Green Baggins has responded to my last comment, and has also finished his review of my book “Reformed” Is Not Enough. He invited me to have the last word on our paedocommunion exchange, which I will do just briefly. He then asked a few questions which I will try to answer.
His question on paedocommunion amounted to “do paedo-communionists really believe that credo-communionists are starving their children?” Well, no, maybe, and yes, depending. But it should be noted that we do not raise this as a question because we have a superstititous or magical view of the elements of the Supper. The Lord’s Supper is what it is while woven together with the Word accompanying it. The real problem for me is not the withholding of the Supper — it is the withholding of the Word. The Supper simply provides a dramatic audio-visual of the manner in which the Word is being withheld.
To use an expression of the Puritans, the thing we should be after is to “close with Christ.” We should want it for ourselves, obviously, and we should want it for our kids. Now we know the children are not partakers of the Supper simply because they are in the same room with the elements, and they are not recipients of the Word simply because the Word is declared in the same room where they can hear it. “Christ died for sinners” is the Word generically, but “Christ died for you” is the Word brought home. Now the reason we withhold the Supper from kids is that we are formally and judicially not sure that the latter expression of the Word is true concerning them. The reason we withhold the sacrament of the Table is that we are not sure the Word as good news has really reached them either. If we were sure, we would welcome them to the Table. We don’t, and so this speaks as loudly about the children’s relationship to the Word as it does about their relationship to the sacrament.
Given that this is the case, it is a mystery to me why churches with this set of assumptions about their children continue to baptize infants. In my days as a Calvinistic baptist, I saw clearly the tight connection between paedobaptism and paedocommunion. I know that they went together. When I became a paedobaptist, even though this logic was as compelling to me as ever, I refrained from adopting paedocommunion for a time — not because I was convinced by the anti-paedo-com arguments, but rather because in the process of becoming Reformed I had also come to greatly distrust my own dependence on my own reason. I knew that the Reformers had overwhelmingly rejected paedocommunion, and I had just repented of my years (as a baptist) of saying that the Reformers had done a great job starting the Reformation, but that they didn’t go far enough. I had abandoned that attitude toward them when I abandoned my baptistic convictions, and I didn’t want to pick that same attitude up again five minutes later as a paedocommunionist. But years went by, and the tight covenantal connection between the Font and Table seemed to me unanswerable, as it still does. So semper reformanda.
Lane makes a point of saying that he holds that the “outward administration” of the covenant is objective, but that salvation is the result of a subjective appropriation at the heart of the covenant. Now I agree with this, depending on what is meant by “outward,” and whether or not that outward administration is still binding if the subjective appropriation is missing. I agree with Lane completely that unless a man subjectively responds to the gospel, he does not have the heart of the matter, and he is lost. We agree there. But suppose we have a married man who does not subjectively enjoy the blessings of that relationship. He and his wife are estranged. What I mean by “objective” is that he is still married for all that, and he still has responsibilities in line with that objective status. Baptized individuals who do not love God have a covenantal responsility to repent and start loving God. That is what I mean by objective. I do not mean that this objective covenant does just fine without a subjective response.
Then Lane asks a series of questions that I will answer briefly. He wants to know my position on Romans 7:14ff. I hold that Paul is using the historical present to describe what the law did to him while he was an unconverted Pharisee, still under the law. I agree with the standard Reformed view of sanctification as the spirit and the flesh struggling with one another, but I find that doctrine taught in Galatians 5, not Galatians 5 and Romans 7.
I appreciated Lane’s clear understanding of the differences between NPP and FV, as well as an acknowledgement of the differences that exist within the FV. In my experience with FV critics, which by now is extensive, Lane has done very well on this issue. In a controversy where rhetorical points are often made by blurring things together, he has my respect for his willingness to resist that tendency.
For his last question, Lane says that he has enjoyed the interaction with me (which I can also say), and he believes that we have successfully clarified some issues, and I also agree there. He then asks (since he is now done with RINE) if I would be willing to continue the conversation, this time using the FV statement as the basis for our discussion. I would be happy to.