Why is there no controversy in the New Testament about not baptising infants?

Kip Chelashaw forwards a question for Baptists.

And wouldn't you know, I have answers! 

Not short ones, but I thought it a good question which deserves a systematic response.... and so here you go: https://david.dw-perspective.org.uk/da/index.php/a-question-for-baptists-answered/

Make disciples, and baptise them

Peter Leithart is very, very, very clever. He's someone whose learning makes me feel that I need to return to nursery school and try again to see if perhaps next time I could reduce the distance between us.

One of the dangers, though, of being so clever, is that you can talk yourself into believing all kinds of things, which a lesser mind would never be able to accept because they're too preposterous.

Which brings us to this Tweet:

Baptize nations, Jesus says. That is: Do for all nations what Yahweh did for Israel at the sea.

Chosen nation status isn't here cancelled, but universalized, as one people after another is incorporated into the chosen nation, each receiving a new political identity by baptismal death and resurrection, each called to its unique historical vocation.

Concerning the grammar of the Great Commission "make disciples of all the nations, baptising them in the name", much ink has been expended (and if we're going to expend ink on anything, I can think of few better places, so no complaints there!). How do these clauses correlate? Are the nations baptised and then discipled? Must one be a self-conscious disciple to be baptised? Are the disciples called out from the nations, or do nations each themselves become some sort of corporate disciple, nationally brought under the tutelage of Christ?

As with many such questions, the grammar can actually bear more than one construction, and the syntax isn't finally determinative (even whilst we can argue about which is the more natural or likely meaning)....

.... but on the other hand, what the disciples actually went out and did in response to this command is recorded in great detail and is as plain as the proverbial pikestaff. And no less plain is what they then instructed those disciples to carry on doing, and also what they entirely omitted to ever make mention of in their teaching.

So plain, that only someone very, very clever and very decided upon using that cleverness to believe and uphold a doctrine that appeals to them, could fail to register. (It's somewhat akin to arguing about Jesus' words to Peter, "upon this rock I will build my church" - if by this, Jesus was telling Peter about an unbroken line of universal pontiffs based in Rome, succeeding from him to all generations, then Peter never afterwards appears to have known anything about it, and that stubborn fact remains no matter what you can argue that the better syntax-level understanding of the words is or isn't).

The New Testament has a nation in it. That nation entirely supersedes and relativises all other nations. The kingdom of God is not a collection of nations, beginning with the apostate 1st century Israel and then one-by-one progressively assimilating one more nation at a time; and if it were, it has not yet begun, if the New Testament's teaching about discipleship means anything at all. The New Testament's actual teaching gives no countenance to the fever-dreams of some post-millennial theonomic Presbyterians, who hold that once your nation is covenanted, it's always covenanted, end of - and nations never really cease to exist, or come into existence, so there's always an ever-growing number of covenanted nations. The New Testament explicitly and directly redefines the meaning of nations. There are the old nations, which are passing away. They still exist as this old age still endures, and they certainly still have much relevance to our lives; but they are nevertheless passing away. (Analagously: my marriage to my wife endures and is deeply important, notwithstanding my membership of the bride of Christ - it will continue until death do us part, and nothing about Christ's espousal to his eschatological bride can reduce the importance of this relationship in the here and now; and yet, at the same time, human marriages are already passing away, from the New Testament's viewpoint - 1 Corinthians 7:29-31). The kingdom of God is the one nation that will remain, and it exists where there are real disciples of Jesus, who have been born again of his Spirit and are then pass through baptism as individuals and who now belong to his glorious Body. Other nations are around: but also already fading.

If Jesus was telling his apostles to assimilate old-order nations, one-by-one, into his kingdom, as the constituent parts of his kingdom, then they utterly misunderstood, failing to either do it, or tell anyone else to do it, or explaining a theology that would ground it. More than that, they were false teachers, who openly, clearly and pervasively taught in its place a new theology of nationhood that was simply wrong, because Jesus was actually still asserting the old theology of nationhood.

Peter Leithart is very clever. This is a great gift. But his postmillennial/theonomic beliefs, on this subject, have blinded him to what the New Testament does straightforwardly and explicitly and pervasively teach, both at a doctrinal level, and in terms of what program the apostles of Jesus actually implemented.

(So note, in the screenshot above, John is correct, not specifically because of the syntax, but because of the New Testament's sufficient and authoritative record of what was actually then done and taught by the apostles).

Christians' children are worse off if not baptised during infancy?

"Those who claim that Hebrew infants should be circumcised, but that ours should not be baptized, make God more gracious to Jews than to Christians." - Peter Martyr Vermigli (Commentary on Romans, chapter 4 verse 11)

This is, of course, an archetypal supporting argument within circles that teach infant baptism for children of believers. And on the surface, it has an immediate plausibility: if Jews' children received the sign of welcome into the covenant family, then why would Christians' children no longer possess that sign? Has this privilege been withdrawn from them?

It is, however, not truly an argument at all. It is not an argument, but a re-wording of the conclusion. It is a statement that only follows if the actual argument has already been accepted. If the actual argument has not already been accepted, it does precisely nothing to advance it.

How so? Lying behind the statement is the belief that circumcision and baptism are not only divine ordinances with similarities as well as differences, but are fundamentally and essentially the same thing. Any differences are of strictly limited import and finally of no real weight in any practical matter, for they are both "the outward sign of the covenant of grace", signifying and sealing the recipient's membership of that covenant.

And note there that another concept has been admitted which must be viewed in a certain way, in order for that equation to work: there must be a "covenant of grace", and this covenant of grace cannot merely be a unifying concept for understanding God's overall plans throughout salvation history. It is absolutely required that all actual historical covenants (or, at least all those after the fall) found in the Bible, again, despite all their differences, are in the end found to be essentially the same thing, and these differences all found to be of no final weight or import. All Biblical covenants in history do not simply flow from, reflect or advance the purposes of the covenant of grace.... rather, they are "administrations" of this covenant of grace. Note specifically that what cannot be the case is that the New Covenant is the one actualisation in history of an eternal covenant, i.e. the New Covenant is "the covenant of grace" with all the preceding covenants being entities that should be approached firstly upon their own terms, whilst still being intended to ultimately reveal, lead to, and having a deeply important underlying continuity with it. That position (i.e. the Reformed Baptist position) is not enough; all covenants must fundamentally be the covenant of grace. There is really, in practice, only one covenant, under different names and times. The signs and outward accompaniments may change, but the covenant is always one and the same. Jews and Christians must, at the root of it, be the same thing: members of the one-and-only salvific covenant. Again I repeat: we are not talking here about underlying unity, but of to-all-intents-and-purposes identity.

Only then, if all this is accepted, can you speak as Peter Martyr does. Only then can we say that the immediate offspring of a descendant of Abraham according to the flesh before the coming of Christ has received "more grace" than an infant born to believing Christian parents, if the former (assuming that it's a male child) is circumcised on the eighth day, whilst the latter is not sprinkled with sacramental water. But as I say: that's actually the thing to be proved. In and of itself, "but then that means God has been less gracious to Christians than he has been to Old Testament Jews!" is not any sort of argument. It is merely the re-statement of the thing to be proved, but using different words. And as such, in all honesty, it ought to be struck out of the canons of paedobaptist argumentation. It has no actual content that is specific to itself. It simply re-labels the other, real arguments. It is not a supporting sub-argument: it is merely the begging of the question.

The sometime fantasy land of paedobaptist apologetics

Baptists who are Baptists by conviction (i.e. not simply by default, but who have taken the time to seek to understand and analyse paedobaptist arguments), will be aware that a good number of paedobaptist arguments effectively exist in their separate universe. They convincingly refute arguments that either nobody made, or if they did, they are a representative not of a serious or representative attempt to argue that baptism is intended for those who profess faith, but of some off-the-cuff comment that nobody would mistake for a serious argument, of the kind dealt with when seeking to get the best version of an argument.

Of this sort are arguments like "Baptists are Baptists because they are hyper-individualists who see the kingdom of heaven as following the American dream, but we paedobaptists believe in the community of God's people", or "Baptists believe that the Old Testament is a failed plan, but paedobaptists believe in the continuity of God's plans and people throughout the ages" or "Baptists think the church began with revivalist preachers preaching in tents in the 19th century", and such like over-simplifications. Well, fine, if someone does believe that, then do refute it, but please can you do so without the "Baptists believe" prefix?

Of this ilk is Douglas Wilson's recent blog post, "The Grace of All Forgiveness".

It opens: "Some have argued that baptism should be withheld from infants and children because they think it a sign, not of inclusion in Christ, but rather as a sign of ordination—as a sign of taking on the mantle of service for Christ."

Really? Who argued that, and where? Baptism is not a sign of inclusion in Christ, but solely of being appointed to serve him? And this is a viewpoint found significantly amongst Baptists?

Again, perhaps "some" have indeed argued this. But the suggestion to people that this is a representative or common viewpoint, or that recognising that "Baptist is a sign of inclusion in Christ" is a belief that leads one towards paedobaptism, is absurd.

I invite my paedobaptist friends to leave the fantasy land of what they too often tell themselves round in circles concerning the strange things Baptists believe, and to read some serious works of Baptist apologetics instead. Then we can mutually discuss our beliefs, and endeavour together to understand which more accurately represents the mind of the Lord.

Expanded covenant privileges

I was interested to read here, Derek Thomas's reasons for switching from a credo-baptist to a paedo-baptist position.

I have not yet ceased to be amazed at how routine it seems to be that when a credo-baptist changes his convictions, he also loses his ability to accurately describe the Baptist position. Derek Thomas is a professor of theology. Does he really think that "they shall all know me because every member of the church has made a profession of faith" is the Baptist understanding of Jeremiah 31? Amazing.

But the thing that struck me was his first point on why he ceased to be a credo-baptist:

My inability to convince someone like Simeon that the New Covenant was “better” than the Old in relation to children.

This is the 'expanded covenant privileges' argument. If children were covenant members and had covenant privileges before the coming of Christ... then should the coming of Christ leave them worse off? Is that progress?

I was struck by this because in the same week, a pastor in my class at Bible college made the same point - in a rather different context. This being Africa.

The context was discussing of the health-wealth-prosperity (false) gospel.

Under the Old Covenant, the Israelites were promised that they'd be the "head and not the tail" (Deuteronomy 28:13), etc. If they were obedient to the law, then prosperity would belong to them. The land would flow with milk and honey. There would be peace. They would be rich. Their enemies would lick the dust. Etcetera.

Since all of God's promises are "yes and amen" in Christ (2 Corinthians 1:20), then how can this not be so - more so - under the New Covenant? Has Christ left us worse off?

Every competent paedobaptist believer could answer that question straight away, of course. We need some nuance. We need to ascertain God's purposes in how his dealings with man were structured before Christ came. We need to evaluate properly the blessings we have, then and now. A simple "you had it then so you have it now" argument is crude and we need to be better Bible students than this. And so on.

The point and its implications are clear, I trust, as they apply to the discussion regarding baby baptism. I presume that Dr. Thomas wouldn't feel obliged to take up the health-wealth-prosperity heresy if he were unable to persuade someone like, say, Solomon that it really was better to take up the cross and follow Christ. But the difference between the two arguments ultimately amounts only to special pleading. Either 'expanded privileges' needs nuancing, or it doesn't; whatever the context is; can't have your cake and eat it.

"Presumption and sacrilege"

Tomorrow I'm preaching (God-willing) on Mark 10:13-16 - "let the little children come unto me".

Some paedobaptists have found in this passage an argument for paedobaptism. Ho hum. And amongst that number is John Calvin, whose boots we would not be fit to polish... but who was not infallible, and in his commentary on this passage states, in direct application to those who don't baptise infants, that "it is presumption and sacrilege to drive far from the fold of Christ those whom he cherishes in his bosom, and to shut the door, and exclude as strangers those whom he does not wish to be forbidden to come to him."

This conjures up an interesting mental image of what Calvin (and other paedobaptist writers who've run the same line) supposed Baptist churches to be like.

Here in Eldoret we run children's clubs (had a holiday one this week, and the weekly one this afternoon), have spent some weeks to train our Sunday School teachers, teach the catechism, teach songs, teach the Bible day in and out in family worship, have had special meetings to press parents' duties upon them, and arrange the Sunday School to be before the service that the children can all be in the sermon.

But in Calvin's mental universe, it appears that it is actually of the essence of the Baptist position to be halting the service when we see children approaching, chasing them far off down the hill, and bolting the door in case they dare to show their faces again!

Ha ha! The key is in Charles Spurgeon's famous sermon title: "Children to be brought to Christ - not to the font". Regular Baptists don't actually leave their children in the parking lot when they go to church, and therefore Jesus' rebuke of the disciples in this passage does not neatly transfer over to an anti-Baptist application; unless you believe in sacramental regeneration, i.e. in literal "Christening" via the water. Notice that when Jesus insisted the infants were brought to himself, according to the Scriptures, he prayed for them - exactly what Baptists do; he did not baptise them or perform any other sacramental ceremony, and it is ridiculous special pleading to insist (as even John Murray does in his book) that Jesus words' necessitate we do what Jesus never did.

Galatians, circumcision and infant baptism again

I want to further elaborate on what I said last week about Galatians, circumcision and infant baptism. Consider these near-closing verses of the book:

15 For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation. 16 And as for all who walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God. 17 From now on let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus. (6:15-17, ESV)

The evangelical paedobaptist insists that the "sign and seal" of the New Covenant is baptism. As a Reformed Baptist, I assert to the contrary, that it is conversion and the receiving of the Holy Spirit - that circumcision has been fulfilled in heart circumcision and sealing with the Spirit not in another outward sign.

I judge that the whole tenor and direction of Galatians has been to make this insistence. I find it incomprehensible, from a paedobaptist assumption, that Paul could have omitted in the entire argument to explain the role that baptism allegedly has as the New Covenant equivalent of circumcision, when the whole problem in Galatia was Judaisers wrongly insisting that Christians need to be circumcised. But I think Paul actually spells out what he believes quite clearly. There are no outward marks that have significance for delimiting who is a true Christian or not (and here I'm particularly contradicting Douglas Wilson et al's "Federal Vision" theology which especially insists on Trinitarian baptism as the delimiter of those who should be considered Christians, in the same way that wedding rings mark those who are married). What counts, as the mark of the New Covenant, I read in verse 15, is the new creation - that you have become a new person. i.e. reality, fulfillment.

These people, Paul calls the "Israel of God" - i.e. the true Israel, the Israel that really counts. A paedobaptist can point out that Paul does not explicitly say, "of course, I am hereby excluding believers' infants, where they are not yet actually a new creation by conversion." But such a statement would be redundant - Paul has just said that being a new creation is what counts to get you into the authentic Israel. He no more needs to explain that this is also required of infants than he needs to explain that it is required of Gentiles, slaves or circus clowns.

I find verse 17 even more telling. In it Paul is saying, "Well, if you are going to absolutely insist on some outward mark to prove your Christianity - then I have it here: I am persecuted and beaten". (That Paul is speaking in context about marks of persecution, not about "stigmata" or some other mark is made clear by the context - see 5:11 and 6:12). The Judaisers gloried in their circumcision as the bodily mark showing their covenant status; Paul said that no outward mark mattered, only the cross of Christ (6:14) and we should glory only in that - but if you must have one, it is persecution for the gospel's sake which proves that we belong to Christ.

Again, Paul does not add "and of course, it is not baptism that is the covenant marker!" But why would he need to? Once he's told us what the marker is not, and what it is then what more explanation is needed? Why should he be forced to explicitly address debates that had not arisen in his day?

In my opinion, these kind of considerations are conclusive once you allow Paul to speak for himself, instead of trying to read him against the backdrop of paedobaptism as an assumed theological system.

New Testament Circumcision

It took me a while, compared to some other issues, to decide that the New Testament definitely takes a Baptist position (as opposed to a paedo-baptist position). This was because many/most of the old books (by the Reformers, Puritans and other historic Protestant Evangelicals) who had been my guides and teachers were written by paedobaptists. The other problem was that I did not know many convinced Baptists.

One of the major factors in convincing me was study of the New Testament passages which directly and intentionally address the relationship between Old and New covenants, and their ordinances. I came to believe that a good deal of the theology specifically supporting paedobaptism is constructed out of special pleading which read out of other passages on different issues. Why was the theology not being built out of these passages which are on the very relevant topic, I wondered?

Enough history. I'm teaching Galatians 5 this week at Bible college, God-willing, and it contains an example passage (verse 5-6). (There are several in Galatians):

5 For through the Spirit, by faith, we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. 6 For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love.

One question which I think every evangelical paedobaptist should be troubled by from Galatians is to Paul's complete silence on the belief that, supposedly, baptism is the New Covenant replacement for circumcision. Circumcision was the sign of being one of God's covenant people before Christ came, and baptism is afterwards, so they say. This has a kernel of truth in it, of course; nobody is denying that Jewish males were circumcised and that Christians are baptised. But when faced with the Judaising heresy in Galatia and the sight of many Christians at least considering being circumcised for their justification, would not the simple observation that circumcision is unnecessary because we are now baptised have gone a terribly long way? Seems like a killer argument to me - and yet Paul never seems to even approach it. The belief that "the sign was changed, the significance remained the same" I cannot recognise as one that Paul held. That's why he never thought of this argument; it was not actually consistent with his beliefs. Circumcision and baptism have overlapping, but essentially different - not the same - significance.

If you look at those verses above, then if you read them with paedobaptist glasses on you may see nothing to challenge you - we all agree that circumcision is not significant in Christ, and that we by the Spirit wait in faith. So what? But I believe that verses like this are very significant if you instead take of the glasses and try to read the verses from a more neutral point of view - not asking whether you can assimilate such words into your system, but which system of thought would be naturally more likely to produce such verses. Paul in these verses, I believe, is expressing consistently with a Baptist point of view that the Holy Spirit who works by faith, hope and love in an individual is the essential sign of the New Covenant. In other words, that the New Covenant is an era of fulfilment in reality - not just in the coming of Christ, but in the membership of God's people and in what fundamental, essential realities characterise them. We do not have to wait until heaven for the true people of God to be only those who love Jesus, even whilst fully conceding that "false brethren" will worm their way into churches. Today - not just in the future - all the merely outward (being a Jew, being circumcised, etc.) is of no value, because now that Christ, the reality has come, the external scaffolding that existed before his coming is taken down.

Again I concede that a convinced paedobaptist can give an explanation of these verses that does not imply any of this. But that's not my point or argument here. My point is to ask which reading of these verses is more consistent with the direction and contours of the letter as a whole, and all its various statements on the significance of circumcision and the relationships between the covenants. It was asking those questions about Galatians and the rest of the New Testament that were major factors in my becoming a convinced Baptist.

Here's a quote from the "Preacher's Study Papers" by Grace Baptist Mission (intended for preachers in the third world) making the same point:

In these verses Paul does not put baptism as the New Testament equivalent of the Old Testament circumcision ceremony It is not biblically correct to say we must now baptise the babies of Christians because the Old Testament Jews circumcised their babies. According to Paul the New Testament equivalent to the Old Testament sign of circumcision (to show a person to be one of God's people) is the possession of spiritual faith, hope and love. That is one reason why Baptists baptise only believers who by their faith show that they are God's New Testament people.

Baptist churches, membership and the Lord's Supper

Historically Baptist churches have had to wrestle with the question of believers who don't follow Baptist teaching and yet who become, or want to become, involved with the church in some way. Of course this is not a new problem - churches of every persuasion have to wrestle with this. It's not an easy problem and the number of potential variations on the issues that may come up in practice can be almost endless. Here's something I penned in trying to explain the broad range of options and positions to a friend that may be of use to others also...

Some [Baptist churches] are the "strict Baptist churches"; their practice is that you must be baptised as a believer to become a member, and only members of the church (or visitors who are members elsewhere) can take the Lord's Supper.

Then there are the "open communion" Baptist churches, which have "strict" membership, but allow anyone who professes faith to take part in the Lord's Supper. i.e. non-members are welcomed to the supper.

Then there are the "open membership" Baptist churches, which insist that the church's teaching and leadership will always be Baptist, but that sincere believers of different persuasions should not be kept outside of the membership.

The "strict Baptists" can say that they are trying to follow the Bible's teaching on baptism and membership most closely (the Bible teaches believer's baptism and that the Lord's Supper is a privilege for members who have made themselves subject to church discipline).

The "open communion" Baptists can say that they have a Baptist church and so maintain Baptist doctrine, but avoid excluding true believers of different opinions from fellowship. (On their bookshelves Strict Baptists have heroes of the faith that they learn from, but would not actually sit down at the Lord's Supper with them - but would say that those people were excluding themselves by not following the Biblical path).

The "open membership" Baptists think that church membership should not be more difficult than salvation (both strict and open communion Baptists have to admit that there are godly, obedient people going to heaven who yet cannot join their churches - and perhaps those people are more obedient and useful than those who are members!), and so whilst Baptist doctrine is taught and required for leaders, it is not made a test of membership and fellowship. (Though members are required never to contradict the taught doctrine - it is a Baptist church, not a choose-your-own doctrine church!).

I think that William Carey was a strict Baptist, Spurgeon was an open communion Baptist, and John Bunyan was an open membership Baptist.

Personally I think there should be a distinction between what the church teaches, and what individual members have so far managed to understand and apply. I think that to require that the members should have maturity in every area of belief before they can join is not right. Should baptism be made absolutely compulsory so that nobody can join the membership at all without agreeing, yet if they fall into error in other areas (e.g. working on Sunday, or poor family relationships) it is a matter for us to address as it arises within the membership? Is a correct understanding of baptism more fundamental than all of the other areas in which our members can fall short? Is it a heresy such that they must be kept outside the church like as if they were believing salvation by works or anti-nomianism?

An edifying debate

In the last few days I listened to a debate on the subject of infant baptism between two American Reformed pastors, Dr. James White (Baptist) and Dr. Bill Shisko.

It was edifying, and very useful for clarifying each's position. You can get the MP3s here I believe (I think I paid for them somewhere else but can't remember now):

http://www.opcli.org/display.php?id=15

I thought that Pastor Shisko applied an unworkable hermeneutic in his interpretation. His main argument was that the Old Testament required such-and-such, so that if we don't find this-and-that in the New Testament, then we should assume the infant baptism position by default. I thought that Dr. White's continual pointing out that this hermeneutic is not the one that Reformed believers consistently use in other areas was right on target. Listen to it yourself to see if you agree...

The New Covenant And Believers' Baptism (part 7)

(Part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six).

In this installment, we finish our review of Dr. Field's first post. Here's how he ends:

Abstraction. This all brings home that the idea of the NC in 3. above is an abstraction from the (true) doctrine of God having a certain and decreed invisible big-E elect.

8. There are, however, other ways of relating these realities. For example, let the OC [Old Covenant] = the historically observable manifestation of the CG [Covenant of Grace] pre-Jesus. Let the NC [New Covenant] = the historically observable manifestation of the CG post-Jesus. Then you are able at one and the same time to assert and understand the wonderful discontinuities between OC and NC (internalisation, internationalization, greater privileges, historical actualization, human maturation, intensive and extensive access, better motivation, greater permanence etc.) and to avoid the category confusion, disconnect, denial, and abstraction described above.

This is the same argument again, using different words. Dr. Field classifies talk of the elect as being invisible and intangible, then insists that such things can't be linked to historical covenants (which are visible). This, as we have observed, completely misses the point that there are visible fruits of election which spiritually minded and Biblically educated men are competent to make a judgment on. I think Dr. Field is one of the elect; his confession of faith in Christ, his many years labouring for the Lord, his conduct as testified to by other Christians and his godly standard of speech on his blog and so forth are not invisible. The hard and fast "election=invisible, covenant=visible" distinction that the whole argument is based upon simply doesn't work.

In fact, as a Reformed Baptist I don't have a problem with the supposedly alternative characterisation of the New Covenant given above, or see it as contradictory to the one given when viewing it from another angle. It is simply a false dichotomy that Dr. Field has set up to argue that the New Covenant can either be viewed as being made with the elect alone, or being the historically observable manifestation of the Covenant of Grace post-Jesus. Dr. Field is committing an equivocation fallacy upon the words "historically observable", which he through the assumptions of the Federal Vision defines in a very nuanced way. Baptist churches aren't actually invisible - you can observe them at work, and we know that as a former Baptist Dr. Field must surely have observed some at some stage in his theological journey!

The New Covenant And Believers' Baptism (part 5)

Denial. At which point the only rescue for the antipaedobaptist use of the nature of the NC is to deny that baptism is really baptism for the non-Elect. They get wet but you deny that they have been baptized. They take bread and wine but you deny that they have taken the body and blood of Jesus. At this point you have a New Covenant which dips in and out of relationship with covenant initiation, the covenant meal, covenant blessings and covenant threats.

Dr. Field's point here is that there he (he says) a problem which arises for the Baptist (or, to use Dr. Field's own polemical choice of terminology, "antipaedobaptist"), because we've got to say what happened at the baptisms of those who later turn out not to be truly converted. If baptism is only for the elect, and if a non-elect person goes through with the ordinance, what did they receive?

This is a common Federal Vision argument, but I confess that it leaves me totally unmoved. To the Reformed Baptist mind it addresses a non-problem. Is it meant to be a word game of some sort? Someone was baptised, but not really baptised - ha ha, gotcha, a formal contradiction? Dr. Field says that this leads to a New Covenant which "dips in and out of relationship", so this does indeed appear to be what he is saying: it leads to ambiguity.

The assumption that Dr. Field and other antiantipaedobaptists are making here and which is driving the argument, is that baptism must do something. Whoever is receiving it, in whatever condition they are in, whatever they understand by it and whatever reasons they ask for it: it must do something. Otherwise it would just, so the thinking goes, be in itself an empty ritual which we can't allow: maybe something more for certain recipients, but in itself a nothing. The Reformed antiantiantipaedobaptist though, here says "why can't we allow it? What's wrong with saying that the false believer got wet but didn't really receive any of the benefits which a believer who approaches the ordinance with faith receives?" It becomes clear, then, that what's driving the argument here is an assumed sacramentalism. Again, I point out that Dr. Field doesn't argue from Biblical texts, but from certain constructions of what the Covenant and its signs must be, which he then imposes upon the case.  Maybe a case for that kind of sacramentalism could be made from the Bible, and then examined and evaluated. In this post, though, Dr. Field is simply assuming his conclusions at the outset without making the arguments.

The New Covenant And Believers' Baptism (part 5)

(Part one, part two, part three, part four).

Dr. Field continues:

Disconnect. It is clear, too, that any argument from the nature of the NC to the proper subjects of baptism is a serious non sequitur.

Why is that?

It is not that talk of big-E elect is irrelevant (it’s not irrelevant to know that God will infallibly, eschatologically save everyone he has Elected – it’s wonderful). But it is clearly impossible to aargue [sic] that baptism is only for NC members, IF those in the NC = big-E elect. We simply do not know who is in the NC if it is equated with the (post-Jesus) CG. It is soteriologically reassuring (as is the doctrine of Election) but covenantally un-usable.

This argument really repeats the argument already made in another form: the elect are only infallibly known to God - they are "invisible", and therefore if we say that the New Covenant is made with the elect we cannot then proceed to draw any conclusions about baptism because baptism is to do with the visible and tangible.

One problem in this argument is that Reformed Baptists do not leap straight from election to baptism in the arguments that they actually make. There is the intermediate step: there is visible and tangible evidence of election in a credible profession of faith. The "disconnect" only exists because Dr. Field appears to have confused Calvinistic Baptists with some varieties of hyper-Calvinism. Some hyper-Calvinists seek to require infallible signs of someone's election before baptism by asking for testimonies of dramatic internal experiences which are thought (by them) to prove election. I'd agree that this procedure is unworkable, because according to the Bible those who are elected come to faith in Jesus Christ, and faith is the essential New Covenant sign: not further experiences, whether in conversion or subsequent to it. It seems to be that in avoiding the mistake that many paedobaptist writers make in lumping Reformed Baptists in with dispensationalists, Dr. Field has driven into the ditch on the other side of the road by treating them as hyper-Calvinists instead.

The argument that Dr. Field makes here basically banishes election to the realm of abstract and practically useless. It's good, he says, to know that God will save the elect - but we can never really know who any of the elect are until we get there. I presume, though, that if we were talking about a different subject than baptism then Dr. Field would talk differently. Election is the root, but there are fruits which manifest themselves, and through which we can assure ourselves that we truly are recipients of God's grace. Yes, these fruits can be counterfeited and we can make mistakes in identifying them - but that's no reason to completely give up on the matter, as in the argument presented. If God has not infallibly revealed to us who the elect are, then what we do is to baptise those who give the evidence as far as God has explained it to us. We baptise when we see evidence of repentance and faith. We do not begin with election and then proceed to baptism. We begin with a credible profession of faith, and then proceed to baptism - and to election. Election does not come first; it can only be inferred from other factors, not made fundamental. Dr. Field's construction on things is a formulation known only to some small parties of hyper-Calvinists and a curious way for him to frame things.

The puzzling thing about Dr. Field's argument here is that he is a former Baptist and so ought to know better. Does he actually know of any Baptist churches which claim that they are infallibly identifying the elect when they baptise? Rather than just claiming that as far as it is given to men to know (which is not infallibly), they believed that those they were baptising were really in the faith? It seems rather unlikely that Dr. Field never appreciated this distinction - we are left wondering at what point he forgot about it?

Unusable?

What does Dr. Field mean when he says it is "unusable"? This is a key issue, because it illustrates how this argument is driven by the "Federal Vision" assumptions that Dr. Field holds to. Historically Presbyterians and other paedobaptists have not had a problem in saying that "the New Covenant is made with the elect, and their seed (children)". This formulation, though, is rejected by Dr. Field just as much as the Baptist one. Historically, paedobaptists have been happy to baptise adult converts (presuming they weren't sprinkled in infancy) when they have seen the evidence of sincere faith in Jesus, because they, like Baptists, have viewed this as the evidence that God has savingly worked in that person.

Dr. Field, though, is building his argument upon one of the premises of the  "Federal Vision": that the New Covenant must work like the Old one did, and in particular it must as easy to identify who is truly in the Covenant as it is to identify who is married and who isn't. The covenant must be "objective", to use their terminology. Anything else, it is asserted, is unworkable.

This assertion has no real basis in reality. To talk about something being unworkable is a pragmatic argument - you're saying it can't operate in the real world. Churches in the real world, though, have happily been operating in this way for many centuries. Churches have been baptising those who they thought were true believers, and later disciplining and eventually excommunicating them if the fruit of their lives proved otherwise. They didn't collapse when the first baptised person turned out to have been baptised erroneously, but they accepted that it is, during this period of the overlap of the ages, possible to counterfeit the reality of spiritual life. How is this concept unusable? Only if you've begun with the Federal Vision's premise that every covenant must be as immediately visible as marriage is. And if you've begun with that as a premise, then you're not really proving a case when you reject credobaptism - you're just arguing in a circle. That is what Dr. Field does. There's nothing exegetical in his argument - it does not come from Bible texts, carefully explained and applied. It simply comes from assuming at the outset that the Federal Vision's constructions are true, and then going from there. This may work if you're preaching to the choir, but it's not going to convince an outsider.

The New Covenant And Believers' Baptism (part 4)

(Part one, part two, part three).

Dr. Field writes that any attempt (e.g. as in baptism as carried out by Baptists who believe in the perfection of the New Covenant) to say that a person has evidenced themselves to be one of the elect is "category confusion". The category of the elect operates in the realm of the "(to us) invisible and inaccessible", in contrast to Old Covenant membership, which was "at the level of historically observable categories of which we have knowledge and for which we have moral responsibility".

This assertion, though, flatly contradicts Scripture. Dr. Field has theologised himself into a hole. The Bible writers did not hesitate to declare that (certain of) their readers were elect:

4 Knowing, brethren beloved, your election of God. 5 For our gospel came not unto you in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost, and in much assurance; as ye know what manner of men we were among you for your sake. 6 And ye became followers of us, and of the Lord, having received the word in much affliction, with joy of the Holy Ghost: 7 So that you were examples to all that believe in Macedonia and Achaia. (1 Thessalonians 1:4-7)

1 Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the strangers scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia,
2 Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ: Grace unto you, and peace, be multiplied. (1 Peter 1:2)

Notice that Paul says that he was assured that the Thessalonians were elect, because of the results he had seen from the gospel in their lives. Similarly, Peter after mentioning election then mentions one of its inevitable fruits - obedience. It was not to them an illegitimate category mistake to talk about election in relationship to distinct people; rather, because election is part of a chain that includes definite results (Romans 8:28ff), it was legitimate to call someone elect when those results are seen. Dr. Field's argument excludes this kind of talk, because he has denied that election belongs to the realm of the "historically observable" - as we've seen, via importing the pre-requisite of absolute cast-iron certainty. If, though, Paul and Peter were happy to say that their readers were elect, then it is no longer feasible to say that it is a category confusion to say that the New Covenant sign is only for the New Covenant members, i.e. those who give sufficient evidence that they belong to God's elect.

Dr. Field's line of reasoning would have been a gift to the opponents of Paul in his letter to the Galatians. They reasoned that it was necessary to have an outward sign, namely circumcision, to mark one off as one of the true people of God. Faith in Jesus Christ was not enough. Paul, however, insisisted that faith itself was the New Covenant sign, sufficient to establish one's relationship to Abraham (e.g. Galatians 3:7). Dr. Field, though, should for consistency's sake label this as a category error. Faith resides unseen in the heart - only God ultimately knows who has true faith in the Saviour and who does not. Circumcision, however, is an outward and demonstrable sign that is indisputable before all men. Paul completely overlooked to make the kind of argument that a Federal Vision proponent would make: that baptism was now the sign that proved the reality of one's covenant relationship and inclusion with Abraham, and so to insist on a second such outward sign, such as circumcision, was to ask for a repeat of what had already been done. Paul instead insisted that under the New Covenant faith itself, nothing more and nothing less, is the dividing line, and that nothing more was required. Hence Baptists, understanding this logic, identify as covenant members whose who have faith - not those who've been through some outward ritual, whether circumcision or baptism. I wonder if Federal Vision advocates realise just how much their logic sounds and works like that of the Judaisers when they insist that there must be a definite, this worldly ritual that allows us to infallibly identify those who are in the New Covenant.

To be continued...

The New Covenant And Believers' Baptism (part 3)

(Part one, part two).

Point 6. then leads Dr. Field to the statement:

7. And this way you have category confusion and disconnect and denial and abstraction.

i.e., at this point, by admitting point 6, you've fallen into all kinds of miserable mistakes. How so? Dr. Field continues:

Since we do not have access to the list of the big-E Elect, we also do not have access to the list of NC members (when those members are identified with the Elect by making NC unbreakable). It was possible to have access to the list of OC members because OC membership was objectively, historically identifiable to finite human observers: it related to things like circumcision and sacrifice and sanctuary access and self-labelling and prophetic address.

(It's worth pointing out that the terminology of "big-E Elect" only has relevance under Dr. Field's own scheme, because the Reformed Baptist teaches that under the New Covenant the distinctions amongst God's people have been abolished: there is no longer any concept of members who know the Lord and those who don't, of outward and inward Christian, etcetera. Either one is elected to salvation and manifests that election in saving faith, or he isn't, and that's it.)

So, Dr. Field observes that no mortal man infallibly knows who the elect are - and as a consequence, no mortal infallibly knows the actual members of the New Covenant. He then argues that this was different to the Old Covenant. OK - yes. If you observed Isaac's birth then you'd have no doubt that Isaac was Abraham's son and part of the covenant. When covenant membership is transmitted through the first birth rather than the second, it's easy to spot the members. This contrast, though, is not absolute and entire. A man could impersonate an Israelite and claim the name and identity of someone else written in the genealogies. His great-great-great-great-grandmother could have hidden the fact that she cheated and that her son was illegitimate, and that therefore the next ten generations were not allowed to enter the Lord's gathering (Deuteronomy 23:2). An excommunicated son and his covenant-belonging twin could leave the country, and the excommunicated one could return and take the place of his twin - would you know? Even when these things depend only upon physical and not spiritual identification, we still don't arrive at 100% certainty. This is an important point to note, because Dr. Field is going to make an argument that brushes it under the carpet.

This means that where NC members = the Elect then you have:
Category confusion. OC is identified and functions at the level of historically observable categories of which we have knowledge and for which we have moral responsibility. But NC, in this scheme, is identified and functions at the level of the (to us) invisible and inaccessible decree for which we do not have moral responsibility.

This paragraph makes a classic paedobaptist error, by making a sudden leap. Having observed that we cannot infallibly identify the elect (or under his terminology, the big-E elect), Dr. Field then leaps across a chasm and makes a conclusion based upon the idea that the elect cannot be identified at all - they are invisible and inaccessible. Faith, though, is not to be described bluntly as "invisible and inaccessible", and no Baptist of any stripe ever did so. Faith works - it results in fruit (this is the argument of the book of James). He who has the seed of God in him will love his brother, obey his Lord's commandments and avoid sin - this is the argument of the first letter of John. It is impossible for faith to not change the one in whom it has been worked. To describe it as "invisible and inaccessible" is ridiculous.

Notice also how Dr. Field has white-washed over the point I made above. The black-and-white distinction that he makes can't work. If the fact that faith can be counterfeited or if we can make mistakes in identifying it is allowed to over-ride the fact that faith can be seen and to put it into the category of the "invisible and inaccessible", then in the same way the facts that 1) one's genealogy could be faked and that 2) a man's circumcision could have been performed in one of the surrounding heathen religions rather than in Judaism ought, for consistency's sake, to be allowed to also place the Old Covenant into the realm of the invisible and inaccessible. Dr. Field's argument requires this black-and-white, all-or-nothing dichotomy - which can't be made to work in practice. In practice, paedobaptist churches, when faced with an adult convert from the world, look for signs that he has true saving faith. What else can they do? I often find that Federal Vision proponents seem to face two ways at once: they argue that Christians are identified by baptism, but then when it comes to baptism instead of baptising indiscriminately everyone who asks for it they then look for another qualification, and that qualification is... genuine faith! So it seems that, when faced with practical cases instead of theoretical discussions, they do understand that even though you can't peer into someone's heart and have to look for a "credible profession"; but when it comes to theological argument, that goes out the window and the most amazing statements like the above can be made instead.

Another major point is that this argument of Dr. Field's is entirely a priori. That is, it requires in advance of any Biblical revelation or any decision of God, that it is actually impossible for God to have a covenant in the present age with the elect, without him also revealing a list from heaven of who the elect are. It actually charges not that the Reformed Baptist position is contrary to Scripture, but that it is logically impossible in advance of any other consideration. This is a huge argument to make, and the logical leap that Dr. Field makes goes nowhere in terms of actually substantiating it.

To be continued...

The New Covenant And Believers' Baptism (part 2)

(Read the introduction to this series here).

We're beginning with Dr. Field's first post, "Covenantal category confusion, disconnect, denial, and abstraction".

I notice that Dr. Field pulls a polemicist's trick by, instead of using the normal label "Baptist", branding those who don't agree with his position as "antipaedobaptists". This is a well-known rhetorical ruse to make the person you're arguing against look bad: label his position negatively instead of using the self-description he himself uses - because in our postmodern age to be negative is to be bad, nasty, bigotted. This can often be seen in Internet apologetics: Roman Catholic apologists routinely call Protestants "anti-Catholics", Mormons call their critics "anti-Mormons" instead of accurately describing whatever they're positively advocating, and so on. I really doubt that when Dr. Field was a Calvinistic Baptist he chose to label himself as an "antipaedobaptist", or attended the "First Anti-Paedobaptist Church of <Wherever>". To make the point for my readers who aren't Baptists, do you ever describe yourself as an Anti-Baptist or have sermons in your church on "the Biblical doctrine of anti-Baptism"? Still, let's pass on. I'll just presume that Dr. Field feels he's on the back foot - that's OK!

My brother Dr. Field also makes a curious final comment in which he speculates about whether there really does exist anyone who reasons from the nature of the New Covenant to the legitimate subjects of baptism. Given that his posts are (as his students' own blogs show) a response to the lectures of a visiting lecturer, Dr. Tom Schreiner, who argued precisely that, this comes across as quite weird. Has Dr. Field never read any literature by "antipaedobaptists"? Did he read any when he was a Baptist himself (does this mean he adopted the paedobaptist position without researching the alternative)? In charity I must admit that I might completely misunderstand his final paragraph and what it's saying, but after repeated readings in the context it just comes across as strange.

OK. That's enough poisoning the well now (another polemicist's ruse!). What of the actual substance of the post?

First of all, Dr. Field sets up his terms (Old Covenant, New Covenant, Covenant of Grace), and the contrast which Reformed Baptists will often make between the New Covenant and what went before it. The New Covenant is (so say these Baptists) an unbreakable covenant: one of its greatest glories is that Christ is a perfect Mediator who infallibly ensures the eternal salvation of all those on whose behalf he Mediates. He is actually in the presence of God having finished the work of sacrifice once and for all - and nothing he requests on behalf of those who are under his Covenant headship can fail. (This is me expanding a bit - Dr. Field just highlights the unbreakable versus breakable nature). The Old Covenant had members who were ultimately damned because of the imperfection of that Covenant; the New Covenant will not have any such members.

This leads Dr. Field to this observation, following from the RB (Reformed Baptist) premises about the above matters:

6. But now, in effect, you are making the NC to be identical with or a manifestation of the CG (in a certain period of history, i.e. post-Jesus).

I can only think that Dr. Field had a mental slip here unless I've majorly misunderstood something; does not every Reformed Christian - everyone who holds that there is such a thing as the Covenant of Grace - whether Baptist or not, hold that that the New Covenant is the manifestation of the Covenant of Grace in present history? What else would be - is there some other covenant presently operative? I'm presuming this is a slip - that Dr. Field did not mean the "or", but just to say that "you are making the New Covenant to be identical with the Covenant of Grace (in a certain period of history, i.e. post-Jesus)."

That in itself would be acceptable to Reformed Baptists, as long as an unintended nuance isn't put on "identical". The Covenant of Grace has, we hold, been fully, finally and perfectly revealed in the New Covenant. Previous administrations were preparatory and partial - the New Covenant is glorious and complete. It has a perfect mediator, a perfect sacrifice, a perfect revelation, perfect promises, and so on. There are no glories of the CG which remain hidden to be revealed or actualised in a future age. Previous Covenants were mixed in nature or partial in efficacy or extent; the New Covenant is not, but is completely efficacious towards all the elect of God (who are alive in its days, that is).

Point 6. then leads Dr. Field to the statement:

7. And this way you have category confusion and disconnect and denial and abstraction.

i.e., at this point, by admitting point 6, you've fallen into all kinds of miserable mistakes. How so? Next time...

The New Covenant And Believers' Baptism

It seems that recently Dr. Tom Schreiner visited Oak Hill College in London, and some of his lecture material provoked blogged responses from supporters of the "Federal Vision" theology on the staff and in the student body of the college. In particular, they have been responding to the argument that the New Covenant is an unbreakable covenant - and therefore (by consequence) is a covenant made with the elect alone, and that therefore (by consequence) church membership and baptism are privileges for those who can give a credible profession of faith.

Lecturer David Field has put up six posts so far, though without mentioning Dr. Schreiner, here:

1. Covenantal category confusion, disconnect, denial, and abstraction
2. New covenant and antipaedobaptism
3. New covenant and antipaedobaptism (2)
4. "Our rule in adminstering of sacraments"
5. "Our rule in adminstering of sacraments" (2)
6. Covenant and election again

Plus in the midst of another post, this extraordinary comment in the context of the UK's parliamentary bill on human cloning and abortion: "More pointedly, what's the relationship between a church which excludes children from the life in the covenant and a nation which excludes the unborn from life in the world?" (here - the answer isn't spelled out for us but we assume that he raises the question because he thinks that the relationship is a strong one).

Dr. Field seeks to address what the Calvinistic Baptist typically feels is his strongest argument for baptising only those who give a credible profession of repentance and faith: the nature of the New Covenant as a perfect covenant in which Christ saves to the uttermost all those who come to him, unlike the Old in which many, though rightful members of the Covenant, yet fell short of actual salvation.

I'm glad to see this kind of interaction, because as I've commented before, it's all too typical to find that when infant baptists seek to argue against the Baptist position, they seem to hone in on refuting dispensationalism as if the two were one and the same, which leaves the Reformed Baptist profoundly unimpressed. The inevitable "answers to objections" sections in books written in favour of infant baptism rarely seem to touch the actual objections that a Calvinistic Baptist will have. So it's good to see an attempt to counter some actual arguments which those in the camp I'm in actually use - one of the values of actual face-to-face interaction with someone like Dr. Schreiner I suppose.

So, in a new series of posts I plan to review the arguments which Dr. Field and his students present. Stay tuned!

A critical evaluation of paedobaptism

Since I've had a couple of posts about infant baptism lately, here's a link to Professor Greg Welty's booklet:

"A critical evaluation of paedobaptism"
http://www.founders.org/library/welty.html


See also Stan Reeves' FAQ:

"FAQ on the Reformed Baptist View of Baptism"
http://www.eng.auburn.edu/~sjreeves/personal/baptism_faq.html


From the year 1659 but still relevant:

A Short Catechism about Baptism by John Tombes, B.D. (1659)
http://www.reformedreader.org/ccc/tcat.htm

Answers to some questions about baptism

Jam Cary was kind enough to read my response to his thoughts on paedo-baptism:

1. http://jamescary.blogspot.com/2008/01/baptising-of-infants.html - Jam's original article
   
   
2. http://mothwo.blogspot.com/2008/02/reply-to-paedo-baptist-brother.html - my reply, part one
   
   
3. http://mothwo.blogspot.com/2008/02/reply-to-paedo-baptist-brother_06.html - my reply, part two
   

In between tending to his own new little one, Jam asks some good and necessary questions:

I would be interested to know your views on what you do with your own children? At what age would you baptise them? And would you consider them Christians before that baptism? How would you know there [sic] profession was genuine? And if you baptised them and then rejected their faith as an adult, would they still be a member of the Elect? You are of course more than welcome to ignore all of those questions!

My answers...

Thanks Jam. The big question which I think is tying all of this together is the question of how we consider the New Covenant - what it is, who is a member (and how that relates to being one of the elect) and the link between membership of the New Covenant, the church and its ordinances. When talking about infant baptism, this is often tied up with the question of how the New Covenant relates to the Old, and how all the other subsidiary bits (the link between Old Covenant membership, membership of the nation of Israel, reception of its ordinances, etc.) changes or doesn't in coming over to the New.

Presbyterian writers such as Doug Wilson tend to emphasise continuity - infants were members of the Old Covenant, received its sign (circumcision), etcetera - and because God's has only essentially one people and not two, we would expect, unless there's been some radical change in the nature of infants, that this would be the case under the New Covenant also. The alternative seems unthinkable - that under the New Covenant God has become less generous, and now tells our infants to hop it until they're a bit more mature.

Baptists like myself have tended to point out that this argument is made fairly inconsistently - Presbyterians have historically generally excluded infants from the Lord's Supper, for good, Biblical reasons. They make sound arguments about the discontinuity with the arrival of the New Covenant with its emphasis upon personal faith and the second birth over against the Old Covenant with its hereditary membership relying only on the first birth which, if they were applied to baptism as well as the Lord's Supper, lead to the Reformed Baptist position. This argument though doesn't work against Pastor Wilson and other Federal Vision advocates, because they've taken the other fork in the road, and actually do argue for paedocommunion.

>From the Reformed Baptist point of view, though, this increased internal consistency in the paedobaptist positions comes at the cost of decreased consistency with the statements of the New Testament on the relationship between the covenants and the nature of the New Covenant. It also leaves behind a good deal of inconsistency in other areas. Presbyterians feel no difficulty in arguing that the physical territory promised to Abraham was a type and shadow of the spiritual inheritance actualised under the New Covenant, and ultimately realised in the new heavens and the new earth - so that no promise of the land of Palestine is given to us living here and now. Israel doesn't belong either to natural Jews or to Christians; the promise was a temporary one; a piece of the scaffolding as the house was being built. The house itself is much more glorious and the scaffolding gets taken down. The kind of Presbyterian argument that goes "look - these littles ones have had their privileges taken away unless we baptise them!" can be made for the Lord's Supper, and also for the land promises - and is invalid in all three cases. Wilson has increased his consistency by adding the Lord's Supper to baptism, but hasn't yet gone the whole way and argued that we must have the land promises as well otherwise our New Covenant privileges are less than the Old Covenant ones.

What this is leading to is this. Under the Old Covenant, Abraham's fleshly children were admitted to the covenant family and received its signs and privileges, but this was merely part of the scaffolding whilst the house was being built. Now that the reality - Christ - has come, the scaffolding gets taken down. The New Covenant is viewed by the (Reformed) Baptist as an era of fulfillment and reality; Abraham's children are those who share Abraham's faith, whether they have some fleshly relationship to anyone else in the Covenant or not. All such distinctions of the first birth - whose family we were born into - were temporary and abrogated.

The New Covenant, then, is truly made only with the elect - those who'll end up in heaven. Nobody will be in heaven merely because of who they were born to, but because they were actually in union with Christ. We live during the period of the "overlap of the ages" - the "already and the not yet". Christ has brought in all that he intends to bring in - but it's not yet been received in all of its fulness. What this means is that the church now is intended to be composed of those who are truly united to him, but because we haven't arrived in the eschaton yet, it still admits some who ought not to be in it - those who are amongst us, but not of us (1 John 2:19). Reformed Baptists see this line of thought as being explicitly taught in the New Testament,  Hebrews 8 being a particularly striking example, comparing the temporary and breakable nature of the Old Covenant with the permanent and unbreakable nature of the New:

6 But now hath he obtained a more excellent ministry, by how much also he is the mediator of a better covenant, which was established upon better promises.
7 For if that first covenant had been faultless, then should no place have been sought for the second.
8 For finding fault with them, he saith, Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah:
9 Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt; because they continued not in my covenant, and I regarded them not, saith the Lord.
10 For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord; I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts: and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people:
11 And they shall not teach every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for all shall know me, from the least to the greatest.
12 For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.
13 In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old. Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away.

 
All the members of the New Covenant "know the Lord". It was part of the imperfection of the Old that some (many) of its members actually didn't share Abraham's faith, only his physical descent - they had to be evangelised and exhorted to know the Lord truly, not just outwardly. The New Covenant, though, is made only with the elect.

This means, then, that those in the church who don't truly "know the Lord" are not true members of the New Covenant - not true Christians - whether they be baptised, eat the Lord's Supper, or not. They are those who John says are in the church, but not of it (1 John 2:19). Because we cannot see into a person's heart and know whether their professed love to Christ is the real thing or not, we have to admit people to the church on the basis of their profession of faith - whether it is credible or not. If they live exactly as they lived before they professed to know Christ, then their profession is doubtful. If they live differently, then it is creditable, and we baptise them. We might turn out to be wrong, and our error might only get discovered on the day of judgment.

At this point I've contradicted the scheme of the Federal Vision several times, though I've agreed with historical Presbyterianism as far as it deals with adults. My beef with historical Presbyterianism is that it says that there is a different set of rules for children - they belong to an "external" or "secondary" phase of the covenant, until they have faith (that's an oversimplification and many will disagree, you'll have to pardon me!). My beef with the FV is that whilst it says that the rules are the same for children and adult - they both become covenant members upon baptism - it gets the nature of covenant membership wrong.

That's laying the foundation which I hope will make my answers to your questions more intelligible...

I would be interested to know your views on what you do with your own children? At what age would you baptise them? And would you consider them Christians before that baptism? How would you know there [sic] profession was genuine? And if you baptised them and then rejected their faith as an adult, would they still be a member of the Elect? You are of course more than welcome to ignore all of those questions!

I agree with Doug Wilson that a Christian is the same as a member of the New Covenant. However, I disagree with him by saying that a member of the New Covenant is the same as a member of the elect, someone who is in saving union in the Lord Jesus Christ through his death and resurrection and who will hence persevere to the end.

The same standard is to be applied to children as to adults, namely that they evidence the reality of their relationship to Christ by showing the hallmark of New Covenant membership - faith. That is, that they have received and believed the gospel, and rested on the Saviour who it is all about.

Now, the difficult bit of course is that faith, as expressed by a little child brought up in a Christian household, will look a bit different to faith expressed by someone who used to, as Wilson would say, ride with the Hell's Angels. In one it's more likely to be more like the gradual flowering of a plant, rather than a radical shift from darkness to light. The question then becomes more about how to identify and encourage infant faith, avoiding the twin dangers on the one hand of squishing it by failing to support it and treating our children like heathens (!), or on the other hand preventing it from developing properly by encouraging presumption - telling our infants how they're elect, going to heaven and saved, just because they said a few words about loving Jesus just to please mummy or daddy.

This is a difficult balancing act I think, and the main thing we need is lots of patience and trust. God uses means - faithful Christian parents - to bring little ones to faith. I understand the desire of Christian parents to define their children into a specially privilege category (covenant youth, presumptively regenerate, or even actual Christians through baptism), but what we actually need to do is just exercise patience and trust, and allow time for the reality to show itself.

I can't lay down any hard and fast rules about age, as the child's own level of understanding and development and own personality will all play a part. Baptists are vulnerable to the charge that we deny our children the benefits of baptism and church membership - means which are meant to help them grow - but we're tied up to this by our understanding of the New Covenant. We appreciate that the sphere for Christian growth is inside the church and not outside of it and so are eager to see them baptised if and when they can give a credible profession of faith relative to their age - but it's not as if we leave our children in the car-park on Sunday's and tell them that they can't come in until they show us they're elect. They get the teaching and admonition too. It's only a sacramentalist theology that makes actual eating of the Lord's Supper essential for every stage of Christian growth that can insist that we're making a mistake.

I might well suspect that my children are Christians a good while before being baptised, and be cautious about baptising them prematurely. I see this as a lesser danger than giving them false assurance, because their initial expressions that they love Jesus may just be that they want to please their parents by saying so. I'd like to see the evidence of dislike of sin and true remorse when caught in wrongdoing before I have confidence that they're really sorry over their sins and not just saying so because they know it's the right thing to do.

What I'm saying is that there's no neat and packaged answer. When is a little one's profession of faith credible? We all agree that it can't be credible at age 1 month, as all they can say then is "gaa". We all agree that by 10 or 12 or whatever the reality ought to be visible (and I've seen it in many younger than that; I was converted at 7). So, at some point they cross the line from one to the other - but there's no one-size-fits-all answer for all of them. Raising children is tough - as I'm sure you're already appreciating!

How do we know their faith is genuine? We don't, any more than with an adult. We don't, contrary to the caricature in many paedobaptist books, baptise upon the belief that we have an infallible knowledge that their faith is genuine, any more than we do with an adult. We baptise on the basis of a credible profession, just as paedobaptists do with their adult converts. It's just that with little ones there are several more complicating factors for working out this credibility, and for some of the little ones they're not yet up to making a profession that could be weighed and judged by the church, even though their faith may actually be geniune, saving faith and if they die tomorrow they will certainly be with the Lord Jesus. (I'm not discussing the subject of infant salvation here, BTW!).

And if you baptised them and then rejected their faith as an adult, would they still be a member of the Elect? I'm not too sure I understand this question! (Who's doing the rejecting? Me or them?). In general, though, Baptists understand the real members of the New Covenant to be the same as the elect. A person who apostatises is evidencing that they were never really in the New Covenant at all - though of course they may repent, in which case they'll demonstrate that they were. I find no Biblical evidence that Pastor Wilson's analogy with marriage - a public covenant with lists so that you can work out exactly who is in and who isn't - is the correct understanding of how the New Covenant works. It makes no allowance for statements such as John's, about those who were with us but not "of" us - on Pastor Wilson's understanding the two are one and the same up until the point where we break covenant and leave.

Whew! Hope that wasn't too long.

A reply to a paedo-baptist brother, continued

Part two!

Infants and Children, continued

4. Once you can swallow point 3, a lot of James' other concerns melt away. Look at it this way. My PB baptise adults. They do so on what standard? On the standard of a credible profession of faith. Therefore I know that the PB understand this concept, and have thought about how to apply it - in fact, I know they have.

What gets me, though, is how those same PB seem to forget all about this idea when the question of splashing the babies comes into play. It suddenly seems to become a very difficult and unworkable concept - so difficult that it's better to adopt the paedobaptist position. James writes a bit about this in his points 4 through 6. "I'm not sure that Adult 'conversion' is the norm. In post-Christendom Britain, it may be - but globally and historically, this is not the case. We've all read wonderfully exciting tales of conversion like 'Run Baby Run' and 'The Cross and the Switchblade'. But this is not a normal conversion story. The New Heavens and New Earth will be packed with people who grew up in Christians homes, were raised as Christians and could not pin-point a single moment at which they became 'a Christian'." Amen, Hallelujah - I am almost one of those people (I can pin-point the moment I was converted), and my wife is another (she fits the description exactly). This, though, has diddly-squat to do with chucking water over the babies. James is setting up a false dichotomy: either we must all believe that everyone is converted in Run Baby Run fashion, or we must get infants wet. I don't accept this dichotomy any more than I accept that the Baptist case is proved by showing that Roman Catholicism is mistaken.

Argument from Silence

5. James makes a rather novel argument from silence. "If we read what the debates of the New Testament times are, the debates are whether Gentiles, and their households, should be circumcised. The idea that infants should be neither circumcised nor baptised was not even considered. And was assumed by Christendom for the next 1500 years. (See Wilson for more on this. It's excellent and very persuasive)". I think that James found Wilson excellent and persuasive here because he was already persuaded. I can only conclude this because I think that Wilson was at his weakest here when analysed critically.

a) Granted that infant baptism as a practice has an impressive pedigree from the 4th century until present times (the evidence from before the 4th century being much less impressive), the key point becomes this. Until the 16th century, the argument for infant baptism was not the one that was used from then onwards. I mean this: Douglas Wilson's argument for infant baptism is as much as a theological novelty as the Reformed Baptist one is, give or take 50 years. His own route to paedobapism is travelled even less in the times before the Reformation that the Baptist route. If, in fact, the Presbyterian case is correct, then the Presbyterian has just as stiff a task on his hands as the Reformed Baptist. It seems more plausible to me to believe that the church introduced a wrong practice in baptism and hence had to search for an argument to justify it than to believe that the church carried on an apostolic practice in baptism but completely forgot why and instead invented bogus arguments for it (baptismal regeneration, washing away of original sin (Augustine), etcetera) - the true, covenantal argument not being recovered or even mentioned in any clarity until a millennia later.

b) Is brother James aware that the form of the argument from silence here which he finds so compelling is precisely the same one used by Rome to justify a whole range of practices of its own which have no backing from early church history? The reason why the New Testament and the church for many centuries since was completely silent about the use of images, veneration of Mary, purgatory, etcetera, is because these things were completely assumed and not even questionned until the Protestant Reformation - so they say. The silence on them is there because if we weren't so "dull" in reading the Bible, we'd see, allegedly, that these things are all a perfect fit with the Biblical theology and so people wouldn't even bother asking questions about them. Wilson uses exactly the same argument to explain the Bible and church history's silence on the covenantal argument for infant baptism, and I find it no more convincing in one case than t'other. In both cases, though, the argument is actually pure bunk. From the very earliest days some very fundamental questions were being asked; even in Biblical times heretics were teaching that the Christ hadn't come in the flesh and hadn't died on the cross (2 John) or even that justification was not by faith alone (Galatians) - to argue that something as subtle as the covenantal argument for paedobaptism was absolutely assumed without question by everyone is thoroughly ridiculous. I found this the weakest part of James' post.

c) James needs to ask why the early church was debating circumcision. It was not doing so because it was talking about some kind of covenantal continuity. The context of these debates has little to do with the angle that Wilson comes from. Circumcision was the hallmark of Judaism. Everybody in the debate - whether Jew or Gentile - knew and accepted that. The question was must you become a Jew to become a Christian. The answer is that the New Covenant hall-mark is descendency from Abraham by faith, not by physical birth. Nobody even imagined that Christian baptism should belong to those who descended just by physical birth. Wilson has made a very weak argument from silence which comes from importing his own set of ideas about the covenants into the context. I think it's brilliant rhetoric here for Wilson to find the complete absence of his own doctrine from Scripture and history to be a point in his favour, proving the dullness of his brethren who disagree - but the rhetoric is not matched by the substance.

d) What brother James needs to note is that Paul never made the "killer" argument that a modern Presbyterian would do in the circumcision debates - namely, that baptism had replaced circumcision as the sign of the covenant. Let's play this out:

Judaizer: You Gentiles are second-class Christians - or maybe not even Christians at all!

Gentile believer: How so?

Judaizer: You're not circumcised! Don't you know that the family of Abraham carry the mark of Abraham - circumcision? You're not circumcised, so you're not a proper member of his family!

What does Paul say at this point? Is it...

a) The paedobaptist answer: that the mark of Abraham is now baptism, not circumcision. The sign has changed, though the inner reality and meaning of the two signs is the same?

Paul: You dullards! Don't you know that circumcision is redundant because we baptise our babies now?

or is it...

b) Something else? Does he talk rather about the necessity of faith and the insufficiency of a mere fleshly relationship to Abraham?

Paul: "For you are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus." There is no continuation of the verse "or by being born into the covenant family", or anything in the letter or wider Pauline writings analogous to it. It just isn't there.

The real and accurate argument from silence, then, is to notice the absence of a) or any equivalent argument from the New Testament. Paul's explanation of the inner continuity and administrative discontinuity of the covenants simply didn't move along the same lines of Wilson's Presbyterian position. The silence does speak of a weak argument - not of the dullness of those who don't follow Pastor Wilson's theology. Paul rather accepts the argument that circumcision is in fact distinctively Jewish, and argues that the defining mark of New Covenant membership is not Jewish works, but faith. Once you see that, we can no longer say as James does that "[Quoting the Baptist:] The New Testament doesn't say that you should baptise your infants! [Responding:] This is how dull we are to God's word." because the New Testament makes the defining mark of New Covenant membership crystal clear. It's everywhere. Are clowns elibible to join the church? Yes, as long as they have the mark of faith. How about people with one leg? Yes, as long as they have the mark of faith! How about children? Yes, as long as they have the mark of faith. It's not because Baptists are dullards that we stumble here and fail to recognise what the silence is saying. There's no need to explain what happens in the special case of clowns, people with one leg, or infants - because Paul's already told us what the distinguishing mark is 100 and more times.

The Jews were members of the then administration of God's covenant because they were Abraham's offspring - according to the flesh. Believers today are members of the presently active administration of God's covenant because we are Abraham's offspring - we have faith. The babies of believers, though, are a strange half-breed - they neither descend by the flesh from Abraham (unless Jewish!), nor do they possess faith (or at least, unless we're told in advance like John the Baptist, we have no grounds on which to know that they do). Their parents have faith, and their babies descend by the flesh from them - but this was a valid criteria for receiving the covenant sign neither in the Old Testament nor in the New. It's a Frankenstein stitching together of both.

To become, or because we've already become?

6. Earlier on I recommended that my PB brethren read more books commending paedobaptism so that they can spot the differences. James says, "Does baptising someone 'make them a Christian?' It makes them a member of the God's covenant people [sic]." From my reading, I don't believe that this is the majority Reformed Presbyterian (henceforth RP) position either now or in history, but it is the Anglican position. (I think that James is an Anglican, but Wilson is a Presbie). Historically, RPs have normally argued that things work the other way round: You baptise because your babies are (so they say) members of God's covenant people and hence they are entitled to the covenant sign - not because baptise has the power to make them members which they weren't before.

Wilson's take on this matter is tied up with his "Federal Vision" theology. We can't really go into one much without going into the other. I don't want to do that here -perhaps later. I'm just flagging this up, though, because I want to encourage my PB to look at some of these "fault-lines" in the various arguments presented for paedobaptism more critically. When I did so, I began asking questions like - "Well, OK - so let's look at this. How do these guys expound the relevant Scriptures to show either that they baptise to bring about membership, or that they baptise because membership already exists?" When I did so, I started to find that the arguments were beginning to look a lot more insubstantial that they at first appeared.

Finishing Up

OK, there we go. That's enough to be getting on with.

Final thing: read a writer who's written much more cogently than I have. If you can't get something from the shop of the Reformed Baptist Academic Press, then Google for Greg Welty's "A Critical Examination of Paedobaptism". It's a masterpiece for brevity and clarity, and I look forward to the day when paedobaptist books will interact critically with something like Welty's position rather than being satisfied merely to refute dispensationalism and then strut around as if the job were done.

No offence to my dispensational brethren - maybe we'll have a chat later! :-)