Thread by @RScottClark

@joythruChrist @PrometheusX303 Jen,

@JulesDiner is correct. The expression “Reformed Baptist” is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. One is either Reformed or Baptist. One cannot be both. This is not uncharitable. This is the truth.

1/x

@joythruChrist @PrometheusX303 @JulesDiner The expression “Reformed Baptist” has only become widely used very recently. The earliest usage I’ve seen dates to 1823, almost 3 centuries after the meaning of “Reformed” was established. That 19th-cent usage is ambiguous. 2/x

@joythruChrist @PrometheusX303 @JulesDiner Think of it this way. Your family has lived in a house called “Reformed House” since the 1540s and suddenly other folks begin moving in and moving the furniture around and telling you to be quiet and stop complaining about the new arrangements. How would you like it? 3/x

@joythruChrist @PrometheusX303 @JulesDiner I guess that you wouldn’t. I certainly wouldn’t. The adjective Reformed denotes a theology, piety, and practice that has been confessed, believed, taught, and practiced for a very long time. One part of that theology, piety, & practice has been baptism. 4/x

@joythruChrist @PrometheusX303 @JulesDiner Our Baptist friends want to identify with aspects of our theology but they have a very different way of reading the Scriptures and they have arrived at rather different practices. We cannot both be “Reformed” without radically redefining what “Reformed” means. 5/x

@joythruChrist @PrometheusX303 @JulesDiner This contest is unnecessary since those Baptists who identify with aspects of Reformed theology gave themselves a name in the 17th century: Particular Baptist. That’s a fine name, which some of them have begun using again.

@joythruChrist @PrometheusX303 @JulesDiner 7/x Defending the historic sense of “Reformed” as defined in the Heidelberg Catechism, Belgic Confession, Canons of Dort (did you know that the Canons confess infant baptism?) and the Westminster Standards isn’t mean or narrow. It’s true.

@joythruChrist @PrometheusX303 @JulesDiner 8/x Where are we, who still believe the Reformed confession supposed to live, as it were, if Reformed means whatever anyone says it does?

Does that help to see why some of us object to the redefinition of Reformed?

@joythruChrist @PrometheusX303 @JulesDiner 9/9 Would you agree to a redefinition of Baptist to mean “anyone who baptized hitherto unbaptized professing converts”? I guess not. I’ve yet to see a Baptist explain why they can redefine Reformed but we can’t redefine Baptist.