Look Beyond Your Contemporaries

A common mistake in the Christian life is to get overly focused on our contemporaries. Neglect of God is the most significant form that takes, but it's also relevant in other contexts. How we live affects past generations (e.g., preserving and advancing their work). It also impacts future generations. The psalmist referred to how he was writing "that a people yet to be created may praise the Lord" (102:18). Neither the people yet to be created nor the Lord are the contemporaries we're so often too focused upon. We're even told to be concerned about angels (Hebrews 13:2). And I see no reason to think that the only rational beings other than God are angels and humans. When you think of life more expansively like this, it heightens your view of life in general and provides more motivation to persevere in the face of opposition from your contemporaries.

Even as far as your contemporaries are concerned, you frequently don't know much about how you're influencing them. If you benefit, say, a hundred people in a certain context, you could easily only notice the benefit in a few of their lives or only be thanked by a couple of them, if any. That's the nature of this life, because of sin and other factors. But my main point here is that before we even get to these factors regarding how to evaluate our influence on our contemporaries, there are many other people and issues to take into account. In fact, our contemporaries are outnumbered by the others involved.

Another Reason To Reject The Baptismal Regeneration Interpretation Of John 3:5

In other posts, I've discussed some of the problems with taking John 3:5 as a reference to baptismal regeneration. The exchange between Jesus and Nicodemus is set in an Old Testament context, and baptismal regeneration isn't taught in the Old Testament. Even advocates of baptismal regeneration frequently admit that it wasn't in effect at the time when Jesus spoke to Nicodemus (thus explaining why so many people are justified apart from baptism in the gospels while nobody in the gospels is justified at the time of baptism). The claim that everybody agreed with the baptismal regeneration interpretation of John 3:5 prior to the Reformation is far from true. And so on. You can go here to find links to some of the relevant posts in our archives. What I want to do in this post is focus on another line of evidence.

The terminology of being born again is also used in 1 Peter. I've written elsewhere about how 1 Peter contradicts baptismal regeneration, including in 3:21. 1 Peter 1:23-25 tells us that people are born again in the context of preaching, which is distinct from the later context of baptism (1 Corinthians 1:17). I've discussed the importance of distinguishing between the preaching context and the baptismal context at length elsewhere, like here. So, not only is John 3:5 poorly explained by a baptismal regeneration interpretation in its own context, but such an interpretation also poorly explains the other New Testament passage that uses the language of being born again.

Protestants Are Being Consistent About Canonical Issues

I recently came across a critic of Protestantism who made the common assertion that we need an infallible source to tell us what canon of scripture to follow. Apparently, we're supposed to think that fallibly applying some general principles from an infallible source in order to arrive at a canon isn't enough. This critic of Protestantism seemed to be suggesting that we need an infallible source to do something like list the canonical books for us. Supposedly, it's too difficult to discern a canon without such guidance. And so on.

Part of what we should keep in mind when issues like those come up is that the manner in which Protestants handle those canonical issues is substantially the same as how they handle canonical issues in contexts other than scripture and how such critics of Protestantism handle canonical issues in many contexts in their lives. We all accept canons for the writings of various historical figures (Tacitus, Justin Martyr, George Washington, etc.) without any sort of infallible ruling on the subject, for example. There are ongoing disagreements among critics of Protestantism about which extrabiblical traditions are part of the Christian rule of faith and which aren't, such as which papal teachings qualify as an exercise of papal infallibility and which don't. Those non-Protestants aren't relying on an infallible list, just as they arrive at a lot of other canons in other contexts in life without any infallible list. For further discussion of topics like these, see here and here, among other posts.