I am just emerging from a busy season, and now have some time to get back to a promise I made to Lane over at Green Baggins. That promise was to finish our conversation, and so here I am. There were three posts of Lane’s, as I understand it, that were waiting for a reply from me.
The first has to do with my historical/eschatological church distinction, as a supplement to (not a replacement for) the visible/invisible church distinction. Lane says that my distinction is diachronic, which is exactly true and was the central point of it, while the traditional distinction is synchronic, which is also true, and which is the reason why that distinction needed an additional distinction to be made.
“I would ask this question: is it legitimate in any way to say that members of the visible church who are not elect are not part of the church? How else can the visible church be described but as a church that seeks to measure up to the invisible church? Contrary to FV claims, this does not result either in denigration of the church, or in Baptistic thinking (unless the FV wants to take the unprecedented step of accusing non-paedo-communionists of being Baptistic). We do not believe in regenerate church membership for the visible church. That is the essence of Baptistic thinking. What is different about us is that we believe in regenerate membership of the invisible church.”
In order: is it legitimate in any way to say that non-elect members of the visible church are not part of the Church? Sure. Scripture is full of this kind of thing — a true Jew is one who is one inwardly, synagogues of Satan, you are of your father the devil, and countless more. Our whole point is that baptized covenant members are Christians, members of the Church, connected to Christ, etc. in some important sense, not that they are participants in these things in every sense. So, is there a legitimate way to say that non-elect members of the covenant are not part of the Church? Absolutely.
“How else can the visible church be described but as a church that seeks to measure up to the invisible church?” Well, another way of saying largely the same thing is to describe the visible church as the church throughout history, and the church of all the regenerate as the eschatological church. When I claimed that historical/eschatological preserved the “necessary distinction” made by visible/invisible, Lane responds here by saying “it does no such thing!” But what I meant was the distinction between professors and the decretally elect. Both v/i and h/e preserve this distinction. The former does it in a timeless way, and the latter in a time-oriented way.
The FV claim is not that the visible/invisible church distinction leads to a denigration of the church. The claim is more modest — that is to say, that it can lead to this, and in our particular wing of the church, that is has. I have lost track of all the people I have met who despise the visible church, but who are faithful members of the invisible church in their head.
Lane says that to claim that non-paedo-communionists are baptistic (I would use a small b) would be “unprecedented.” But actually it is not unprecedented at all — this issue has come up quite frequently in all our discussions. I agree with Lane entirely that the position of the Baptist proper is to define the visible church as consisting of the regenerate only. But what we mean when we talk about “baptyerians,” for example, is that the same logic in presbyterian circles draws the same kind of line at the Lord’s Table, and not at the Font. Lane believes that the standard for communicant membership in the visible church is a regenerate status. I think that this is baptistic in tendency. I do not say this as a taunt at all. It actually explains why I have consistently gotten a more respectful and thoughtful hearing from TR Reformed Baptists than from TR Presbyterians. Baptists frequently get what we are arguing in a way that others do not.
And last, as it happens, I also believe in regenerate membership of all those in the invisible church, provided I am allowed to point out an anomaly. If the invisible church is made up of all the decretally elect, and it we try to plot it out in a timeless fashion, then we have a problem with the concept of regeneration. This is because regeneration happens in time. Every person who is elect was once unregenerate, and at some point in their timeline, they are born again. This means that Smith, who is part of the invisible church because he is elect, was a member of that invisible church before he was born again. This is not a reason to throw the visible/invisible distinction away. It is a good reason to supplement it with another metaphor — because that is what these distinctions are. And no glorious thing can ever be described with just one metaphor.