Wittenberger
New Member
(See my first answer above, within your quote, in red)
No, it surely does not. No Baptist and no evangelical believes that God can only save adults. You really should stop posting untruths.
I don't brand myself as an evangelical, but, concerning what I have said, I believe believers' baptism proponents would agree that for those who are mature enough to understand, faith is required for salvation; for those who are not, if they should die, God saves them all. In any case, water baptism in NT times was reserved for those who had been regenerated as evidenced by their profession of faith. Water baptism did not produce the regeneration in them, nor did it produce regeneration later in infants when people started baptizing them out of superstition, fear, and ignorance. Man cannot control or summon God by word or ritual. The Spirit blows where it wills, not where man wills that it should blow!
You have absolutely no ground to stand on with your views about infant baptism, as has been shown. Even what you said about John the Baptist destroys your own argument concerning infant baptism because whatever God did for him in the womb, it certainly was not by water baptism! And do you suppose that John the Baptist would have been saved if he had not continued to follow God?
You are one confused individual. Earlier you were making unfounded charges against Baptists as you were calling them Calvinists; now you are doing the same as you are calling them Arminians! You have failed in your arguments and posted untruths in both cases!
What is blown to smithereens is the unbiblical doctrine of infant baptism and that a ritual and incantation can cause the Spirit to move simply by virtue of the words and actions of men. Want to talk works-base salvation? There you have it in a nutshell. Baptists are about as far away from "Mother Rome" as it's possible to get. Magisterial Protestants are not, in many areas, as can be clearly seen.
One more point: The very early "Didache" talks about baptism but does not mention infant baptism; that silence is deafening. This is one proof of the truth of what I said and the Quakers originally said: The stream is purest at the source; the further you get from the source, the more corrupted and polluted the stream becomes. Infant baptism is a prime example. It arose because of superstition, fear, ignorance, and a wrong view of original sin. It did not exist in the NT or the earliest Christian communities; it's only foundation is the tradition of men, as the Catholic Encyclopedia admits, and a Catholic priest and archaeologist proved.
Dear brother,
You need to get out a textbook and start reading about the history of Baptists. They started as two groups: General Baptists and Particular Baptists.
Baptists are not an homogenous group. Some are Calvinists, some are Arminian, and some are Calminian (three points Calvinists, two points Arminian).
I am still waiting for any hard evidence from the first six centuries after Christ where anyone stated that baptism is simply and only "our adult act of profession of faith".
N
NE believed this! You can trumpet your sixteenth century interpretation of the Bible as the true Christian doctrine, but you have absolutely no historical evidence to back it up.You have no more proof that your interpretation of the Bible is correct than the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses.
You can keep making yourselves feel better by wrapping yourselves in the belief that God has told YOU that you have the correct interpretation of the Bible and by putting your hands to your ears, refusing to listen to historical evidence that says otherwise. But you cannot prove your position with hard facts of history.
Ostriches bury their heads in the sand and do the same thing: avoid the truth!