covenantal or not, because they're not baptizing their infants.

Because when you baptize your infants, you are giving them an identity. And that identity then is something that they are to live up to. But it's not up to them to choose it. But if you don't baptize your children and you say you need to repent and believe, then you are granting to them a form of autonomy that then teaches the culture that that autonomy exists.

And then they take that and run with it and it leads to transgenderism. Now, obviously, given my opening comments, I do not believe transgenderism is the fault of the church at all. I will say this. First of all, we have to define, what do we mean when we say the church?

Are we talking about the believing church? Are we talking about the compromised church? Are we talking about the utterly false church? Are we talking about the church in general? Are we talking about Baptist churches?

Are we talking about American Baptist churches? There is an American Baptist church denomination and it's primarily apostate, extremely liberal. Or are we talking about American Baptists as in cultural Baptists in the South?

What are we talking about? I don't know. And it was not defined, I'm sorry. It just, it was not defined. No matter how hard you try, in the cross-politics segment and in the backstage thing, the distinction wasn't made.

In fact, the only time in the conversation, Jock and Knox at the end of the cross-politics said, but what if I'm doing my best to raise my children in fear of knowledge of the Lord, and I'm a Baptist and I'm a covenantal Bap, and he stopped right there because he was rushing at the end.

But he was even saying covenantal Baptists. That was the context of what began the backstage portion. So what are we even talking about when we mention these things? The idea is, what I'm hearing from the guys, is that when you don't baptize your children, you are communicating some kind of autonomy, autonomous idea to them.

And that would be true of all Baptists. And Brother Farley did say, at the beginning of the backstage thing, and he said it fairly quickly, but I know one of my fellow elders caught it. He was saying, no, I know you're trying to protect me, but no, I'm saying it is the cause.

And if not just the Baptists, they're pastors. And so the argument is, you've missed something important. This is a failure of the church and the society then, since it flows from the church to the society, the society has picked this up, this granting of this autonomous capacity and has secularized it and expressed it within transgenderism.

Now, from my perspective, there are so many holes in that argument that it's really difficult to even line them all up. As I've said to the guys, the people behind the transgender movement don't have a clue what we're talking about and would laugh hysterically to know that we're actually arguing that our views of baptism had something to do with their decades of work to destroy any kind of meaningful understanding of humanity so as to bring about this destruction of young people and this profaning of the image of God and his gift of sexuality.

They would die laughing. 99 .9 of them could not tell the difference between a Pato Baptist, a Credo Baptist if their life depended on. So the idea, if say 75 of the population of this nation were serious Christians, I don't mean the silliness that we get in the polls that says, well, it's dropped down to 68 now identify as a Christian.

Let's put it this way. And I've used this in talking to Muslims when they call us a Christian nation. I say, if 5%, if 5 of the people in this nation spent more than 30 seconds a day thinking about Christ and his word, I'd be stunned.

I'd be stunned. And so the fact of the matter is when we talk about the church and its influence upon culture, well, I asked Toby a question. I mentioned the evil of China. And I said, does that come from a failure of the church or from the basic sinfulness of the heart of man?

And he said, well, I would go with basic sinfulness at that point because the church doesn't really seem to have all that much influence. The reality is the church did have for about a century had an amazing presence in that part of the world.

Now it just disappeared. And it's somewhat of a mystery as to what exactly happened. But the point is he recognized there's just no influence. Well, I would say that in the development of transgenderism the church has had no role either.

Is it true that in my generation believing churches hid from issues of sexuality and things like this? Yeah, he didn't talk about stuff like this in church. Is that a failure on the part of the church?

In the sense of not proclaiming the whole counsel of God, yeah, but we would have been behind the culture at that point, not leading the culture. And it wouldn't have been concepts that we were developing that were leading the culture into these things.

We're out playing with the myth of neutrality and ignoring this stuff and trying to play catch up later on. It wasn't like what we were doing led them to do these things. Again, if we represented 75 of the culture then you might have an argument, but we don't represent that.

And so it simply makes no sense to think that, well, our failures have led to, that's where they got the idea. They took it from us. It flowed downstream from us. No, it didn't. It flowed upstream from the sewer of unregenerate hearts.

It developed from the sewer of Darwinism and Rousseau and all of the humanistic absurdity that came from throwing off any concept of the law of God. In fact, if you wanted to try to pin something on the church, then pin it on antinomianism, pin it on the people who don't believe that God's word actually says anything to our society as far as law is concerned, but connect it to Baptists asking of their children faith and repentance.

You Presbyterians, when you have an adult convert, and I'm not talking about someone who was baptized as a kid, that's gonna become more and more rare in our society. More and more often, we're gonna be encountering people who never had any knowledge of scripture or anything like that at all.

You can't grab them by their baptism. They are simple pagans. When they convert, what are you gonna do? What do you ask of them? I know what you ask of them. I know what you ask, and I agree with what you ask of them.

Before they can partake of the supper, what must they do? They must be baptized. And you do expect that they will confess that they believe that Jesus Christ is King of kings and Lord of lords before you baptize them, right?

So why aren't you to blame for transgenderism? Because if you ask of the adult convert that they give a profession of faith, are you not granting to them the same autonomy that you're saying Baptists are falsely giving their children and that that then can be traced to a secularization of that that leads to transgenderism?

I don't see how you could avoid it. Doesn't make a lick of sense to me. I would never make that argument. And you shouldn't make that argument either because it's a really, really bad argument. Everything that happens in society is not the failure of the church.

It's just not. There are all sorts of societies where really lots of bad, bad, bad, bad, bad things happen. And there's almost no church presence there at all. So I really questioned the anthropology of Farley's position that would actually have sinful men dependent upon having to steal things from the church to pervert it to come up with their rebellious ideas that the heart of man is a never ending factory producing idols, isn't it?

Does that require the church to do that? Now in none of this am I saying that the church has never failed in doing things. But what I am saying is that is not the source of the vast majority of society's problems.

And one of the articles came out from a, friend of mine and a fellow staff member of mine in response to this just today, fundamentally located the problem in post-millennialism. And I understand where they would get that idea because the assumption that Farley is making would only actually be valid in the final iteration of post-millennialism.

That is when the vast majority of the culture has been converted to Christ, truly converted to Christ, not in just some nominalistic fashion, but has truly been converted to Christ. Then you could talk about the church would at that point be the primary influencer of society.

But we're not there yet. We're not there yet. So that particular argument was that, well, see, this is what happens when you make the church, you say the church has the necessity of changing culture. Well, as a post-millennialist, my response to that is you need to distinguish between church and kingdom.

They are intimately connected, just like justification and sanctification. They cannot be separate, but they must be distinguished. And their duties and roles must be distinguished and how one grows and the other grows also must be distinguished.

And it is when God brings about the change, when the nations stream to Jerusalem and desire his law, that requires the work of the Holy Spirit of God. That is an outpouring of the Spirit that has yet to happen, but I believe that it can.

And it seems to me that the scriptural promises that it will, but it's not happening right now. So we are called to be faithful. We are called to be the people who lay the foundations of that happening.

And then we leave it to God's sovereignty as to when he's going to accomplish that. We long to see that. We long to see, because that's what the culture of life is. Right now, we are seeing the preponderance of the culture of death around us.

And it hurts to see it. It's a burden every single day to see the destruction that people experience as they are a part of this. But I don't, so there is an element of post-millennialism in Farley's argument, but I believe it is a badly applied element that misses the recognition that we are not yet at that point where the church can be blamed because it doesn't have the influence upon society that it someday, when Christ puts his enemies under his feet, will.

But we're dealing with now. And we're dealing with the horror of transgenderism. And one of the burdens for me is that here we have, I think that some of the strongest argumentation against transgenderism, against, and for a Christian understanding of God's purpose and creation and his glorification and the fulfillment of man and woman.

The group of us that have been working together, we're the ones that are pushing that the most strongly. I mean, Doug Wilson has done tremendous work in that area and expresses such important stuff there.

And by the way, Doug hasn't commented on any of this to my knowledge. I'll be very interested to hear what he says if he does, because I'll just be honest with you, I can't imagine him saying what was said.

I really can't. But I know he'll understand why it was said. I understand why it was said, but I disagree with so much of the foundational elements of why it was said that, well, like I said, it'll be really interesting to see if Doug does comment on this.

And I hope that everyone understands that in this situation, this has to be iron sharpening iron. This is a test of how far we can push our cooperation and the glue holding everything together. Because I don't think this is, from my Baptist perspective, it is an absurdity to think that my sacramentology had anything to do with giving permission to, providing the background to, encouraging someone to think along the lines of developing any concept such as transgenderism.

That is an imbalanced, utterly inappropriate conclusion. It's just wrong. And when people use the same kind of imbalanced argumentation against Moscow, against Doug Wilson, against reformed theology, we all recognize it.

And we all go now, that's pretty bad argumentation there. So it's really a test. Can we recognize really bad argumentation? And go, yeah, that was probably not the wisest thing to say. Now, if you want to somehow explain how following the apostolic example, and this is, did you notice, and Brian, I'm sorry if, I believe you're pronounced Salve, beautiful music, love the guy, Brian Salve.

I think, I don't know if it was intentionally or what, but right in the middle of when all this exploded, posted a tweet where he said, my children are holy from the point of conception. And I found it very interesting because that is very much a part of this whole conversation.

And one thing I've seen, there are a lot of people on both sides that still struggle to enunciate argumentation in the great Baptist, the credo Baptist, pedo Baptist debate that shows they really understand what the other side is saying.

And I've complained about that many times, but I'm sure there's lots of folks that, well, you just don't understand what we're saying. Well, the fact of the matter is, just as there are numerous Baptist positions, there are numerous Presbyterian positions.

And in this, this is an illustration of it. What is the nature of the quote unquote covenant child? And here was a tweet that in essence, brought that to the fore. What does it mean to be holy? A lot of the people that responded to it automatically assumed, well, holy means sinless, set apart unto God in the sense of sanctified.

Are you saying your children by nature of being children of Christian parents are at birth, no longer subject to the fall. And there have been pedo Baptist, Presbyterian pedo Baptist that have really gone that far.

Pierre Marcel, look up his book. It's an older book now, but look up what he said on this subject. And he fundamentally says that being a part of the covenant removes the impact of the fall and puts the Christian child in a morally neutral place.

So that they're no longer really, I guess they're no longer really the fallen sons and daughters of Adam. And in discussing this with people, I'm again seeing that it's hard for me to understand how if people take these positions, they can put the brakes on before they fall into complete sacerdotal baptismal regeneration.

Your child upon being baptized is regenerated, made a part of Christ because that's what the new covenant is, whether you want to accept it or not, that's what it is. And so you're made a part of the new covenant and you are justified.

And if a person is justified, you're indwelled by the Holy Spirit. And so baptism becomes the means of justification. And you know, at the Reformation, you've got Luther doing infantile faith and that kind of stuff, because he's trying to hold on to as much of the old without destroying all the foundations and leading the anarchy and stuff like that doesn't work.

But how many of us would have done much better is always what I say. We have other giants to stand on. But the whole issue of the sacraments and the result of those sacraments comes right back up to the fore.

And it's all been brought back to our understanding and our debate right now by considering these things. Now, Brian said, why mean it in the sense of Paul of the Corinthians, chapter seven, verse 14?

Well, Paul K. Jewett pretty much closed the door on that one, in my opinion. I wouldn't have any difficulty debating anybody on that text. There really isn't any way around it. It's very clear. And to try to build out of that some concept when that's not the context at all is just one of those examples.

Guys, I'm a Baptist, so be prepared. Where tradition overrides exegesis, where my Presbyterian brothers, all of you who use that text, you know that I believe this. This is nothing new. I've said this in debate since 1995.

I believe that your tradition is determining your exegesis in those texts. I do. And you think that about me, about other texts. I think Hebrews eight is a whole lot more important, whole lot more central to the issue because that's the topic is the nature of the covenant, not the validity of marriages when one person is a Christian and the other person isn't.

That's what's being discussed by Paul to the Corinthians. Whereas in Hebrews, the whole thing is, there's nothing to go back to. Here's the supremacy of the new covenant. And in the new covenant, they all know me.

They all know. Their sins are forgiven. And so if you're going to say, and baptism does that for infants, then that is what the early church believed, but not for the covenantal reason. And that led to the practice of infant baptism as the mechanism of justification.

And that's Rome. You're home to Rome if you go there. And so my Presbyterian friends have made it very clear that they call their children to faith and repentance. They may call them covenant children, but they know that they are not made holy by the act of baptism or by the act of birth.

But as it was expressed to me recently, but God promises that. And so now you have the idea that somehow in scripture, there is a promise that the extent of the freedom of God's decree of salvation is thereby by his own choice, limited almost solely to the offspring of Christians.

Now, again, let's say there's going to be a day when the vast majority of people on the planet are followers of Christ. In that situation, the normative way in which the elect will experience life is as children, their offspring of Christians.

That wasn't the case in the early church. That's not the case in the vast majority of the world today. But I could see a situation in the future where that would be the case, but it's not the case now.

And so that raises all questions of hyper-realized eschatology and everything else that we won't get into today. But you notice there's a lot of topics here. And in the conversations I've had over the past couple of days, it did not take very long at all to move away from the Baptist insistence that faith and repentance are always in scripture required for baptism.

And this leads us again, this is nothing new. Everyone who's made this issue for the past forever has had to come to this issue too. And that is what defines the science of baptism. It defines the science of the new covenant.

Is it the new covenant scriptures? Or is it paradigmatic reading of the old covenant scriptures? Because that's the difference between us. If you go, what do the new covenant scriptures teach about its own nature, signs, participants, members, there really isn't any question there.

There really isn't any question. What has to be done is you have to say, well, the new covenant scriptures were unique and limited. And since we have the old covenant scriptures, there is this consistency.

And so that consistency continues on. And so the new covenant scriptures have to be read in light of that consistent fulfillment. And both sides have continuity. Both sides have discontinuity. And to where you draw the line determines where you're gonna end up on these issues.

But I would argue that when it comes to a consistent fulfillment of what we all agree is the central aspects of justification, the utter sovereignty of God in electing his people, even in the doctrine of reprobation, what we can't have is ex opera operato sacramentalism.

Ex opera operato by the very act sacramentalism. So baptism accomplishes this historically versus ex opera operante by the one operating. That's what Cyprian believed. Augustine had to fight against that, establish ex opera operato sacramentalism.

And that's what Rome believes. If we devolve to the point of baptism regeneration, once again, we've lost the key issue of the Reformation. And when we look back at the early church, we see that infant baptism was not understood the way that our Presbyterian brothers understand today.

It was not. When infant baptism first appears, and I've done some sermons on this. I'm not done with the series on baptism yet, by the way. I had some other things I needed to address. We will get back to it maybe even earlier now than expected to.

But in the early, so I dealt with this in the early church. Oh, good. Sorry. When someone's overseas, I go ahead and respond. When infant baptism developed in the early church, the motivation was not covenantal inclusion.

It wasn't. The earliest form of baptism is clearly believer's baptism by immersion. Sometimes trying, sometimes forward, sometimes done through. There are all sorts of variations. Sometimes deeply associated with a supper afterwards that included bread and honey.

I wouldn't, I like bread and honey, that'd be fine. But infant baptism, once it does develop, is developed primarily as an emergency thing. And it's based upon the idea that it is what brings forgiveness to sins.

And so for a while, there was a, you had two different sides. You had infant baptism developing at the same time. Many, many people in the fourth century delayed baptism until right before death. Because again, it was seen as cleansing the soul.

And so the history is complex, but the reality is this. The concept of covenantal infant baptism, where you place the sign of the new covenant in the hope of the fulfillment of the promise of God in the salvation of this child, but don't say that that is actually what brings it about, cannot be traced any earlier than John Calvin.

It's a theological note. Believer's baptism, I can show you very, very early. But for me, the key issue is how do you avoid simple sacerdotalism if you say that it is the promise of God that every one of my children will be saved?

How do you avoid that? Well, and so is it baptism that regenerates them? What's the mechanism? And if you need to be born to Christian parents, what do you do with adult converts that were not born of those people?

Because they're not, so it's just sort of, it's all over the place. I don't know, because obviously from my perspective, no New Testament writer ever addresses anything even remotely like this. It just doesn't.

It's not there. Okay, so Gabe Wrench just posted his, his blog article. I'll try to remember to see. No, that'd be really hard to do. Go find Gabe Wrench's website and read his blog. Read Toby's blog article, read Gabe's blog article.

I want, one of the things that has been disappointing here is that the people who already have Doug Wilson derangement syndrome have been greatly re-energized by this. I want everybody to understand, I love these guys, and we've had sharp conversations, but they have not been angry conversations.

I've challenged them. I will challenge them on the show with the same things I'm asking now. I will ask for consistency. And more than that, I will ask for apostolic example. Show this to me in scripture, and not just by analogy, because I can give you all sorts of straight up apostolic teaching about this is how you do it.

That's what I will be asking for. Anyway, so this has raised all sorts of issues about sacerdotalism and ex-operato sacramentalism. And you know, and I'll go ahead and say, as I said this to Chocolate Knox, I said, you know what?

What I would suggest to you, read some Roman Catholics. Expand what you're being exposed to. Because I think if you had to debate justification by faith with some sharp Roman Catholic apologists, it would help you a lot.

I think you'd see where the concerns are for many of us. In this, in utilization of the language that's being used and just where it can go and how fuzzy some of the borders are. So many important things.

And you know, it was seven hours in the truck today and I probably said it far better and in a more organized fashion somewhere between Denver and here. Just not during the one section going into Raton.