Quote:
Originally Posted by Wannabee  John's baptism was a baptism of repentance
Jesus' baptism signifies:
The remission of sins - Acts 2:38
Washing away sins - Acts 22:16
Death, burial and resurrection of Christ - Romans 6:3-4; Col 2:11-12
Putting on Christ - Gal 3:27 |
That's not a bad list. I would obviously include that it is a sign of:
the covenant of grace - Rom 4:11, Col 2:11-12
ingrafting into Christ - Gal 3:27, Rom 6:5 (somewhat redundant to the above I realize)
But otherwise your list is identical to the Presbyterian one.
The question pertinent to the sign is whether or not,
at the administration of the sign, all must be true of the individual baptized for the sign to have significance. This is why Bruce noted the difference between sign and thing signified.
Baptists want to insist that you want to hold off on the administration of the Sacrament until the reality of the thing signified is present in the individual who is to receive the sign. The problem, of course, is that the
reality of the thing signified can only be participated in by the elect. Nobody knows who they are - as honestly admitted to by Gene in the debate.
But, there is a strange unwillingness to keep this fact in mind. You'll even see Gene slip up a few times in the debate and argue for the baptism of the regenerate.
When pinned down, however, the issue really becomes one of wanting to keep the whole sign as pure as possible. Well, we don't know who the elect are so we'll do the next best thing and determine the best way to ensure that we're not applying the sign to the unregenerate. A couple of problems:
1. By making this concession, Baptists ought to realize that the Scriptures don't command them to baptize the regenerate only as they have immediately failed to meet their own standard by this practical concession.
2. This practical concession finds no Scriptural basis. That is to say that the reasoning: "let's try to baptize only the regenerate but since we can't do that let's baptize the next best thing" finds no Scriptural basis. In fact, Christ Himself undermines this principle by baptizing Judas and the thousands of others that just up and left in John 6 who had been His disciples.
Not only is this reasoning then flawed and the solution for it flawed as well but then we run into the practical theological import of what Baptists actually think about their baptism. Because this argument psychologically conditions Baptists to think that they've "reached the acceptable bar" for baptism, it leads to a presumption about the thing signified necessarily being true of the person receiving the sign. That is, even though the person has merely professed, the Baptist convinces by the above logic that they met the bar and, in fact, the reason why the person was baptized was because the person, really, met the list of those requirements we listed above. Thus, baptism really
does, practically speaking, become a matter of existential import. One person is baptized because what the sign signifies is true about them while another person is not baptized because what the sign signifies is not true about them.
This is why Baptist theology tends toward the idea that Baptism is an outward sign of an inward reality in spite of the Biblical data that states that Baptism initiates one into the Church that provides the means of Grace for conversion and nurture.