I recently had an email exchange with someone I shall call my “sane Baptist friend,” or SBF for short. He had some questions about the Auburn Avenue deal, and I thought our exchange might prove helpful to others. There are a couple back and forths here. For ease of following, my original words are underlined, his words are in bold and mine are in italics.
Dear SBF,
My answers are interspersed below. And if you give permission, I would like to post a portion of this exchange on my blog (with your name removed so that people wouldn’t jump to conclusions about you. I would just call you a “sane Baptist friend”). I have been trying to answer a lot of these same questions for a lot of people, and I think this might help.
At 06:20 AM 8/13/2004, you wrote:
Dear Doug,
Thanks for your message, and please forgive me for this delayed reply. It’s been a hectic week on several fronts. You wrote:
I heard from _________ that you might be concerned that I had gone wobbly. Just a couple quick comments, along with an invitation to ask me anything your heart desires, at any time.
Thanks for that. I hope you know that I have great respect for you. Of course, as a Baptist, I can’t help regarding Presbyterian sacramentalism as somewhat wobbly. Still, I wouldn’t normally criticize a Presbyterian just for being Presbyterian. But “Reformed” Is Not Enough seems to advocate a view of church, sacraments, and soteriology that wobbles to the point of teetering dangerously.
Right. And my problem is not with Baptists who think Prebyterian sacramentalism is wobbly. It is with Presbyterians who think it is. Perhaps we can agree on this—that many of our critics in the Reformed world need to become more consistent with their critiques of us by becoming Reformed Baptists?
- I affirm the imputation of the active and passive obedience of Christ to every regenerate believer, apart from which no one has any hope of salvation. No hope without it, as Machen put it. Everything that Christ is and did is credited to the elect believer at the moment of justification, and faith (itself a gift from God, lest any boast) is the sole instrument for appropriating God’s grace to us in Christ.
- Lesbian Eskimo bishops must be excommunicated without one moment’s delay, and God is very angry with those who tolerate such abominations in the Church. May I never be in that number, or look to any of the faithful as though I might be.
Thanks for those clarifications. I do still have a few questions:
- Would you also say the imputed righteousness of Christ is the sole and sufficient ground of our justification? Saying it’s essential is not quite the same thing as saying it’s sufficient.
Yes. I would say it is the sufficient ground of our individual justification. Without it, there is no individual justification. With it, there must be individual justification.
- Why wouldn’t your ecclesiology constrain you to conclude that anybody that would deliberately ordain practicing lesbians as bishops is no true church?
There are several aspects to this reply. First, for example, I am fully supportive of what the Third World Anglicans appear to be doing in their discipline of the renegade Americans, Englishmen, and Canadians. I believe that this sort of disciplinary action ought to occur, and I support it wherever it does occur. In short, I support disciplinary against individual clerics who are practicing homosexuals, and support as well disciplinary action against those ecclesiastical bodies that deliberately ordain such people. I think that ought to happen.
But the second thing is this. What I believe ought to be done does not make me believe that it is automatically done. Suppose a wife has a husband who is rampantly and unrepentantly promiscuous. I think she ought to divorce him. But until she does divorce him, he is still her husband. In a similar way, the American Episcopal Church ought to be disciplined by Christendom, but she hasn’t been yet.
And one other thing. We should remember that things have been worse than this in the history of the faith, and God (who raises the dead) has brought about Reformations. On the verge of murdering the Messiah, Caiphas, being high priest that year, prophesied.
- You do still seem to be suggesting that we daren’t put the lesbian bishop in the Jude 4-13; 17-19 category until and unless she has been formally excommunicated. Have I misunderstood what you’re saying?
Yes, there is a misunderstanding here. Paul denounces as false brethren men who had not been formally excommunicated, and I believe we can do the same. Go back to my earlier illustration. I think false husbands should be both denounced and divorced. And if there is a faithful Christian in the diocese that now has a homosexual bishop, a man who ought to be deposed and excommunicated, that faithful Christian can and should denounce the infidelity whether or not any excommunication has happened or will happen. But until it happens, that person is objectively in some sense a Christian, just as the husband pre-divorce is objectively in some sense a husband.
- If your view of church and sacraments obliges you to regard a lesbian eskimo bishop as “a New Testament Christian”—i.e., if her baptism (and ordination) are “efficacious” irrespective of her lack of faith or moral fitness—how does your view differ from the notion that the sacraments automatically confer grace ex opere operato? I’m having a hard time seeing any meaningful distinction.
An essential part of understanding this is the notion of blessings and curses in the covenant. I do not hold to an ex opere operato result from baptism if we are talking about baptismal grace or blessing. I hold to an ex opere operato covenant connection, which increases the judgment if the person is faithless. This is because the blessings of the covenant are appropriated sola fide, by evangelical faith alone. All others who despise the covenant through their unbelief, while receiving the mark that obligates them to have faith, receive a much stricter judgment.
I appreciate your taking time to write. I can only imagine how busy you must be these days. Since we last corresponded about the Auburn controversy (probably a year and a half ago) I’ve tried to keep up with how you have answered your critics. (I try to read your blog regularly but can’t do it daily.) No doubt my Baptist presuppositions are a definite handicap as I try to make sense of what you’re saying, but I have to say that your position seems more ambiguous to me now than before you began trying to clarify it.
Sorry about that. Hope this helps.