Into the Church or Into the Visible Church?

Rob Rayburn (in his closing argument in the Leithart trial) stated: "Baptism is a means of grace. It brings a person into the church, the family of God as the Confession itself says."

Actually, the Confession says "Baptism is a sacrament of the new testament, ordained by Jesus Christ, not only for the solemn admission of the party baptized into the visible Church ... ." There is an important qualifier there: "visible."  It is a merely external admission.  But is that what Leithart teaches?  Or does Leithart affirm that all those who are baptized have more than a merely external union with him?  The Federal Vision Joint Statement (which Leithart signed) seems to suggest the latter in its section on apostasy.

-TurretinFan

Does Allah Commit Shirk by Inappropriate Swearing?

David Wood has a video in which he makes the point that using Muslim standards, Allah himself would be guilty of the Islamic sin of shirk:

I would like to add a brief further point. People normally swear by something greater than themselves. Thus, because there is nothing greater than God, the true God swore by himself: Hebrews 6:13-16 For when God made promise to Abraham, because he could swear by no greater, he sware by himself, saying, "Surely blessing I will bless thee, and multiplying I will multiply thee." And so, after he had patiently endured, he obtained the promise. For men verily swear by the greater: and an oath for confirmation is to them an end of all strife. But Allah in the Koran repeatedly swears by lots of other things. May I encourage my Muslim friends to consider that perhaps this is evidence that the Allah of the Koran is not real, for if he were real he would swear only by himself. -TurretinFan