Truth Unites - Baptists Are Retrieving the Great Tradition (With Matt Emerson and Luke Stamps)

Episode Date: December 15, 2021

Here I talk with Matt Emerson and Luke Stamps about the exciting work of the Center for Baptist Renewal, why it is important for Baptists to engage in theological retrieval, whether Baptists can have a high view of the sacraments, and more.  Check out the Center for Baptist Renewal: http://www.centerforbaptistrenewal.com/ Check out the book Matt and Luke edited, Baptists and the Christian Tradition: https://www.amazon.com/Baptists-Christian-Tradition-Evangelical-Catholicity/dp/1433650614 Truth Unites is a mixture of apologetics and theology, with an irenic focus. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites One time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://gavinortlund.com/

Hey everybody, welcome or welcome back to my channel. Truth Unites is a place for theology and apologetics done in an ironic way. The word ironic means aiming for peace. And I'm really excited to talk about the Center for Baptist Renewal with Luke Stamps and Matt Emerson and Brandon Smith was going to join us, but he couldn't make it. But yeah, I'm really, maybe to start off with, share with me and with everybody, how did the Center for Baptist Renewal actually start? I'm actually really curious. Whose idea was it or was it you guys talking together? or how did that actually come together? Well, Luke and I met at California Baptist University. I started working there in 2011, and then he came in 2012. And so through just developing friendship, discovered mutual interests in recovering liturgy,

historic doctrine, those sorts of things. And so, you know, we talked about, we saw other people doing that from different perspectives, including other Baptists, our same fundamental commitments, but who are nevertheless fellow Baptists like us, and just said, man, it'd be great if we could think about this from an evangelical or Southern Baptists for our context perspective. We presented a paper at ETS in 2014, well, think. That sounds right. And it was part of the Baptist Studies group. And the Baptist Studies group, the session that year was on the four

ecclesial notes from the from the creed and so we gave a paper on baptists and the Catholicity of the church around that around that point Brandon Smith introduced himself to us and expressed shared interests I think he may have been able to be at that ETS I can't remember anyway so we developed friendship with Brandon and just talked about the need for this kind of work from within our own context and his mutual friend Winston Hotman was interested in that as well. And so eventually we just said, let's try to start something. Let's try to start a center. Didn't know exactly what it was going to look like, but received counsel from various other people we respect and trust and eventually launched it in March of 2017, I think. Is that right?

Something like that. Yeah. 2018. I don't know. So that's the long and short of it. There's like, lots of twists and turns in the, but that's the gist. Right, right. So for someone who's not already familiar, how would you give kind of the elevator pitch of just what is basically the vision of the CBR? Yeah, I mean, we're trying to position the Baptist movement within the one holy Catholic and apostolic church, right? So trying to say that Baptists are not, or need not be by nature sectarian, but can be, we can be, we can be.

ourselves as a renewal movement within the one true church. I mean, obviously we differ with other Christian traditions and some important ways on on various doctrines, but at the same time, we share much in common with other Christians, other denominations. And so it's kind of a way to, you know, to mainly help Baptists kind of, I mean, there's kind of, I guess, a front-facing part, but also like an internal part. Like, in some sense, we would like to tell other traditions, hey, we're here to be a part of the conversation within the one true church. We want to, you know, have dialogue with other traditions and try to present, again, Baptist's renewal movement within the broader church, but also really mainly internally to try to say to our own people, our own

churches, you know, listen, we're Christians too, right? We're Protestants. We are little C Catholics. We are little-O Orthodox Christians, and there are resources that we can draw on that predate our own Baptist movement, that predate the Protestant Reformation. And at the same time, there are resources within our own tradition that can, you know, speak to the broader church as well. So it's that kind of resourcing the great tradition for Baptists, I guess is sort of the short way to put it. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so without trying to beat up on Baptist too much here. But what would you say are some of the weaknesses or the deficiencies that you see in the world of Baptists that the CBR is trying to remedy? So from my own experience as a Baptist, I didn't grow up Baptist. I grew up in a mainline denomination and became Baptist in college.

And so I wasn't really all that familiar with Baptist culture. I pretty much was trying to find a place where I could land that affirmed the inerrancy and authority of scripture, that affirmed believers baptism, that affirmed. I didn't know this term at the time, but a kind of local church autonomy. So I was looking for something like that because I had grown up in a context where the Bible wasn't taken seriously and was convicted that I needed to do that. And as I read the Bible, I thought, you know, babies aren't baptized. Local churches don't have bishops. And, you know, obviously people disagree with them of these things. I'm just saying this is my own kind of entryway into Baptist life.

And so I read the Baptist Faith and Message 2000. I thought, oh, okay, here's something that I think reflects what scripture teaches. I had no cultural context whatsoever for what Southern Baptist life is. as I've been shaped and formed by specifically Southern Baptists, although there are other Baptists that have influenced me. You know, they've done a lot of great things for me. They help me to take the Bible seriously, to take evangelism seriously, to understand doctrine and take it seriously. But there are still things in our tradition that I think we can point out and try to help address in our own current context. I said the other day, actually, you know, I think there's a pretty big anti-intellectualism strain in Baptist life and not just Southern Baptist life, where we think that doctrine is a checkbox where you take a new member's class and like, yeah, I believe all this stuff, but then theology doesn't matter for the rest of your Christian life.

It's evangelism missions, maybe ministry to the city that really matters. And, you know, it's kind of, kind of pietism that exists. in Baptist life. And so one of the things we want to help our fellow Baptist do is to take the history of Christian theology seriously and see how it helps the church and really how the formation of what we call orthodoxy happened in the context of pastoral ministry. Like when doctrines like simplicity or the eternalations of origin were articulated clearly and systematically in the fourth and fifth centuries and even before that, it was in the context of people trying to pastor their churches. And they're saying, hey, God doesn't change. This is how that matters for you. And so we want to

help Baptist pastors see that taking theology seriously helps you take pastoral ministry seriously. The same thing is true for liturgy or, you know, how we how we order our corporate worship. There's a long tradition of how the church has worshiped together in Christianity. And there are good reasons for doing some of the things that we've done throughout church history in corporate worship, that Baptists have frankly abandoned in some cases. Corporate confession, weekly Lord's Supper, even reciting the Lord's Prayer. There are things that were fairly typical of Christian worship that have fallen out of practice for Baptist for various reasons that we believe can strengthen Baptist churches and help them.

So those are some of the, those are a couple of things I would point out. I think part of that too is an underlying biblicalism, you know, which that word kind of means different things to different people. But I mean, and what says, biblicalism might be good and right. I mean, if you say the Bible is our supreme authority,

as a kind of Protestant principle, if you think about it in like David Bebbington's quadrilateral, you know, or you know, sort of this famous definition of what it means to be evangelical. Part of that is biblicalism in the sense that the Bible is taken as the supreme source and standard of Christian doctrine in life. But there's a negative sense of biblicalism that is a kind of Bible-onlyism that sees like really no benefit in the tradition, no benefit in other forms of theological authority under the supreme authority of Scripture, like creeds and confessions and so on. and, you know, other theological, you know, giants in the history of the faith.

And so I think that's one thing that Baptists often struggle with. There's, on the one hand, a rightful emphasis on the inerrancy, infallibility, authority of scripture. Those are all things that we happily affirm as evangelicals and as baddists. But that can, if you're not careful, that can kind of be distorted to sort of ignore the whole history of interpretive. right, that there are 2,000 years of Christians reading, reflecting on, synthesizing, gaining, offending what the scriptures teach. And so that's part of what we're trying to battle here as well is to say you can have, you know, what I've described elsewhere as a kind of thick biblicalism, you know,

like where you're committed to the Bible as the Supreme Source and Standard. But that entails within it a respect for. the providential ways in which God has illuminated the church and interpreting the Bible down through the centuries. Yeah, I'll just add one more thing to that. I think that Baptists are in some ways uniquely susceptible to negative aspects of the Enlightenment, especially as it relates to individualism. So I affirm very clearly and local church autonomy. I affirm the necessity of personal responsibility before the Lord.

I affirm separation of church and state, all those Baptist distinctives. And those are right and biblical in my mind. I do think, though, that because of our emphasis on the individual, we can be uniquely susceptible to individualism in a negative sense, where we're totally disconnected from our history, from our ecclesial context, from the rest of the church, from its history of exegesis, from historical theology, from liturgical practices.

We just, we're uniquely susceptible to that. And so we want to help reconnect or foster the connection that already exists. between Baptists, especially evangelical Baptists and the Christian tradition. Yeah, it's awesome. I love what you guys are doing. And in just a second, I want to come back to something that Matt said about where Baptists have kind of abandoned some historic Baptist practices. We can talk about that a little bit. But I was curious, too, just what is some of the fruit that you see? Like, for example, there's the reading, the annual reading that you guys have structured.

And I'll put a link in the video description to your guys. YouTube channel where you can watch some of the discussions about that reading. I'm just curious what you hear back in terms of positive fruit as people are engaging some of these historic theologians. Yeah, I mean, so at the beginning of last this year, I guess the beginning of 2021, we sort of launched a theology classics reading challenge where we compiled kind of 12 works or you know portions of works from theological luminaries and christians and christians. history. Some of them Baptists, but others not. Most of them not. And just kind of challenge people to read one a month.

You know, so 12 months of the year, 12 readings. And we haven't really quantified sort of who all is participating in that. We, I guess I suppose we could, like look at the numbers of who's, you know, watching the YouTube videos or podcasts that we've done on it. But we have gotten, you know, lots of feedback via email and otherwise people just saying,

how much they appreciate it. I think there's a real hunger among Baptists for this kind of thing, maybe especially in the younger generations, you know, but not exclusively. Actually, we, not infrequently, we get emails from older pastors who say things like, I've loved church history since I went to seminary in the 60s or 70s, and I've sort of labored in Baptist church as my whole life without much of that emphasis and sort of longing for people to emphasize, you know, Christian history and the history of theology. And so those are really the most encouraging emails, I think, that we get are from older Baptist ministers and believers who are saying this is something that we sort of wish had

been there before now. Yeah. And I will say that we aren't just motivated by younger Baptists wanting to connect with them. But it also is true that in both of our experiences in different places, younger Baptists have left Baptist life for other denominations, especially Anglicanism usually, because they feel like Baptists are totally disconnected from the rest of the Christian tradition. And the reality is that's just not true. It feels true, and I don't want to discount anybody's experience of being, of how they were catechized or trained or whatever.

And it, you know, so it is true that in a lot of our Baptist educational context, we don't actually emphasize how Baptists are connected to the Christian tradition. What I mean when I say it's not true is if you go and read Early Baptist, it's very clear that they wanted to show other believers of different traditions that they, too, arose out of the same common Christian tradition. So early Baptists did not see themselves as some kind of novel separatist group that was totally disconnected from everybody else. And so we do want to, part of the reason for the center, at least apologetically, I don't know if that's the right turn or not, but we do want to say to Baptists who feel antsy about whether or not they can remain Baptists and care about the entire Christian tradition. We want to say, yes, you can't. And here's

how here's why so there's some some other motivations yeah that's really helpful so okay so this term that's come up a couple times already and i know it's on on the cbr website too of baptist catholicity i know a lot of people hear those two words and they seem like oxymorons to people that you could be lowercase c cath and even that word lowercase c catholic can be a can set off alarm bells for people sometimes so if you've touched on this already but maybe you could just briefly respond to this concern of someone who says if you try to do this if you try to be lowercase c catholic you're going to end up watering down baptist distinctives you're going to be less baptist if you try to do that how how would you interact with that concern yeah well a friend of ours actually said that exact

thing after our paper that i mentioned it needs yes he said you know uh i appreciate some of what you said but I kind of take it with open eyes, wait and see what are you going to do with it kind of thing. And then also just said, I want to ask what, how can we amplify, clarify, show what Baptists have given to their tradition? And that's a valid comment. I mean, you know, part of what we want to do is, connect Baptists not just to the Christian tradition, but to the Baptist tradition, because often Baptists don't actually know our own tradition, much less the entirety of the Christian tradition. I actually think that if you go and read early Baptists, they were very, you know, I already said this, but I'll say it again.

When we talk about Baptist Catholicity, what we mean is that Baptists are one part of the bigger stream of Christian. Christianity. Our Baptist, our smaller Baptist stream is a part of the larger river or whatever analogy you want to use there of Orthodox Christianity. And we don't think that

demonstrating that waters down Baptist instinctives, but actually clarifies what it really means to be Baptist. So it doesn't being, you know, for instance, being Baptist doesn't mean, like I said, that we're some sort of novel sectarian group that just was like me and my

Bible, and here we are, like we've suddenly become the first generation of the post-apistolic period where we're just starting over. Like, that's not what it means to be Baptist. It doesn't, being Baptist doesn't mean we're revisionists on the doctrine of the Trinity or the doctrine of Christology or anything else like that. It doesn't even mean we're revisionists on the doctrines of ecclesiology. The doctrine of ecclesiology, there are, there are ways that Baptists believe that those doctrines, especially ecclesiology, needed to be reformed, but they weren't revisionists. In fact, if you read Madison Grace's chapter in the Baptist in the Christian tradition book that we edited, he shows that early Baptist confessions

of faith in their statements on ecclesiology were almost direct quotes of like the Nicene Creed and some other common language about ecclesiology throughout the Christian tradition. So we think that showing how Baptists are connected to the tradition actually clarifies what it means to be Baptist, rather than only talking about Baptist distinctives. Yeah. The word Catholic gets us in trouble both within our camp and outside of it, right? So those on the outside will look at us and say, you can't be Baptist and be Catholic, because you invalidate our baptisms, right?

I mean, that's one of the most common challenges that we face from other traditions to say, well, you can't be a Baptist Catholic. You can't have Baptist Catholicity because believers baptism entails some kind of invalidation of infat baptism. Even there, there's a diversity of views within the Baptist tradition on that question. But that's one thing that we get from the outside. But you're right, from the inside, like, there's the sense that, well, Catholic is kind of a swear word anyway for a lot of Baptists. There is a history of anti-Catholicism, Roman Catholic tradition within the Baptist world in America, especially, that we're sort of swimming upstream against.

But we try to clarify to say, we don't mean capital C, Roman Catholic, but obviously the broader sense of the universal. body of Christ across space and time. And to Matt's point, if you go back and read the early Baptist confessions and also influential Baptist theologians, they are explicitly echoing the language of creedal, conciliar, Trinitarianism, and Christology. They're even echoing language from other traditions on things like the Lord's Supper, which we may want to talk more about the sacraments. And then sometimes in a couple different cases, you have Baptist symbols, Baptist confessional statements,

that just simply include the full text of the three ecumenical creeds. So you see that? I mean, just to give a little homework here for Baptists and non-Baptists, by the way, we found, you know, I say this with as much, with sincere kindness and charity, but we found that a lot of former Baptists know the least about the tradition. they left. And I'm not exactly why that is. People, again, we don't begrudge anyone's spiritual journey. Sometimes people have a bad experience with a particular church or whatever that shapes their

Christian journey. But sometimes the most fiercely anti-Baptist critics are people who are former Baptists who never really were catechized well in their own tradition. And so I would encourage everyone to go read the Orthodox Creed, which was a confessional statement by the General Baptist. Those of you who know a little bit about Baptist history may know there were two Baptist groups in the 17th century, the General Baptist who were more Armenian and the particular Baptists who were more Calvinists. So I'm just going to give you one example from each of those traditions where the three ecumenical creeds are explicitly affirmed. So one is in the General Baptist Orthodox Creed, which was compiled by a General Baptist minister named Thomas Monk,

who, by the way, also wrote one of the best works on the Trinity in the 17th century, a book called A Cure for the Cankering Error of the New Uticians. They just don't make books like that. But anyway, Thomas Monk, General Baptist, the Orthodox Creed, he quotes verbatim the language from the articles of religion. introducing the three ecumenical creeds. And then in a particular Baptist context, a particular Baptist minister named Hercules Collins,

another great name, Hercules Collins, who compiled a Baptist version of the Heidelberg Catechism. So it's almost verbatim from the Heidelberg Catechism, but with some Baptist emendations. And at the end, he adds a chapter with the full text of the Ecumenical creeds. And so the Baptist, both general Baptists and particular Baptists, were at pains to say, we are Little C Catholic when it comes to the cardinal doctrines of the faith. Yes, of course, we're departing from the tradition on the subjects of baptism and on the meaning and mode of baptism in

some ways, but we're not trying to overthrow the creedal foundations of the faith. Yeah, and I would add to that in addition to clearly demonstrating their connection to gredal conciliar Christianity in Trinitarianism and Christology, they also clearly demonstrate their connection to reformational doctrines, especially related to

soteriology and ecclesiology. So in the language about justification, you know, you could find it in any of the reformational confessions. And the language about ecclesiology, including language about the sacraments, both baptism and the Lord's Supper, again, just, you know, you could read it and then go read, especially among the reformed tradition, confessions about ecclesiology and the sacraments, and you're going to find a lot of the same language. And so it's a mistake to think that what Baptist did was, you know, it's first of all a mistake to think that Baptist just sat down, me and my, Bible and came up with stuff. That's not what happened, right? They're connecting themselves to the

broad stream of creedal conciliar Christianity. But it's also a mistake to think that in the distinctives of Baptist thought, there is no connection whatsoever to other reformational traditions or even to the whole Christian tradition. Even in the area of ecclesiology, even in the area of baptism, the language that they use is still connecting them to other Christian traditions, even while they show how their view is distinct from those Christian traditions, especially with respect to the meaning mode and polity. Okay. So I'll put a link to the book that Matt, you mentioned at the beginning, Baptists in the Great

Tradition, I believe is the title. Christian Christian tradition, yeah. Thank you. Sorry, Christian tradition. So for people who are interested in that, they can check that out. We'll go on to the sacraments in just a second. But first, let me give you the chance to speak to this concern because, and it is encouraging talking to you guys, because I often feel a bit lonely on YouTube because there's not many Baptists, you know,

talking about these things. And honestly, I get this sentiment and I take it in good faith as a genuine curiosity, a genuine sense of astonishment that people have. of how can you be connected to church history and remain a Baptist? You know, I get this sentiment a great deal. Gavin, if you were a Lutheran or an Anglican defending Protestantism, that I could maybe understand. But a Baptist, you know, how can you be immersed and you read the church fathers and you still remain a Baptist? So I'm just curious how you guys would interact with a concern like that.

If someone says that, how would you respond? I think part of this is to in some sense admit the validity of the criticism and to say that, well, we're Protestant Christians, right? So for us, the supreme source and standard of truth is the Bible, right? And so all that we read in the Christian tradition, we read as a, at best, as a subordinate authority under the supreme authority of Scripture. And so there are, um, There are plenty of places where we read the tradition and say that's wrong, right? I mean, these theological luminaries, as much as we might glean from them and learn from them, they were sometimes wrong about things. And we were always seeking more light from the word. And so there's a sense of which that's okay, right? Sort of picking and choosing just is what it means to be a proxent in some ways, right?

I mean, I have to carefully qualify that. I'm not saying it's willy-nilly. right but if we become convinced as as churches and then as assemblies of churches that the Bible corrects certain aspects of the Christian tradition well we have to go with the Bible right and so in some sense that's just what it means to be a Protestant right so that's just another way of saying well Baptists are Protestants and and I'm happy to admit that but in another sense like it's just not true that I mean that this is actually related that the tradition is not uniform, right? I mean, even on the questions of baptism, you know, I think we had to be very

careful in making arguments from church history on the debate over the subjects of baptism. But if you go back to the earliest centuries, it's just not as clear as Pato-Baptist apologists would like to, like us to believe that infant baptism was the universal practice of the church in an unbroken perpetuity from the time of the apostles. There is plenty of evidence in the early church that baptism was delayed until adulthood for various reasons that we may or may not agree with, right? But it's just simply not the case that you have this sort of clear apostolic practice that continues unabated until the current day. The practice of infant baptism was developmental. And one of the best books on this, I'm sure you're familiar with is Everett Ferguson.

book on baptism in the early church. And I mean, his, his theses, I'm sure can be debated. But, I mean, he makes the argument that, you know, the only clear examples of infant, the earliest clear examples of infant baptism we have are on funeral, are on inscriptions for, to have died, right? on burial inscriptions.

And so it appears that infant baptism, at least in Ferguson's view, develops as a kind of emergency means for children who are near death. Anyway, all that's debated, that's fine. I don't think the case that either side can make a kind of slam-dunk case from the first 300 years of the church to say, this proves my side is true. But it's just to say it's more complicated than Pato Baptist apologetics sometimes lead us to believe.

and there have been others who have been convinced of that as well. I mean, John Calvin himself became, you know, was convinced that immersion was the earliest Christian practice. And it's a separate issue from subjects of baptism, but the mode of baptism appears to have been immersion from the earliest centuries. So even on the question of baptism, the tradition is not uniform. And in any case, we're happily Protestants who want to say the main question is what the Bible says. What does the Bible clearly teach in terms of the Bible's own covenant? development and the practice of the New Testament. So church history can be a guide, even an authoritative guide to interpreting the Bible, but it doesn't usurp the authority of the Bible. Yeah, it's really

helpful. And for people who want to do a little deeper dive, just following along with what you mentioned from Everett Ferguson, there's some of these other top patristic scholars on baptism really do end up in either the dual practice view like David Wright or their Grito Baptists. They're making a case for Credo baptism from the early church. George Beasley-Murys, another scholar in that area. So maybe just extending this a little bit further on the sacraments. This is an area where often the impression is evangelicals and Baptists specifically have a low view of the sacraments, the other traditions, the non-Protestant traditions, some of the more historic and liturgical Protestant traditions have a high view of the sacraments. On your guy's website, you've got this

manifesto and you talk about the sacraments as signs and seals of God's grace. You talk about whether we call them a sacraments or ordinances, and you kind of draw attention to historic Baptist views on those things. So maybe you could just flesh out a little bit. Can a Baptist have a high view of the sacraments? And if so, in what way? Yes. Again, I rely on early Baptist for these things, and I would just say that in the early Baptist confessions and creeds, it's obvious that they're just ripping off the reformed confessions and the language about the meaning of baptism in the Lord's Supper. So they would, they very clearly are rejecting the kind of sacerdotalism, and the kind of Roman Catholic view of the sacraments where it's an infusion of justifying grace. So they're rejecting all of that, but they're retaining the element of the sacraments that affirms it as a means of God's grace.

It's just sanctifying grace. It's not justifying grace. It's a grace of God's presence. It's transformative. justification is a one-time act at conversion. But baptism and the Lord's Supper in these early Baptist creasing confessions is a manifestation of God's presence to the believer and to the congregation. And it's therefore it is such because it's a proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ in word and in symbol. It's a way to unite the congregation together. I mean, like, it clearly has very obvious spiritual meaning that's not bare memorialism.

And I, you know, I'll let Lou chime in. But the only other thing I would say is memorialism gets a bad rap. But, you know, in scripture, especially the Lord's Supper, is a memory of what Christ has done. So it's not like we should abandon the memorial aspect of the supper as we talk about this. Memorialism is important. And in fact, there are people who have articulated a memorialist position who do so in such a way that Christ is present through remembering his sacrifice. And so, you know, I don't want anybody to hear my use of the term sacrament or our use of the term sacrament as an abandonment of a kind of Baptist emphasis on the memorialization. aspect of the supper, I just think there are other things going on because of the fact that we're

remembering Christ in the supper. Yeah, and the earliest Baptist used the word sacrament. That's not alien to Baptist usage. So someone like Benjamin Keach, an important particular Baptist minister in London in the 17th century spoke about how the Lord's suffer as a sacrament. And so ordinance, in the earliest usage, ordinance was not. seen as a as a competitor to or a replacement of sacrament. Ordinance was just actually a broader term that described the things that Jesus ordained, namely the ordinary means of grace, preaching

baptism, Lord's Supper, and prayer. So ordinance was seen as a broader term. That's why it was used. It came to be used as a kind of alternative to sacrament, like the Methodists have sacraments, we Baptists have ordinances. But actually, from the beginning, it was not so, right? from the earliest Baptist used the languages of sacraments. And so the short answer to your question, can Baptists be saccharacter? So how or in what way? The answer is yes. And the how is actually very close to the reform tradition, as Matt has laid out here.

What the Baptist say about the Lord's Supper and say the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, sometimes referred to as the 1689 Confession, because that's when the General Assembly adopted it as the, the statement of faith for the particular Baptists. But the 1689 confession echoes exactly the same language about what the supper does as the Westminster Confession of Faith does. And so Baptists in that sense are reformed-ish, we might say. Certainly they change things related to, you know, the subjects of baptism and therefore of the Lord's

supper, but what they believe the sacrament actually did is very close to what the reformed tradition believed, especially in the case of infant bat, I'm sorry, of the Lord's supper. Now, baptism is a little bit different. In some sense, I think Baptists are actually in a better position to affirm the sacramental nature of baptism than our reformed Pato Baptist friends are. Now, there are other traditions that I think would escape this criticism, but the mistake that I think the reform tradition sometimes has made is to separate baptism from conversion or baptism from regeneration, where baptism becomes merely promissory. It's merely a kind of future looking when this child grows up into the faith, then what signify will be sealed in their life in a saving way.

a regenerating way. So it sort of introduced this gap between the administration of the sacrament of baptism and actual regeneration. Now, Calvin and some others would say that, you know, it's possible that God regenerates the infant in baptism. But still, there's this notional separation between baptism as a sign and seal of the covenant, covenant promises and actual regeneration. That's actually the novel position, I think. Certainly the Catholics, the Orthodox, the Lutherans, the Anglicans would not have

had that kind of notional separation between baptism and regeneration. Baptism is closely tied to regeneration and conversion. And I actually think Baptists can affirm the same thing. Because we believe that faith is prerequisite to baptism, there's this sort of close matrix,

we might say, this sort of intimate, integral matrix between dependence and faith, convert, regeneration and baptism, because baptism is to take place at the beginning of the Christian life. And in that sense, baptism, the way the earliest Baptist spoke about it was baptism was the seal of our union with Christ. The union with Christ, it sort of begins in, you know, repentance and faith, but it sort of has this formal seal, this formal ratification, not in, you know, the, like walking an aisle or praying a prayer. Like we think about in contemporary Baptist.

practice, but the ordinary means by which our union with Christ was sealed and ratified was baptism. So, again, there's this close connection between baptism and regeneration. It's not a baptismal regeneration in the strict sense. Don't misunderstand what I'm saying. But it's this close connection between baptism and regeneration or conversion that the Baptist retain that's actually lost in the reformed of Pado Baptist view. I don't know. What do you think about that, Gavin? Is that, I mean, you've studied these things more than we have. I think it's really helpful. Yeah, I think it's really helpful. It maps on to what a lot of my thoughts have been recently. You know, this is another one of the appeals leveraged against us is if there's anything that is universal among the church fathers, it's baptismal regeneration. That's the appeal that's often made against us. And I just have, the more I try to consider that and with an open mind, kind of say, okay, you know, what, what's the data supporting this? Then I go in. into the fathers, the early witnesses. Yeah, I think what is universal is what Luke is talking about,

this close association between baptism and salvation. So the language I've used to describe it as baptism is the public expression of salvation. It's the formal, and I think your language is also right on with how I'm thinking. It's the ceiling of it. And there's various metaphors that I've used to articulate that. But yeah, that close association, a Baptist is able to retain in the way that a reformed Pidal Baptist doesn't. And that's what I hear you saying. And I think that's right. And yeah, the earliest records on this, what happens is people overly specify.

Because baptismal regeneration, number one, has a range of meanings. But if you take that to mean through the water itself, the water is the instrumental means by which you are regenerated, I think that's reading things into a lot of these patristic statements. a lot of these church fathers, they're just not speaking to that specific question. They're speaking at a little more general level of the association between baptism and salvation. So, yeah, I think a lot of those statements against us are overstatements. And so, yeah, I think that's really helpful. In my mind, it's one of those things where we have to recognize the history of, the history of doctrinal development.

I mean, these debates don't actually happen until they happen with back. Baptists, you know, in terms of, you know, the baptism or regeneration question. Nobody's, nobody's really trying to dive deep and clarify anything, you know. And so you get to the point where it comes up as a matter of discussion. And then you see this fracturing, which is not really one group taking the position and another group taking not the position. It's more like, well, now this is a matter of debate. And here we have all these options before, so we didn't really recognize that we're under this one umbrella of these sort of generic say i mean the same thing happens with i know in my mind at least same thing happens with transubstantiation you know there's this

assumption that transubstantiation is the position uh of the entire church but then you look at it it's like no this clearly came about in a way in such a way that the language of the church about the lord's supper was articulated in a context in which aristotle is being retrieved, and that produces this view right here, which is now called transubstantiation. So it's an anachronism to take the debates that happen a millennia or now two millennia on and try to map that debate onto statements of the early church. And we could, I mean, pretty much anything except for the Trinity and Christology, you could, you could say, you know, I mean, there's more than that.

But those two things especially are really the ones that we can try. trace to the protristic period and say, this is the consensus. A lot of other stuff, it's more difficult than that. Yeah. Oh, right on. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think you have to see that with the Lord's Supper because of the debates going on, you know, all the way up into the 9th century, you've got debates about the nature of real presence, and neither side is seen as like the official position of the

church. And then even after that, you've got more, you've got Beringar and others with a huge following, opposing transubstantiation in its kind of earlier form and then it's controversial. So that's a long period of time before you kind of get this solidification of the categories. So yeah, that's really helpful. Maybe we can pivot on to a new topic and also kind of pivoting back on to helping the Baptists in the work of retrieval here. Because a lot of the great work you guys have done is in, doctrine of God, doctrine of Christ, and then with the Trinity specifically, there's a kind of resurgence

of retrieval of the doctrine of God and kind of people, lots of people interested in retrieving the church fathers on the Trinity, really exciting. What would you say is the importance of that? What is maybe a way I could ask the question is this? What are the errors that tend to happen when we have a view of the Trinity that's just informed by script? and we're not engaged in historical theology. I think that what we've witnessed over the last, I don't know, how far you want to go back, maybe 100, 200 years, really,

is not quite, that's not quite the description of the state of affairs. It's not quite Bible only, but it's Bible and then a very skeletal understanding of Nicene Trinitarianism. You know, so that you had, you know, pretty much universally. Like there's this, there's an affirmation of, well, there's one essence, three persons, you know, one, one God, one Godhead, but you have these three distinct persons. So there's an attempt to try to position that against the various heresies of the early church.

But I know, I just, I think in our, in a lot of our experiences, like the interaction with the actual text of the fourth century was minimal. So you had like the, the kind of. result, at least in terms of like the formal propositions that we feel like we have to affirm about the Trinity, but there wasn't always a deep engagement with the fourth century text that explained what that was. Like what do we mean when we talk about three persons? If you're not interacting with what, say, the Capadocian fathers meant by a person, or what St. Augustine meant by a person, a divine person, then other definitions of person sort of rush to fill the gap.

And so you can still end up with Trinitarian error. It might not be formal heresy, right? I think we have to be clear and very careful. I think some of the ways that people have talked about the Trinity debates of recent years, those who are familiar with that in evangelical circles, pretty hotly contested debates over the last five years over the Trinity. And sometimes I feel like language of heresy and hermetical, get thrown around in some sloppy ways and in some uncharitable ways.

And so I think we had to be very careful not to accuse people of heretics too quickly, right? Or hastily. But at the same time, you can end up with Trinitarian error if you're using the right terms, but you're using a different lexicon. You know, you're not actually engaging with what Athanasius and Gregory and Basil and so on were actually saying about what the extent is meant. Yeah. So what I would say is we don't want to pit the Bible against tradition, and we don't, I don't want to say that everybody needs tradition in the same way that you need the Bible. I mean, theoretically, anybody could arrive at the doctrine of the Trinity just with their Bible because the Bible teaches the doctrine of the Trinity.

But, you know, the problem that I think we're seeing is that that's exactly. exactly what people are trying to do, and they're running into the same problems that have already been discussed and resolved a millennia and a half ago. You know, and I think that arises from the fact that they don't engage with the primary sources. People, I think, I don't remember exactly how you put it when you started, Luke, but you said something about a bare-bones approach to Nicaea. And that's, that's part of the problem is people think that to affirm Nicaea is merely to affirm the term homozyos. but what you get when you engage those primary texts is the fact you know this interbiblical canonical canonical theological logic that shows that you can't affirm homausias if you don't also affirm the eternal relations of origin and reject any other distinction between the persons besides that

so you can't actually just take homoosius by itself and call yourself Nicene. That doesn't make any sense. And I'm not trying to be, you know, some kind of arbitrary gatekeeper here. That's, that's just what Niccia is. It's not an affirmation of one term. It's that one term in the context of this whole interbiblical, canonical, canonical, theological logic that the father's articulated. And so I have a problem with just the attitude that I can start again, it's like this, let's have a small group and develop a doctrine of the Trinity by ourselves. That doesn't work. Not because the tradition has any kind of ontological sameness to scripture in terms of authority level, but because you're not a man on an island as you do theology.

These things have already been talked about and discussed by people who are smarter than me, smarter than you, smarter than any of us. They've already figured it out. The church has affirmed it. And now I'm going to be the one to stand over all of that and say, no, we got to start over again. Like, that to me is just arrogant. On the other hand, because of the context that we're in in the 20th century and now the 21st century where church history has not been taken seriously for quite a while, historical theology has been something where we're demonstrating how us moderns are so enlightened and these pre-moderns were silly. you know, I mean, nobody takes church history seriously in that regard, and they haven't for a while. I also want to be more charitable than maybe the pronysines would have been for those people who are articulating what I would call a Trinitarian error, even if it's not, as Luke said, heresy.

You know, we have 150 years at least now of a kind of enlightenment arrogance where we don't want to listen to the past. And I'm not saying that's true of the people who are postulating what I would call error with respect to the doctrine of Trinity. I'm not saying they're arrogant. I'm saying that's the kind of cultural environment in which we arrive to study the doctrine of trinity already. Like you might, you yourself might not be arrogant, but we're in an environment where our entire culture, the entire western half of the globe is arrogant towards the past. you know and so I want to be charitable and careful when I talk about those who I believe are in error I don't think it's because they're spiritually deficient or unsaved or heretics or anything like that I still think it's error and we need to correct it but I don't I'm not going to call it heresy

now I think I'll say this I'm going to get a little salty more salty I do think there are people who are deliberately obstinate and refuse to engage and that is that is I would say not just doctrinal error, but spiritually immature. Yeah. I'll stop there. Yeah, I mean, I think for a long time, evangelicals were more, and this is still true in some ways, like more characterized by careful biblical scholarship, right? I mean, I think we could still see this in the journal of the evangelical theological

society where there still is a tilt. I mean, it's sort of become a joke for some like this guy. You know, there's a tilt towards biblical studies, right, where there's less theology, less historical theology. It's more biblical studies. I think that's actually symptomatic of what has been true of the evangelical movement more broadly for a long time, where our expertise really has been biblical studies, biblical scholarship. and has been less concerned with historical theology or historic dogmatic categories and so on. Again, that's a broad generalization. There are exceptions to that that we could point to.

But I think in general that's been the case. And the fact that we live in an era where some of that is being remedied, right? I mean, I think we can all look around over the last hundred years and see not just an evangelicalism, but more broadly, these movements of retrieval, of racehorse mott, or of, you know, recovering the past. And I think we, I mean, our friend Timothy George, you know, has commented that we can see that as a work of the spirit. God is doing a renewal work across the traditions. I mean, among Catholics, among reformed folk, among Anglicans, among Methodists, among Baptists, among non-denominational evangelicals,

where there is this a sense of a need for recovery, for retrieval. And I think we can see that as a move of God. But what do we do in sort of the meantime with people who have it necessarily been catechized by those kinds of traditional formulations? I think that's a real concern pastorally for a lot of us

in the church and in the evangelical Academy is sort of how do we treat people with respect and love who who didn't I guess sort of cut their theological teeth in a climate where retrieval was fashionable does that make sense? Yeah. You know, we live we we didn't create these movements of retrieval. We are the beneficiaries of them, right? And it's almost, you know, an accident of history that we are the beneficiaries of that. more accurately, it's the providence of God, I think. And so how we treat those who may not have had that benefit, I think, is a key question of

faithful wisdom and love. So anyway, all that to say, that may be kind of meandering for some of your listeners. But I think as evangelicals are recovering the past, especially about the Trinity, also the doctrine of God, the doctrine of the incarnation and so on, we just need to be careful. and saying, let's recover the past. Let's keep in step with the great tradition on these things. But at the same time, let's be patient with those who may not have been as informed by the tradition as they ought to have been. Yeah, that's really good.

Well, as we're kind of nearing the end here, this is a question. It's kind of a maybe kind of an oddball question, but it would be kind of fun to think about. And I'm curious what you'd say about this. So I'll ask the question, and then I'll kind of explain why I'm asking it. but do you think theological retrieval and engaging the tradition can speak to some of the current cultural issues that we're facing right now? So, for example, there's so much talk of deconstruction right now. So are there ways that engaging church history, engaging the tradition can help us as we're navigating issues like that? So that's kind of what I want to ask about.

But to explain it, I'll just say my own experience has been, for example, just recently, doing some study in Gregory of Nisa and his criticism of slavery and just finding it so helpful to me in just helping me think through. And what I experienced was he was pushing against kind of what I would see as maybe some of the unhealthy tendencies of an extreme conservatism, an extremely conservative ethos or an extreme progressive ethos. And I'm hearing things in Gregory that are surprisingly relevant. to conversations happening in the church today and in the culture today about what is justice and so forth. So that's just been this feeling of like, wow, this is like amazingly more relevant than I would have anticipated to kind of speak to these particular things that we're wrestling with today. So I'm just curious, does that resonate at all? Do you have any thoughts about that? How can retrieval speak

to the issues today? Yeah, I mean, you know, you mentioned Gregory, but also Basil, his work on justice, and then you have John Chrysostom. He writes a lot about justice, wealth, and poverty, these sorts of things. The early church had a very clear sense of the moral obligations of Christians that had no connection to any of the debates surrounding wholeness today. So, you know, that's one way where you can look at a text and say, this person isn't influenced by one side or the other of this debate, but they're very clearly trying to articulate what it means to be a Christian in society and what it means for the church to do that as well. So that's a good example.

Actually, and I might be, I hope I'm not stealing Luke's thunder here, but the thing that came to my mind initially is something that we've been talking about a lot, which is the relationship between the church and the state and how actually Baptist thought, retrieving Baptist thought on that question can help the current debate surrounding integralism and a kind of of Lockean disestablishmentarianism. Early Baptists weren't either of those things. So they saw a place for the government to be impacted by what we would call of Judeo-Christian principles, but also were very clear on freedom of religion. And so we think retrieving Baptist thought specifically can help in some of the political debate or the debates about political theology today.

Yeah, I mean, I'm fairly new. I suppose I should be embarrassed to admit this. I'm fairly new to this notion of deconstruction as something that doesn't end in apostasy. I mean, just being honest, you know, like I think that term here tofore has been used in ways that met people leaving the faith. And I've only recently discovered that people are using it in a sense to mean something that doesn't necessarily entail apostasy, right? But it's sort of more like kind of unwinding what is only cultural in our faith, you know, or what is only a product of a particular cultural expression of Christianity and not the nabot Christianity per se. And so, yeah, in that sense, I absolutely think that studying the past is enormously helpful. I mean, some of your listeners may be familiar with this essay written by C.S. Lewis on the virtue of reading old books, which was published as an introduction to a translation of Athanasius on the incarnation. And it still is included as the introduction in the St. Vlad's version of that book in the popular patristic series, St. Vladimir

Seminary Press. Anyway, so Lewis argues that we should read books from the past, not necessarily because the past is always right, but because the past is different. You know, it's just different, they're different assumptions than people on the left and the right might be assuming the same thing on a particular issue, even as they debate it. But people from the past may have totally different assumptions and totally different perspectives. And so I think reading the past, I think helps to unwind some of those cultural assumptions. Just to throw out another example of this, I recently lectured on Thomas, Aquinas' views on justice.

And that provoked a lot of reflection among the students on, like, how his views of justice apply to issues of social justice today. And so, yeah, I think resourcing the past for those issues is enormously helpful. Yeah, that's great. Well, maybe we can finish by just highlighting some of your own work, in addition to encouraging people to check out the CBR website, other books I'm put in the video description, and I'll put these in it as well. Matt, do you want to say anything about your work on Christ's descent to the dead

and basically what you're trying to accomplish in that book? Yeah, so weirdly, my recent academic history has been trying to defend creedal statements that have been attacked. So the stuff that we've done on the Trinity has been in particular relation to one of my earliest papers in that regard, which was an essay that's published in the Sanders and Swain edited volume retrieving eternal generation. So I've spent a lot of time in the doctrine of the Trinity, and specifically on eternal generation trying to defend the Nicene language about the eternal relations of origin. that that project sort of led me to think about what else is getting attacked but really it was it was a way more well maybe not way more but it's a bit more spiritual than that um every every holy saturday for a number of years i was really moved by the collect on holy saturday as i was reading through the book of common prayer and you know just thought back to my seminary days and how the line

he descended in the hill was attacked and said to be added later on and these sorts of things and just took an interest in trying to do the same kind of thing where it's like let me let me try to demonstrate the biblical historical and theological rationale for this historic Christian doctrine and so published a book a couple years ago on on that clause and it's just called he descended to the dead um so yep um right now we're working on 40 questions on the Trinity together. So with Craigel. So that's the next immediate thing.

Okay, cool. Does the 40 questions on the Trinity book have an Amazon page yet? Not yet. No. Okay. So our manuscript is due. I don't know that I necessarily want to publicize what it's due soon. We'll see if we meet the deadline.

If you're a Craigle editor, we're certainly going to meet the deadline. but we'll see if we meet the deadline. I hope we will. So yeah, it should be next year, middle of next year when the Amazon page comes up, we hope. I think. Okay. So I didn't know that you guys were doing that. That's very cool. So we'll keep our eyes peeled for that. And then I know, Luke, you are also writing on Angels. Is that right? You have a book coming on Angels. Do you want to say anything about that? Yeah, so it's kind of a lay-level introduction to the doctrine of angels and demons, which is another doctrine that is hugely important in the history of interpretation and the history of doctrine, but is at least relatively muted in

contemporary evangelical spirituality. And so, yeah, it's just a book that will cover the biblical, you know, teaching on angels and demons, but also thinking about the history of the doctrine, looking at patristic medieval reformation sources on the doctrine of angels and demons cool awesome all right well thank you guys for chatting i really appreciate the work that you're doing uh keep up the keep up the great work you should uh both start youtube channels and uh help me feel a little bit less lonely out here so because people always make these appeals like how are you a baptist when you're like engaging and i'm trying to tell them like there's a lot of us okay a lot of baptists are actually really interested in historical theology. So yeah, so anyway, keep up the great work. And for people

watching this, make sure you check out this Center for Baptist Renewal website and check out the great work that they're doing. All right, thanks, everybody. See you next time.