When I was born-again a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, by default I became a baptist. I was born and raised a Catholic and so baptized as an infant, but born-agains don’t do infant baptism, so I got re-baptized. It made sense to me at the time because in this new form of Christianity I had embraced, the way you became a Christian was by making a personal decision for Jesus. Only then could you be baptized. Infants can’t make such a decision, so I reasoned they should not be baptized. I remained a baptist until I was introduced to Reformed theology when I was 24.
There are Reformed baptists, and that’s what I guess I was initially, until I went to a Reformed baptist church service. The gentlemen who introduced me to this strange new theology was a paedobaptist, so he had his children baptized. This new theology seemed upside down enough without me having to change that too, so I resisted it initially. Then I went to that service.
It so happens that Sunday morning they had an infant dedication. I had seen plenty of those in my five and a half years of being a Christian, so didn’t think anything of it. Then when they called up the parents with their children, a phrase snuck its way into my brain, I know not how, but it was disturbing to me. I thought, these children are strangers to the covenant! That didn’t sit well with me. I had been learning how important the covenant was in this new theology, and this dedication process was telling me the children had nothing to do with it. I became a paedobaptist on the spot!
The reason why is as simple as it is difficult for most Evangelical Christians to accept. Most don’t embrace it not because they’ve grappled with the texts and the theology, but because it’s so common to be a baptist that it just seems right. It could be right because my being wrong about something wouldn’t surprise me in the least, but for now I’m convinced baptizing our infant children is what we should do. I’ll give a very brief and probably not very persuasive case for why I believe this.
When I was praying this morning before we left for church, I was marveling that little Eleanor was part of God’s covenant promises to Abraham. She, literally this beautiful energetic little 9 month-old baby was in God’s mind when he said that Abraham’s offspring would be like the sand on the seashore and the stars in the sky. She is one of those! Then I thought, well, she’s really part of God’s covenant promise to Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 when he said to the serpent:
15 And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel.
Then I realized, she was actually part of God’s covenant promise to himself, which is known in Reformed theology as the covenant of redemption. In the words of RC Sproul:
The covenant of redemption is intimately concerned with God’s eternal plan. It is called a “covenant” inasmuch as the plan involves two or more parties. This is not a covenant between God and humans. It is a covenant among the persons of the Godhead, specifically between the Father and the Son.
That this eternal covenant is revealed and fulfilled in redemptive history is strongly implied by Jesus in John 6:37:
All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away.
We believe as Peter preached in the first Christian sermon in Acts 2, that the promise is for us and our children. Not just when they grow older and put their trust in Christ as their Lord and Savior, but now when they pretty much can’t do anything at all. I love the way Moses puts it in 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.
. . . . and to our children forever . . . . Our children are part of the covenant! And praise our Almighty God and Savior for it.
Good question, Mark. Because we live on the other side of two Great Awakenings, and the powerful influence of American individualism, most Christians see Christianity primarily in individualistic terms. We see people pretty much as atomized individuals in the secular culture, and just transfer that same perspective to the church.
The church, however, is God’s covenant community. It’s both corporate and individual. So how I see it, in baptizing our children we do not believe as the Catholics and Lutherans do that it is salvific. Rather, it affirms God’s covenant promises to the parents for their children (makes the holy in Paul’s terms, set apart from the world), and initiates them into the covenant community, the visible church. We treat them as if they are Christians, just like the Christian parents do who don’t believe in infant baptism. Except, we have theological justification, and they do not because their children are in fact little heathens until they make a “decision” for Jesus.
It’s the inconsistency that I guess bothered me way back then. Thanks for the comment.