The Desert of the Real

The times has a very telling telling piece reporting on the Roman Catholic Church and its decision this week to discard their teaching on Limbo. Or at least the part that pertains to unborn babies.

According to the article, the Pope is doing this to make it easier to spread Christianity in areas where they’re competing with Muslims for conversions. See, it’s hard to market their religious product in countries with high infant mortality rates against a product which testifies that children who die go straight to heaven. So the solution, of course, is to change your product to make it more appealing:

...[I]n the fertile evangelisation zones of Africa and Asia, the Pope is only too aware that Muslims believe the souls of stillborn babies go straight to Heaven. For the Church, looking to spread the faith in countries with a high infant mortality rate, now is a good time to make it absolutely clear that stillborn babies of Christian mothers go direct to Heaven, too.

Now, obviously, it’s a false doctrine regardless, so it shouldn’t matter to me all that much that they’re abandoning it. Except they’re abandoning one false doctrine for another. And, they’re abandoning it for all the wrong reasons. Sure, their theologians met and discussed it. However, what was the impetus? They’ve taught this for how long, and it wasn’t until they were struggling to compete with Islam that they addressed it. Now they go to scripture and say Hey, there’s nothing here about a “limbo”, so we’re good, we can drop it. How about taking that as a chance to re-evaluate some other positions that have no basis in Scripture? I know, now I’m just being a radical.

The theologians’ finding is that God wishes all souls to be saved, and that the souls of unbaptised children are entrusted to a “merciful God” whose ways of ensuring salvation cannot be known. “In effect, this means that all children who die go to Heaven,” one source said.

Is it just me or is this a contradiction? If you don’t think you can know what God’s ways of ensuring salvation are, then how can you say that “all children who die go to heaven“? At least the foundation is consistant with other things they’ve said (even if still not consistant with Scripture). Since they can now apply the same belief that people of other religions get to go to heaven too, to the salvation of infants. When your goals are numbers, power, and money, there’s no greater tool than a wide gate and a broad road right?

However, the main reason for this post is the paragraph which falls further in, painting a radically inaccurate picture of evangelicalism:

One of the reasons Baptists and some other Protestant denominations resist infant baptism is because they believe the souls of babies are innocent and that it is for adults to choose a life in Christ or otherwise.

Who in the world is this reporters source? I hope and pray it was a General Baptist she spoke with, and not a Southern Baptist. The former would be disgraceful enough as it is, but for the SBC to be so far gone as to have people espousing such blatant pelagian heresy would just be too much. The souls of babies are innocent!?

This is far more accurate:

This seems lenient compared with St Augustine, who in 418 persuaded the Council of Carthage to condemn the British Pelagian heresy that there was an “in between” place for unbaptised babies. He persuaded the council that unbaptised babies share the general misery of the damned. The most he would concede was that their misery was not quite as bad as that of wicked dead adults.

Is true that God is a God of Mercy, but remember that we do not enter heaven as an infant, or an old man, or even a young man. When we stand before judgement, it is our immortal soul, and not the state we were in at death which stands before God. And even as infants, we share the headship of Adam. We stand condemened before God, dead in trespasses and sins, having sinned together with Adam. The scriptures plainly teach that it is only through rebirth into the headship of Christ that we are saved from this. This comes by regeneration, through faith, and faith comes by hearing the Word.

I was reading over one of Spurgeon’s sermons this morning and ran across this:

...[T]he natural lethargy of the Church requires a kind of healthy irritation to arouse her powers and to stimulate her exertions. The pebbles in the living stream of truth are worn smooth and round by friction. Who among us would wish to suspend a law of nature whose effects on the whole are good? I glory in that which at the present day is so much spoken against—sectarianism, for “sectarianism” is the cant phrase which our enemies use for all firm religious belief. I find it applied to all sorts of Christians; no matter what views he may hold, if a man be but earnest, he is a sectarian at once. Success to sectarianism, let it live and flourish. When that is done with, farewell to the power of godliness. When we cease, each of us, to maintain our own views of truth, and to maintain those views firmly and strenuously, then truth shall fly out of hand, and error alone shall reign: this, indeed, is the object of our foes: under the cover of attacking sects, they attack true religion, and would drive it, if they could, from off the face of the earth.

Once again, Spurgeon’s preaching finds application, and is shown to be true as much, if not more, in our day as in his. Our desire to avoid conflict at any cost…even at a cost of true and faithful doctrine…has brought us to exactly that place he predicted – truth has flown out of hand, and error alone reigns where peace, comprimised, and compliance are valued above truth and fidelity to scripture.