One more and I am caught up in my exchanges with Greenbaggins. But before answering the questions he raises about my chapter on baptism, I think it is important to address a question raised in the comments of my previous post.
“You make it sound like you’re boys playing king of the dirt pile. Say uncle! A lot of theologizing is like that, isn’t it?”
Yes, it does sound like that if all we were doing is talking. But we are in a situation where the ministries of friends of mine are under assault, and not just verbal assault. The FV guys are bringing charges against no one, challenging the ordinations of no one, and we are not trying to get anybody removed from their pulpit. The same cannot be said in the other direction. In other words, this is not a neener neener debate. Ministries and livelihoods are on the line. Yes, the reply might come, but this is what confessional faithfulness to the truth requires. But that is where we encounter the kick in the teeth. As I showed in the previous post, the people who are bringing accusations that we are out of accord with the Westminster Confession are in fact themselves out of accord with the Confession. And they are accusing us of being out of accord with the Confession at just the place where we hold to the Confession and they do not. In such a situation, that anomaly should be pointed out.
This reveals that in conservative American Presbyterianism, the governing doctrine is not the Westminster Confession, but is rather the agreed-upon-consensus of what the Westminster Confession must have meant. And whatever it must have meant, it cannot stray too far from the baptistic ethos of American evangelicalism. But when you go back to the words of the Confession, you find out that at the appointed time, for any one to whom the grace of regeneration belongs, the Holy Spirit exhibits and confers that grace through a right use of the baptismal water. Folks have every right to disagree with this, but they don’t have the right to disagree with it on the basis of their “consensus” in the name of Westminster. It is Westminster. Sometimes I feel like a speaker at a Fourth of July picnic who gets himself accused of being un-American because I mentioned that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
The basic question Lane asks here is “with whom is the covenant of grace made?” I have no trouble with some of the distinctions he makes, particularly if you take them all together. I do have trouble with internal/external if no other metaphors are used, and none at all if it is used in conjunction with a cluster of other metaphors. I think that the distinction of narrow/broad is particularly helpful. In the broad sense, the covenant of grace is made with believers and their children. In the narrow sense, the covenant of grace is made with the decretally elect.
One other quick thing. Lane also asks why I identify the unregenerate within the covenant as covenant breakers. “Aren’t unbelievers already covenant-breakers in Adam? . . . Are we going to say that they become covenant breakers of both the covenant of works and the covenant of grace?” Well, yes, that is exactly what I want to say. If Adam is their covenant head, they share in his rebellion. That’s covenant breaking. And if they are in the covenant of grace in the broad sense required by the Westminster Confession (remember that even the Mosaic economy is described there as an administration of the covenant of grace), and they fail to keep the covenant because of their unbelief, then why would we not consider them covenant breakers there as well?
“Of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace?” (Heb. 10:29)
How is such a person not a covenant breaker? How is he not a covenant breaker beyond the covenant made with Adam in the garden? He tramples underfoot the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified. How could this be anything other than covenant breaking?