Sign or seal?

***QUOTE***

I was asking what was distinctive about RBs and why they don't expend more apologetical effort against calvinists. Your paragraph about "infant baptism" makes my point. There's nothing distinctive about the RB, RC, lutheran and calvinist views on the nature of Christ the God-man and the Trinity. When it comes to baptism, however, I would find it interesting to hear an RB argument against the calvinist view. There's a reason we call it covenant baptism. It's because we believe that God faithfully keeps His covenant word to act savingly by means of (instrumentally through) the sacrament. According to Calvin, God acts effectively in applying grace through the mediating means He has determined to use: the Supper and Baptism.

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2005/12/whose-covenant-theology.html

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1.Throughout your comment, you oppose the RB view to the “Calvinist” or “Reformed view.” No doubt that reflects your own perspective, but from an RB viewpoint, it begs the question.

2.You are now redefining your original query. You are welcome to do that. But my reply, as well as JD’s, was framed in response to the way in which you framed your original query.

As JD pointed out, infant baptism is a carryover from Roman Catholicism. That doesn’t make it true or false. But it does mean that infant baptism per se is not a defining feature of Calvinism. It is not what makes one a Calvinist in contradistinction to a non-Calvinist.

3.You are now shifting the debate from the observance of infant baptism to the grounds for infant baptism. Again, that’s a valid move, but a different move. We did answer you at the level at which you posed your original query.

4.As a parenthetical, there is a significant difference between Lutheran Christology and Reformed Christology. Lutheran Christology is oriented in such a way as to underwrite the real presence.

5.If you want to read a succinct argument against the Presbyterian case for infant baptism, I’d recommend Greg Welty’s online pamphlet which you can access at: http://www.ccir.ed.ac.uk/~jad/welty/

6. For the record, Presbyterian/Dutch-Reformed theologians like Bavinck, Dabney, and Cunningham have been quite critical of Calvin’s mediating position on the Lord’s Supper.




***QUOTE***

"baptism is...a true and effectual sealing of the promise, a pledge of sacred union with Christ, it is justly said to be the entrance and reception into the Church. And as the instruments of the Holy Spirit are not dead, God truly performs and effects by baptism what He figures."

The key word in this quote and in the WCF is "seal." According to the Reformed, the sacraments are not only signs, they are seals. WCF 27 says that there is a sacramental union between the sign and the thing signified. The Holy Spirit actually confers grace through the sacraments rightly used. So I agree with you about this: baptizing infants is not the sole provenance of the Reformed. The Reformed have their own theological take on it, but the outward form is not distinctive. But that wasn't the point. The point was that the Reformed view of baptism is decidedly distinct from the RB view. Was your point that it is the RBs that have the proper Reformed understanding of baptism, church government, etc? If so, then you have your finger on just the issue that has been driving this dispute.

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1.It’s true that “seal” is a key word in these debates. However, that word is often left undefined, as if it’s meaning were self-explanatory.

2.Within historical Reformed theology there is no uniform position on what grounds infant baptism. The Catholic rationale was baptismal regeneration. This is taken over by the Lutherans.

The Dutch-Reformed tend to assign some presumptive status to the infant, a la presumptive election, presumptive regeneration, whereas English-speaking Calvinism generally grounds infant baptism in the candidate’s status as a covenant child.

Since Reformed paedobaptists disagree over the grounds for infant baptism, the grounds for infant baptism is not a Reformed distinctive.

3.There is also a question as to whether the category of “covenant children” isn’t a theological innovation. See William Young’s articles on “Historical Calvinism & Neo-Calvinism” (originally published in the WTJ) at:

http://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/articles/topic/calvinism.html

4.Speaking for myself, I regard the issue of church gov’t as a matter of comparative indifference.

***QUOTE***

Steve, the quotation from Ch 7 of the LBCF really highlights the difference between the RB understanding of the covenant and the Reformed (cf. WCF 7.5 and 7.6).

***END-QUOTE***

i) True, there’s a difference between Presbyterian and Reformed Baptist covenant theology.

You could claim that the only authentic version of covenant theology is a version which underwrites infant baptism, but that would be a circular argument.

ii) There are internal tensions in the way the Westminster Standards formulate covenant theology. The WLC says “the covenant of grace was made with Christ as the second Adam and in him with al the elect as his seed” (Q/A 31).

But it also says that “infants descending from parents, either both, or but one of them, professing faith in Christ, and obedience to him, are in that respect within the covenant, and to be baptized” (Q/A 166).

This looks like a makeshift position:
i) Why do the parents have to be believers? Were all Jewish parents true believers?
ii) Why is the child only in the covenant of grace for purposes of baptism? Is this a principled restriction or exception? Can we partly be in the covenant of grace? Half in, half out? Are they elect, or aren’t they?
iii) Can one be a temporary member of the covenant of grace? If someone who was once in the covenant of grace can fall away, what distinguishes a covenant of grace from a covenant of works?

***QUOTE***

As to your point #10, I think that's (part of) the rub. You claimed that the RBs are reformational because they uphold the 5 soli. Let's pick sola gratia. Given the Reformed view of actual applied grace through the means of the sacraments (WCF 27), how can we and the RBs be talking about the same sola? From the Reformed covenantal perspective, sovereign grace and mediated grace are of a piece. The denial of this by RBs is precisely what appears to me to be (one of) their distinctives and what would have endangered their lives had they lived in Geneva or Zurich.

***END-QUOTE***

1.This fails to distinguish between Reformed and Reformational. “Reformed” is Calvinist; “Reformational” is Protestant. All Calvinists are Protestant, but not all Protestants are Calvinists.

To the extent that they’re true to their roots, Lutherans, Anglicans, Anabaptists, and Presbyterians are all Reformational, but they are not all Reformed. (Whether Anglicans are Protestant is a sticky question.)

2.It’s true that if you get micro about it, differences emerge. For example, Lutherans believe in both gratia particularis and gratia universalism, whereas Calvinists only believe in gratia particularis. So Lutherans and Calvinism don’t define sola gratia the same way. And the difference on this point is quite significant.

Yet no one would deny that Lutheran theology is Reformational. It can be Reformational without being Reformed. It is Reformational for the simple reason that Martin Luther was one of the leading Protestant Reformers, and Lutheran Orthodoxy codifies his theology.

Likewise, Anabaptism is Reformational even though it doesn’t uphold the five soli.

3.There’s a difference between saying that the sacraments are a means of grace, and saying that the sacraments are a necessary means of grace, or the sole means of grace, as if all saving grace were channeled through the sacraments.

Sovereign grace and mediated grace are not of a piece. Even Calvin limited sacramental grace to the elect.

In addition, by its denial of baptismal regeneration, Calvinism is committed to immediate regeneration.