Interesting observations. Most Baptists I know would circumvent the whole question by denying the possibility of gradual conversions. But I agree with your whole premise, and see how it creates some difficulties in Baptist argumentation.

“Real consicences are being crushed because men prefer the easy road of cheap exegesis rather than the hard slog of wisdom” — all-too-true and all-too-sad.

Real consicences are being crushed because men prefer the easy road of cheap exegesis rather than the hard slog of wisdom. Not that I have made up my mind on the issue. I cannot yet, for I am weak and persecution is at hand for me if I refuse to join in the mantras of the UK evangelical church, the so-called “secondary issues” that occupy 3 times more space on seeker courses than repentance and faith do.

I thank you as well for the stimulating interaction — and I remain assured of your faithfulness to the word and of your humble willingness to embrace any teaching of which you become textually convinced. I don’t see any need to have the final word: your thoughts on typology are definitely saturated with truth, and I would do well to ponder your words deeply, and not just spout off some answer from the top of my pitifully small and sinfully arrogant head.

Blessings in our Savior. Keep pursuing him.

Nathan

In fact, I think I might want to rephrase some of my earlier statements if I may, and agree that on one level there was something very wrong in the dissonance between majority Israel’s external conformity to the covenant signs and her lack of corresponding inner repentance and faith. It was this dissonance which Israel’s leaders and prophets consistently and rightly tried to harmonize throughout her history. But in this, a tension remains. Until the dawning of the New Covenant, until the risen Son received the authority to pour out His Spirit on all of God’s people, there would always be a wider Israel which benefited from the covenant merely externally in her God-ordained, redemptive-historical role as a type. Actually, Moses’ admonition that they circumcise their hearts may support this, because it shows that, when considered as a nation merely, they knew nothing of this greater spiritual Abrahamic blessing.

I’m trying to account for the apparent duality in the nature of the covenant given to Abraham. At once, promises have in view both Abraham’s plural seed (his physical descendants – Gen. 17:7) and his singular seed (Jesus Christ – Gal. 3:16). It speaks of physical blessings, secured by Israel as a nation (Joshua 21:43-45) and of spiritual blessings enjoyed by the true Israel of God. It calls for an external circumcision and for a circumcision of the foreskin of the heart. How do these two aspects relate? Certainly they are not completely distinct, but nor are they one. I would suggest that they relate as type and anti-type. Part of the function of the Abrahamic Covenant was to create a nation of people naturally generated from Abraham, many but not all of whom would have a corresponding spiritual connection to Abraham by faith, who received, as a nation, certain physical blessings which pointed to a spiritual inheritance which would one day be the enjoyment of all of Abraham’s spiritual posterity in Jesus. As types are intended to do, this one fell away with the fullness of times, leaving a pure Church among which God walks and over which He is God forever.

Maybe I’m not making any sense. Anyways, with other pressures coming to bear in the days to come, I’ll bow out for now and happily let you have the final word. You can accuse me of closet dispensationalism or close in any way you see fit :-). My respect for you in Christ continues, assured that were you to become scripturally convinced of any doctrine, you would gladly embrace it. I hope that I have integrity in saying the same.

In His mercy,

Ryan

I agree that there was a prophecy of God’s circumcising hearts that were not circumcised in truth — but the character of the prophecies suggest that this is necessary because things are not as they should be: their hearts were supposed to be circumcised from the beginning — the fact that the essence did not correspond to the sign was a very improper thing. Again, if circumcision did not even signify (usually) anything to do with the heart, the prophecy would be meaningless, and, frankly, completely undemanded by the case of the unbelieving Israelites. They already fulfilled perfectly the significance of the sign, being 100% biologically descended from Abraham. How could the prophets say that their circumcision ought to be (and would be) internalized, if it was already being fulfilled in them to perfection? What room is left for greater coincidence of sign and essence?

Anyway, I hope you can follow my confused ramblings. I heartily wish to you as well the blessing which our Savior died to present us with. Keep following him!

Yours in Christ, Nathan

You seem a bit incredulous, which gives me some pause; but yes, I continue to think that the children of Israel by and large received the circumcision not as an act of personal faith, but because they were physical sons of Abraham, to whom the covenant was given. The language of Genesis 17 seems to bear this out. God ordained that the larger, religious, national body of Israel be known as His covenant people and receive the external benefits of the covenant though throughout most of Israelite history only a portion of them believed after the pattern of Abraham and thus had true, justifying connection to God through Christ. No reference is made in these verses to the faith of individual Israelites. Sons of Abraham received the sign of the covenant because they were his offspring. No qualification of personal (or parental) faith is placed on the command to circumcise “Every male throughout your generations, whether born in your house or bought with your money” (17:12).

Yes of course, justification has always been by faith. And Abraham is by no means the only one whose circumcision corresponded with a circumcision of the heart. There was always a believing remnant. You agree, of course, that not every Israelite belonged to this believing remnant. You understand that “They are not all Israel who are descended from Israel” (Romans 9:6). Where we differ is that you seem to see this true-Israel/ethnic-Israel distinction as an unfortunate, inevitable reality that should never have been so for the people of God, parallel to the existence of hypocrites in the visible Church today, whereas I want to say that in God’s strange purposes, He ordained this as a recognizable and intentional dynamic of the imperfection of the Old Covenant. I believe Moses understood this temporary distinction within the people of God when he bemoaned: “Would that all the LORD’s people were prophets, that the LORD would put his Spirit on them!” (Num. 11:29). As you point out, God did call upon Israel to circumcise their hearts – a testimony to the rift between their external conformity to the sign of the covenant and their lack of fidelity to and affection for Him. But this is sometimes cast in terms of a future work of God by His Spirit among His people (so Deut. 30:6). The prophet Jeremiah spoke of a coming, eschatological Day in which God would cease to put up with those whose hearts had not been circumcised alongside their foreskins (Jeremiah 9:25).

The fact that God called for a cutting off of the unfaithful in Israel is something I’ll have to chew on longer. I’m inclined to say that this cutting off was for lack of external conformity to the covenant more than anything. God wanted to preserve some purity in this foretaste of His New Covenant people, shadowy though it was.

Again, happily, God was pleased to preserve a remnant of people who did have circumcised hearts to correspond with the sign of the covenant, in accord with the case of Abraham. It is interesting that in the verses in Romans 4 which you reference, the main thrust actually seems to be to separate circumcision from faith. Abraham was justified prior to his circumcision, which argues, for Paul, that uncircumcised people can possess saving faith in Christ for righteousness, while those merely circumcised in the flesh may not. Yes, circumcision is declared to be the seal of Abraham’s righteousness of faith, but to say that it functioned that way for everybody would be, to me, an unwarranted stretch.

Just a humble attempt on this Lord’s Day to see more of God’s holy ways, though blurred by sin and through a glass darkly. I trust that God is granting you speedy progress in your work, and that the Spirit of Jesus is using the process of going deep into His revelation to bring about more of the image of Christ in you.

Blessings in the grace that is ours through the cross,

Ryan

P.S. Poor Owen. Faithful exegete though he was, he couldn’t see completely past Romish trappings to a concluded reformation, could he? :-).

Do you mean you think that external circumcision looks forward to an eschatological reality of faith and regeneration? I don’t see how that can be the case, especially when passages such as Deuteronomy 10:16 call for an immediate appropriation of the realities signified by circumcision. And besides, when Paul uses the example of Abraham (Romans 4), he is establishing the fact that justification has always come through faith, and that in the Old Testament this faith was signified by circumcision. No faith/regeneration, no true Church. But God has always preserved his remnant of believers. It seems as if Paul is definitely making Abraham’s example paradigmatic for all OT believers – the outward circumcision is a sign of inward regeneration/faith. I don’t see how it would make any sense for Paul to say, “Abraham’s circumcision signified faith, but no one else’s would have the same significance until the New Covenant had been established”.

As far as adult recipients of circumcision, they were by that very act confessing their faith in the God of Israel. Of course it is no surprise that many of them were insincere, and neither should it be a surprise that perhaps the majority of the professing, baptized church around the world, particularly in areas where Christianity has a well-established history (perhaps the majority of professing believers in America today, for example) has no true faith. But every man that underwent circumcision under Joshua was thereby confessing his belief in the God of Israel, who would send the Messiah to be cut off for covenant unfaithfulness, suffering in the worshiper’s place as a sacrificial lamb so that he might be forgiven and justified. These were all willing participants of circumcision, they were not held down and hacked upon by a strong-armed Joshua.

One more quick point: those who, as adults, demonstrated their lack of the faith to which their circumcision pointed, were to be cut off from the people. Israel was supposed to be kept pure, but they failed miserably, which is why God stepped in, in faithfulness to the Abrahamic promise, to regather Israel as a pure Church from every nation.

Your last point is good – in the New Covenant, ethnic considerations have been obliterated. But I would still contend that the basic New Testament picture is one of God calling out a people from every nation under heaven in family units. This is why Jesus could attribute Kingdom possession to brephe, this is why the children of believers are holy to God, and so on. Biological descent from Abraham no longer matters, only having faith as he did. But having his kind of faith was always essential to being one of God’s true people. All that changed in that regard is the facility with which all ethnicities could become his children by faith without being incorporated into his lineage in a nationalistic sense. In other words, the shell dropped off to reveal the essential kernel beneath, but the kernel remained the same.

I’ll bat back one of your burden-of-proof balls: Colossians 2 teaches that baptism is to be regarded as the new circumcision. I won’t get into re-hashing all that exegesis again, just make a unilateral assertion of correctness :).

As far as your other ball — I can’t do anything with it except to plead again the covenant lines of continuity. I know that isn’t the exegetical proof you require, but if you complain I’ll trump you with the following appeal to authority: “John Owen agreed with me!”

But all joking aside, I treasure your scripture-saturated, Christ-centered dialogue. Who knows whether God will use it to bring us to greater unity on this difficult point?

Blessings from the cross of the risen Savior, Nathan

Thanks for these points. I was especially helped to be reminded that the newness of the New Covenant is in contrast mainly with the Mosaic rather than the Abrahamic covenant.

If I understand you correctly, you are saying that in the Old Covenant, signs of faith and regeneration were required on the part of adults who entered the covenant and underwent the rite of circumcision. I’m not sure I’ve ever thought about it the same way. Was inward circumcision of the heart a prerequisite to circumcision, or was it a promise to which external circumcision looked forward? I’m inclined toward the latter (Deut. 30:6), and in that sense to seeing a discontinuity between circumcision and baptism. Of course, there were glorious exceptions like Abraham for whom external circumcision truly did correspond to inner faith, but is his experience paradigmatic for all of his offspring? At the renewal of the covenant at Gilgal (Joshua 5), Joshua saw to the circumcision of EVERY male among them. As I see it, no kind of a pure membership is imagined at all. I doubt that evidence of faith was required on the part of each of the sons of Israel on that day. They underwent the ritual because they were Israelites – called by God to be distinct from the surrounding nations and to give testimony to a yet-not-fully-realized hope. I doubt it was a surprise to Joshua that there were Achans among them who disregarded the Word of God. He whacked off Achan’s foreskin anyway.

Paedo-baptism assumes a connection between the faith of fathers and their offspring yet unable to demonstrate faith. Not everyone’s sons and daughters are baptized, only the sons and daughters of those who express conscious faith in Christ. But was the same true in the sign of circumcision? Can it be demonstrated that in cases where an Israelite boy’s father showed no sign of circumcision of the heart, that that boy was denied circumcision? Perhaps I could be persuaded so. The way I regard it now, circumcision was administered not only to those who didn’t believe because they were mentally unable, but sometimes to those who didn’t believe although able. This accounts to me for the sweeping, indiscriminate, mass circumcision accounts in places like Joshua 5. So the difference from Pentecost on where explicit faith is required for baptism and the reception of the Spirit is pretty massive.

Fundamentally here, I still can’t help but feel like the paedo-baptist construal of the relationships between the covenants leaves the history of the covenants feeling relatively flat. I like the way you talk about the Abrahamic and New covenants in terms of promise and fulfillment. Part of that fulfillment is, as I see it, a movement from the physical to the spiritual. The people of God undergo a radical change. The indwelling of the Spirit becomes the seal of belonging to Christ. Covenant membership suddenly has nothing to do with biological lineage, but a common faith with Abraham. The redrawing of the lines of covenant membership is, I believe, substantial enough – especially as it regards a movement away from defining God’s people biologically/ethnically – that early Jewish Christians would not necessarily have assumed that their children and the children of Gentile converts should be considered members in the covenant without explicit teaching to that end, accompanied by explicit teaching that baptism is to be regarded as the new circumcision. Have you noticed how the burden of proof keeps getting batted back and forth like a tennis ball :-)?

Where am I off? I’m sure you don’t want to get engrossed in another debate over this relatively small difference in practice… nor do I. But I wanted to acknowledge that you seem to have hit on one of the main nub points in this gentlemanly disagreement.

In the Beloved,

Ryan

Thanks for the feedback. I too agree that the issue is more difficult than many will admit, and should by no means constitute a reason for division. But anyway, to some of your points:

1. Yes, at the end of the passage in which circumcision is given (Genesis 17:1-14), it is mentioned that the one who has not received the sign of circumcision has broken the covenant and is to be cut off. But the whole tenor of the passage up to that point is that God is unilaterally establishing a covenant of which the essence is this, “I will be your God”. You do have a point, but I think that the issue is too complex just to say, “it can be broken, so it is different than the New Covenant of Jeremiah 31”. At other times when God established his covenant with Abraham, there was no hint of its possibility of being broken (e.g. Genesis 12:1-3; 15:1-20). In the same way, we see no hint of covenant-breaking in Jeremiah 31, but later, when that covenant is spoken of again, in Romans 11 and Hebrews 6, 10, etc., we see the same reality brought out: certain persons formally incorporated into this unilateral covenant will be broken off for unbelief. I think that the threads of continuity between the Abrahamic Covenant and the New are strong on this particular point.

2. I don’t know if “Covenant of Peace”/”Everlasting Covenant” always means precisely “New Covenant” in the prophets. I tend to think that it usually means the covenant which began, in a sense, in Genesis 3:15, came to its crystallized expression with Abraham, and was fulfilled in those Abrahamic terms with the triumph of Christ. But even if in cases it does mean “New” specifically, I see the continuity of the Abrahamic and New as being so strong that any difference suggested is minor in comparison to the difference spoken of in Jeremiah 31 (unless you can show me any clear cases where the Abrahamic Covenant is specifically contrasted in such strong terms with the “Covenant of Peace,” etc.). The vast difference between New and Mosaic is clearly mentioned in Jeremiah and Hebrews; but on the contrary, the continuity between New and Abrahamic is strongly emphasized in Galatians 3, Ephesians 2-3, etc. I think (along with Michael Horton) that the Sinaitic Covenant is of a different sort than the Abrahamic/New. I think that is what Paul is getting at when he says that the Law could not change the promise earlier made to Abraham; and I certainly think that is what the prophecy in Jeremiah 31 is getting at.

3. In Galatians 3 the covenant is being redefined only in the sense of promise giving way to fulfillment. What was promised to Abraham is now a fulfilled reality for us. And yes, it is because Abraham’s true Seed was given the promises, and therefore, they belong likewise to all who are in him. The New Covenant is not a replacement, but a fulfillment of the Abrahamic Covenant, which endures forever (cf. The Abrahamic terminology of Revelation 21:3). We are Abraham’s seed (in Christ), Abraham’s heirs (in Christ), no longer strangers to Abraham’s covenant (in Christ – see Ephesians 2:12-14). We partake of the same covenant as was given to Abraham, but with us, the promise has already come to fruition. So I certainly would not see any difference spoken of as necessitating the elimination of children as covenant members, especially since they had been members of the covenant for so long, they are spoken of differently from the children of unbelievers throughout the New Testament, and there is no other passage which seems to indicate that their status has now changed (except what I mentioned about promise giving way to fulfillment). This here is an argument from silence, and admittedly not of final authority, but if the Jewish believers that had two thousand years of unbroken history of extending covenant inclusion to their children had suddenly been told, “In the Covenant which fulfills the Abrahamic promises, your children are no longer members, at least until they can vocalize their faith” — don’t you think that would be a major issue in the NT Church? Surely someone would have objected, or one of the apostles would have given definite prescriptions for the subject somewhere. I just don’t think the changes spoken of in Galatians 3 can be made to stretch far enough to deny covenant membership to children, and I don’t think the believers Paul was writing to would have taken them that way or would have stopped considering their children covenant members because of them.

Anyway, I apologize for the rambling. Blessings in Him, Nathan

Great post. I think this explains the gist of your argument well. I don’t think you are going to get every Baptist to understand that all the examples in Scripture have no real direct bearing on the debate, unfortunately.

I’m with you on that point. And truly you almost have me convinced. Especially poignant were these words: “This one observation cuts away the foundation of the pure-membership argument. It is not as though we should not strive for purity of membership, but we must do so, first, by using the canons of inclusion that God has given us, which is ever spoken of in terms of those whom he has called and their seed; and second, acknowledging the fact that this attempt for purity will not be finally successful until Jesus returns to separate the sheep from the goats.”

I have some difficulties with points 1 and 2 above, however.

1) I don’t understand how you say the Abrahamic covenant was unequivocally cast as pure membership. In the most formal inaugaration of the covenant, at the giving of the sign of circumcision, it was expressly stated that those who refused the sign would be cut out of participation. Does that not then imply that the covenant was not unequivocally seen as a pure membership?

2) With the Jeremiah passage, in the context of Jeremiah you might be able to prove it was “new” in contrast to the Mosaic, but can you prove that for all the other times in the OT the “New” covenant is addressed (albeit not with the same designation.) If the “everlasting covenant” or the “covenant of peace” is equivalent to the “new” covenant, then you need to look at all the covenant references and establish all of them are positing the newness as opposed to the Mosaic covenant. In fact O. Palmer Robertson says this about the specific Jeremiah passage in view: “Jeremiah’s contrast, therefore, is not simply with the Mosaic covenant. He contrasts instead the new covenant with the totality of God’s covenantal dealings with Israel previously. (pg. 281, Christ of the Covenants)” He concludes that way due to Jeremiah’s imprecise allusion to the covenant on the day Israel was brought out of Egypt (see pg. 280-281).

Lastly, what about Gal. 3. Is the covenant being redefined there? “Seed” now focuses on Christ, not on the progeny of Abraham. I need to think about this more, but a professor friend who teaches our SS class, told me that passage was what kept him a Baptist. I want to discuss your articles at more length with him.

Ultimately, I agree with Chris above, this issue is one where we can have great unity with those who disagree with us on. And currently, I am convinced the issue is not as clear as both Baptists and Presbyterians claim. There is room for much unity I think.

Blessings in Christ,

Bob Hayton

Thanks for the comments. I remind my Baptist bretheren of our relationship that, despite major theological disagreement, we can work “that they may all be one” (Joh 17:21).

(I had a longer reply, but I had the wrong security code. I think I’m going to disable it on my site.)