Garrett and Bob Ross Rebuked by the LCF

As we have observed in a recent blog dealing with Garrett's Fullerism, Brother Garrett is not an Old Baptist.

Brother Garrett stated:

"But, God has absolute foreknowledge, and knows who will believe and who will not.  Therefore, Christ died only for those whom he foreknew would believe."

The London Confession plainly states in Chapter 3, paragraph 2:

"Although God knoweth whatsoever may or can come to pass, upon all supposed conditions,5 yet hath He not decreed anything, because He foresaw it as future, or as that which would come to pass upon such conditions."

I demand he change the title of his blog, the "Old Baptist". What a farce.

Now, I would like to consider Garrett's understanding of John 3:8. He stated in his first response to my blog last year:

"Jesus connected, in John 3, being born again with believing the gospel (vss. 13-18) According to Jason and the Hardshells, Paul, James, and Peter, in teaching that the Spirit begets through the gospel, "run afoul" of what Jesus taught in John 3 about being "born again"?"

Garrett also, on a separate occasion on one of his blogs, quoted Bob Ross' post on the "Calvinist Flyswatter", approvingly. Bob Ross stated:

""thou hearest the SOUND thereof."

My interest was focused on the word "sound" and to what it referred in the context of being born again by the Holy Spirit. This is not the word for "sound" which simply refers to any type of random sound or meaningless noise which one might hear. Rather, it is, in the Greek language of the Scriptures, the word "phone" (See Strong's Concordance #5456; Vine's Dictionary under "sound" and "voice"), and is used for distinctive, meaningful sound.
Actually, the Greek word is most frequently rendered "voice," and is so rendered in the KJV well over 100 times. It is a word which refers tolanguage, speech, utterance, and saying, and that which has a distinctive sound which is understandable (see I Corinthians 14:7)

Also, it is even translated "voice" in John 3:8 in a number of Bible versions, including the American Standard Version, Wycliffe's, Young's, Darby's, English Revised Version, and Douay-Rheims.

The word "voice" in John 3:8 therefore equates to the Word of God in this context.

W. E. Vine points out that "phone" is translated in the King James Version in reference to the voice (1) of God, (2) of Christ, (3) from Heaven, (4) at the resurrection, (5) at the resurrection to judgment, and of course in John 3:8 where "voice" is related to the work of the Holy Spirit in the New Birth.Thus, when Jesus referred to the unseen work of the Spirit in the New Birth and compared it to the unseen wind and its "sound" (voice), He included a reference to the Word of God which is the instrumental means employed by the Spirit. One cannot "see" the Spirit do His work in the hearts of men, but one can hear the Word by which He brings men to conviction, repentance, and faith in Christ."

The foremost point to be made, as the subject of this post indicates, is that this view of John 3:8 is rebuked and contradicted in Chapter 10, paragraph 3 of the 1689 London Confession, entitled "Of Effectual Calling":

"Elect infants dying in infancy are regenerated and saved by Christ through the Spirit;10 who works when, and where, and how He pleases;11 so also are all elect persons, who are incapable of being outwardly called by the ministry of the Word."

The proof text provided by the framers of this confession for (11) is John 3:8. Manifestly, by the use of this proof text they believed that this text applied what they state of those "incapable of being outwardly called by the ministry of the Word". It is not the historic position of Old Baptists, therefore, that φωνή referred, in this text, to the audible sound of the preached word. The confession states quite clearly here that the elect that are incapable of being outwardly called are regenerated by the spirit alone. It affirms a spirit alone view of regeneration and not of Word clearly. Bob Ross and Stephen Garrett are not "Old Baptists", and I demand that Stephen Garrett change the title of his blog.

Moreover, the Greek word, φωνή, is erroneously asserted by Ross to refer in this text to physical sounds of the spirit in spoken language. John 3:8 is making a pun of both πνεῦμα and φωνή. πνεῦμα means both wind and spirit, just as 'phone' means both voice and sound. Just as the wind blows, the spirit effects regeneration.

The deductions Ross makes do not follow from the text because he inconsistently applies the analogy. A physicality of the spirit does not follow by the comparison to physical wind, does it? Or, why does he not believe the text proves the physical wind can regenerate? If a person accepts that the text is referring by analogy to the spirit, you cannot pick and choose which parts of the analogy you would prefer to accept.

The 'hearing' under consideration is in the context of the physical analogy in which the wind blows. The fact of the hearing of the wind is plainly used to refer to the fact that you cannot see the wind, not that a man's hearing of the wind is instrumental to the sense of the analogy. Again, making selective inferences from the physical part of the analogy to the spiritual is inconsistent and without foundation.

Lastly, in the physical analogy, the wind is the sound - it is clearly what is "blowing", just as in the spiritual, the spirit is the "voice" of God. The wind cannot be seen physically, it can only be heard and felt. It is the same with the spirit. Manifestly, if the gospel was instrumental to being born again, Christ would have stated this instrumentality plainly in verses 5-8.

Also, if this was the sense of this text, as Ross and Garrett want to understand it, certainly the sense in which, "but canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth", becomes a problem. Or is this part of the text plainly just referring to the wind again, mysteriously? On a fundamental level, if John was referring to gospel instrumentality in this text, then a person knows somewhat of "whence it comes" and "why it goes" because the gospel is the supposed necessary means.

Above all, the Baptists of England would have viewed this text in that manner, as they believed that regeneration was ordinarily by both Word and Spirit.