Alistair Begg free audio

Alistair Begg is now offering his mp3 library of sermons for free. Here are a couple good series to start with:

What is the Church?

Fix Our Eyes on Jesus: A Study in Hebrews 1-6

Bio from his website:

Alistair Begg has been in pastoral ministry for 32 years. Following graduation from The London School of Theology he served eight years in Scotland at both Charlotte Chapel in Edinburgh and Hamilton Baptist Church. Since 1983, he has been the senior pastor at Parkside Church near Cleveland, Ohio.  He has written several books and is heard daily and weekly on the radio program, Truth For Life.  The teaching on Truth For Life stems from the week by week Bible teaching at Parkside Church. He and his wife, Susan, have been married 32 years and they have three grown children.

Keith and Kristyn Getty, noted contemporary worship artists (see In Christ Alone), are members of Parkside.

Covenantal Baptism and the Problem of History

Last week, I finally received Everett Ferguson’s Baptism in the Early Church. I’ve been selectively reading portions throughout the work. In recent weeks, I’ve been especially interested in researching the Reformed arguments for infant baptism, and I’ve been studying the major critics of the Reformed arguments, namely G. R. Beasley-Murray and Paul Jewett. So, with this in mind, I’ve found Ferguson’s work highly interesting.

Ferguson doesn’t much deal with the Reformed arguments for a parallel between circumcision and baptism, supported by a strong continuity in the covenant(s) of grace. He doesn’t much deal with it because the apostles and the early church didn’t work with this framework in their understanding of baptism. If anything is clear from Ferguson’s reasearch, this is it: baptism parallels “spiritual circumcision” by Christ and the Spirit, not the circumcision of the old covenant. John the Baptist’s understanding of baptism was “for the forgiveness of sins,” which was then taken by Paul and put in a Christological framework of death and resurrection. The early Church then developed their baptismal beliefs along these lines of “regeneration in baptism” (Ferguson’s preferred phrase, instead of “baptismal regeneration”). There is no indication that infant baptism was practiced by the apostles (actually, there is some negative evidence, such as Paul’s presups in why “the children” in 1 Cor. 7:14 are “holy”), but once the church in the 3rd, and especially 4th and 5th, century started to develop a theology of original sin, the benefits of baptism were deemed appropriate for infants — once again, not because they, the infants, were in covenant with God, but because they needed redemption.

Thus, the early church could say, without equivocation, that the baptized infant was saved and heaven-bound. Once normative baptismal practice was removed from its sole context of the believer’s repentance and faith and expanded to infants, baptismal’s efficacy in-itself was highlighted and integrated into the theologies of the church fathers. Invariably, the problem of sin and apostacy had to be dealt with, with (eventually) an understanding of penance as a “second plank after shipwreck” of salvation/baptism. All of which, I would contend, inevitably lead toward the Reformation.

Those are some of my thoughts for now. I’ll have more in the future.

Delight in the Happiness of God

This is how theology is done, folks.

Here is John L. Dagg, concluding the introductory section to his doctrine of God, in Manual of Theology:

Love to God implies cordial approbation of his moral character. His natural attributes, eternity, immensity, omnipotence, &c, may fill us with admiration; but these are not the proper objects of love. If we worship him in the beauty of holiness, the beauty of his holiness must excite the love of our hearts. As our knowledge of these moral perfections increases, our delight in them must increase; and this delight will stimulate to further study of them; and to a more diligent observation of the various methods in which they are manifested. The display of them, even in the most terrible exhibitions of his justice, will be contemplated with reverent, but approving awe; and their united glory, as seen in the great scheme of redemption by Christ, will be viewed with unmixed and never-ceasing delight.

Love to God includes joy in his happiness. He is not only perfectly holy, but perfectly happy; and it is our duty to rejoice in his happiness. In loving our neighbor, we rejoice in his present happiness, and desire to increase it. We cannot increase the already perfect happiness of God, but we can rejoice in that which he possesses. If we delight in the happiness of God, we shall labor to please him in all things, to do whatever he commands, and to advance all the plans, the accomplishment of which he has so much at heart. Love, therefore, includes obedience to his commands, and resignation and submission to his will.

Love to God will render it a pleasing task to examine the proofs of his existence, and to study those glorious attributes which render him the worthy object of supreme affection. Let us enter on this study, prompted by holy love, and a strong desire that our love may be increased.

The Unlikely Disciple

Liberty University

Books & Culture has posted a book review of Kevin Roose’s The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University. The review is insightful, and the book seems to be very fascinating. Roose is a student at Brown, who decided to spend a semester at Liberty, the Baptist university founded by Rev. Jerry Falwell. Coming from a run-of-the-mill liberal Northeast household, Roose was curious to understand the “other side.” Thankfully, he is generous, open-minded, and objective (something that typically eludes the average “liberal” inquirer into evangelical faith and culture). Check out his YouTube trailer for the book.

The greatest testament to Liberty is his overwhelmingly positive impression of the students, their embodiment of the love of Christ. I’m not too surprised. I was raised in a Baptist church and school that was pretty much Liberty University in microcosm. The students from my school that went to Liberty, or similar colleges, were among the most devoted to Christ, insofar as these things can be surmised. We can, and should, criticize continuing remnants of fundamentalism at Liberty, but the most important thing — as God will judge us — is our faith in Christ, our trust in Him, and the love from this fount that extends to our neighbor. Higher education, typically, knows nothing of holiness as an academic telos.

Baptism and Fulfillment

In browsing through old issues of the Princeton Theological Review, I came across this article from 1905 by T. F. Fotheringham, “The Doctrine of Baptism in Holy Scripture and the Westminster Standards.” Fotheringham’s thesis is that the dominant understanding of baptism in Presbyterian circles of his day is wrong (nothing’s changed). Baptism for infants and for adults must have the same meaning, he argues. The language of scripture is clear that baptism is about fulfillment, thus infant baptism cannot merely indicate promise (OT category). It’s an interesting read.

In other words, he realizes what Baptists and Catholics have been saying all along: baptism indicates union with Christ, adoption by the Father, and sealing by the Holy Spirit.

Evangelism Is Not Enough — what the SBC doesn’t get…and does get.

First, what does the Southern Baptist Convention get? Evangelism. Baptists understand far better than other Protestant traditions that the Protestant faith is a pietistic and revivalistic faith. As much as doctrine may be inscribed in confessions, as much as church order and discipline may be practiced, as much as the sacraments may be emphasized — Protestantism is not capable of sustaining these emphases without the balance of personal conversion in a new birth (yes, I mean, “a personal relationship with Jesus Christ”). Otherwise, the result is a Catholic rationalism without the Catholic Christ and Catholic conversion-to-Christ required by the Catholic dogmatic structure. Lacking the “Catholic,” Protestantism without evangelicalism becomes rationalism, of the sort abundantly exhibited by the mainline churches and taking various synergistic forms. While there’s much more to be said, I just wanted to register the point that Protestantism requires the sort of characteristics popular to evangelicalism, rightly finding their origins in both the Reformation and the revivals of Whitefield, Edwards, Wesley, and Graham.

This emphasis on evangelism is what grew the Baptist movement with an almost shocking success, especially on the fertile soil of the Southern states. I say, “fertile,” because the South was far less attached to or dependent upon established societal structures, such as the state church in England or the mainline churches of the North. This autonomy and individualism in the South is very congenial to the tenets of Baptist faith, with its most recognizable tenet being the rejection of infant baptism for undercutting the requirement of personal conversion to be a Christian. So, the Baptists grew and grew, and alongside the Baptists, various independent “Bible churches” and “nondenominational” churches grew as well, sharing the same Baptist beliefs. Today, the SBC, the largest cooperative program of Baptists, is the largest Protestant denomination in America. But, now they are not growing (for the first time in the SBC’s existence), and the leadership of the convention has been incessantly pushing for a “Great Commission Resurgence” (yes, with capital letters and all). The GCR has been a popular topic on SBC blogs and magazines, including the latest issue of SBC Life, and the popular mantra has basically been that the problem is “you,” i.e., the Baptist in the pew who is not evangelizing (or “soul-winning,” as it was called in my church growing-up).

Surely they are right. The problem is that people are not evangelizing. Or, at least, this is the surface-level main problem. And the SBC should at least be applauded for recognizing this problem (as anyone who has spent time in a mainline church can attest, many churches are utterly oblivious to the basic need to witness to Christ, with both words and deeds). But, Southern Baptists have heard of the need to evangelize all their lives. After all, they are Baptists and this is what Baptists do. Baptists may not do much in the way of art (like the Anglicans), or great systems of theology (like the Presbyterians), or profound ethical and societal philosophies (like the Catholics), but they can at least do evangelism — that is where all the money goes (the domestic and international mission boards). There have been programs and resolutions for increased evangelization long before the official decline in baptisms of late. So, now there is a new acronym (the GCR), but nothing else is new.

That’s the problem. Nothing else is new. Telling Baptists that they need to evangelize is not enough. This is not really the problem; it’s a result of the problem. The problem is that far too many Southern Baptists could not evangelize even if they wanted to. They do not have the intellectual and social resources to evangelize to our current society. This is not to go off on a postmodern rant. The solution is not capitulation to current modes of thought (a mix of rationalism and relativism). The problem is that (most) Southern Baptists are aloof to this mix of rationalism and relativism, and they have no idea how to proclaim the Gospel to those with little to no Christian presuppositions. Much is made of how evangelicals have capitulated to society (in a sort of American-style Constantinian complex), which may be true to some extent, but the greater problem is a continuing fundamentalist and sectarian influence on Southern Baptist thought. In other words, they are not secular enough. If you believe drinking alcohol and subscribing to evolution are anathema for a proper “Christian” life, then you are not going to get very far with the average “non-churched” person. Until a holism is achieved in Southern Baptist life and thought, an intractable barrier will continue to exist between the faithful in the pew and their co-workers at the office. How exactly I would suggest this holism is to be achieved would take a whole series of posts, and I certainly do not wish to devalue the importance of the Holy Spirit’s conviction of sin and other dogmatic matters. I simply question whether Southern Baptists, and similar evangelical bodies, have thought sufficiently whether their congregants have a depth of understanding about those issues which sustain the particular intellectual vision of their fellow men outside the church.

Baptism, Baptist-style

In perusing YouTube videos, I came across this Vineyard video of some baptisms (quick history lesson: Vineyard is a denomination of Baptists who don’t like to call themselves Baptist. Insert “your nondenom church next door” for “Vineyard” and you have the same history lesson). I’m a fan of the Baptist-style baptism and not just because it’s likely the apostolic method. The symbolism is clearly stronger with full immersion — being buried and rising again to new life (Rom. 6:4, Col. 2:12), plus the cleansing of the whole body as is the whole person. Now, I don’t expect the mainline churches to adopt full immersion any time soon (too bourgeois for that), nor is it especially important, but it is worth considering. I found this video beautiful, and I’m a fan of the musical artist, Jeremy Riddle, whose song, “Sweetly Broken,” is playing.