iMurphy

I’ve started listening to Covenant Radio dot com’s podcast, and made it as far as episode five, Overview of Paedofaith. It was very interesting to hear and I think anyone who cares about Christendom should be aware of such issues in the Modern Church. Mark never mentioned it specifically, but the Federal Vision is what has ripped apart the church where our membership still resides, Lynden formerly OCRC. Some will marvel at my ability to be pro-paedocommunion but anti-Auburn Avenue, so I’d better explain how I arrived at this position.
Our pastor, Rob Rayburn, has spoken very persuasively about childhood participation in the Lord’s Supper. He did so, not speaking so as to break with the Reformed tradition, but to seek to extend it and follow it’s already open line of thought. That is, if we baptize infant because they are members of the visible church in the same way that babies were circumcised in the Old Testament, then we cannot rightfully withhold communion because they haven’t reached the “Age of Accountability”. 1 Corinthians 7 was meant to make us make us practice closed communion, not set up a bar of some test of intellect.
So, as I listened to the podcast interview with Rich Lusk, I was pleasantly surprised by how many insightful ideas he had. Paedo-faith, as a topic, was a nice neologism, I thought, for a section of theology that hasn’t been given in name in my understanding yet. He also had new argument for paedo-communion I hadn’t heard: if someone age 15 is a baptized member of a church, but isn’t getting communion ’cause they can’t become a member, and they fall into a sin they are un-repentant of, how can the church discipline them, since they can’t without the sacraments ’cause they’re already denied them? Also tied in is the question of frequency of the Lord’s Supper: if you’re just taking it once, twice, thrice or four times a year, you almost don’t care who’s denied it or accepted to it! Our traditional definitions of FAITH are based on refuting Works Righteousness of the Reformation Era and do nothing to explain to average Joe’s why we would baptize our infants.
All that good stuff being said, I could also TOTALLY hear all the mess that Guy P. Waters has mentioned about the Federal Vision flunkies going off some proverbial planks. Rich is so quick to bash the Enlightenment that he doesn’t he ar how much like a Socinianist he sounds. Towards the end of the episode, he expressly states the grievous error that drove our old pastor to drop the H-Bomb, that “the branch that is ultimately cut off from Christ once received the same vital sap as the branch that stays.” That is pure nonsense! Children who grow up in believing homes who apostatize finally were members of the Visible Church and never really Elect. We cannot see a roster of the Book of Life in this world, so all we have to go on is the visible Body. Anything else, either Hyper-Calvinist or Federal Visionist, is arrogant presumption.
I don’t call Federal Vision-ites heretics; there are so many people who call themselves Christians who have so much more wrong with their theology! I don’t think they’re great on everything, but their particular bend arises out of a practical hole in Reformed Theology: we don’t teach well on how to raise our children or the role of the sacraments. The solution is to fix our practice, not our theology.