Private baptism

I went to Mark Dever's seminar 'Healthy Christians, Healthy Churches' today, which was a great way to start the day. He had a lot of challenging things to say, and was very encouraging that churches should always just continue to preach the gospel.

In the Q&A I asked a question about Christian uni student groups (AFES groups for example) and whether he considered them to be churches. He didn't, and explained that he thinks churches must do four essential things: preach, baptise, have communion and discipline members. That ES doesn't baptise people was his main reason for not considering it a church.

Leaving aside the passages that describe the purposes of churches (why is serving each other not an essential?) I've been wondering how much baptism is something that should be strongly associated with public gatherings. There are nine times when baptisms are recorded in the book of Acts. Four of them are quite clearly large public baptisms when an apostle baptises a large number of people throughout a city: Jerusalem in 2:41, Samaria in 8:12, Corinth in 18:8 and Ephesus in 19:5. I think there are four situations when the baptisms are private, with only an apostle and those being baptised present, and no mention of further baptisms in the area: the Ethiopian eunuch in 8:36, Saul in 9:18, Cornelius and his gang in 10:48 and the Philippian jailer in 16:33. Although Lydia's baptism in 16:15 seems somewhat private, Paul's preaching to her was very much public, so I'll give that to the public baptisms.

So that makes five recorded public baptisms and four private baptisms. Although this is only a shallow investigation, and considers only descriptive and not prescriptive passages, I think it would be hard to argue that baptisms must always be performed in public gatherings. Nor does it disprove Mark's church essentials. What I think it does show is that the Bible presents a much more casual view of the sacraments than Mark, and most churches today, holds to.

It's bigger than Phinehas!

“Phinehas son of Eleazar and grandson of Aaron the priest has turned my anger away from the Israelites by being as zealous among them as I was. So I stopped destroying all Israel as I had intended to do in my zealous anger. Now tell him that I am making my special covenant of peace with him. In this covenant, I give him and his descendants a permanent right to the priesthood, for in his zeal for me, his God, he purified the people of Israel, making them right with me.”

(Numbers 25:11-13, NLT)

I'm a rather big fan of Phinehas. He's a real man's man. He spears this dude and then God gives him this covenant! I personally use Phinehas as a bit of a litmus test, to see how comprehensive some frameworks and interpretations of scripture are. He seriously confuses Hebrews for example. Very few people know of or have studied Phinehas, and even fewer seem to have been able to fit him nicely into their frameworks for the whole Bible.

But I think I've decided that it's actually a lot bigger than Phinehas alone. I've found many hints throughout the Bible that seem to indicate some kind of special relationship with Levi or Aaron's descendants, and possibly even a covenant relationship before Phinehas. I do not think this is just part of the Sinai covenant, as its permanency contrasts strongly with Sinai's conditionality. I really don't know what to make of all this, and it seems no one else does either, as I've never seen all of these passages linked together.

Do you have any ideas, or know of other passages that would seem to be part of this?

Dress Aaron with the sacred garments and anoint him, consecrating him to serve me as a priest. Then present his sons and dress them in their tunics. Anoint them as you did their father, so they may also serve me as priests. With their anointing, Aaron’s descendants are set apart for the priesthood forever, from generation to generation.

(Exodus 40:13-15, NLT)

Only the priests, Aaron’s descendants, are allowed to blow the trumpets. This is a permanent law for you, to be observed from generation to generation.

(Numbers 10:8, NLT)

Yahweh gave these further instructions to Aaron: “I myself have put you in charge of all the holy offerings that are brought to me by the people of Israel. I have given all these consecrated offerings to you and your sons as your permanent share.
...
Yes, I am giving you all these holy offerings that the people of Israel bring to Yahweh. They are for you and your sons and daughters, to be eaten as your permanent share. This is an eternal and unbreakable covenant [Lit. a covenant of salt] between Yahweh and you, and it also applies to your descendants.”

(Numbers 18:8,19, NLT)

For this is what Yahweh says: David will have a descendant sitting on the throne of Israel forever. And there will always be Levitical priests to offer burnt offerings and grain offerings and sacrifices to me.

(Jeremiah 33:17-18, NLT)

“Then at last you will know it was I who sent you this warning so that my covenant with the Levites can continue,” says Yahweh of Heaven’s Armies.

“The purpose of my covenant with the Levites was to bring life and peace, and that is what I gave them. This required reverence from them, and they greatly revered me and stood in awe of my name.”

(Malachi 2:4-5, NLT)

The state of humanity

There were over sixteen hundred years from when Adam first sinned to when God's patience finally ran out and he sent a flood to exterminate humanity. They had gone from rejecting God's rule, to being what can only be described as totally depraved. But before God did destroy the world he took one last look at the people:

Yahweh observed the extent of human wickedness on the earth, and he saw that everything they thought or imagined was consistently and totally evil.

(Genesis 6:5, NLT)

In my linguistics courses at uni we would call these three italicised words quantifiers. They are words which determine what scope a sentence has, and these three say there is no limit to humanity's evil! It would have been enough to use just one of these words, but the author of Genesis used three just to hammer in it.

God looked into the minds of every person on the earth, and it broke his heart. Their actions were disgustingly evil, but for everything they did there must have been a thousand more options they also considered. Every thought and every imagination of theirs was evil. Every thought. Every imagination.

And it wasn’t like God happened to look at an unlucky time, for everyone was consistently, always, like this. And neither were their thoughts mildly evil, scoring 4.5 on some ten point scale. No, they were totally evil in every way. If you could ever find a scale that could do it justice they would all rate absolutely zero. In God’s eyes there was not even the smallest speck of goodness in humanity.

But so that we won't think that those evil people all died with the flood, God has more to say. Just a little later, as God promises never to flood the whole earth again, he says that nothing has really changed. Indeed that's why he makes that promise, because humanity would soon be sinning as much or even more than before.

I will never again curse the ground because of the human race, even though everything they think or imagine is bent toward evil from childhood.

(Genesis 8:21, NLT)

Modus operandi

Clearly, God’s promise to give the whole earth to Abraham and his descendants was based not on his obedience to God’s law, but on a right relationship with God that comes by faith. If God’s promise is only for those who obey the law, then faith is not necessary and the promise is pointless. For the law always brings punishment on those who try to obey it. (The only way to avoid breaking the law is to have no law to break!)

So the promise is received by faith. It is given as a free gift. And we are all certain to receive it, whether or not we live according to the law of Moses, if we have faith like Abraham’s. For Abraham is the father of all who believe. That is what the Scriptures mean when God told him, “I have made you the father of many nations.” This happened because Abraham believed in the God who brings the dead back to life and who creates new things out of nothing.

(Romans 4:13-17, NLT)

Paul writes here about two of the covenants, Abraham's and the Sinai, and his purpose is to show that God always works the same way. I like to say that God's modus operandi is grace.

God chose Abraham and made a covenant with him before Abraham did a thing. Even before God gave the rite of circumcision he considered Abraham righteous. What mattered was that Abraham trusted God to do all he promised. It was the same with the law of Moses, given as part of the Sinai covenant. All the law brings, says Paul, is punishment. The covenant's promised blessings are given freely to everyone who shares Abraham's faith.

God's MO is grace. He chooses to bless people just cause he feels like it. The only proper response is that we trust him to do just that. It's always been this way. And if it ever seems like someone earned God's favour then we must investigate more because that's also not how God works.

Covenant Theology is based on the concept of the Covenant of Grace. Although they mean much of the same, the use of covenant language is unhelpful and confusing. The Covenant of Grace is an ahistorical one, being made outside of time between God and the fuzzy group of all his people. I don't know if in the Ancient Near East's understanding that would be recognised as a covenant, but I suspect it would not. It's true that God always acts by grace, but I question what value there is in proposing an ahistorical "theological" covenant (ie, one not mentioned by the Bible explicitly.)

When God swore by himself

For example, there was God’s promise to Abraham. Since there was no one greater to swear by, God took an oath in his own name, saying “I will certainly bless you, and I will multiply your descendants beyond number.”

Then Abraham waited patiently, and he received what God had promised.

Now when people take an oath, they call on someone greater than themselves to hold them to it. And without any question that oath is binding. God also bound himself with an oath, so that those who received the promise could be perfectly sure that he would never change his mind. So God has given both his promise and his oath. These two things are unchangeable because it is impossible for God to lie. Therefore, we who have fled to him for refuge can have great confidence as we hold to the hope that lies before us. This hope is a strong and trustworthy anchor for our souls.

(Hebrews 6:13-19a, NLT)

This is one of the most fascinating parts of the Bible. In the midst of proving the incomparability of Christ the writer adds a few words about God's covenant with Abraham. Everything he says is really quite simple, and yet so profound!

We know, as Abraham did, that every word from God is true, every message reliable, every promise unbreakable. So why would God go so far beyond that and bind himself with an oath too? Well because people suck, and although just a single one of God's promises should be enough, it so very often isn't. With God's oaths, and covenants, there's no excuse to a lack of faith.

I believe that many Biblical teachers today do not give these covenants the prominence they deserve. All of us acknowledge they are important, but many put them second when explaining how we should understand the scriptures. Sure, they are only a small part of the full text and God's other promises far outnumber them, but well, when God binds himself we should take notice! I believe that the Biblical covenants should form the basis of our Biblical meta-narrative. Any framework or model formed around anything else is unhelpful and doing us a disservice, if not outright heretical. I suspect that two popular models, Covenant Theology and Dispensationalism, do this, with the former putting the Covenant of Grace ahead of the Biblical covenants, and the later with the dispensations.

I hope to put aside some time to study the Biblical covenants, and post my findings on this blog. I want to investigate what exactly the terms of the covenants were, and more generally, find out what "covenant" meant for those in the Ancient Near East. I want to study how the covenants interact together, and how they fit into the wider scriptures. And I'll try to find what is the most helpful and faithful meta-narrative, or hermeneutic, that we can develop.

Please join me! All comments, suggestions and ideas will be greatly appreciated.