What this is about
The author of this site heard these questions from members of a modern church. He paraphrased them from memory and asked that no one be named or guessed at.
- 1
How did the sacraments become mere symbols?
- 2
Did the early church not baptize infants?
- 3
How can we call ourselves a Protestant church if we do not agree with Luther on anything major? In fact, we make fun of Luther during sermons.
- 4
Did God really change his mind after almost 1,800 years?
- 5
Since when did being a Christian become about ‘me’ and not about Christ?
- 6
How can you redefine the term ‘born again’ after 1,800 years? If words can be dramatically redefined, then why have the written word at all?
- 7
How can we trust your personal revelation, especially when you use it to override the Bible and centuries of church history?
His thesis: “When a member of the congregation asks honest theological questions, Scripture tells the teacher to answer them, with sound arguments, gentleness, and respect. It does not tell him to ask God to remove the one asking. A teacher who makes new and extraordinary claims carries the burden of supplying the evidence for them.”
What this page is not doing
It does not name or describe any preacher or church. It does not claim to settle the long debates between churches about baptism and the Supper; it shows the evidence on both sides. It does not say whether anyone is a Christian, and it does not tell anyone whether to stay in or leave a church.
The short answer
- The case for silence uses real verses. Paul does say “foolish and unlearned questions avoid” (2 Timothy 2:23), and warns that “knowledge puffeth up” (1 Corinthians 8:1).
- Read whole, they point the other way. The foolish questions are genealogies and fables. The man “doting about questions” is the one who “teach otherwise” (1 Timothy 6:3–4). And the verse after “avoid foolish questions” says the Lord’s servant must be “apt to teach.”
- A church elder must answer. He must be able “by sound doctrine both to exhort and to convince the gainsayers” (Titus 1:9), and “ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh” (1 Peter 3:15).
- Scripture honours people who ask. Jesus asked questions in the temple at twelve. The Bereans checked Paul and were called “more noble.” Thomas was given evidence.
- Whoever brings something new must show his work. The faith was “once delivered” (Jude 3). Luther himself asked to be corrected from Scripture.
- All seven questions are fair, and they have answers you can check. On baptism and the Supper, the early sources are dated and clear; the opposite views became church teaching in the 1520s.
- The spider may be the teacher. Most of the questions repeat what the creeds and the Reformers already taught.
The case for silence, fairly stated
The full dossier gives the preacher’s side first, in seven arguments. Paul tells Timothy to avoid “foolish and unlearned questions” (2 Timothy 2:23) and Titus to avoid “foolish questions, and genealogies” (Titus 3:9). “Knowledge puffeth up” (1 Corinthians 8:1). “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (2 Corinthians 3:6). Paul condemns a man “doting about questions and strifes of words” (1 Timothy 6:4). Questions distract from evangelism, cause division, and may show a lack of faith.
Read each verse whole, and a pattern appears. The foolish questions are named: genealogies, fables, quarrels about words. “The letter” in 2 Corinthians 3 is the old covenant written on stone, not careful study. “Knowledge puffeth up” is about meat offered to idols, in a letter where Paul spends whole chapters correcting doctrine. And the man “doting about questions” is described in the verse before: “If any man teach otherwise, and consent not to wholesome words.” He is the teacher of a different doctrine, not the member asking about it.
“Foolish and unlearned questions avoid … And the servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient, In meekness instructing those that oppose themselves” (2 Timothy 2:23–25).
Idle question, or the faith itself?
Six topics. Which look like the “foolish questions” Paul names, and which touch the faith Timothy was told to guard? The first three are made up for illustration.
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Paul’s foolish questions are speculations and quarrels about words. The questions from the pews are about the sacraments, the gospel and revelation.
The teacher’s duty, and the people who asked
The New Testament writes the answer into the job description. A church leader must be “apt to teach” (1 Timothy 3:2); able “by sound doctrine both to exhort and to convince the gainsayers,” those who contradict (Titus 1:9); “ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (1 Peter 3:15). And teachers “shall receive the greater condemnation” (James 3:1): they are judged more strictly, not less.
Titus 1:9 gives the elder two jobs: to encourage, and to convince those who contradict. Both are done “by sound doctrine.” Neither can be done by silence, by mockery, or by a funeral.
Scripture is full of people asking questions, and every one is answered. At twelve, Jesus sat among the teachers “both hearing them, and asking them questions,” and they “were astonished at his understanding” (Luke 2:46–47). Luke wrote his whole Gospel so that Theophilus might “know the certainty” of what he had been taught (Luke 1:4). When Thomas doubted, Jesus said, “Reach hither thy finger” (John 20:27). Priscilla and Aquila took the eloquent Apollos aside and explained “the way of God more perfectly” (Acts 18:26). When the first Christians disagreed about circumcision, the apostles met, heard the arguments, quoted the prophets, and wrote their reasons down (Acts 15). And Luke calls the Bereans “more noble” because they “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so,” checking even Paul (Acts 17:11).
Does this answer meet the standard?
Six responses a pastor might give when a member asks one of these questions. All are made up for illustration and quote no one. Does each meet the standard of Titus 1:9 and 1 Peter 3:15?
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Who has to supply the evidence?
The saying “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is usually credited to Carl Sagan, who made it famous in 1980. The idea is much older; Laplace wrote much the same in 1814, and church writers used similar words in the 1700s. The Church held the principle long before: Jude speaks of “the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3), and Paul says that even if “we, or an angel from heaven” preached another gospel, it should be rejected (Galatians 1:8).
Around 434, a monk named Vincent of Lérins put it in a rule: hold “that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all.” He did not forbid growth. The faith may grow like a child into a man, he said, but it may not be “transformed into something else.”
The Reformers accepted this test for themselves. At Worms in 1521, Luther asked anyone able to “expose my errors, overthrowing them by the writings of the prophets and the evangelists,” and promised to recant if shown wrong. The Augsburg Confession of 1530 claimed that nothing in it differed “from the Scriptures, or from the Church Catholic.”
When a teacher says the whole Church misread Scripture for fifteen centuries, he is making the extraordinary claim, and he must show his work. The member who notices that the teaching is new is making an ordinary one.
The seven questions, briefly answered
Tap a question to open it. The full dossier gives each one five tabs: Scripture, the early Church, when it changed, the other side, and your verdict.
1 · “How did the sacraments become mere symbols?”
Jesus said “this is my body” and “this is my blood … for the remission of sins” (Matthew 26:26–28); Paul calls the bread “the communion of the body of Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:16). Baptism is “for the remission of sins” (Acts 2:38). The earliest writers agree: Ignatius (about 107) and Justin (about 155) call the Eucharist the flesh of Christ, and Justin says converts are “regenerated” in baptism.
A largely symbolic view was taught by Berengar in the 1000s, who was made to recant. It became the teaching of whole churches only in the 1520s, with Zwingli in Zurich. At Marburg in 1529, Luther chalked “This is my body” on the table and would not move. Even Calvin rejected “bare signs.”
The other side: Jesus said “do this in remembrance of me,” and some early writers, like Tertullian and Augustine, used the language of “figure.” But none set the figure against the reality.
2 · “Did the early church not baptize infants?”
Whole households were baptised in Acts (16:15, 33), and Peter said “the promise is unto you, and to your children” (2:39). By about 246, Origen wrote that the Church had received the practice “from the apostles.” Around 253, a council of sixty-six bishops under Cyprian was asked whether to wait until the eighth day; they said not to wait. Nobody asked whether.
The other side: no New Testament verse names a baby being baptised, and Tertullian (about 200) advised delay. But his advice assumes infants were already being baptised. Rejecting infant baptism as invalid began in Zurich in January 1525.
3 · “How can we call ourselves a Protestant church if we do not agree with Luther…?”
The name comes from the Protestation at Speyer in 1529. The next year the Augsburg Confession said children “are to be baptized,” condemned those who reject it, and taught that Christ’s body and blood “are truly present” in the Supper. Luther’s Small Catechism says baptism “works forgiveness of sins.”
The other side: “Protestant” was never only Lutheran, and today it often means any Western church that is not Catholic or Orthodox. Fair, but the Reformed confessions also kept infant baptism and rejected bare signs. A church using the name should say what it means by it. Mocking Luther, to whom such churches owe their open Bibles, is harder to explain.
4 · “Did God really change his mind after almost 1,800 years?”
“I am the LORD, I change not” (Malachi 3:6). “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever” (Hebrews 13:8). God did reveal new things, such as welcoming the Gentiles (Acts 10), but through Christ and his apostles, in public, before the faith was “once delivered.” A reversal through a modern teacher fifteen centuries later is a change in the teaching, not in God.
The figure checked: about 1,800 years fits “born again”; for the sacraments it is nearer 1,500.
5 · “Since when did being a Christian become about ‘me’ and not about Christ?”
“He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). “We preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord” (2 Corinthians 4:5). Faith is personal (“who loved me, and gave himself for me,” Galatians 2:20), but “for me” points to what Christ has done. The worry is the reverse: Christ as the means to my purpose or success. See Dossier 50 and Dossier 63.
6 · “How can you redefine the term ‘born again’?”
Jesus said “born of water and of the Spirit” (John 3:5). Paul speaks of “the washing of regeneration” (Titus 3:5); Peter says “baptism doth also now save us” (1 Peter 3:21). Around 155, Justin quoted John 3 to explain baptism. The Creed of 381 confesses “one baptism for the remission of sins.” For about seventeen centuries, “born again” meant baptism.
The new birth as a remembered moment, separate from baptism, grew through the revivals of the 1700s and 1800s. The label “born-again Christian” went public in 1976. And the member’s sharper point stands: if key words can take new meanings, the written word protects nothing (Deuteronomy 4:2; 2 Peter 3:16).
The other side: Calvin read John 3:5 as about the Spirit, not baptism, and 1 Peter 1:23 ties new birth to the word. But even he did not make it a remembered decision.
7 · “How can we trust your personal revelation…?”
“Though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel … let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8). “Try the spirits” (1 John 4:1). Even a prophet whose sign comes true is rejected if he leads people away (Deuteronomy 13:1–3). The early Church tested prophets by whether they had “the ways of the Lord” (the Didache), and rejected Montanus’s new revelations.
The other side: Scripture does say “despise not prophesyings” (1 Thessalonians 5:20). But the very next verse says “Prove all things.” A revelation that overrides Scripture removes the only standard by which it could be tested.
What silencing does
A question met with mockery or threats does not go away. It goes quiet. And everyone watching learns something: the teenager learns that the faith may have no reasons; the new believer learns that questions are risky here; the quiet member who had the same question learns never to ask it. “He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him” (Proverbs 18:13).
Six questions you can ask in your own church:
- When someone asks a theological question, is it answered from Scripture?
- Is it answered with gentleness and respect?
- Is the person asking treated as a brother or sister, or as a threat?
- When a teaching is new, does the teacher say so and show where it came from?
- Is the teacher willing to be examined, as Paul was by the Bereans?
- Could a teenager ask “Did the early Church baptise infants?” and get a real answer?
What does this prove?
It is easy to claim too much for this argument. Six claims. Does the argument show each one?
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Check it yourself
Five things. The first takes ten minutes. The last is the one that matters.
- 1. Read 1 Timothy 6:3–5 and 2 Timothy 2:23–26. Who is “doting about questions”? What must the servant of the Lord do?
- 2. Read Titus 1:9 and 1 Peter 3:15. What must a teacher be able to do?
- 3. Read Justin Martyr, First Apology 61 and 66 (free online at New Advent). How did Christians around 155 describe baptism and the Supper?
- 4. Read Acts 15 and Acts 17:10–12. How did the apostles handle a dispute, and what did they think of people who checked them?
- 5. One question. Do this one. Write down one question you have never asked in your church. Ask it, gently, of someone whose job is to teach.
- 68 · Kill the Spider? Praying for the death of those who disagree.
- 01 · When Were You Born Again? Baptism and the new birth, from the apostles to the altar call.
- 26 · Does God Play Dice? “Everywhere, always, by all.”
- 30 · Theology and Reason are Dead! Trust Me. Private revelation versus any public test.
- 34 · Warmed-Over Ashes? Disagreement met with evidence, not labels.
- 29 · Have You Abandoned Your Beliefs Without Meaning To? Outsourcing your faith.
The full dossier links to thirty earlier dossiers, grouped by thread.
Want the whole thing?
The full dossier weighs the case for silence with you, reads 1 Timothy 6 phrase by phrase, shows how eight questioners in Scripture were met, draws each teaching to scale across two thousand years, and opens all seven questions with dated sources and the strongest case on the other side.
Read the full dossier → Simple English →