That is a plausibly drawn conclusion after the kerfuffle created by Mark Dever’s post on “Things He Can and Cannot Live With.”  Like others to comment on this post, I admire Mark and count him a friend. During a recent conference at Southern Baptist Seminary, where Mark is chairman of the board, he and I enjoyed several pleasant conversations. He is not only the pastor of the church where Jay and Ellen Hart were married (TMI – alert), but he is a Calvinist and says a lot of sensible and valuable things about congregational life, church membership, and discipline. He is one of my favorite Baptists, most of whom orbit around Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville.
It should also be said that Mark deserves real credit for saying what he did about paedobaptism being a sin. I disagree with him. What do you expect from a Presbyterian elder? But I’m not offended, much less annoyed. If you take the sacraments seriously, not to mention being a faithful minister of the word, you need to say that the wrong practice of baptism is sinful. (It should also be pointed out that Mark was not singling out paedobaptism. He did mention it along with racism and universalism, but his list actually ran to 15 and included drum, organs, and female elders, none of which hit the threshold of paedobaptism but this was a free-flowing column.)
What is curious about the post is what it means for the variety of evangelical parachurch agencies like the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Together for the Gospel, and Gospel Coalition, all of which find credo- and paedobaptists inhabiting membership cheek by jowel under the umbrella of a lower-common denominator evangelicalism. Mark actually has a very good interview with a fundamentalist pastor who questions Mark’s own participation in these alliances and coalitions on the grounds of not participating with those who observe sinful practices. It was a frank even if friendly exchange. (Why do conservative Presbyterians today keep wanting to “hang” with Baptists who think paedobaptism is a sin?)
When you read, for instance, the copy for the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, and then see the way that Baptists and Presbyterians on the Council differ on baptism, you wonder if the Alliance is really doing what it says it does when it states:
Since 1994, the Alliance has been an association of evangelical pastors, teachers, leaders, and Christians committed to the great evangelical consensus arising from the protestant reformation, working together for the recovery of the biblical, apostolic witness of the Church. It fosters a collaborative movement of reformed evangelical Christians, to promote robust, biblical, historic, confessional Christianity through media, events, publications, networking, and more. It has encouraged the Church to evaluate its message and methods, according to Scripture. It has warned the Church against false doctrine. It has advocated for sound doctrine, warm piety, catechetical instruction, biblical worship, faithful cultural engagement, and scriptural methods of evangelism and church growth.
It’s that “warning the church” against false doctrine that could give one pause. Has the Alliance actually done anything to warn Baptists or Presbyterians about baptism and its abuse? The issue is dicier for the Gospel Coalition where, at least the last time I checked they were recruiting not just individual pastors but also churches for the common cause of — well — either paedo- or credobaptism.
My hunch is that ACE hasn’t because the sacraments do not ascend the list of criteria that demonstrate a biblical and apostolic ministry. Or at least, baptism doesn’t. Talk about Christ’s real presence in the Lord’s Supper and that could get you in trouble with Baptists and low-church Presbyterians. In fact, that seems to be what happened after White Horse Media and ACE went their separate ways. Yes, Ed Veith perseveres as the Alliance’s sole Lutheran. But for a consistent Alliance, we should probably consult, yet again, the Christian & Missionary version.
Maybe what we really need is a coalition of soteriological Calvinists. That seems to be the glue holding together these pastors and theologians who come from distinct communions to rally for the gospel. The problem here, is that it would leave out Veith. It would also likely leave out Dever. Mark is too a churchman to think that the gospel can be disembodied from the body of Christ.
Come to think of it, why not a fellowship or communion of confessing Protestants?  Wait. We already have that. It’s called the Southern Baptist Convention, the Presbyterian Church in America, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church — the list goes on. The problem here is that several of these communions are not in fellowship.
So what’s an ecumenical Protestant to do? Admit that evangelicalism is not a solution to the disunity of Protestantism, and then consult with the committee on ecumenicity of his own communion.
Old Life 
I think you raise a fair point. But perhaps the problem is not with Presbyterians attempting to cooperate with other denominations, but the sectarian nature of Baptist theology. After all, it is pretty cheeky to claim that local visible churches are actually made up, as far as we can ascertain, of regenerated folks and that the only baptism that exists is the baptism that our particular church offers in the way our particular church does it.
And so, while I applaud Mark for being consistent with his theology on baptism, the real question is, “How is it possible for Baptists to cooperate with anyone other than other Baptists?” For us Presbyterians, since we open the doors of Christ’s church to all who make a credible profession of faith and their children, it is relatively easy to recognize the legitimacy of other branches of Christ’s church.
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Of course, Sean, there is a difference between the riff-raff Presbyterians allow to the table, and the standards we maintain for those going into the pulpit. Even so, I suspect most OPs and PCAs would be more comfortable letting a Baptist rather than a Lutheran hold forth as guest preacher. And don’t get me started on our hymnals.
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I’m just trying to figure out why, if we can have (credo) Baptists who claim Reformed orthodoxy, there aren’t (paedo) Communionists to do the same? (And then Northern Communionist Alliance, the General Assembly of Regular Communionists, etc.?) I know that would only make more work for all the unifying efforts, alliances and coalitions, but who’s really counting anymore? Plus, it just makes sense.
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DGH, my being a son of Walther is going to show here, but although I’m currently benefiting from the ACE’s handsome reading schedule for Calvin’s Institutes, Romans 16:17 is too much in my mind to desire fellowship with anyone, be he the most confessional, earnestly Christ-centered Protestant, who is not a confessional Lutheran. The ACE has to undervalue the Sacraments in order to understand itself as warning against false doctrine, but since Peter told us baptism now saves us, I can’t understand how the ACE can warn with a straight face. It’s not sectarian to insist on maintaining the pure teaching of Christ in his church because unity is in his Name and his Word, not ours.
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The position of para-church organizations is de-facto baptistic as they begin with the unwarranted, unbiblical, and, I think, un-presbyterian assumption that the gospel can be divorced from the sacraments by which it is signified and sealed.
By starting the discussion by separating ecclesiology from soteriology, the Baptists have won before the first sentence of the debate has been uttered.
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I personally would welcome a LCMS brother to preach, but because of his understanding of Word and sacrament ministry and his fear of unionism, I doubt he would take up my invitation.
But isn’t that the point here? The Reformed branch of the Reformation tried (albeit vainly) to bridge the gaps between higher and lower views of the sacraments, both baptism and Supper, in an effort to center the unity of the church on Word and sacrament. Those who suggest that *they* have the proper view of the sacraments and hence the church inevitably move toward a sectarian position that strikes me at odds with what the Reformed tradition has consistently sought to do–affirm both the unity and pluriformity of the church as centered on a fairly broad conception of the marks of the church.
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The position of para-church organizations is de-facto baptistic as they begin with the unwarranted, unbiblical, and, I think, un-presbyterian assumption that the gospel can be divorced from the sacraments by which it is signified and sealed.
By starting the discussion by separating ecclesiology from soteriology, the Baptists have won before the first sentence of the debate has been uttered.
The assumed divorce is certainly a problem. But I don’t know that it is (credo) Baptist in character so much as modernist-evangelical. After all, can a tradition that names itself after sacramental theology, however misguided, really be faulted for divorcing the gospel from the sacraments? It might be that (credo) Baptists ironically happen to be most often associated with para-church organizations that assume the separation.
The common denominator to explain why (credo) Baptists and (paedo) Presbyterians and everyone else find themselves in these projects may be that they are more modernists than Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, etc.
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Sean, I don’t think the Reformers were broad about credo baptism or about re-baptizing. On that score, they changed the mode and dunked the Anabaptists, and held them under a good long time. So I don’t see the breadth in the Reformed tradition about baptism that you do. The Lord’s Supper may be a different matter. But even there I wonder if the introduction of breadth comes less from Reformed than from revived sources, as in Whitefield’s remark — with a straight face and a crooked collar — forms don’t matter.
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Hmm, I was actually thinking about Calvin’s comments the other way, toward Roman Catholicism and him arguing that at least Rome still had baptism. Of course, he was pretty harsh towards anabaptists, but as much for the political havoc they caused and for their faulty view of the church that I mentioned above (the danger of sectarianism in a reforming period) than for the theology of baptism itself.
On the Lord’s supper, wasn’t Calvin and Bullinger at Regensburg trying to sort things out with the Lutherans? And wasn’t Bucer trying to do the same at Marburg? And what do we do with the original Zurich Reformed reformer, Zwingli? I typically say in class that the genius of the Reformed branch of the Reformation was that it focused in three different city-states with three sets of Reformers; Lutherans, on the other hand, spent their first 50 years fighting about what Luther really said and how true they were to Luther. Because of the variety of the Reformed stream, there was great energy, confession writing, and evangelism.
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Regarding the Supper:
There’s really not *that much* breadth if we take into consideration the developments which led to the confessions of the latter part of the 16th cent. The Belgic, French, Old Scots, and Heidelberg are all farily similar, and Westminster basically follows the same stream of thought. Zwingli’s position is decidedly ruled out. Bullinger marks an advance on his predecessor, and his position (as seen in the 2nd Helvetic) is of course acceptable within the Reformed pale, as Calvin acknowledged by penning the Consensus Tigurinus (though, as Paul Rorem has pointed out, Calvin remarked later to Bucer that he may have given a bit too much leeway in Bullinger’s direction in that document).
It would seem pretty safe to say that anything either to the left of Bullinger or to the right of Calvin is pretty much impermissible. This doesn’t leave a whole lot of breadth, but it does leave some. However, it also at least makes Zwingli’s articulation decidedly unacceptable.
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Something for Baptists and evangelicals to think about:
The Baptist doctrine of the “Age of Accountability” is nowhere to be found in the New Testament.
Isn’t it strange that God provided a means for the babies and toddlers of his chosen people in the Old Testament to be part of his Covenant promises but is completely silent about the issue in the New Testament?
Jesus seemed to really love the little children… but he never mentions even once, if the Baptist/evangelical view of salvation is correct, how a Christian parent can be assured that if something dreadful happens to their baby or toddler, that they will see that child again in heaven.
In the Baptist/evangelical doctrine of adult-only salvation, God leaves our babies and toddlers in spiritual limbo! A Christian parent must pray to God and beg him that little Johnnie “accepts Christ” the very minute he reaches the Age of Accountability, because if something terrible were to happen to him, he would be lost and doomed to eternal hellfire.
Do you really believe that our loving Lord and Savior would do that to Christian parents??
Dear Christian parents: bring your little children to Jesus! He wants to save them just as much as he wants to save adults! Bring your babies and toddlers to the waters of Holy Baptism and let Jesus SAVE them!
The unscriptural “Age of Accountability” is the desperate attempt to plug the “big hole” in the Baptist doctrine of adult-only Salvation/Justification:
How does Jesus save our babies and toddlers?
Gary
Luther, Baptists, and Evangelicals
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