Garrett's Response 4.1

This is a rejoinder of Garrett's post: http://old-baptist-test.blogspot.com/2011/07/jasons-4th-rebuttal.html


Garrett stated:


"Certainly I disagree with Beebe and Trott making the new birth different from regeneration, but who is closer to the primitive teaching of the Baptists? Jason's or the first Hardshells?"


Garrett attempts to orient the discussion around this issue away from his error in regard to Beebe and Trott. My intention is to take him to task for misrepresenting Beebe and Trott as teaching gospel regeneration when they plainly followed Gill in attributing gospel instrumentality after an initial, immediate infusion of a principle of grace. Garrett glosses over his mistake to claim that what is important is that they necessitated gospel conversion in contrast to present Primitive Baptists. 


I'm well aware of this principle difference between Beebe and present Primitive Baptists, but this was not the issue under consideration - my point in bringing Garrett's comments up in regard to Beebe is that Garrett inaccurately depicted the conflict between present PB's and Beebe's theology as a conflict of gospel utility. Any person familiar with Beebe and mainstream PB's knows that it was Beebe's doctrine of the absolute predestination of all things that was the divisive issue. Beebe's necessitating gospel conversion is not an issue of gospel utility, as modern PB's believe that gospel conversion is mediated through the preached word, it is an issue of the Scriptural misapplication of the doctrine of predestination. 


Garrett cannot deny that Gill, Beebe, and Trott taught that the doctrine of immediate regeneration preceded gospel faith. Whether or not they necessitated gospel conversion for all the elect, it is academically incorrect to claim they did not teach immediate regeneration. 


Garrett stated: 


"Who, at the time of Beebe and Trott, publicly disagreed with them?"


One must exercise caution with this for several reasons. Beebe's doctrine of Absolute Predestination split the PB's. It's naive to think that James Oliphant's position negating this view in the latter half of the 1800's (exemplified in his letter exchanges with Silas Durand - a follower of Beebe in regard to Absolutism) came out of nowhere. It's likely to suppose that Beebe was opposed by a silent majority, but were not prepared to oppose so influential a man - on top of the fact that Beebe was not altogether wrong, save in the fact that he used unscriptural terminology. He never subscribed to the view that God was the direct cause of sin.


Beebe seemed to have a penchant for controversy. He seemed to love to re-define words unscripturally, which simply caused confusion. Not only is he responsible for proposing predestination in place of providence in terms of Biblical language, he also redefined regeneration from being born again - a distinction not apparent from the Scripture. In addition, he seems to have believed that Christ was created in eternity, which prompted Elder John Clark's book, "Exposure of Heresies Propagated by Some Old School Baptists." Sylvester Hassell states that his father said:


"In regard to the charge of Arianism made against the first editor and some of the old correspondents of the “Signs of the Times,” my father, who was personally acquainted with the parties, was fully satisfied that the charge arose from a misconstruction of the real views of the writers; while, at the same time, it must be admitted that some of the expressions of some of the writers were unguarded, ill-advised and unscriptural."


There was Beebe again, at the very least, causing division because of unscriptural language.


It is plain that Hassell, while sympathetic to Beebe's Absolute Predestination, nevertheless disagrees with at least his use of "predestination" and the Absoluter rejection of the word "permission" in regard to God's relationship to sinful actions of men. Hassell seems to believe that the issue was semantics and that it should not have been a test of fellowship, but he quotes Elder Respess regarding two churches in Texas that had already withdrawn fellowship from sister churches over the issue. This was all happening pre-1885, which is when Hassell's History was published. Beebe died around 1880, so it's perfectly reasonable to infer that Beebe's declarations of Absolute Predestination were controversial among Primitive Baptists from the start. 


This would indicate that Primitive Baptists during this period would not have embraced a view of soteriology that made gospel faith mechanically deterministic. For that matter, neither did Gill, as I have already quoted in his Book of Divinity, ".. then faith comes by hearing, and ministers are instruments by whom, at least, men are encouraged to believe...".