This is a very soulless image of a laager, but it was between this and the glorification of colonial slaughter of the Zulu, so I guess this is the second-most-soulless.
In South Africa, we refer to a certain variety of beer as lager. I don’t know what it is called elsewhere in the world. I know they have lots of varieties of beers in the UK, including lager I think, and they don’t make beer in the US. They just have Budweiser and the like. #lazyburn
But a laager is something else. It refers to a defensive wagon formation in which they would form a circle around the vulnerable like a wall, and defenders need only be posted at the gaps.* Laager mentality therefore refers to the tendency to get defensive about your ‘camp’ and to barricade your group off from criticism.
* (Wikipedia tells me that this is called “circling the wagons” in the US.)
In researching the stand-off between ‘camps’ on the matter of Christian baptism, I found that bad arguments are common from advocates from each camp—whether for the baptism of infants or of believers only. Yet, I was quite surprised that some of the best examples of fallacious arguments came from highly regarded biblical scholars, and all I can ascribe it to is the tendency for us to ‘retreat behind the wagons’ on controversial matters such as this—we end up defending our camp rather than honestly interrogating our own position.
For example, on the matter of immersion one such scholar insists that all NT references that hint at the mode of baptism imply full immersion, and that the word itself means ‘to immerse’. This ignores at least Mark 7, which says that the Jews “do not eat unless they wash (baptize). And there are many other traditions that they observe, such as the washing (baptism) of cups and pots and copper vessels and dining couches”. In this text, baptism is clearly a reference to ceremonial cleansing, and it clearly could not have been performed by full immersion each mealtime in the case of dining couches.
It also ignores that several paedobaptist denominations insist that even infants ought to be immersed in baptism, so even if this argument carried water it hardly solves the problem.
Laager mentality also cripples IVP’s discussion of baptism in their “Three Views…” format. In this book, key proponents of the two major baptismal positions (and one more minor one) present their positions and then each have an opportunity to critique one another’s view. These books can be a great way of being introduced to the main issues and to what is at stake, but it also forces the scholar to represent his team in the most typical way possible. In the case of the baptism debate, it really only perpetuates the same-old arguments that have failed to be persuasive for centuries, and serves to deepen the sense that it is a debate at an impasse.
Laager mentality makes for defensive and polarized discussions, and it means that really hearing one another or making room for new ideas are impossible. Troubled Waters aims at working out the baptism argument from its foundations, and finding a new route through an old problem. I hope that it can shed some light on the way forward in this debate.
The ebook of Troubled Waters is currently on promotion for free download here.
It can be printed on demand through Amazon (substantially less free) here.
LongWind 