I think the best way to speak about it is to distinguish between the visible church and “congregations.” The problem is what to say about the Baptist groups that developed after the Belgic? I consider Particular Baptist congregations to be irregular gatherings of earnest believers. They are, by Reformed lights, defective and deformed in significant ways and thus not churches as defined by Belgic Art 29. Just as there are believers in the Roman communion so there are believers in other groups that are rather more faithful to the gospel than Rome but which remain, in significant ways, defective.

Perhaps you have already commented on this, but how would you articulate the distinction between being (or not being) a “church” or “true church” on the one hand–and yet still being part of the visible church on the other.

For example, a Baptist church, though not a “church” in the sense you’ve explained above, is still part of the visible church, isn’t it? (Or am I hopelessly confused?)

Thanks!

From this side of the font, it sure seems like credo-baptists are faulting Reformed for being Reformed. Why is this oddity so hard to apprehend over there? It’s like Reformed faulting Baptists for not baptizing their children. Good Baptists don’t do this, bad ones do.

It is the classic formulation of the Reformed to understand the visibility of the true church by the three marks, the second of which is the right administration of the sacraments. What you are having problems with is the Reformed formulation. To be credo-baptist is to deny paedobaptism as true Christian practice.

Also, has it has been explained throughout, nobody is saying that there is some sort of magic one-to-one correspondence between what is visibly manifest and what is invisibly true: not being a member of a true church doesn’t mean someone isn’t a true believer. You know, wolves within and sheep without. Putting rings on certain fingers and living in the same house doesn’t itself make anyone married. But married people wear rings on certain fingers and co-habitate.

I wouldn’t presume to claim to know the secret will of God (Deut 29:29). God is free to do as he will (John 3). Churches, on the other hand, have to make a judgment on the available evidence. If someone comes to us, as happens with some regularity, and demands to be admitted to the Lord’s Table on the basis of one’s membership in the “invisible church,” if that applicant for the table lacks a credible profession of faith as measured by membership in a recognizably true church, then we cannot admit them to the table.

As I keep saying, I didn’t write the Belgic Confession. It was published in 1561. It has been a doctrinal standard of the Reformed Churches since that time.

Are you scandalized by the fact that Baptists don’t regard me as Baptized?

FWIW, my good friend Jim Renihan isn’t scandalized by my view. We were just chatting about it today and he was defending me to some RB friends! (God bless ‘im).

“This rejection of the status of Christian children as such introduced (and continues to perpetuate) a principle of radical discontinuity between Abraham and the Christian, i.e. a radical principle of discontinuity in the history of redemption and in the covenant of grace. This principle of radical discontinuity, this denial of the fundamental unity of the covenant of grace as symbolized in the administration of the sign and seal of the covenant of grace to covenant children, is serious enough to warrant saying that any congregation that will not practice infant initiation (baptism) into the administration of the covenant of grace is not a church. The Protestants criticized the Anabaptists on these very grounds. Denial of infant initiation is a denial of the catholicity of the church stretching back to Abraham and it is too much like the Gnostic denial of the unity of the covenant of grace in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.”

So Baptist churches are invalid churches.

Then you say…

“By analogy, the church invisible is composed of those who are, have been, or shall be, members of a visible church. if you’ve never sworn membership vows and confessed a common faith with a congregation, you are not a member of the visible church and if you’re not a member of the church visible, by definition, you are not a member of the church invisible. The former is a prerequisite for the latter.”

So if you are not a member of a valid (i.e. infant baptizing) church evidenced by “sworn membership vows” and therefore part of the visible church as you have defined it, you are not part of the invisible church, or the elect from all the ages.

So membership in a non-infant baptizing church is membership in an invalid church, so your membership is invalid or at least no more valid than membership in the local Rotary club. Membership in an invalid church is not membership in the local body at all. Not being a member is tantamount to not being in the Body of Christ.

Isn’t the inevitable conclusion here that you are saying that by refusing to baptize infants, one is demonstrating that they are not a part of the elect of God and therefore not Christians at all? That seems the logical end result of your proposition….

To suggest that what is being put forth here is to undermine church planting is pretty odd. That Reformed having something against evangelism or church planting is an old revivalist trick. The historical data just don’t support this idea.

The thesis here assumes that vigorous evangelism/church planting is already happening. Its point is that what also has to be happening is that we are just as responsible in instructing those who come in what it means to be Reformed (something quite lacking anymore). There is no antagonism here between evangelism and catechism, rather an organic one.

But I think what is being proposed is a dramatic paradigm shift in what should constitute Reformed Church growth. Instead of the traditional model of planting Churches and calling sinners to repentance it shifts to calling wandering Evangelicals to true piety and practice.

As Clark intimated, it’s a shift from using resources to plant churches to a program of catechism and membership classes.

Looking back at my days in the SBC I am shocked at how thoroughly pagan I remained about so many things and how easy it was simply to baptize (no pun intended) my paganism and call it Christian. I spouted all manner of nonsense (not that the spouting has ended, mind you) to friends and fellow youth group members and people took it seriously. Yikes! I suspect it was because my secular, egalitarian, individualism was only shades different from the religious egalitarian individualism of my fellow evangelicals. I loved Jesus and I was having a quiet time (or at least laboring under the law of the quiet time) and that’s all that really mattered, that and my Navigators verse pack.

I don’t think that my experience back in the 70s was much different from what’s happening today. I’m sure that, but for the grace of God, I would be an “emergent” guy saying and doing who knows what in that possible world. Yikes!

I’m grateful for all the time Warren and the others spent with me. I learned a good bit in the three years or so that I had there before going off to sem. Not everyone has a “Warren” or a “Bill” in their congregation or a vibrant college group such as we had back then.

Exactly. There will be some howls that the implication here is that if the wandering in evangies are being treated like new converts that those left behind (pun intended) are unbelievers. But it seems to me that this would be to reveal is the very confusion of in/visible the thesis of these posts (and RRC) means to correct (!). There are converts and then there are converts. I mean, I never considered my conversion to Geneva from Wheaton to be qualitatively the same as my conversion from unbelief to belief; it was simply giving true faith a way better wardrobe.

No doubt the present task is necessarily different from Pentecost. But everything is. Maybe I am confused as to what your point is. Are exilic Jews finally really any different from wandering evangelicals?