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Originally Posted by S. Spence  Could it be he's confusing election with covenant. That salvation requires a mediator - Christ and His shed blood. However it is possible to be in covenant without being elect?
I don't think he would deny that there were unbelievers in the Abrahamic covenant. |
Yes, he does deny that one can be in the Abrahamic covenant without being elect by stating that one cannot be in the New Covenant or the church without being elect.
Yes he conflates election with New Covenant (read Abrahamic covenant) participation. He even conflates it with church membership by stating that only the elect are in the church.
The problem he has, with this schema, is that he has no basis for baptism. He says he does here:
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Though all would agree that false professors were addressed as members of the church for which Christ's effectual blood was shed, yet they were so addressed on the basis of their profession, not on the basis of their parents' faith.
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He doesn't connect, of course, the idea that he's gotten to his goal - that is, made sure they only admitted the elect. He just presents what his acceptable bar for error is: false profession. He then presents an unwarranted conclusion: that none were admitted on the basis of their parents' faith. He merely affirms this but does not establish this from any Biblical text.
This is the common Baptist fallacy: move from the idea of an Elect Church to the idea of baptizing only professors. They make that leap not by any teaching of the scriptures but by an unwarranted inference. Nowhere in Scripture do we encounter this reasoning.