Who is the "his" you are referencing?
You said "infant baptism and all its accompanying heresies" --you have some explaining to do.
What is your meaning of the word heresy anyway? Is it soul-damning? Or something that you believe to be sub-biblical. The "H" word is bandied about with far too much abandon around here.
I'm referring to what Calvin himself either personally believed, or at least allowed to occur when he was the nominal head of the Geneva church-state back in the 1500's.
The "accompanying heresies" are that which allowed folks who were supposedly baptized long before they were old enough to even question why, indeed, am I being baptized (See Acts 16:30-31. The jailor wasn't an infant.)
Since they were baptized as infants, they had all the rights and privileges the state-church accorded them--regardless of whether they were truly saved at some later point in their lives or not.
Some may have been truly saved, but some weren't. Those who were saved had the HS dwelling in them, but those who weren't saved didn't have the HS dwelling in them.
Now, since none of us can know with complete certainty who has the HS dwelling within another person, and, conversely, who doesn't, we have no 100% guarantee that the other person will act in accordance to the HS's guidance.
Knowing this, how can we be absolutely certain that person who is now a full member of that church-state will always live his life in full accord with the HS's guidance?
We can't. All we really can do is to take that person's word that he's going to live in accordance with the HS's leadership...regardless if he truly is indwelt by the HS or not.
If he's not, then he may be prone to hold to any number of heresies that were around in the 1500's....and there certainly were plenty heresies making their rounds back then.
Since there were so many heresies around back then, I'll just pick one out to illustrate my point.
One such heresy was that it was okay to kill any person who might hold to something your state-church says that he shouldn't....Let's say this person holds to the idea that he himself should be able to read and practice what his own Bible tells him he should do, rather than blindly following what his local priest says he should do.
The priest says it's okay to kill that neighbor of his who holds to the idea that he doesn't necessarily have to mindlessly obey his local priest in all matters of life.
What's this person then prone to do?
Kill that pesky neighbor who has the audacity not to follow the local priest like a dog on a leash!
If my memory of what went on in some places back then serves me right, there were a few innocent "neighbors" who met up with a fate such as that.
My point is this: Once you allow for one heresy to take foot in a church/state-church, there's no telling what that may eventually led to.
Heresy is the kind of thing that you can't always tell exactly what it may eventually led to. See what I Cor. 5:6 and Gal. 5:9 tells you what can happen if you allow the symbolic leaven [Symbolic of sin in most NT cases] to take root in a church.
A heresy
per se may not immediately be "soul-damning." At first it may just be "sub-biblical." But heresy is still heresy.
Maybe you believe there's nothing wrong with infant baptism. You have that right to believe if you wish. But, IMHO, infant baptism isn't right because it has the potential to eventually result in a lot of unintended consequences...consequences that can be fatal to a church or other Christian "ministries."
That's why I posted what I did.
You're free to disagree with me over the proper subject for baptism if you wish. I suppose we as brothers in Christ will just have to agree to disagree on this point, okay? :wavey:
