Even as a young man without children at the time, one of the things that attracted me to Reformed theology was that it was specifically a generational faith. For the first five years of my Christian life I was by default a Baptist, as are most Evangelical or born-again Christians. When I was introduced to Calvinism at 24, the gentleman who did that also introduced me to infant baptism, something I couldn’t accept. I had been born and raised a Catholic, and after I prayed the sinners prayer, I soon rejected everything associated with my Catholic upbringing, including baptizing babies. As I learned about this new Presbyterian and Reformed understanding of how children fit into God’s covenant, I recoiled from it. I could accept predestination and the sovereignty of God over the salvation of His people, but each person having to make their own decision for Jesus, and then being baptized, seemed like the only logical way to look at baptism. And the New Testament seemed to affirm that. Then I went to a Reformed Baptist church service.
I’ll never forget that Sunday morning in 1985. I can see it like it was yesterday; apparently it was that momentous for me. As happens in thousands of churches around the country every Sunday morning, there was a baby dedication during the service. I have no idea why I responded like I did, or why a certain phrase came into my mind, but it did. I thought, “They are treating their children like strangers to the covenant!” I was actually offended, and I was instantly a paedobaptist.
That is an interesting phrase because even at that very early stage in my Reformed journey, I saw the Christian faith as fundamentally generational. It wasn’t just for me, an isolated individual who makes a decision for Jesus, and my children as their own isolated individuals who have to make their choices. I will discuss covenant theology below, but even before I knew the first thing about it, I intuitively knew my children were included in it. As my wife and I are Christians, we raised our children as Christians, not as little heathens who have to decide someday to become Christians. They will of course have to make their own decisions to follow Jesus, but as our children they receive the blessing of God’s covenant promises through us as their parents. The covenant is to them every bit as much as it is to us.
One verse that always comes to mind when I think of this is Deuteronomy 29:29:
The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.
These things revealed do not belong to our children as a result of them making the right choice and a public profession of Christ. No, they belong to our children specifically because they are our children. We are Christians, we have children, and they are part of God’s covenant promises to us as His people, therefore we raise them as little Christians and not strangers to God’s covenant.
Here is another wonderful passage from Psalm 103:
17 But from everlasting to everlasting
the Lord’s love is with those who fear him,
and his righteousness with their children’s children—
18 with those who keep his covenant
and remember to obey his precepts.
If you read these words carefully with no preconceived ideas, you can easily see in them the glorious gospel of Christ, that is, God’s love and righteousness given to His people. There is always a connection between God’s active relationship to His people, and their response. In other words, God doesn’t try to get a response from people out of loving them, but His loving activates an inevitable response in them toward Him. This can happen because in Christ He grants us His righteousness so we are no longer His enemies, but granted Sonship in the new birth. We have God’s promise here that His righteousness isn’t just for us, but for our children, and our children’s children—it is generational!
This isn’t just an Old Testament concept either. The first generation of Christians were all pious Jews, and what Peter declared in the first Christian sermon in Acts 2 would have made perfect sense to them, that “The promise is for you and your children.” Of course it is! I contend that if the Apostles had preached a New Covenant in which the children were not included, that would have been controversial to say the least. I can imagine the Jewish Christian families responding, that sure doesn’t sound like new and improved!
The Idea of Covenant in Redemptive History
Depending on your Christian or denominational environment, you are more or less familiar with the word covenant, and it’s importance or not for our faith. I don’t remember hearing it talked about at all during the first five plus years of my Christian journey, which is surprising given the centrality of the concept in Scripture. The word is used almost 300 times in the Old Testament, and almost 40 in the New. The reason the concept is almost invisible be can found in the history of fundamentalism, and especially the interpretive system known as dispensationalism, popularized in the 19th century. Biblical history, in this scheme, is God dealing with His people and the world in different ways in different ages, or dispensations. Thus there is little continuity in God’s dealings with humanity. Covenant theology, on the other hand, sees the unfolding of God’s covenant as the primary interpretive principle for all redemptive history. It is the universal in which all the particulars of redemptive history make sense, and unifies the teachings of the entire Bible.
The practice of covenants, usually by kings, was a common occurrence in the ancient Near East. Formal agreements between two parties, covenants brokered power and defined obligations. Covenants would have been as commonly understood as contracts are today. God’s covenant with His people had stipulations, specifically there were blessings for obedience, and curses for disobedience. Israel failed to succeed as the covenant representative for God’s people, so Jesus came to be the new Israel to fulfill all the stipulations of the covenant of redemption.
Reformed theologians typically argue that there are three biblical covenants: works, grace, and redemption. In the covenant of works God promised Adam and Eve the whole of creation if they would but obey the command to not eat from the tree. In the covenant of grace, God saves sinners by grace through faith in Christ (Old Testament saints were saved the same way, retro‑actively if you will). Daniel R. Hyde explains how the covenant of redemption is rooted in the relationship of the Triune God:
From all of eternity God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit covenanted to share their eternal love and fellowship with their creatures. In human terms, God the Father covenanted to create a people, whom He knew would sin; to choose from this fallen mass “a great multitude that no one could number” (Rev. 7:9); and to give them to Christ (John 17:24), whom He would “crush” on the cross according to His eternal will (Is. 53:10). The Son covenanted to accomplish their redemption: “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work you gave me to do” (John 17:4). The Holy Spirit covenanted to apply the work of the Son to those the Father chose, “until we acquire possession of it” (Eph. 1:14).
The covenant of redemption is the ultimate universal, which means everything in the Bible and in our lives needs to be seen in light of it, including baptism.
To understand generational faith, I need to go back to the Garden of Eden post Fall, and God’s promise that he would “put enmity between you (Satan) and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” There we have the whole history of redemption in one verse. The promise of God is the foundation of our Faith. From Genesis 3 it is easy to trace the covenant throughout the Old Testament. In Genesis 6, God established his covenant with Noah to save him and his family from God’s judgment and wrath in the flood. Then when the Lord calls Abram (Gen. 12) to go to the land he would show him, he promises to make him into a great nation. He confirms the covenant with Abram in one of the most amazing scenes in the Bible (Gen. 15:8‑21). The Lord tells him a second time that he will have a son, promises that his offspring will be like the stars in the sky (and before electricity that must have been an awe‑inspiring site), and shows him the land he will one day possess. Abram asks how he can know all this will happen. Then something very strange to our modern sensibilities happens. The Lord tells him to get some animals, cut them in two, and line up the halves opposite each other. Then this:
17 When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking firepot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces. 18 On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, “To your descendants I give this land . . . .
What makes this covenant ceremony so strange is that normally both parties to the covenant would walk through the bloody sliced up animals, in effect saying if one of the parties doesn’t keep the covenant, they will end up like the animals. God was declaring to all of history that He would keep both sides of the covenant of redemption, His and ours. We can see here that the Old and New Covenant are intimately connected. Charles Hodge in his Systematic Theology tells us how:
It is plain that Christ came to execute a work, that He was sent of the Father to fulfill a plan, or preconceived design. It is no less plan that special promises were made by the Father to the Son, suspended upon the accomplishment of the work assigned to him.
As we saw in the above quote from Daniel Hyde, that Jesus accomplished the work the Father gave him to do, which is why he was given his name (Matt. 1:21), “because he will save his people from their sins.”
Our salvation, then, is rooted in something so much bigger and more profound than our decision, and making a good choice when presented with the case for heaven or hell. In fact our faith, and the faith of our children is rooted in God’s eternal covenant promise with Himself, the covenant of redemption. Paul in Ephesians 1 is clear Jesus didn’t come to redeem every human being, but specifically His people:
4 For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love 5 he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— 6 to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.
We and our children are part of this amazing, eternal story worked out in history, in our lives, and in the lives of the generations to come from our bodies. It is an amazing, thrilling, wonderful faith that was once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3).
Continuity versus Discontinuity in the Covenant
Here is where the covenantal rubber meets the road in the discussion of generational faith. One of the reasons I am not a Baptist is because I am a Christian whose faith is a fulfillment of its Jewish heritage, not something completely different. Therefore, this means that my understanding of God’s covenant relationship to His people is one of continuity between Old and New, not discontinuity. Before we ever get to water, it is this question we must grapple with. Are children similarly part of the New Covenant as they were of the Old, and thus qualify for the sign of inclusion of the covenant: circumcision in the Old, baptism in the new? My answer would be absolutely! Even Jeremiah, the prophet of the New Covenant agreed (Jeremiah 31:31-34). We read this is Jeremiah 32:38-40:
38 They will be my people, and I will be their God. 39 I will give them singleness of heart and action, so that they will always fear me and that all will then go well for them and for their children after them. 40 I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will never stop doing good to them, and I will inspire them to fear me, so that they will never turn away from me. 41 I will rejoice in doing them good and will assuredly plant them in this land with all my heart and soul.
This was what Jewish people thought, not like individualistic post Enlightenment Westerners who default to thinking faith is primarily individual not familial. God’s covenant promises were always to them, and their children. The Lord through Isaiah 59:21 puts it bluntly:
“And as for me, this is my covenant with them,” says the Lord: “My Spirit that is upon you, and my words that I have put in your mouth, shall not depart out of your mouth, or out of the mouth of your offspring, or out of the mouth of your children’s offspring,” says the Lord, “from this time forth and forevermore.”
And not just our children, but our children’s children to get across the point.
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