When theological folks dichotomize, they often do it without regard to the reality of time. And this causes no end of trouble.
Given their assumptions about the political dualities of life, the anabaptist impulse to reject infant baptism is a shrewd one, because all these things are connected together. And infant baptism is a statement, among other things, about time. The tangles we get into over visible/invisible church, the City of God/city of man, kingdom of God/kingdom of the devil, heaven/earth all occur because we try to conceive of them all as static realities, and not as categories that exist in various forms of tension or battle over the course of history. Time matters; history matters. An infant you baptize is not the same person who goes to heaven, and yet is very much the same person. There is continuity/discontinuity, and much of it is revealed over time.
Some of us were baptized as infants, and some of us were not. But Western civilization sure was baptized in infancy and, some might say, this accounts for many of the troubles we have had. I grant it, I acknowledge it. But the messiness of growing up to maturity is a messiness that (I would argue) God wants us to embrace.
The impulse to theological perfectionism is a deep one in every theological tradition, because imperfect creatures such as ourselves like to believe that God’s perfections are more like a proof out of Euclid than anything else. But God is perfect . . . not a perfectionist.
Perfectionists want static categories; they want things to be defined and to stay put. They want the kingdom of God to stay here, right where we put it, and they want the kingdom of man to stay right there, on the unbelieving shelf. And then Constantine converts. Darn.
Maybe we can say he didn’t really convert, and keep all our categories. Or maybe not. Once we have a king who professes Christ, we immediately have new and interesting dualities. He may have meant it and he might not have meant it. He could be true Christian or a false one. More time goes by (what a pesky thing time is for theologians!) and then we have to consider another option. Maybe the magistrate is a true Christian, but an immature one. Maybe the Christian civilization he represents, baptized in infancy, is just going through the terrible twos. And now adolesence, and what next?
A lot of our debates are caused by a failure to recognize that history will answer and resolve a lot of our debates. We are growing up into maturity, which means that we are not mature now. We, and by this I mean all our theologians, bloggers, librarians, scribes, college presidents, authors of fat books, heresy hunters, heretics, orthodox men thought to be heretics, heretics thought to be orthodox men, and everybody else, are just a bunch of Dufflepuds. We will get there, but it is going to be a while.
The one thing I would urge — which even Dufflepuds should be able to do — is for us to live up to what we have already attained. In the Reformed world, for example, custodians of Reformed confessionalism should be able to take exceptions (as appropriate) to their confessional documents, and as appropriate, amend them. But they should not be allowed to accuse those who don’t take the exceptions, and who don’t want to amend the standards, of being “unconfessional.” It is one thing for us to be Dufflepuds, making progress with agonizing slowness. It is quite another for us to be Dufflepuds going in the wrong direction.
One quick example, and I am done. In the revised Belgic 36, it says that:
God “has placed the sword in the hands of the government, to punish evil people and protect the good . . . civil rulers have the task, subject to God’s law, of removing every obstacle to the preaching of the gospel and to every aspect of divine worship . . . They should do it in order that the Word of God may have free course; the kingdom of Jesus Christ may make progress; and every anti-Christian power may be resisted.”
Do I have a problem with R2K gents differing with this, or taking an exception to it? No, let’s have a discussion. But when they take an exception to it by by refusing to talk about it, and then they accuse those who still hold to it of being “unconfessional” and not really Reformed, well, then it’s a bit thick. But I want to defend my bona fides — fathers, brothers, I, like you, am a Dufflepud, the son of Dufflepuds, of the tribe of Benjamin . . .