Even though I am not a Baptist, Baptists remind us that we must all claim Jesus Christ for ourselves.  But the tendency to base salvation on one’s ‘conversion experience’ has its limits.  It focuses on one’s past life, rather than on who one is now, today.

I confess that the issue of ‘covenant baptism’ vs ‘believer’s baptism’ is not something I am prepared to go to the mat about.  [‘Baptismal regeneration’ is another matter.  I do not support it.]

But one important matter that Baptists bring to the church is useful.  To remind us of that, I quote a Billie Holiday lyric:

Papa may have, and Mama may have, but God bless the child who’s got his own. . .

And Sly Stone:

Sunday School don’t make you cool forever.

Indeed, Baptists remind us that we must all claim Jesus Christ for ourselves and not simply revisit our childhood experiences.

There is a certain humility in the Presbyterian doctrine of covenantal baptism that I actually kind of like.  It says, “You, infant, are now placed into the visible covenant of the visible church, while we can make no judgment about your ultimate election and your membership in the invisible Body of Christ.”  I like the lack of presumption in this.

On the other hand, the age at which people are immersed in believer’s baptism churches is often still in the single digits.  This makes their ‘dedication’ functionally parallel to our ‘baptism’ and their ‘baptism’ parallel to our ‘First Communion’.  Neither really assures that the child, as a mature adult, has ‘got his own’.

If we Reformed weren’t opposed to celebrations of human decision, or if I was in a less Reformed church, I might welcome the idea of some kind of a liturgical ‘rite of passage’ between ages 25 and 30, at the time our brain synapses have finally begun to close.  Take comfort, twenty-somethings; Jesus was in ‘emerging adulthood’ until He was 30!

But the biggest problem in Baptist and ‘Bible Church’ theology, I think, is the tendency to base your salvation on your ‘conversion experience’.  This, in my case, took place 53 years ago, [‘Did I do it right?  Do I need to do it again to make sure?’] rather than “Am I in the faith now?  Do I trust Christ for salvation, not myself, and is my life NOW showing some difference as a consequence of having Christ as my Lord and Savior?”  There is a tendency to focus on an event in one’s past life, rather than as one is now, today.

I will confess something.  Ever since I encountered it in C. S. Lewis more than 50 years ago, I have believed the ‘Boethian’ doctrine that God, in His own nature [all three Persons, except when incarnate] is outside of time and views time the same way He views space.  Lewis attributes this to Boethius, and it seems to fit very well with what I know of Einstein; so I call it the ‘Boethian-Einsteinian doctrine’.

In this context, God does not really foresee; He just ‘sees’.  That makes me, I guess, a ‘phenomenological Arminian’.  ‘Phenomenological’, as I understand it, is a fancy word for when we talk about the sun rising, moving through the sky, and setting, while we know it’s really the earth that’s turning.  In a similar sense, we see people visibly coming to Christ all the time, and we also see them visibly apostatizing.

The one thing that I stumble over in mainstream Baptist and Bible Churches [In my view, a ‘Bible Church’ is Baptist configured for Presbyterian social tastes] is this:  trying to combine Unconditioned Decisional Regeneration and Preservation of the Saints.  I can’t do this.  So, I go one way or the other, or both, toward Ultimate Predestination and Phenomenological Arminianism.

My one doubt about my salvation is not that Jesus will reject me.  He won’t.  My fantasy is that there will be security procedures at the Pearly Gates that will demand that I surrender or put out of reach something I want badly, or was counting on, and that I will bolt and run off in the other direction.  Of course, anything I want that badly is an idol that must be renounced!