“In the Presbyterian view, what makes one a Christian is the sign and seal of Baptism.  It puts one inside the covenant in some way which may or may not be finally determinative — I’ll leave that for the FV and non-FV readers to settle in a back alley after school today.”

This is the second of 4 parts in response to Dr. Mark Jones on the question and meaning of Baptism and the Lord’s table as the question stands between Baptistic types who practice a closed table and Presbyterian types who practice a more-open table.

Two items as caveats, as listed previously, before you read this and start hurling fruit at my kind hosts here at Ref21:

    1) The opinions and arguments here are mine and not the arguments of the Alliance.  Hate the player and not the game in this case. 2) The arguments I will make here are also not the position of the local church I attend.  In spite of that church being baptistic in confession, they practice a more open form of communion than I would advocate for.  I’m not an elder there, so as I make my case for what I think is a robust response to Mark Jones, I speak for myself and not my church at BCLR.org.

The Meaning of Baptism

There are a lot of important ideas to run down from where we left off last time, such as the meaning of maturity and how we can know the difference between immaturity and actual apostasy or faithlessness, but the scope of this essay is the question of Baptism.  If we accept the WCF’s definition of saving faith (and I have, previously), do we really need anything else to understand who is and isn’t “a Christian”?

The answer, obviously, is “no” and “yes.”  In some important sense, we really don’t need any more hair-splitting to answer the question of who is and is not a Christian – we just have to see it through to the end.  That is, we have to agree that someone who starts down the path of obedience to Christ ought to continue down that road (we hope with few pit-stops and detours, but we also know that even Peter actually denied Christ after declaring him to be the Son of God), and as James says in his letter we should show our faith by doing works.

There’s absolutely nothing controversial about this as the WCF says plainly:

Good works are only such as God hath commanded in his holy Word, and not such as, without the warrant thereof, are devised by men out of blind zeal, or upon any pretense of good intention.

    These good works, done in obedience to God’s commandments, are the fruits and evidences of a true and lively faith: and by them believers manifest their thankfulness, strengthen their assurance, edify their brethren, adorn the profession of the gospel, stop the mouths of the adversaries, and glorify God, whose workmanship they are, created in Christ Jesus thereunto, that, having their fruit unto holiness, they may have the end, eternal life.

And all good Protestant warning labels stipulated to this statement.  But foremost among these things “commanded by God in his holy Word,” certainly not “devised by men out of blind zeal,” are the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper — and this is where the “yes” part comes in.  For my money, we Baptists would be best served to use the Presbyterian word here for two good reasons: (1) we are talking about the means of corporate worship in these items and not merely the more-common acts of obedience which the Bible commands, and (2) I think it clarifies what is at stake as we approach the question of how one influences the use of the other.

That relationship is the one which Dr. Jones’ essay misses broadly as it considers why some of us Baptists are closed-table at the supper – because surely when Dr. Jones accuses Baptists of denying the Christianity of Presbyterians he isn’t denying that one’s baptism ought to come before one participates with the body of Christ and in the body of Christ at the Lord’s table.  Of course not – what he is saying is that because baptism makes one a Christian, denying that one is baptized (by drizzling, before personal faith) denies that one is a Christian.  He isn’t denying the logic that only the baptized ought to participate in the Lord’s supper; he’s questioning the meaning of denying the baptism of those baptized as Presbyterians are inclined to do — which is to say, to baptize infants.

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