The Great Paedo-Bapti-Trans Dispute of 2022

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I drove from Denver to Santa Fe today, set up my unit and jumped on line to address the great dispute that erupted over the weekend. I hope that my comments will clarify, enlighten, bless and challenge.

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Greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is James Blunt coming to you live from Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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Arrived less than an hour ago and we threw everything together.
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And I start doing this while you start getting to know folks, get to know campgrounds.
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And I stayed at this campground a couple weeks ago on the way up to Colorado. And there is a cat here at the campground named
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Marvin. He is the chillest cat you will ever meet. He just is unperturbable.
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And he just sits on the counter when you check in and lets you pet him. And I did get a little reaction when
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I gave him some kitty treats today. But to make a long story short, I wrote a review for the campground when
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I left and said that everybody needs to come so they can see Marvin at the Santa Fe KOA.
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And so on the way in the day, I had already had some exchanges and had requested this slot that I'm in because it's super easy to get into.
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The 5G tower is right there. It's just right there.
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And so I called and I said, so could I just skip the check -in thing and just pull into E2?
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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.
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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.
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As you know, I've been traveling and really I'm on my way home, but I'm only going to be home long enough to sort of switch out clothes and head right back out for a much longer trip.
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And so that makes it a little bit more difficult to respond to sudden developments as what took place over the weekend.
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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.
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But this past weekend, all the discussion of the great tradition stuff and Thomas Aquinas got shoved off to the side.
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And all of a sudden, Reformed Baptists were back to being united as Reformed Baptists.
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Because the first I saw was a meme, as I recall.
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The memes have been flying. But a meme quoting
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Mr. Jason Farley, who is a poet.
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And he was a guest on CrossPolitik.
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Now, it wasn't a long episode. I guess it was the daily ones instead of weekend ones or something like that.
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And Toby Sumter wasn't there. Jared Longshore took his place. And Mr.
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Farley was on Zoom, whatever they use as the guest software.
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Anyway, what's called the backstage after show, which
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I guess is just for subscribers, was titled The Failure of Baptist Theology.
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And the first meme that I saw was the statement that Baptist theology is responsible for transgenderism.
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And there were immediate responses, obviously.
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Because the first thing that crosses your mind is,
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I can't possibly see where any connection there is at all. But I realized, okay,
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I guess I'm going to have to take the time to track these programs down. And that took a little work to do.
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And one of them was on YouTube. So I was able to grab the transcript. And so I listened to to everything in the original show, and then to the backstage discussion that continued after.
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They're not super long programs. And the material in the first show only made up a portion because they did stuff from the
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Psalter. And what they had done is they started with quotations and materials and clips about the horror that is the transgender movement, the mutilation of children.
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It almost makes you wonder if the phrase, there is nothing new under the sun, may not be false.
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There have always been crossdressers and sexual perversion along those lines.
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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.
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The current transgender craze is only a decade old.
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And it is completely dependent upon TikTok, YouTube, and social media.
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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.
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It arises out of a combination of ungodly concepts and beliefs that are now becoming ingrained in the next generations.
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And it is happening very quickly because our society has become disconnected from its past and from any foundation that can keep it stable.
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Those influences begin with secularization, with the abandonment of any logical or rational understanding of the origination and purpose of man.
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The door to where we are today was kicked open by the so -called
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Enlightenment and then given rocket fuel by Charles Darwin.
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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
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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.
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It 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.
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And therefore, if there's no creator, there's no definition of who I am, therefore I get to define who
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I am. There is, in a sense, a level of rebellion even against naturalistic materialism.
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Because from a Darwinian, from a strictly Darwinian perspective, transgenderism is idiocy.
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Because the ultimate good in Darwin is the passing on of as much of your genetic material to the next generation as possible.
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When you use puberty blockers, which stop the development, mental development, brain development, they are poisons.
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They are absolutely poisons. Any doctor that would prescribe these things, except in the 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.
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If Mengele was still alive, he'd be sitting back going, man,
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I'm an amateur in comparison to what we're seeing today. So the sources of transgenderism are more than sufficiently documented.
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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.
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Because secularism can't give you a grounding of who you are, why you are who you are.
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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.
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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.
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We don't have to ask what other sources could we look for.
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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.
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Now, as a Baptist, and let me just mention that that is not an overly descriptive term,
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Baptist. The fact is,
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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.
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It doesn't tell you anything. There are non -Trinitarians who practice baptism by immersion, so the very phrase
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Baptist theology is a vague, undefinable term.
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It really is. It really has no meaning, and even if you say
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Presbyterian theology, well, okay, there are 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
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Presbyterians who have female ministers in rainbow frocks, and then you've got your pipe -smoking,
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Calvin -quoting Presbyterians who want to hunt down the people in the smokes.
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You've got a wide variety, and so, especially though,
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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.
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What exactly are we talking about? Well, when I listened to the programs, there is now some dispute and some disagreement as to exactly what the intentions and the statements were.
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Let's start with what actually happened on the program. After Mr.
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Farley made his argument that the radical individualism illustrated in the
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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.
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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.
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When you're 44 feet long, you cannot relax. You cannot have an easy drive.
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There's lots of stuff that you have to be doing to keep everything working and not destroy everything in the process.
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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.
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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.
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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, will be by the end of the week, cross -politic, that is.
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And so, we have sought to create a consensus movement, a unity.
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It's been very costly. By the way, I have spoken with both
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Gabe and Chocolate Knox for 50 minutes and 35 minutes,
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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.
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And the idea is a couple -fold. The idea is, well, look, we take on Presbyterians all the time.
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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.
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What you're saying here is, the problem is with Baptist sacramentology.
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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.
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It's up to you. Now, in talking with some of the guys, they've defended that.
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They haven't gone, oh no, we weren't talking about you guys. We know you reformed
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Baptists. We know that you understand covenant theology. And you don't get it quite right, but you're better than the
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Armenians are. And the whole idea there is, based upon, and this is what almost no one has responded to.
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Almost no one has understood the real background context of what was being said.
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Let me deal with that while it's fresh in my thinking. There is a concept that is regularly expressed on CrossPolitik, that culture flows downstream from the church.
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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.
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And so the idea here is, Baptists are missing it. All Baptists, whether covenantal or not. Because they're not baptizing their infants.
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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.
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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.
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And then they take that and run with it, and it leads to transgenderism. Now, obviously, given my opening comments,
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I do not believe transgenderism is the fault of the church at all. I will say this.
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First of all, we have to define, what do we mean when we say the church? Are we talking about the believing church?
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Are we talking about the compromised church? Are we talking about the ugly false church? Are we talking about the church in general?
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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.
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Extremely liberal. Or are we talking about American Baptists as in cultural
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Baptists in the South? What are we talking about? I don't know. And it was not defined.
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I'm sorry. It just it was not defined. No matter how hard you try in the cross -politics segment and in the backstage segment, the distinction wasn't made.
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In fact, the only time in the conversation, Jacob 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
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Lord, and I'm a Baptist, and I'm a covenantal Bap, and he stopped right there because he was rushing at the end.
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But he was even saying covenantal Baptist. That was the context of what began the backstage portion.
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So what are we even talking about when we mention these things? The idea is, what
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I'm hearing from the guys, is that when you don't baptize your children, you are communicating some kind of autonomous idea to them.
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And that would be true of all Baptists. And Brother Farley did say, right at the beginning of the backstage thing, and he said it fairly quickly, but I know one of my fellow elders caught it.
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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
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Baptists, they're pastors. And so the argument is, you've missed something important.
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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.
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Now, from my perspective, there are so many holes in that argument that it's really difficult to even line them all up.
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As I've said to the guys, the people behind the transgender movement don't have a clue.
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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.
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They would die laughing. 99 .9 % of them could not tell the difference between a
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Paedo -Baptist and a Credo -Baptist if their life depended on it. So, if, say, 75 % of the population of this nation were serious
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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
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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,
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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,
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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?
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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.
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The reality is, the church did have, for about a century, had an amazing presence in that part of the world, and then it just disappeared.
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And it's somewhat of a mystery as to what exactly happened. But the point is, he recognized there's just no influence.
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Well, I would say that in the development of transgenderism, the church has had no role either.
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Is it true that, in my generation, believing churches hid from issues of sexuality and things like this?
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Yeah, you didn't talk about stuff like this in church. Is that a failure on the part of the church?
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In the sense of not proclaiming the whole counsel of God, yeah.
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But we would have been behind the culture at that point, not leading the culture.
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And it wouldn't have been concepts that we were developing that were leading the culture into these things.
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We're out playing with the myth of neutrality and ignoring this stuff and trying to play catch up later on.
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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.
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But we don't represent that. And so, it simply makes no sense to think that, well, our failures have led to that.
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That's where they got the idea. They took it from us. It flowed downstream from us. No, it didn't.
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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.
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In fact, if you wanted to try to pin something on the church, then pin it on antinomianism.
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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.
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But connect it to Baptists asking of their children faith and repentance.
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You Presbyterians, when you have an adult convert, and I'm not talking about someone who was baptized as a kid, that's going to become more and more rare in our society.
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More and more often, we're encountering people who've never had any knowledge of scripture or anything like that at all.
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You can't grab them by their baptism. They are simple pagans.
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When they convert, what are you going to do?
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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.
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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
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King of Kings and Lord of Lords before you baptize them, right? So why aren't you to blame for transgenderism?
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Because if you ask of the adult convert that they give a profession of faith, are you not granting to them the same autonomy?
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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?
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I don't see how you could avoid it. It doesn't make a lick of sense to me.
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I would never make that argument. And you shouldn't make that argument either because it's a really, really bad argument.
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Everything that happens in society is not the failure of the church. It's just not.
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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.
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So I really question 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.
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The heart of man is a never -ending factory producing idols, isn't it?
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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
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I am saying is that is not the source of the vast majority of society's problems.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Well, as a post -millennialist, my response to that is you need to distinguish between church and kingdom.
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They are intimately connected just like justification and sanctification. They cannot be separated, but they must be distinguished.
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And their duties and roles must be distinguished, and how one grows and the other grows also must be distinguished. And it is when
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God brings about the change, when the nations stream to Jerusalem and desire
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His law, that requires the work of the Holy Spirit of God. That is an outpouring of the
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Spirit that has yet to happen, but I believe that it can. And it seems to me that the scriptural promise is that it will, but it's not happening right now.
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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
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He's going to accomplish that. We long to see that. We long to see, because that's what the culture of life is.
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Right now we are seeing the preponderance of the culture of death around us, and it hurts to see it.
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It's a burden every single day to see the destruction that people experience as they are a part of this.
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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
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Christ puts his enemies under his feet, will. But we're dealing with now, and we're dealing with the horror of transgenderism.
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And one of the burdens for me is that here we have I think that some of the strongest argumentation against transgenderism, and for a
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Christian understanding of God's purpose and creation and His glorification and the fulfillment of man and woman.
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The group of us that have been working together, we're the ones that are pushing that the most strongly.
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I mean Doug Wilson has done tremendous work in that area and expresses such important stuff there.
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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.
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Because I'll just be honest with you, I can't imagine him saying what was said.
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I really can't. But I know he'll understand why it was said.
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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.
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And I hope that everyone understands that in this situation, this has to be iron sharpening iron.
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This is a test of how far we can push our cooperation and the glue holding everything together.
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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.
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That is an imbalanced, utterly inappropriate conclusion. It's just wrong.
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And when people use the same kind of imbalanced argumentation against Moscow, against Doug Wilson, against Reformed theology, we all recognize it.
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And we all go, now, that's pretty bad argumentation there. So it's really a test.
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Can we recognize really bad argumentation? And go, yeah, that was probably not the wisest thing to say.
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Now, if you want to somehow explain how following the apostolic example, and this is, did you notice, and Brian, I'm sorry,
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I believe you're pronounced Salve, beautiful music, love the guy,
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Brian Salve, 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.
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And I found it very interesting because that is very much a part of this whole conversation.
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And one thing I've seen, there are a lot of people on both sides that still struggle to enunciate argumentation in the great
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Baptist, the credo Baptist, pedo Baptist debate, that shows they really understand what the other side is saying.
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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.
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Well, the fact of the matter is, just as there are numerous Baptist positions, there are numerous
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Presbyterian positions. And this is an illustration of it. What is the nature of the quote -unquote covenant child?
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And here was a tweet that in essence brought that to the fore.
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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
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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?
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And there have been Presbyterian pedo Baptists that have really gone that far.
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Pierre Marcel, look up his book. It's an older book now, but look up what he said on this subject.
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And he fundamentally says that being a part of the covenant removes the impact of the fall and puts the
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Christian child in a morally neutral place, so they're no longer really the fallen sons and daughters of Adam.
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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.
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Your child, upon being baptized, is regenerated, made a part of Christ, because that's what the new covenant is.
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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.
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And if a person's justified, you're indwelled by the Holy Spirit, right? And so baptism becomes the means of justification.
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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.
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It doesn't work, but how many of us would have done much better is always what
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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.
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And it's all been brought back to our understanding and our debate right now by considering these things.
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Now, Brian said, well, I mean it in the sense of Paul of the
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Corinthians, chapter 7, verse 14. Well, Paul K. Jewett pretty much closed the door on that one, in my opinion.
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I wouldn't have any difficulty debating anybody on that text. There really isn't any way around it.
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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.
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Guys, I'm a Baptist, so be prepared, where tradition overrides exegesis.
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Where my Presbyterian brothers, all of you who use that text, you know that I believe this.
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This is nothing new. I've said this in debates since 1995. I believe that your tradition is determining your exegesis in those texts.
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I do. And you think that about me about other texts.
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I think Hebrews 8 is a whole lot more important, a 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
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Christian and the other person isn't. That's what's being discussed by Paul to the
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Corinthians. Whereas in Hebrews, the whole thing is there's nothing to go back to.
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Here's the supremacy of the new covenant. And in the new covenant, they all know me.
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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.
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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.
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And so my Presbyterian friends have made it very clear that they call their children to faith and repentance.
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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.
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But as it was expressed to me recently, but God promises that.
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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.
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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.
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In that situation, the normative way in which the elect will experience life is as children, they're offspring of Christians.
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That wasn't the case in the early church. That's not the case in the vast majority of the world today.
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But I could see a situation in the future where that would be the case, but it's not the case now.
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And so that raises all questions of hyper -realized eschatology and everything else we won't get into today.
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But you notice there's a lot of topics here. And in the conversations
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I've had over the past couple days, it does not take very long at all to move away from the
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Baptist insistence that faith and repentance are always in scripture required for baptism.
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And this leads us again, this is nothing new, everyone who's debated this issue for the past forever has had to come to this issue too.
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And that is, what defines the signs of the new covenant?
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Is it the new covenant scriptures? Or is it paradigmatic reading reading of the old covenant scriptures?
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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.
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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.
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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 going to end up on these issues.
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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.
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Ex opera operato by the very act sacramentalism.
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So baptism accomplishes this historically versus ex opera operante by the one operating.
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That's what Cyprian believed, Augustine had to fight against that, establish ex opera operato sacramentalism, and that's what
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Rome believes. If we devolve to the point of baptism regeneration, once again, we've lost the key issue of the reformation.
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And when we look back at the early church, we see that infant baptism was not understood the way that our
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Presbyterian brothers understand today. It was not. When infant baptism first appears, and I've done some sermons on this,
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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.
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So I dealt with this in the
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Sorry. When someone's overseas, I go ahead and respond. When infant baptism developed in the early church, the motivation was not covenantal inclusion.
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It wasn't. The earliest form of baptism is clearly believer's baptism by immersion, sometimes trying, sometimes forward, sometimes done through, you know, there are all sorts of variations, sometimes deeply associated with a supper afterwards that included bread and honey.
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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 of sins.
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And so for a while, there was a, you had two different sides. You had infant baptism developing at the same time.
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Many, many people in the fourth century delayed baptism until right before death, because again, it was seen as cleansing the soul.
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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.
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It's a theological note. Believer's baptism, I can show you very, very early.
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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?
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How do you avoid that? Well, and so is it baptism that regenerates them?
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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?
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So it's all over the place? I don't know, because obviously from my perspective, no
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New Testament writer ever addresses anything even remotely like this. It just doesn't. It's not there.
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Okay, so Gabe Wrench just posted his blog article.
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I'll try to remember to see. Oh no, that'd be really hard to do. Go find Gabe Wrench's website and read his blog.
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Read Toby's blog article. Read Gabe's blog article. One of the things that has been disappointing here is that the people who already have
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Doug Wilson derangement syndrome have been greatly re -energized by this.
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I want everybody to understand, I love these guys, and we've had sharp conversations, but they have not been angry conversations.
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I've challenged them. I will challenge them on the show with the same things I'm asking now.
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I will ask for consistency, and more than that, I will ask for apostolic example.
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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.
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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 and said, you know what
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I would suggest to you? Read some
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Roman Catholics. Expand what you're being exposed to, because I think if you had to debate justification by faith with some sharp
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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 the utilization of the language that's being used, and just where it can go, and how fuzzy some of the borders are.
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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.
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Oh my goodness, please New Mexico, fix the road. Wow, it's bad.
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I wasn't thinking about anything at that point, other than just survival, but during the less stressful periods,
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I probably expressed all this stuff in a clear fashion, but I'm trying to encourage folks to realize that this statement wasn't just made without a context, and without a background, because most of us have responded to it by going, that's just silly.
01:00:20
There is no connection. It's far better, and we'll have longer beneficial results if we understand, okay, the assertion is this.
01:00:34
It's this idea of culture flowing from the church outward, and therefore, if there's this problem, then
01:00:42
I look back at the church, I go, as a Presbyterian, I see
01:00:48
Baptist individualism as a bad thing, and it can lead to this, and therefore, that, and that's where you need to go, but that's not what happened historically.
01:01:03
That's not what's happening today. That's not what's happening in our context, and so maybe your assumption that this is how things flow isn't correct.
01:01:15
I mean, aside from the fact that there's an inconsistency in your argument, because you ask of adult converts what we ask of younger converts, and that doesn't mean that you are promoting transgenderism, and there is no meaningful connection between calling anyone to repentance and faith with the idea that I am granting to them autonomy, or that there is any connection whatsoever in saying to them, you get to create your own personal identity as male or female.
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Even the shallowest form of Arminian -Baptistic revivalism doesn't do that.
01:02:02
Never did. No one ever raised an argument. Can you imagine in 1990 if someone had popped up and made this statement in 1990?
01:02:13
No one would have had a clue what was even being said. There was no understanding of what trans -
01:02:21
I'd never heard of transgenderism, neither had you, and so Arminian -Baptist revivalism has been around for hundreds of years, but never resulted in any of this, so there's no necessary link, and I would say the conceptual link is based upon some really imbalanced understanding.
01:02:45
The point being, it's not going to lead us to actually knowing and having good responses to any of this.
01:02:54
When we talk to the world, when we try to be that prophetic witness to the world, they look at this and go, what?
01:03:06
That doesn't make any sense, and that's because it doesn't. If we want to talk about the sources and evil of transgenderism, and we need to, it's being shoved down our throats, that our answers need to be something significantly less esoteric than what was suggested on CrossPolitik and on the backstage show afterwards, because that is just not where - that's not where the issue is.
01:03:37
That's not where the issue is. The issue is we're dealing with people made in the image of God that hate the image of God.
01:03:46
They hate it. They didn't have to look to the church to be given permission to rebel against what
01:03:54
God has done. That didn't - those folks wouldn't know a
01:04:01
Baptist sacramental from a widget. There's no connection. So we're not really addressing the issue when we argue in this fashion.
01:04:12
We're really not. So anyways, there was some of the thoughts, like I said, and I even said to myself as I was driving along,
01:04:25
I said, no, it's not good that you're going over this now, because then - because I can't be taking notes.
01:04:32
I have no notes in front of me. The only thing I have in front of me is Psalm 12 .8, which is what
01:04:39
I was actually going to start with in regards to transgenderism. The wicked strut about on every side when vileness is exalted among the sons of men.
01:04:49
There was no Baptist sacramentalism back then, but there were vile people and the wicked strutted about doing their vile things back in the days of Psalm 12.
01:05:00
And that's where the real issue is. It's not that we've given permission by some failure of our understanding of sacramental sacraments or covenantal theology or anything else.
01:05:17
We are living in dark days, dark days of judgment. And our calling is to, with grace and without compromise, be a prophetic witness to this culture so that when the fire falls from heaven, they will know exactly why and exactly what to do, what repentance looks like, and to encourage our children and our grandchildren and our great -grandchildren to hold firm to the truths that will allow them to rebuild after all of this foolishness destroys itself.
01:06:04
And that's going to be costly, but that's our calling. And so I do this with great love and admiration for all the guys
01:06:16
I disagree with, for Brian. This is not meant to be a,
01:06:23
I'm going to get in your face and beat you up type situation, but we also can't just go, well, for the sake of, so we can't do the, and this there's difference between mere
01:06:32
Christianity and mere Christendom thing. I know Doug's used the term mere Christendom, but I'm talking about the mere
01:06:39
Christianity thing, and I'm not talking about C .S. Lewis at that point. I'm talking about the gospel -less version of Christianity, where we figure that the only way we're going to get everybody together so we can work together is to have a bare bones thing that no longer has the gospel in it.
01:06:55
So we can't talk about the gospel. And so we just agree on the big, big issues, and we don't really push very hard on that.
01:07:02
We agree on who Jesus was, but we don't agree on what he did or why he did it. But that's the best we can do.
01:07:10
That's as far as we can go. I oppose that.
01:07:16
That's not going to work. That's, no. We, I want to continue working together with all these guys.
01:07:26
And in this situation, I think you guys need to listen to what we're saying and ask yourself the question, is there imbalance in the applications of principles that we repeat very often, but maybe there's something more to it?
01:07:49
Maybe there are situations where what's going on in the culture is not the failure of the church?
01:08:00
Maybe consideration of that will help a lot.
01:08:07
So anyways, I'm up for the conversations, but I want them to be restorative.
01:08:20
There are a lot of people that were disappointed. I hope you guys understood this. There are a lot of people disappointed that Doug and I did try to eat each other's faces and gouge each other's eyes out earlier this year.
01:08:35
And I don't want that to happen here. I think there are people on both sides that just won't listen to the other, but let's not be amongst them.
01:08:46
This is important. We can't ignore it. We can't do the, oh, let's not talk about that because then that might cause division type stuff.
01:08:54
No, we need to recognize where the divisions are in our understandings of things and then get them head on and say, how are we going to deal with this in the future?
01:09:10
And let's be honest, probably the greatest resource that we would have to avoid those divisions and to create a meaningful unity is the one thing, the one thing that we don't do so much quicker to hit the return button rather than just minimizing the window and praying.
01:09:58
So let's, you know, the memes have been great.
01:10:06
You got it, guys. You got to admit the Baptists took you down on the memes. They did.
01:10:12
Memes have been great. We've got the blog articles out there now, but let's pray for one another.
01:10:25
Let's pray because I don't have the wisdom to know how exactly to cooperate on the big things and not divide over the little things.
01:10:44
And you and I both know my experience is people will come along and insist that the little things are actually the big things and blow everything up.
01:10:54
How often has that happened? That could happen right now. I don't have the answers as to how to avoid that.
01:11:05
Fallen world, but God does. And if we believe that someday
01:11:12
Christ will put all of his enemies under his feet, he's going to in some way, shape or form do that by binding our hearts together in a way where we don't compromise, but we live in a fallen world.
01:11:28
Takes a lot of maturity. Takes a lot of love. Takes a lot of love.
01:11:36
And we love the people that we are around the most.
01:11:44
The people of our fellowship. That's natural. That's good. That's all right.
01:11:51
But in this situation, because it's global, we need a move of spirit to give us a love for one another that transcends my understanding, my abilities, my sinful, tired self.
01:12:16
So I will covenant to pray before we do the program later this week.
01:12:25
I don't know when it's going to be or anything. I don't get home till Wednesday. You do the same and you pray for us.
01:12:35
And praying for somebody does not mean that you do not correct them if they're in error. But if we're all indwelled by the
01:12:44
Holy Spirit, don't you think there should be a way for us to exemplify the fruit of the
01:12:52
Spirit? Self -control. Love for one another. That's what we need in so many areas.
01:13:04
That's what we need. So let's pray that in.
01:13:10
So what that means is I have no earthy idea when
01:13:18
I'll be on cross -politic and I have no earthy idea. You must be tired when your
01:13:27
Face ID doesn't work anymore. Your iPhone goes, I don't think that's you. You look that bad.
01:13:33
Thanks. Anyway, so we're going to have to figure out when the cross -politic thing will be and when the next dividing line will be as well.
01:13:49
Because I will have the opportunity, Lord willing, to do some in the studio before we get back on the road.
01:13:55
But as I said last time, my daughter's about to give birth to my fifth grandchild, a grandson.
01:14:04
And that takes precedent over all of it. Deal with it.
01:14:11
Grandpa has spoken. That's just the way it is. And every grandfather and grandmother in the audience is giving me a hearty amen.
01:14:21
Whether Paido or Credo Baptist, we have brought us all together in something that we can agree on. And so we will see how that all works out.
01:14:30
So let me thank the guys for talking with me.
01:14:40
And once again, assure you of my love in the midst of disagreement. Thank Rich for getting this available.
01:14:49
And I want to thank our supporters. We don't talk a lot about our supporters, though we need them just as much as everybody else does.
01:14:59
We don't harangue people about that. But I think it's really awfully cool that I am able to sit here in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and speak to a global audience in my little mobile house.
01:15:20
And you make that available. Your support, you're giving to the travel fund, the ministry is what allows all this to happen.
01:15:29
And I just want to tell you, I love doing this. I see people flying all over the place.
01:15:35
And I used to fly all over the place, too. I also see and hear horror stories right now.
01:15:44
Worst on -time record ever in the American travel industry.
01:15:50
Cancelled flights everywhere. British Airways just cancelled 10 ,000 routes for the rest of the summer.
01:16:00
I don't want to do that. So there are some places
01:16:05
I can't go. Some things I can't do. Some people I won't see again. But last night,
01:16:14
I tweeted the video of my presentation last night. And then afterwards,
01:16:21
I had wonderful conversations with individual Christians I did not know. One broke my heart.
01:16:30
A grandma situation with a grandchild that was relevant to what I was talking about.
01:16:36
You can't do that at the super big conferences. You can't have those conversations.
01:16:44
And so I had somebody recently, somewhat jokingly, but sort of in a way of saying, man, you're really limiting the number of people you can get to, said, well, you know, you might have to be at Lizard Snake, Texas during that time, so you can't do this other thing.
01:17:05
And I'm sort of like, yeah, I might. I might. And that's fine with me.
01:17:11
That's perfectly good. Because we can do this. I want to keep doing this as long as I can do it.
01:17:17
I don't know how long that's going to be, because the regime doesn't want us to have the ability to do anything other than live in a shack and eat bugs and serve them and not have children.
01:17:32
God deliver us. God deliver us, please, from these evil men and women. Because we literally have men and women right now in the public eye that are just as evil and just as willing to bring about death and misery as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao.
01:17:57
And we just can't believe that they're there. But they are. I can give you their pictures. I can give you their pictures.
01:18:02
Anyway, thank you for making it possible for me to be here.
01:18:08
We very much appreciate it. Hope it's been useful to you. We'll see what happens at the end of the week as to how all this comes together.
01:18:18
Pray for, hey, you don't pray for my safe travel, none of it will come together the rest of the week.