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I did not read the rest of the website, I was only going by what the one article said.

I asked a seminary friend (SBTS) about this, and he in turn asked a professor, who pointed me to these two books: Baptist Successionism by James Edward McGoldrick and The Doctrine of the Church by John Thornberry.

At heart the biggest issue here is Baptist Successionism. This was a popular view amongst Baptists, but it has been almost entirely rejected since the beginning of the 20th century by all but the Landmark Baptists. The English Baptist origins view is most commonly accepted by historians (Baptist, non-Baptist, Christian and secular). Wikipedia will testify to this, as will a lot of other well respected sources.

The problem with the successionism view is that it requires significant mischaracterizing of a lot of groups, including a number who were definitely heretical. I looked at some of the sources you linked, and they miss it on some of the groups they affiliate themselves with. Some groups (like John Wycliffe's) were pretty down to earth, but other groups (like the donatists or the montanists) were pretty far out there, rightly condemned as heretics, and most important to this argument, not all that similar to the baptists. Both groups readily practiced infant baptism. Both groups held baptismal regeneration. Both groups severely limited the power of grace to forgive errant christians. The donatists were episcopal, while the montanists did not believe in any formal leadership structure (except Montanus and his prophetesses). Accepting Baptist Succession tends to put Baptists as the only legitimate christians, while the false churches persecuted us. This leads to embracing heretics and rejecting widely accepted giants of the faith. Alternatively, if we accept the generation of Baptists out of the reformation, we can acknowledge that there have been christians previously who had some of the same core convictions as us, and we can readily accept the legitimacy of giants of the faith, with the caveat that we think they got it wrong sometimes. I am harshly against Baptist Successionism not only because I think it is errant, but because I think it is dangerously so. It can easily lead one to rejecting catholicity, separating from Christians with whom we agree 95% of the time, and affiliating ourselves with men who are burning in hell for leading people astray.

I really don't want to offend, and I apologize if I have. I too want to learn the truth regarding faith and history, I just think the Reformed tradition is a excellent place to do that. While I don't agree 100% with most Reformed theologians, I think Baptists can pleasantly fit within the camp where we can learn from the wisdom it has to provide, and at the same time influence those around us towards greater truth as well. A standalone Baptist tradition is not nearly as strong, and I don't think it is as faithful to history, either.

>Any comments about this essay?

That's waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too vague of a framing question. I'm going to interpret that as "liveblog about this until you finish or get bored"

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You should listen to "The Master Storyteller" by Theocracy.

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The analogy in paragraph 2 breaks down, as both General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are both acknowledged to be wrong because they each only work for certain scales but give contrary results when applied to the others' scales.

>So with that said, I will begin and hope that I won’t be burned at the stake.

I'll just keep my torch ready in case.

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Okay, I've hit the end of page one without getting a roadmap of your argument. If you want to call this an essay, it is officially a poorly written essay. An essay is supposed to make a point. The point is summarized in your thesis statement:

>With this essay I would like to take some of the same mindset, that of looking for pattern and spiritual meaning, and apply it to Christ himself.

And somewhere in the first 12.5%, one should find a roadmap of the--at least two, stereotypically three--major points you'll make supporting that thesis. An essay is not a thriller. With the latter, you intend to keep your reader in suspense and make him guess. With the former, you're trying to make yourself easy to follow so it's the readers fault if he doesn't. A thriller is a high-speed car chase. An essay is a convoy with walkie-talkies, turn-signals, and driving 5 mph under the speed limit. The convoy can be fun, but keeping everyone with you and getting where you mean to go take precedence over speed or car-games.

That being said, this strikes me as more you taking a bunch of notions that have been floating around your mind and putting words to the notions so you can really think about them. Rather than an essay, this seems more like a window into thoughts-in-progress, like a stream-of-consciousness travelogue along a train of thought. This kind of writing is good, and it's useful in its own way. To go back to our analogy, this paper is a scouting trip to figure out the best route to a destination before you travel there.

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>Unlike many, I have always connected the number two with the Trinity.

Probably not written by an engineer.

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>whenever I look at the number two in scripture things come up that make me think of the Son and the Holy Spirit

The "two witnesses" motif does crop up a lot in scripture. I'm not sure the Exodus 25:18 reference fits with that, but the others do.

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>even the duality of male and female can be linked to the number two

which Paul explicitly links to Christ and the Church

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>In our Exodus verse above there is mention of two or three witnesses

Think you meant "Deuteronomy"

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Another "two" we see is the ministry of Word and Sacrament.

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>Now the Holy Spirit will not be neglected here, but it will be discussed incidentally

"He"! Not "it", "He".

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>For me, the cornerstone verses that describe Christ pertain to declaring God

Surprised you didn't include anything in that list from John ch 1 or from the Carmen Christi.

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>And this leads us to the language of John.

Ah, there it is.

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>Now the Word here is in Greek λόγος, which has a very storied history among the Greek philosophers outside of Christianity.

Were it me, I'd more emphasize the "Word of YHWH" as it comes through the Old Testament.

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Or I could finish reading the paragraph.

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>Synergists and post-millennial types tend to focus on man being an image of God struggling to perfect that image which has been tarnished by sin.

Don't let Jeff Durbin hear you say that #NotAllPostmils

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>but is far from mainstream among today’s conservatives

Probably because it seems easy to slip off from this into Arianism, Modalism, Partialism, or some other heresy.

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>Irenaeus comes to mind.

A footnote would be helpful here.

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>balanced perfectly between love and chaos

Interesting juxtaposition. Don't know what I think of it.

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>could it be beneficial to think of Christ as a type of the God Father

Heh, typo. Irresistable Grace: an offer we can't refuse.

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>This only scratches the surface of the significance of waters in scripture

This one on my to-read list goes more into that significance, I think.

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>in our lives (which are our true baptisms)

Seems like a giant statement to put in a parenthetical remark. Don't know that I can follow you here.

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>When we get distracted, though, God, through his Holy Spirit and our meditations on Christ, pulls us from the quagmire

I was sinking deep in sin, far from the peaceful shore,
Very deeply stained within, sinking to rise no more;
But the Master of the sea heard my despairing cry,
From the waters lifted me now safe am I.

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>If Christ suffered and died, how can we translate this into being a message of the God the Father? Well, let’s take a look at suffering.

Another easy to reach heresy would be Patripassianism.

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>In its essential and primitive meaning, the word actually means the experience of something beyond one’s control, perhaps by surprise, or to be overcome by something.

Which definition applies not to Christ.

"For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father." (John 10:17-18)

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> Arius, the arch heretic

"Heresiarch" needs to come back into more common usage.

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>In my understanding, this suffering that Christ experienced, hated and spit on and treated as a criminal by humanity, is the expression of the suffering that God the Father experiences.

That's probably wrong.

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>his heart bleeds in grief, he expresses the suffering of the Holy Spirit

I'm not an expert on the doctrine of impassibility, but I'm fairly sure you've crossed a line by this point. Christ is the mediator between God and man. Christ is the high priest who is able to sympathize with our weakness. I don't think we can say that of the Father or the Spirit.

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>So whenever the ancients sinned, they sacrificed an animal, which expresses that when we sin, something living and feeling, that we depend on for survival, that is perfect and has done us no wrong, suffers and is lost to us.

I think you're missing the substitution element. There was more than one kind of sacrifice. For a sacrifice of atonement, the one who sinned should die. The animal is allowed to substitute for the sinner. Other offerings are more about losing something.

At the very least, I don't think you can lump all sacrifice together as you have.

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>They cause him anguish. Yet this anguish is merely a moment

Yep, you've lost hold of impassibility. You've placed the eternal and un-caused into temporal causality.

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Final verdict: Some interesting ideas, but needs work.

I think the root problem is carrying the typology of Christ a bit too far. Only the Son is hypostatically unioned.

I've been reading Aquinas Among the Protestants. It's a collection of essays about the influence and reception of Thomas Aquinas among Reformed Protestants. Their thesis focuses on Protestant Orthodoxy (and Protestant Scholasticism), and argues that recent scholarship is showing that the Protestant Scholastics had a more positive view of Aquinas than was previously thought.

The view in question stems from Martin Luther's negative opinion of the Scholastics, which the authors argue was a misinterpretation of Aquinas as a Semi-Pelagian; Aquinas' later works were very Augustinian, but Luther never had the opportunity to engage with them. They also claim that Luther's knowledge of the Scholastics was limited to late-Medieval Scholastics like Occam and Scotus. Because of Luther's low opinion of the Scholastics, Scholars have maintained that Protestant Scholastics (like Turretin and Junius) were breaking with the Reformers by going back to the Scholastics. This is hardly the case, though, as many of the Reformers were themselves trained in Scholasticism. In fact, the authors talk a lot about Vermigli and Zanchi, who were Thomists and contained extensive libraries of Aquinas' books. Their overall conclusion is that although there were certainly breaks with Aquinas, the Protestant Scholastics were in continuity with Medieval Scholasticism and could be seen as a form of Neo-Scholasticism. Because of the Renaissance emphasis on the Humanities, developing into Renaissance Humanism, Protestant Scholasticism could be characterized as a synthesis of Medieval Scholasticism and Renaissance Humanism.

Additionally, their thesis focuses on the Neo-Calvinists (Kuyper, Dooyeweerd, Van Til, et al.) and their interpretation of Aquinas. According to the authors, the Neo-Calvinists view Aquinas as having a Nature-Grace distinction based on Natural Law, and they object to this doctrine. However, the authors argue that Dooyeweerd and Kuyper were reacting to 19th and 20th Century interpretations of Thomas that may not have been accurate interpretations. I'll admit I've not made it to this chapter yet, but so far this is how I understand the authors' arguments.

I highly recommend this book as a fine work of scholarship and an interesting read. I've been studying a lot of Medieval Theology and Philosophy, particularly Scholasticism, and I've become quite interested in Aquinas lately. There's much for Protestants to gain by studying his work, and this book adds a lot of new perspectives for us, and shows that indeed the Reformed Scholastics who developed Reformed Orthodoxy were in continuity with Aquinas' thought.

This looks great. I found the Amazon link to the actual DVD in case anyone is interested in purchasing:

http://www.amazon.com/C-H-Spurgeon-Peoples-Preacher/dp/B00371QQ5M

Thanks for sharing this.

I already had the updated one in Confessing the Faith but it's nice to have a well-printed version of the original.

> " The supper of the Lord Jesus was instituted by him the same night wherein he was betrayed, to be observed in his churches, unto the end of the world, for the perpetual remembrance, and shewing forth the sacrifice of himself in his death, confirmation of the faith of believers in all the benefits thereof, their spiritual nourishment, and growth in him, their further engagement in, and to all duties which they owe to him; and to be a bond and pledge of their communion with him, and with each other."

-- 2LCF 30.1

This sums up my view. I've always wanted to read Barcello's The Lord's Super as a Means of Grace, which expands on the Reformed heritage of the means of grace, but there are a lot of books I want to read...

Wife got me this for Christmas: CSB Spurgeon Study Bible, Black Genuine Leather https://www.amazon.com/dp/1586409743/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_EhETCbDAJS1H5

Liked what I've read in it so far. Looking at Spurgeon's writings is really cool.

I know next to nothing about the history of Acts 29, but for church and baptist history, here are some things you should check out:

Church History 101: The Highlights of Twenty Centuries is a very concise book introducing key moments and movements in church history.

The Baptist Story: From English Sect to Global Movement is a very accessible and engaging Baptist history.

Holding Communion Together: The Reformed Baptists, the First Fifty Years - Divided & United gives a history of the modern Reformed Baptist movement.

This one by Steve Gregg is a good one that goes further than merely millennial views.

The Voice of Faith: Jonathan Edwards's Theology of Prayer (Evangelical Heritage) https://www.amazon.com/dp/1894400321/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_NuoLDb98NMFGA