Fred, your characterization caused me to stop and reflect on my own pastoral experience -- both in terms of teaching, tolerance, and outcomes.

I suspect that you are exactly on target. However, another case is also true.

More often than not, a family that stays committed to a [Baptist] church for a length of time where tolerance is exhibited, but the truth of the Scripture is consistently and unashamedly proclaimed from the pulpit and in education classes, will come to adopt [credobaptism].

In fact, we can probably substitute any number of doctrinal distinctives in the slot and come up with an empirically accurate statement, including issues of charismatic practice and many other things that neither you nor I would approve of doctrinallly.

Isn't it fun to see through a glass darkly!?! Once we take a presupppositional fork in the road, all of the education in the world usually serves to confirm us in that path and blind us to contrary lines of interpretation regardless of how legitimate. For more than three decades I have endeavored earnestly to approach the inerrant Word of God with an honest and faithful exegetical hand. All of my study merely confirmed my credobaptist first principles without a whole lot of second thoughts, doubts, or contrary notions. Now, in middle age, my crisis with being a conservative in a mainline denomination brought me to a fresh reconsideration of things that I have not thought seriously about in decades. Who knows where this current reconsideration will lead? My reading of Reformation documents, the Puritans, WCF materials and commentary, and (in the next few months) people like Robertson on covenant theology, are making a significant impact on my thinking. But, thanks, Fred, you and my sis and bros on this board provide a wonderful environment for this old dog to return ad fontes to the Scriptures afresh.

__________________
Dennis E. McFadden, Ex Mainline Baptist (in Remission)
Atherton Baptist Homes, CEO
First Baptist Church of Alhambra, Member, Transformation Ministries (CA)

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