Green Baggins is continuing his review of my book “Reformed” Is Not Enough, and he continues to do a fine job. In his review of the next chapter where I seek to establish my evangelical bona fides, he basically has one question that he wants clarified, and it has to do with my views on the “detectability” of regeneration.
If you believe, as I do, that baptized covenant members can be either converted or unconverted, this sets up a very practical problem for pastors. If our task is, as St. Paul put it, “warning every man, and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus” (Col. 1:28), then this means that pastors have to know how to watch for warning signs that a baptized someone is headed in the opposite direction. That’s what shepherds do.
I don’t believe that any of us can prove the internal spiritual condition of other people with any kind of absolute certainty, and I have seen some pretty arrogant attempts. But at the same time, over the course of people’s lives, we can have evidences of their spirtual condition. Jesus says that the nature of the tree determines the nature of the fruit, and so long as we are not running our spiritual evaluations of other people’s hearts out to the tenth decimal point, I have no problem with prudent judgments in terms of those evidences. Paul says that the works of the flesh are manifest, and those who live that way won’t inherit the kingdom of God. In a similar way, godly fruit is manifest over time as well.
My central problem with how many contemporary evangelicals handle this problem is not that they look for fruit to determine the nature of the tree. That is biblical enough. My problem is that the “fruit” that they look for is often radically unbiblical. “He’s a Christian because he threw a pine cone in the fire on the last night of youth camp.” “He’s not a Christian because I saw him order a beer in a restaurant last week.”
Lane wonders if he has come to our first substantive disagreement in this chapter. I do not believe that he has.