March 2016

Let's celebrate Easter
with the rite
of laughter.
Christ died and rose
and lives.
Laugh like a woman
who holds her first baby.
Our enemy death
will soon be destroyed.
Laugh like a man
who finds he doesn't have cancer
or does but now there's a cure.
Christ opened wide the door of heaven.
Laugh like children
at Disneyland's gates.
This world is owned by God
and He'll return to rule.
Laugh like a man
who walks away uninjured
from a wreck
in which his car was totaled.
Laugh
as if all the people in the whole world
were invited to a picnic
and then invite them.

-Joe Bayly

...the division among those who say they believe in "paedocommunion" is far deeper than most imagine. Those who require discernment on the part of the child before he can partake in the Supper have already rejected the reasoning of a large part of the paedocommunionist camp.

(This is the fourth in a series opposing paedocommunion, a practice started by some Reformed parents a few years ago in which parents require their infants and toddlers to participate in the Lord's Supper. Here are the first, second, and third in this series. For more on this subject, see the "Paedocommunion" tag.) 

We showed in our previous post that those who demand they be permitted to feed their infants and toddlers at the Lord's Table (denying their children need to obey Scripture's command to discern the body) have lost any reasonable, biblical grounds for delaying the participation of their baptized children in the Lord's Supper even a single day. By their own logic, immediately following their newborn's sacramental initiation into the Church of Jesus Christ through baptism, they must commune their child.

We now turn to the paedocommunionists who reject this no-discernment position and require some form of discerning the body on the part of their child...

I'm not keeping up with announcing the joy of new grandchildren given us by God. Yesterday, Emmeline Kate Bayly was born to Reze Bayly, wife of Taylor Bayly.

Mother and baby are doing well. We thank God for Emmeline's safe delivery and His kindness to us in our celebration of Mom Taylor's 99th birthday this weekend.

Mom Taylor had ten children, all of whom gathered for the celebration of her birthday with almost all the spouses, also. Those ten children had twenty-eight children of their own, and those grandchildren have had, so far, about 75 of their own children. So Emmeline is something like Mom Taylor's 75th great-grandchild.

What blessings of fruitfulness God has given Mom! What joy she and all these hordes and scads of children are to us!

(This is the third in a series opposing paedocommunion, a practice started by some Reformed parents a few years ago in which parents require their infants and toddlers to participate in the Lord's Supper. Here are the first and second in this series.) 

As stated in the previous post in this series, Jeff Meyers's novel exegesis of 1 Corinthians 11 subscribed to by paedocommunionists leaves them convinced that, when the rest of the Covenant community is partaking of the Lord's Supper, regardless of age, for a member of the Covenant community to abstain is sin. Those who refuse to commune with the rest of the covenant community have failed to discern the body. In fact, Meyers demands that orthodox Presbyterians examine themselves by this rule coming out of his exegesis. As he sees it, the historic Presbyterian and Reformed church's requirement that all who partake of the Lord’s Supper must be able to discern the body is proof the historic Presbyterian and Reformed church has failed to discern the body, and thus they are guilty of breaking apart the Church's unity—the sin of schism.

Yet, when we examine the range of practices among paedocommunionists, particularly with regard to “discerning the body" around the Lord's Table, it is clear this is no united group holding to the same doctrine and practice. Rather, paedocommunionists are split into two camps: first, there are those who require no discernment at all from the Covenant child; and second, there are those who demand the Covenant child has enough discernment to recognize he is part of the body. Even within these two camps, though, there is inconsistency of belief and practice.

In this post, we'll focus on the first of the two groups—those who require no discernment at all from the Covenant child...

The soulless creatures who have been the enforcers of the closing of the American mind for decades, now, all contracted the plague during their mandatory four-year service to the Academy we euphemistically refer to as "getting the college degree." If someone escapes the Academy with their thinking still free and their speaking truthful, the media can be trusted to finish the Academy's work.

When NPR needs someone to comment on the darkness of darkness above the Arctic Circle, it has to be a PhD. But when NPR needs someone to comment on the higher suicide rate among single men who are childless, it has to be a PhD then, too.

Even when NPR needs someone to explain why the Stupid Class is coming out in droves for Donald Trump, they'll get a PhD to do the explaining.

No kidding: even if NPR needs someone to explain...