Married a Baptist

John Stott too i think. And the whole Reformed Episcopal church. I was in a hurry filling out the new member stuff. Just saw the Westminster and London Baptist Confessions. Didn’t see any 39 article type option. I just wasn’t taking it too seriously when I signed up. Didn’t even know if anyone would respond. Wouldn’t have guessed I’d get sooo many well thought out responses. The longer it went on the more I was greatful for their time, but wished I had been able to sign up as an Anglican. Odd experience. Calvinists are all business. I feel like the reaction was as extreme as if I was trying to harm the site or I was pretending to be a Christian but was really a Muslim.

 

Yeah, maybe they over reacted just a little. Maybe they were afraid you would inform on them as non-conformists. Or worse yet, you might be a Jesuit!

 

I agree with others that there was no need to be untruthful and I can understand the dismay of the other board members. But notice my word choice - dismay. What you have articulated is far beyond that, and certainly seems an overreaction in my opinion.

Calvinists, especially those that congregate in such places, do tend to very much be all business, and very confrontational. I look at it through the lens that they are following the maxim of "iron sharpens iron".

While writing this, I have found the board in question (Do not ever doubt Mag's ability to find stuff out. ) and I will confirm that yes, that is a hard core group and that they are very strict. That's their right. They also definitely seem to draw a bright red line between "reformed" and "Reformed". They state very clearly in their rules to not even bother registering if you are not Reformed. (Their terms are amazingly strict. That said, perhaps there is something to learn from them about the bounds of membership. ) They are upfront about it. So, in light of that, their reaction is...normal...for that board.

 

I signed up just to see what they would say about the issue from their perspective. All I knew was that a lot of them would agree with infant baptism. Now, knowing more about them, I couldn’t care less about their perspective. They are like a Christian Taliban. That’s not even an exaggeration. Literal Theonomic Reconstructionists there. Considering that they probably think I should have been stoned, I got off easy.
My fault for asking for advice from a group I didn’t understand...and yes, my fault for using CIA tactics to infiltrate them. That was silly. I’ll stick with my own tribe from now on.

 

Yikes. Was this PuritanBoard? Good Grief.

 

Yeah, PuritanBoard.

 

Just started reading, Radicalism: When reform becomes Revolution, by Hooker. Apparently the Reformed have a type that will unfortunately always be with us.

I say this not just because their reaction to my mistake was extreme, but by having looked more at the forum in general since then.

 

LOL PuritanBoard.

Do they try their members for witchcraft and allow, to some extent, spectral evidence, in the manner of Cotton Mather? Perhaps a century from now half of them will be Unitarians, and then two centuries further in time we will find PuritanBoard most curiously embracing in the grand tradition of the UUA neo-Paganism and so forth.

 

Indeed, in the early church we see this nuttiness among sects such as the Montanists, to which Tertullian was attracted owing to their dogmatic rejection of the forgiveness of sins comitted after baptism, and the Novatianists and Donatists who applied to their clergy a standard which is impossible, unless we were to accede to the Pelagianists, and there is a kind of disturbing Utopian Pelagianism in the Puritan movement.

By the way, I have on occasion seen advertisements for a “PuritanDrive” allegedly containing more than two gigabytes of Puritan tracts. I was and remain dumbstruck there is a market for such a product. And yet I’m the sort of man who someone like your typical ECUSA bishop would regard as a religious extremist.

 

Geneva became Unitarian by the 18th century.
One of the fastest ways of killing Christianity in a region is by it becoming Puritan and/or Presbyterian.

Looking forward to visiting, in 2050, the grand website, PuritarianBoard.