In the area of cautions when approaching his work, his views toward Baptists do not just highlight the differences between paedo and credo. They are extreme, unwarranted, and troubling.
According to what he has written and posted on the internet, it his vision that Baptists, if they do not repent and baptize their children, should be jailed by the state, their children removed from their homes, and given over to paedo families to baptize and raise.
This is just some of what he had written in "The Anabaptists and their Stepchildren."
In this work he wrongly starts with this assumption:
The Baptists are the (equally antipaidobaptistic) stepchildren of the Anabaptists. Baptists, however, have baptized by single submersion -- at least ever since about 1638. In this, they have followed Mediaeval Romanism -- and repudiated both the Protestant Reformation and most Anabaptists.
Because he automatically makes a connection between credos and the Anabaptists he is off on the worng foot throughout the rest of his work. He tries to show that Baptists claim to descend from the Anabaptists, and while many do just that, he fails to identify the FACT that the First London Baptist Confession of Faith, penned by CALVINISTIC Baptists who repudiated the Anabaptists, begins with these words:
A confession of faith of seven congregations or churches of Christ in London, which are commonly, but unjustly, called Anabaptists; published for the vindication of the truth and information of the ignorant; likewise for the taking off those aspersions which are frequently, both in pulpit and print, unjustly cast upon them.
A simple reading on our confessions proves how wrong Lee is on what he writes about what we believe. But because he so overemphasizes infant baptism, even saying that to baptize an infant is to write God's name of their forehead, he misses the point of all that we have in common between credo and paedo churches.
He likens modern day Baptists with these others groups:
the Christadelphians, the Mormons, the Seventh-day Adventists, the Jehovah witnesses, the Pentecostalists, and the left- wing liberationists
He also labels us in the same category as:
sacramentalists like the Campbellites; unitarian Christadelphians; 'charismatic' Pentecostalists; premillennial Dispensationalists; polygamous proto-Mormons; state-hating "Jehovah's witnesses"; soul-sleeping Seventh-day Adventists; and various assorted deniers of everlasting punishment.
He goes on to state that those who do not baptize infants are "heretics."
And it just gets worse from there.
In closing he writes the following:
God has not left us in the dark as to how to overcome Anabaptist (and all other deleterious) influences even in our modern world. Those methods are: firstly, the powerful preaching of the Gospel; secondly, the 'improving' (or daily living-out) of one's own baptism; thirdly, the joyful outworking of the preached Word of God; fourthly, the State's punishment of criminals.
"For their publishing of such opinions or maintaining of such practices as are contrary to the light of nature or to the known principles of Christianity..., they may lawfully be called to account and proceeded against...by the power of the civil magistrate.
It is an earnest petition that the Church be "purged from corruption" such as Anabaptism, and be "countenanced and maintained by the Civil Magistrate" against all ungodliness -- so "that the Ordinances of Christ may be purely dispensed." Romans 10:1f & 11:25f. This is a petition that baptism no longer be limited by some to adults alone -- nor repeated in adulthood to those already baptized in infancy.
The Westminster Assembly's Directory for the Publick Worship of God rightly understands the above petition to be a promise that the Church will ultimately calvinize all the world. That includes de-brainwashing heretics -- and redirecting them toward the untruncated Word of God.
and finally:
standing upon Scripture, Christian Calvinists now say to all such stepchildren: "Anabaptists of all countries -- repent!"We therefore call upon all of the various stepchildren of the Anabaptists -- including justified Baptists; heretical Seventh-day Adventists; apostate "Jehovah witnesses"; polytheistic Mormons; and atheistic Communists -- to repent of their great sin of antipaidobaptism (and of all their other sins)
Read it for yourself here,:
http://www.reformed.org/sacramentology/lee/
Phillip
[Edited on 8-14-05 by pastorway]
he has got alot of degrees. He is from africa originally I believe.
His academic credentials are amazing. I have a great deal of respect for Dr. Lee. I especially appreciate his writings on historicism and the Christian Sabbath. His account of his father's murder and the salvation of the man who did it is deeply moving.
