Implicit Exclusions Of Baptismal Regeneration In Early Christian Literature

As I discussed in another post, we find baptismal regeneration contradicted in a large number and variety of ways in the extrabiblical sources before the Reformation. Sometimes an exclusion of baptism as a means of justification is implicit rather than explicit.

And people will often object to the use of implicit evidence. But we all rely on it. For example, we depend on implicit evidence when deciding how to translate a word in a document, basing our conclusion on what the surrounding context seems to imply. Christians have often said, rightly, that it's unreasonable for a Muslim to ask us for a passage in the gospels in which Jesus says "I am God. Worship me." or some equivalent. A term like "Trinity" doesn't have to appear in the Bible for Trinitarianism to be Biblical. Roman Catholics often use arguments from typology that aren't explicit. And so on. Advocates of baptismal regeneration rely on implicit argumentation in the context of supporting that doctrine. The appeal to alleged references to baptism in terms like "water" in John 3:5 and "washing" in Titus 3:5 relies on implicit argumentation, so does their reasoning that baptismal regeneration has been in effect during certain circumstances and not in others (e.g., not being applicable during the Old Testament era and some portion or all of Jesus' public ministry), etc. Since proponents of baptismal regeneration rely on implicit argumentation in their reasoning about the subject, they're not in a position to object to their opponents' use of implicit argumentation. The fact that we prefer explicit evidence doesn't mean that implicit evidence has no value. Something can be less valuable, yet still have value to some extent. The nature of life is such that evidence comes in both implicit and explicit forms, with people sometimes disagreeing about whether something is implicit or explicit, and we have to take all of the evidence into account.

How Later Church Fathers Disagree With Earlier Ones

Sometimes a disagreement is more obvious, such as the comments of a later church father who explicitly refers to his disagreement with the premillennialism of Papias or Irenaeus. Other times, the disagreement is more subtle.

For example, I've written before about how Irenaeus compares Mary's virginity to the virginity of soil that was "as yet" virgin, but would later lose its virginity. Contrast his comments with those of Maximus of Turin, who wrote more than two centuries later, after the perpetual virginity of Mary had become more popular. I'll quote Irenaeus, then quote Maximus with emphasis added to highlight a difference:

"And as the protoplast himself Adam, had his substance from untilled and as yet virgin soil ('for God had not yet sent rain, and man had not tilled the ground'), and was formed by the hand of God, that is, by the Word of God, for 'all things were made by Him,' and the Lord took dust from the earth and formed man; so did He who is the Word, recapitulating Adam in Himself, rightly receive a birth, enabling Him to gather up Adam [into Himself], from Mary, who was as yet a virgin." (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3:21:10)

"For Adam was born of the virgin earth and Christ was begotten of the virgin Mary; the maternal soil of the one had not yet been broken by hoes, while the hidden place of the other's maternity was never violated by desire." (Maximus of Turin, Sermon 50A:2, Boniface Ramsey, trans., The Sermons Of St. Maximus Of Turin [Mahwah, New Jersey: Newman Press, 1989], 122)

Where Irenaeus sees a parallel, Maximus goes out of his way to describe a contrast. (And you can read my post on Irenaeus linked above for further evidence that he didn't think Mary was a perpetual virgin. For more about the larger historical context surrounding Irenaeus, in which we see other opponents of the perpetual virginity of Mary in many places for hundreds of years, see here, here, and here, for example.)

How strong is the Christian argument against polygamy?

Polygamy has been getting some attention lately in response to a pastor's announcement that he's married a second wife. Ben Shapiro recently addressed the subject on one of his programs and had Matt Fradd on to discuss it with him. Both men made a Biblical case against polygamy, but far less of a case than they should have made. Their comments about the extrabiblical evidence likewise fell well short of what could have been offered. Matt was focused on church authority and didn't say much about the church fathers and other early extrabiblical sources, where there's early and widespread evidence against polygamy. The use of Roman Catholicism's authority claims is problematic, since those claims are false and end up leading Catholicism's defenders to making unverifiable appeals to doctrinal development, what ecclesiology they think would be fitting, and so forth.

Support for polygamy has been increasing substantially in recent years. More than one out of five Americans consider it morally acceptable now, which is about a tripling of its support over the past couple of decades. See Gallup's polling results on moral issues here. And here's an article on the subject published by Gallup in 2017. Support for polygamy has gone up a few more percentage points since then.

About twenty years ago, I wrote a post discussing the evidence against polygamy in the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the early extrabiblical sources. I added some other posts over the years in the comments section of that thread, including some interactions with defenders of polygamy. Matthew Schultz posted an article here in 2011 that discusses how negatively polygamy is portrayed in the Bible. My initial thread on polygamy, linked above, discussed a lot of extrabiblical sources, but didn't include Minucius Felix. Here's a later post in which I cited his comments about the Christian rejection of polygamy.