Books Which Changed My Mind

Memories from my days when I was becoming Reformed and working in the Christian Bookstore industry

The next in the series: Books Which Did Not Change My Mind

I don’t remember when I first read Arthur Lewis’s short monograph on the presence of evil in the millennium—it was sometime during my journey from dispensationalism to Reformed amillennialism. But I’ll never forget how the force of Lewis’s argument finally struck me. The presence of evil in the millennial age was a serious error and the fatal flaw in all forms of premillennialism (whether historic or dispensational). Ignore this unintended consequence as they might, it is—and remains—the Achilles' heel of premillennialism. If evil is present on the earth during a millennial age after Jesus returns to raise the dead, judge the world, and usher in the new creation, then people must somehow pass through Christ’s return in natural bodies with sinful natures and repopulate the earth in a manner completely contrary to Jesus’s words in Luke 20:34–36.

After Lewis’s book clinched the deal and I became a full-fledged amillennarian, I began incorporating his arguments into my Academy lectures on the end times. I have expanded upon his thesis in my published work ever since. I was pleased to learn that Wipf and Stock has reprinted The Dark Side of the Millennium. The Dark Side of the Millennium.

I was still a credobaptist during my student days at Westminster Seminary in California, but I was finding my views on baptism increasingly difficult to defend. My professors—especially Bob Strimple (himself a former Baptist who ended up in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church)—patiently answered my questions. He had gone through the same struggle I was enduring when he had been a student of John Murray at Westminster Theological Seminary.

He related how one question had kept him up at night. Murray had asked him, “Bob, is the new covenant a better covenant than the old covenant?” “Of course,” he had replied. Murray pressed the point: “If the new covenant is a better covenant in your view, how can that be when the old covenant included children, and your view excludes them?”

Strimple was not initially impressed with Murray’s question. He explained his reaction to Murray’s challenge: “Well, that’s not a biblical argument, even if the logic of it is correct.” But the question kept waking him up at night and troubled him enough to motivate him to go back and wrestle with the biblical arguments for infant baptism—arguments that Murray’s question was designed to force him to consider.

Eventually, I found myself in the same place Strimple had been. The one thing that kept me from becoming a paedobaptist was the lack of a direct biblical command to baptize the infants of believers. Enter Geoffrey Bromiley, and his book, Children of Promise.

While in seminary, I continued managing the family’s Christian bookstore. One day, I saw this volume in the William B. Eerdmans book catalogue and decided to order it. Bromiley was a five-sola Anglican, so I trusted he would do his best to answer the question from both Scripture and the larger Reformed tradition. Interestingly, he did not appeal to the usual Reformed/Presbyterian writers I had been reading (like the aforementioned John Murray). In this case, that was actually helpful—it was a different voice than I had been hearing.

Bromiley did two things that brought me much-needed clarity. First, he made a compelling case that the absence of a direct command to baptize believers' children did not nullify the biblical teaching requiring the practice. The witness of the Old Testament, and the way in which New Testament writers interpreted that witness, clearly provided sufficient grounds—and even a necessity—for baptizing the children of believers. This aligned perfectly with the covenant theology I was also beginning to embrace.

Second, Bromiley addressed all those nagging worries I had about whether infant baptism was merely a carry-over from Rome—something that had not been properly reformed during the Reformation. This concern lingers, I think, in the back of every credobaptist’s mind (especially those with fundamentalist or evangelical roots) when they consider infant baptism.

Bromiley’s work did not produce an immediate conversion from my credobaptist views. It took some time before I finally embraced paedobaptism. That moment came when I heard a noted evangelical pastor claim that baptizing infants was merely a Roman Catholic doctrine based on nothing but mere superstition, and was to be rejected.

That did it. I embraced infant baptism because Geoffrey Bromiley had made the case from Scripture and had exposed the a-historical nature of such credobaptist claims.

In the years since, a number of helpful books introducing infant baptism and explaining its biblical basis have been written. Here’s list of books which I recommend. What Should I Read to Learn About Infant Baptism?