Quote:
Originally Posted by Philip A 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. |
Phillip,
I wonder if you could explain more about the part in your last post I bolded. Regardless of your view on church government, I am not sure the bible any where asks believers to submit to the church irregardless of what the scripture teaches. If the English baptists truely believed the bible teaches believers baptism, then they should not at all have submitted to the church in this matter. Whether or not they would remain in that church or leave is prehaps another discussion.
I agree that going against your teachers ought to be something done in extreme carefulness. But to say we ought to just submit to the church against our biblical convictions is going to an unbiblical extreme. The bible itself teaches that sometimes we must go against the established 'church' (Job 32:6-10, Ps 119:99-100, Acts 24:14).