Infant baptism requires two separable doctrines of descent in the Old Testament

The ground covered so far 

Recently (essay, follow-up), I've been examining the Reformed (covenant) argument for paedobaptism, and conclusions from the claim that the New Testament is silent about the revocation of covenant membership for the infants of believers, when that is a subject that we would have expected to generate controversy and debate.

I've argued that the claim itself is incorrect. The New Testament contains numerous passages, self-consciously controversial, which directly contradict an expectation that under the New Covenant relationship to the Messiah can or would pass by hereditary descent.

The reason why paedobaptists overlook these passages (for they do overlook them, generally not including them for discussion at all in their analyses of relevant material in their arguments) is because of how they define how the debate ought to, according to their presuppositions, be carried out. Because the debate is not carried out in that way, thus they effectively define these passages out of existence. Specifically, they require the passages to be explicitly framed in terms of one-generational descent from covenant members (from believers) to their infants; passages discussing physical descent from Abraham are overlooked. They assume that the Old Testament's "infant inclusion" is in in terms (if we speak in terms of primary concepts, i.e. the self-conscious focus of the subject) of "the infants of covenant members" rather than in terms of "descendants of Abraham". Because they do not find such passages, they then assert that this is because the concept which they find in the Old Testament has carried over, unaltered, uncontroversial, universally accepted.

Two separate concepts? 

Noting and describing this helps us to shed further light on the precise nature of the paedobaptist error. The paedobaptist - intentionally or not, consciously or not - has asserted that the Old Testament has two separable teachings about covenant descent. That is to say: for the paedobaptist, in effect (i.e. whether he explains or even realises this or not), in the Old Testament the patrilinear descendants of Abraham via Jacob are covenant members by virtue of that descent; but also the infant offspring (at the first generation) of covenant members are also covenant members. You may be thinking "isn't this precisely the same group of people?" Yes, it is (we bracket proselytes, who are treated as de facto descendants of Abraham). And that is precisely the problem.

So: when we come to the New Testament, we have the various passages which intentionally, directly and explicitly deny that those of Jewish descent are ipso facto members of the New Covenant, the great renewal and fulfilment effected by the Messiah. These are the passages I discuss in my essay. John the Baptist, Jesus, Paul: they all directly deny that mere Jewish descent is enough to qualify you as a member of the New Covenant: you must have faith in Christ to be a child of Abraham. You must be born again. Reformed paedobaptists are aware of these passages; they read them, they understand them, and they agree with what I just said.

What they don't do, however, is allow that the same passages have any relevance to the status of the infant offspring of believers (whether Jew or Gentile). They will say things like "such passages are discussing adults, who are developmentally capable of faith in Christ; infants are not in view; thus they have nothing to say about infants, to whom a separate category of entitlement applies". (Or there are a few who will instead argue that we are taught to, perhaps presumptively if not actually, believe that infants of Christians actually have saving faith, in some prototypical form - but that is problematic when the claimant has also conceded contradictory claims about the New Testament's silence - which, after all, is the question we are responding to; it also is a doctrine that calls for wholesale revision of the Reformed doctrine of what saving faith is).

The implications of this claim, this denial of relevance, is that Jewish descent and descent as an infant from a covenant member, are two separable concepts. They are so separable that one can be entirely, explicitly abolished (via Messianic fulfilment, if we wish to be precise!), whereas the other can carry on, entirely untouched, not having even been mentioned or in anyone's mind because it was so uncontroversial. And yet, as we have already noticed, the people affected up until this point were entirely the same group of people. The infants of Israelites were Israelites. 

The thing to notice here is that the claim of "uncontroversial and complete continuity" relies upon this separation. In turn, then, this relies upon this separation, this conceptual distinction, being actually taught in the Old Testament. It cannot be argued that this separation is actually taught in the New Testament, because the claim is of perfect continuity supported by complete New Testament silence. So, the Old Testament must give us passages in which it explains that infant covenant membership has a two-fold aspect; one is from Abrahamic descent, the other is from descent from one's immediate parents, and that these two are separate claims such that one can remain whilst the other falls away.

An unreasonable demand 

It is quite evident, of course, that this demand is ludicrous and absurd. A false distinction has been introduced. A splitting of a single concept into two which has no real basis in the relevant Scriptures has been made. The two concepts are only one. Thus, when one is changed, fulfilled or abolished in whatever, then so is the other. The denial that membership by descent in the nation of Israel means participation in the Messiah under the New Covenant is the same thing as denial that the infant children of covenant members are already covenant members by virtue of their descent. The latter way of putting things, focussing on infants and parents is, as I argued in my essay, simply a choice of focus made, one which comes naturally to post-Industrial Revolution Westerners whose own primary "clan" focus is dominated by the nuclear family. But Israelites did not have the same narrowness of focus, and the Old Testament Scriptures do not teach that covenant descent has this corresponding bifurcation. There is no separable, separate "descended from Abraham" as well as "descended from my covenant parents"; no dual covenantal status of "I am a legitimate Israelite - but also a member of this nuclear family of legitimate Israelites".

We see this with clarity when we remember (as touched upon in the essay) that there was never any denial that the Jews, even after the resurrection and ascension of Christ, were under the Old Covenant. Pharisees and unbelieving Jews: those who either explicitly rejected Christ, or who at least had not yet believed in him, are spoken of as (Old) covenant members. The repudiation of the covenant, its annulment by God (together with the threatened Deuteronomic curses), is not until AD70, when the Romans come and destroy Jerusalem and the temple. Nowhere prior to that is there any claim that the Jews were not children of Abraham under the terms of the Old Covenant.

So:

• Acts 13:26 - "Men and brethren, sons of the family of Abraham, and those among you who fear God, to you the word of this salvation has been sent." Here, Paul affirms to unbelieving and not-yet-believing Jews to whom he is explaining the gospel for the first time, that they are sons in Abraham's family. He does not, and cannot, mean that he is affirming that they all have faith. And neither can he be affirming that they are all infants, for plainly his address assumes an adult audience. Though the New Covenant was already in force, these adults, independently of their actual belief in Jesus as the Messiah at this point, were the sons of Abraham (under the terms of the Old Covenant).
• 2 Corinthians 11:22 - "Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they the seed of Abraham? So am I." Paul, of course, is a true son of Abraham, as the New Covenant bifurcation of this concept was well underway by the time that he wrote. Yet he affirms that the false teachers, the false apostles, the Judaizers, if any of them had a claim to be Hebrews, Israelites, seed of Abraham - so did he. It is nowhere suggested that he believed none of them actually did. 
• “The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. Therefore whatever they tell you to observe, that observe and do," - Matthew 23:2-3. There is no suggestion that these adult Pharisees, though enemies of God's Son, had manifested a lack of faith in the Messiah that meant that they could or should be excommunicated from the nation of Israel. That would be to back-port New Covenant aspects into the Old Covenant.
• Romans 9:4 - "who are Israelites, to whom pertain the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the service of God, and the promises". The unbelieving Jews, as Paul wrote, possessed these things, in the present tense. Paul has made the distinction between them and true Jews (many times) - but he never suggests that they should also be considered as already excommunicated from the Old Covenant.

Anticipating a response 

I expect that in response to these points, a paedobaptist might make true, but actually irrelevant, observations like "there was an overlap of the covenants". Of course there was - who denied it, because I was affirming it? That is not the salient point in the observations above. The key point is that Old Covenant membership explicitly did not work along the lines of "you can join by virtue of being an infant born within the covenant, but to remain in, you must have faith". Adults, lacking faith, were members. If the paedobaptist wants to distinguish between saving faith and some form of "implicit" faith, then this opens up even more problems: should such adults, including ones who explicitly reject Jesus as the Messiah, be New Covenant church members, as they were in the Old? I don't think that paedobaptists have really thought their doctrine of "strict covenant continuity" through.

Conclusion

The Old Testament did not teach two separable-but-coinciding routes into covenant membership for the same group of people, such that the New Testament can explicitly repudiate one route, and leave the other completely undiscussed, enjoying perfect continuity, paving the way to infant baptism. Again we see that the paedobaptist demand for an explanation of the New Testament's "silence" is one based upon his own imported and unjustifiable assumptions. There is no "strict continuity", because the conceptual furniture of Reformed paedobaptism does not exist in the Old Testament any more than it does in the New. The "silence" is entirely a product of making unwarranted demands that the New Testament be written in terms of this furniture. It is silent about such things, precisely because the Old Testament also knew nothing about them. The implied split is not there in either Testament. 

Under the Old Covenant, the seed of Abraham according to fleshly descent was circumcised; under the New, his children according to the second birth which manifests by repentance and faith in Christ are baptised. There are, in fact, two separable descents. Some are born of the flesh, only - and some also of the Spirit. This is taught in both Testaments. But this in no way maps onto "patrilinear descent to any number of generations (through Jacob)" and "physical descent at one generation if your parents have saving faith". That is a chimera, a confusion, faithful to neither Testament, mixing external foreshadowing and Messianic fulfilment up into a mass that is neither one nor the other.

Infant baptism and anachronistic versions of "continuity"

This is a short follow-up to my post of a few days ago.

There I presented a lengthy argument. But now let me instead briefly summarise the main arguments in succinct form, "that he who runneth may read it". The two paragraph version (omitting lots of supporting and side arguments).

The Reformed paedobaptist, quite correctly, notes that the New Testament has a complete absence of argument, debate or teaching about modifications to arrangements for children of believers being part of God's covenant. Quite incorrectly, he concludes from this resounding silence that no changes have been made and that thus the Old Testament arrangement of inclusion remains, uncontroversial in everyone's eyes.

The significant errors here begin with the idea that the Old Testament itself focussed as the significant unit upon "believers and their children". It did not. This is an anachronistic back-porting of something related to, but subtly and importantly different to the real concept of "Abraham and his seed". In the Old Testament, Abraham and his seed received the promises and (the male seed) were circumcised as a sign and seal of this. Once we recognise this, we then note that the New Testament has many and frequent teaching sections (gospels and epistles) in which controversial change is announced and explained. There is a new identification of who Abraham and his seed are - one which cuts out many who before were included, and brings in, even to dominate, many who previously were far off. The New Covenant cuts across family lines, and Abraham's family is constituted around being born again, born from above; those who have faith are the children of Abraham. There is no "Abraham and his children - and their offspring too". The concept of "believers (Abraham's children) and also their seed" is not faithful to either Testament; it is anachronistic in both ages, over-emphasising New Testament distinctives in the Old Covenant era, and retaining fulfilled Old Testament scaffolding during the New. Paul, most directly, addresses the question of the distinction between Abraham's seed and his children in Romans 9, showing that right at the beginning God, intentionally, made it clear that automatic inheritance via bodily descent has never been a permanent part of God's plan, under-cutting the Reformed paedobaptist assertion of uninterrupted continuity at a stroke, in the first and second generations.

So, quite simply, there is an entire silence about the controversy that Reformed paedobaptists demand to be addressed in the New Testament because their demand is unreasonable. They wish the apostles to announce a development in a concept that is different in important ways from the actual Old Testament concept, and hence an unfair and invalid demand.

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/

Is infant baptism a "natural and inevitable consequence of the fundamental pattern of covenantal integration" ?

 "The fact that identity is constituted in covenant bodies requires that we baptize our babies. Infant baptism is not explicitly taught in Scripture because it is such a natural and inevitable consequence of the fundamental pattern of covenantal integration."

Kip Chelashaw - https://xcancel.com/ChelashawKip/status/1940003362335867137#m

This is a favourite argument of many evangelical Presbyterians. The fundamental reason why, we are told, nothing teaches, requires or alludes to infant baptism in the New Testament is because it's something so integral to everything that a biblically-minded person would already think, that it would be entirely redundant. Not just in keeping with, but "because" it is so "natural and inevitable", it isn't mentioned.

Firstly I'd like to note and bank the true and in honesty unavoidable concession that "Infant baptism is not explicitly taught in Scripture". But is it, as asserted, taught implicitly?

What things does the Bible assume and for that reason not directly state?

I've never yet read an explanation from brethren who hold this belief as to why it is, in their understanding, that the New Testament does frequently and clearly state so many other fundamental beliefs. Infant baptism, we are told, is not taught explicitly because something so important is all-pervasive. But what about other all-pervasive, fundamental truths? Are they not taught explicitly either? Or not taught every often? Quite the opposite....

There is one God; the God of Abraham is the Creator of the world; his blessings are received by grace through faith based upon his own works and not ours; God will judge the world; God deals with people through covenants; the covenants climax and are fulfilled in the coming of the Messiah; etc., etc., etc. Although all of these things are as inherent and integral as you could get, yet, they don't therefore escape mention - on the contrary, they are mentioned early, often, and late, and often again. Of course they are: it was the intended purpose of Christ and the apostles he sent to manifest the truth openly and clearly, so that even a child could grasp the essentials. As wise teachers, dealing with weak, foolish and fallible human beings, Christ and his servants therefore made sure to lay out their teachings clearly and frequently. Moreover, since these things were in many cases being taught to those who were either strangers and foreigners (Gentiles), who were previously bathed in all kinds of wrong understandings, or who even as Israelites had been indoctrinated in very wrong ideas by the Pharisees or others, it was necessary to rewire them at every level.

The idea that because infant baptism is so obvious a teaching to those to whom the apostles wrote, that therefore it is not something that we'd expect them to openly mention, flies in the face of everything they did mention.

Things that the first Bible readers needed explicitly stated for them

I see this idea as something from Presbyterian fantasy-land (do feel free to share with me the things that you think come out of Baptist fantasy-land). Let us look at the actual churches and Christians we find in the New Testament. To the Galatians, the idea that justification was by faith alone apart from the works of the law, had become vague and cloudy; the very doctrine that underpinned their salvation was being twisted and lost. To the Hebrews, it was no longer entirely clear that Christ's coming meant that all the Old Covenant ordinances were annulled and done away with in Christ. To the Corinthians, the fact that our bodies would be raised from the dead, and that Christians should not consort with prostitutes, was something they were losing their grip on and needed strong instruction and exhortation over. And so on, and so on. In the gospels, Jesus must patiently and repeatedly explain to his hearers that God requires mercy, not sacrifice; that the fundamental commandments are of love; that it is no part of God's law that we treat human beings worse than animals; and many other fundamental things that are part of the warp and woof of all the Scriptures to that point. 

But, but, but.... all of these brethren, we are assured, of course never wavered for even a minute in their inevitable and unshakeable understanding that wherever there was a divine covenant, those whose immediate physical parents were covenant members must also be thereby be entitled to that covenant's sign. This was a point, we are solemnly assured, beyond the possibility of anyone's misunderstanding; merely appealing to the idea of a "covenant" was enough to make this perfectly plain. And anyone who doesn't see this just doesn't understand covenants at all. He is still a babe, and the apostles, supposedly, didn't stoop to explaining things necessary for babes.

Is not merely to state these ideas to expose their complete absurdity? The Corinthians, the Galatians, the Hebrews, the first disciples of Jesus, the crowds, etc., suffered from great darkness and prejudice (as is common  across the entire human race and our own personal experience too) on the most fundamental and basic topics of Scripture.... but somehow, all with the marvellous exception that they were fine covenant theologians who were beyond all possibility of error on any of the relevant details and important consequences? Are you being serious?

The fact that infant baptism is nowhere, whether directly or indirectly, alluded to (without painful contortions), is, in reality, a great embarrassment to the paedobaptist case. The fact that, where historically churches have practised it, they have done so on mutually contradictory and incompatible grounds, is equally embarrassing. Which is to say, if the Presbyterian "covenantal" argument were such a clearly Biblical one, then Lutherans, Roman Catholics, etc. would have been glad to take it up and add it to their arsenals. The fact that the Presbyterian argument for paedobaptism has to appeal at its heart (having conceded that there is nothing explicit) to a priori claims is not a strength, but a significant "tell".

You and your seed, according to Scripture

Kip's fundamental error above is not, in fact, in noticing that the covenant is "to you and your children"; he is quite correct to hold that when God promised to Abraham that he and his seed would be his people forever. The error which pervades Presbyterian argument for infant baptism is the failure to notice how the New Testament has, explicitly and consistently, explained the fulfilment of the concept of "seed", and what it means to be born into the covenant. It is not silent, but speaks loudly, telling us who the "children" are. That concept has, as with many others, attained a point of transformation and fulfilment in the New Testament. See Romans 9, Galatians 3, Matthew 3, John 3, and many others. The Scriptures explicitly clarify who are the seed of Abraham, and directly deny that physical descent alone, under the New Covenant, means that you are one of them. The promise is to Abraham and his children - and it is those who are of faith who are believing Abraham's children. The preparatory shadow of literal, physical descent gives way to the glorious intended final reality of being born again, by the Holy Spirit, into the final family of God (and this often results in earthly households divided against themselves). 

Fulfilment and reality

We do baptise babies: babes in Christ. But we do not baptise babes born only of the flesh, because there is neither command nor example to do so. If you've been following, that silence is something that cannot be accounted for, if you believe that Christ and his apostles wished every Christian family anywhere and ever to do so, no matter their level of maturity. If you study everything (and there is plenty) that the New Testament does say about baptism, then amongst all the rich variation, one constant is the note of fulfilment, of reality, of accomplishment, of a meeting of the sign and the thing signified. Baptism is tied together conceptually with the coming of the Holy Spirit and receiving him, repentance unto life, the exaltation of the Messiah, being born into his kingdom, etc.... but universally this is depicted in terms of experienced reality, not of a kind of covenantal promise that still looks ahead to the baptisee being initiated into the personal experience of it if he will, when he reaches a stage of being able to respond, believe and personally appropriate it. He always already believes and is glorying in what he already experiences; the Spirit is come, and the New Age has dawned, not objectively only, but personally, too.

Doctrines of the gaps

Infant baptism is a "doctrines of the gaps". Such doctrines end up functioning as hermeneutics. i.e. They are used as controlling paradigms to pre-interpret Biblical texts, instead of allowing the texts which explicitly and directly discuss those subjects to determine what our hermeneutics will be. Overlooking and minimising the many things we are directly taught, "doctrines of the gaps" come in, with the claim that they are the real background, the fundamental assumption which must control the reading of everything else. The "a priori" conclusions rewrite the actual conclusions that the apostles explicitly and directly wanted us to understand when they exegeted the meaning of Christ and the nature of the New Covenant to us. Then when those hermeneutics are worked out, they lead on to all sorts of other mistakes as they are applied in other areas.

Kip is a Protestant, not a Roman Catholic. Thus, when a traditional Roman Catholic denies the explicit and direct teaching of Romans 3-4 or Galatians 3-4 with his claim that the fundamental hermeneutical assumption of The Church (TM) leads us to see justification as being channelled through the sacraments, Kip will rightly urge his antagonist to try, for a moment, to take off his glasses and first deal with what it was the direct concern of the apostles in these and other passages to seek to assert, as revealed firstly by their context and wording; and then to re-shape his doctrine of the church in the light of that, and not the other way round. But Kip needs to do the same when he reads all the direct and intentional teaching in the Bible about the New Covenant, and its relationship to what went before, and how this transforms our understandings of covenant membership, birth into the covenant, being a child of Abraham, the privileges of covenant membership, etcetera. The traditional Roman Catholic asserts that every member of the people of God always understood in every age that the church on earth has a visible head, whom we must all be in direct submission to. Kip will urge him to try to understand the Newness of the New Covenant, and that we do indeed still have a head, and he is actually visible; but that does not lead to the conclusions about Popes that the Roman Catholic holds to. The matter is not pre-determined by what comes before, but rather the fulfilment explains for us how to understand the earlier stages of the plan. I similarly urge Kip and all those who hold his views to try to understand analogous things in respect of Christian baptism.