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Originally Posted by thunaer  I now hold to a Presbyterial church government, and view the independant system as only as a reactionary against the state churches and romanism. And independancy is a sin of individualism and lone rangerism and is contrary to the Word of God.
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What does this mean for me... I guess it means I am a hybrid.. A Presbyterial Reformed Baptist. |
Hello Michael. Your story sounds very much like mine. My journey from London (I was a 1689 Confessional Baptist) to Heidelberg (Three Forms) by way of Westminster happened in much the same way. I saw the mess and schism that is independency, and came to presbyterial convictions around the same time that I found acapella psalm singing to be the wisest and most biblical way to worship in song.
It didn't take long, though, for me to begin to have doubts about credobaptism as a result of my change of view with regard to church government. Here's the issue: if presbyterian church government is biblical, then the credobaptists had no right to separate from the established churches because of their independently derived position on baptism. If the presbyterial model holds, then the right way to go about handling doubts about baptism would be to follow the process of taking the issue to session, presbytery, and ultimately assembly. So for the English Baptists that were present at Westminster (or at least petitioned the Assembly with respect to baptism), once the Assembly had ruled that paedobaptism was the biblical position, shouldn't the Baptists have given up their independent take on scripture, and submitted to the ruling of the church? If nothing else, that fact alone should cause them to seriously reconsider their position, and be ready to admit that they could very well be in error.
So while I too found myself for a short time having to wear a tag saying "Presbyterial Reformed Baptist", I wasn't able to wear it for long, because I found that I was unable to defend credobaptism without invoking the principles of independency. There is a reason that the two issues go together for 99.999% of churches; ultimately holding to the one necessitates the other.