A post I found most interesting, as you might expect – here (HT de cura animarum).

Principle number one reads:

“The Lord Jesus Christ is the crucified and risen Savior of all mankind, and no human person can fully understand his life or find his dignity and destiny apart from a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus. It is not enough to know who Jesus is; we must know Jesus.”

I think I’ll be quoting that…

I’m really enjoying Doug Chaplin’s blog, which I only discovered a month or two ago. He’s just put up another fascinating post on why it’s barking mad (my phrase!) to try and read the New Testament without paying attention to the Fathers, who first read those Scriptures, and indeed decided that they were Scripture in the first place! On the question of the development of priestly roles he writes “…there is nothing clear in the text of the NT that either prevents or criticises the linguistic and theological moves attested in the very earliest of patristic writings, and subsequently developed over the next two centuries. Those who read these texts written in their own language, recognised them as scripture partly through their consonance in the same faith, and collected them and canonised them as part of that same inheritance, are the same people whose reflections on ministry in the light of that slowly forming canon led them to a theology of priesthood dependent on and reflective of the true high priesthood of Christ. They almost certainly offer a surer guide than those who, fourteen centuries later, mined the same scriptures for their own polemic against mediaeval developments.”

This quotation applies to the development of the priestly office (indeed the entire three-fold ministry); it also applies, inter alia, to the baptism of children and – though I hesitate to mention it – the doctrine of penal substitution which was virtually unknown in the Fathers. This is an area where I have qualms with the anabaptist arguments, which seem to run together developments post-Christendom with developments in the immediate post-apostolic generations. To my mind it’s essential to separate those two things.

Partly provoked by Tim’s stuff on anabaptism.

If Anabaptism is about discipleship more than belief, what’s wrong with infant baptism? That is, a child can be discipled into the faith – initiated into their practices and commitments and language – and I know many people who have been raised in the church, have always been members of the church, and are perfectly sincere in their declarations of faith. It seems that the insistence on an adult baptism has behind it some sort of Modernist experiential bias, you’ve got to have had some sort of conversion in order to be a real Christian, the corollary of which is that a child cannot be a Christian. They are not part of the household of faith unless they have had a particular specifiable experience.

Which is a way of saying: is discipleship really as core to anabaptism as all that?

I’m just thinking out loud here.