So much to unpack here!! Really appreciate this treatise on baptism. We attend a baptist church here now and all the phrases you mentioned some denominations using are used here. They also talk a lot about once saved always saved and describe people that are living overly unchristian lives that as saved but just ineffective. But like you mentioned they actually all get baptized and it is a huge deal. Indeed, they baptize little kids all the time. It doesn’t sit right with me at all. I honestly don’t think anyone should get baptized until adolescence when they enter that critical thinking stage.
Thank you for writing this. I appreciate your ability to state your belief in one point or another, and at the same time encourage others whose understanding of Scripture or of traditional understandings of practice differ. I like to call this holding truth as I understand it lightly. I have written about secular (i.e., not specifically Christian) topics, like the Desiccation Hypothesis and galactic rotation in the same light. I am working on an apologia in which I hope to build inescapable truth about God starting from the premise that the Gospels are reasonable accounts of real events. It seems a little like starting a wrestling match from a supine position, and may be too much of a challenge, but I'm aiming the approach will get readers started on a route to the same place at which we've arrived. While my experience began a decade or so later than yours, and the paths fail the parallel test, your account encourages me.
Thanks for the comment, and I'm glad if it's an encouragement. I expect your approach via the reasonableness of the gospel events will help some people who had the opposite idea to take another look, with an open mind. Of course the miracles are the part that sound unreasonable at first, but I assume you'll emphasize the fact that there were many eyewitnesses who later were even willing to die rather than deny what they saw and heard and experienced. That kind of testimony is powerful.
So much to unpack here!! Really appreciate this treatise on baptism. We attend a baptist church here now and all the phrases you mentioned some denominations using are used here. They also talk a lot about once saved always saved and describe people that are living overly unchristian lives that as saved but just ineffective. But like you mentioned they actually all get baptized and it is a huge deal. Indeed, they baptize little kids all the time. It doesn’t sit right with me at all. I honestly don’t think anyone should get baptized until adolescence when they enter that critical thinking stage.
Thank you for writing this. I appreciate your ability to state your belief in one point or another, and at the same time encourage others whose understanding of Scripture or of traditional understandings of practice differ. I like to call this holding truth as I understand it lightly. I have written about secular (i.e., not specifically Christian) topics, like the Desiccation Hypothesis and galactic rotation in the same light. I am working on an apologia in which I hope to build inescapable truth about God starting from the premise that the Gospels are reasonable accounts of real events. It seems a little like starting a wrestling match from a supine position, and may be too much of a challenge, but I'm aiming the approach will get readers started on a route to the same place at which we've arrived. While my experience began a decade or so later than yours, and the paths fail the parallel test, your account encourages me.
Thanks for the comment, and I'm glad if it's an encouragement. I expect your approach via the reasonableness of the gospel events will help some people who had the opposite idea to take another look, with an open mind. Of course the miracles are the part that sound unreasonable at first, but I assume you'll emphasize the fact that there were many eyewitnesses who later were even willing to die rather than deny what they saw and heard and experienced. That kind of testimony is powerful.
Hope and pray so.