Truth Unites - Why I'm a Baptist

Episode Date: April 30, 2023

In this video I share three reasons why I am a Baptist Christian: credobaptism, congregationalism, and the separation of church and state. 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. I'm doing a series of videos called Three Reasons in Five Minutes. Hopefully the name of that kind of explains what that is. This one is three reasons I'm a Baptist. This is not done as a criticism of other traditions. I love and respect other Christian traditions. As a Baptist, I see myself as a servant of the broader Christian realm. That really is what's in my heart. But this is just an explanation, just canvassing some of the distinctives, because people have asked me to do this. Why does my conscience lead me in this way? I'll go quick, try to do it in five minutes. We'll see if I can't. can do it. Number one, creedobaptism. Cretel baptism means delaying baptism until someone makes a credible profession of faith. That seems to me to be the pattern of the New Testament in the Book of Acts. It seems to me to best accord with the nature and purpose of what baptism is. Seems to me to be the practice of the earliest of church history. And it seems to me to flow out of the doctrine of the church. In the new covenant, knowing the Lord seems to be coextensive with a status of membership among the people of God. And you see this in Hebrews 8, quoting Jeremiah 31.

This is a point of discontinuity with the Old Covenant. I also just think practically. It makes sense for people to experience the sacrament. That's a good thing for them to understand and remember and have that experience of being baptized. I've gone into that more elsewhere. Number two, congregational church government. It seems to me that each local church should have relationship,

partnership, etc. With other churches, we distinguish the power of counsel and the power of command. So we have lots of relationship, but the ultimate accountability,

the ultimate authority, the power to enforce something should be that own churches, members, for matters of discipline, dispute, doctrine, membership.

You see this in the New Testament, 2, that church is accountable to receive the member back in. 1 Corinthians 5. church is accountable to put the member out. They're supposed to be, you know, Matthew 18, the final court of appeal, tell it to the church. It seems like there's no central headquarters in the early church that dictates how particular local churches should be functioning or that

you make the final appeal to. The only exception of that where you have a kind of pan church authority would be the office of apostle, but that is redemptive historically unique. And so when you get outside of the New Testament, you look at the didache, the first epistle of Clement, these early extra-biblical texts, each local church is electing her own leaders. And that's different from later where you get more hierarchical and interconnectional church structures. Practically, I think the benefit of fractionating authority down to the level of local congregations is kind of like the argument for democracy. It's a form of damage control. Because basically what we worry has happened so much throughout church history is if some entity outside the local church has the power of command

to enforce a policy or doctrine, then if that entity deviates from the gospel, you are in a position where you lose one of the most sacred, precious privileges in all of life, and that's freedom of conscience. That leads to the third reason, separation of church and state. This is a classic hallmark Baptist, distinctive Baptist in the 17th century with the first religious group to make this a fundamental article of faith. We think these two spheres are separate, and we're very concerned about violence and coercion. done in the church. This has become a deep value of mine. I'm horrified by violence and torture in the

medieval era done by the church. I'm dismayed that the Protestant reformers failed to extricate themselves from that. This is one reason I really identify at a personal level with some of the proto-Protestants like Jan Husse, much more so than some of the first Protestants themselves, like Zvingli, for example, who died on the field with a battle axe in his hands. Okay? From a Baptist perspective, all of that goes back to the fourth century, where the church and the Roman Empire get entangled. We don't think the church died at that point, but we do think the church changed. Before that, a lot of Christians were pacifists. And basically Baptists, we think we've got to keep these two realms separate, church and state. That doesn't mean the church shouldn't influence the

state. It doesn't mean that individual Christians should not engage in political activism, of political service, but the church herself has a distinct calling. John Owen, who was an independent in his view of church government, said, let the church be protected in the exercise of its spiritual power by spiritual means only as preaching of the word, administration of the sacraments, and the like. The great image of this is Jesus telling Peter, put your sword away after it cuts off the ear of Malkus, and he's saying, that's not how we do things in the kingdom of God.

Now, I know this one episode won't settle everything, and in five minutes we're just introducing things. some things, but hopefully it can canvas some of the distinctives of the Baptist tradition. Those are just three of them. At least it puts them out on the table and we can work through them more in other videos, which I have done. Subscribe to my channel and hit the bell. A lot of people never hit the bell. But hit the bell that'll help you stay in touch with other videos that come out on topics like this. If you like this series, let me know what you think about this series idea. Trying to compliment my longer sort of, and by the way, if I'm over

the five-minute marker now, it's because this is just the addendum at the end here. But I do a lot of long videos and one of the points of feedback is do some shorter ones where you canvass things, you know. So that's what I'm trying to do here. So hopefully this format will be helpful complement to some of the longer videos. All right. Now I'm probably at six or seven. We'll see.