Infant Baptism - Biblical Foundations

My last post on the subject of infant baptism attempted to justify the methodology used to derive the doctrine - the process of deduction from Scripture by which we arrive at the "good and necessary consequence" of infant baptism.

In this post I'll try to lay out the biblical foundations by which we derive this doctrine.

There are several biblical considerations which go into the doctrine of infant baptism, but the two main ones are the doctrine of the covenants and the doctrine of the church.

The Doctrine of the Covenants

At the outset I should point out that the doctrine of the covenants, or covenant theology, is a very large topic encompassing one's view of history, the relationship of Israel to the church, and many key doctrines.

If you want to start exploring the broad topic of covenant theology may I point you to the collection of articles on this subject at Monergism.com. 

For the purpose of this discussion on infant baptism I will simply point out one aspect of covenant theology, and that is its emphasis on continuity. 

Covenant theology assumes the basic unity of the redemptive plan of God.  This means that God has had one plan of redemption throughout history.  There is a continuity in the covenants from the Abrahamic, to the Mosaic, to the Davidic, to the New Covenant in Christ.  The "New Covenant" in Christ is not "new" in kind, but it is the fulfillment of the Abrahamic Covenant.

The doctrine of the covenants asserts that, throughout all time, there has been one people of God with one destiny in the one plan of God.  Thus, we say that Israel is the Old Testament manifestation of the church and the church is the New Testament manifestation of Israel.  Israel is the church in it's infancy, the church is Israel in its maturity. 

The crucial thing to see in this is that those of us in the covenantal tradition assume continuity between the testaments and the covenants.  Covenantal theology is often spoken of as the counterpart to dispensational theology which sees much more of a distinction between the testaments and between Israel and the church.  In all fairness, covenantal theologians acknowledge that there are discontinuities between the two and dispensationalists acknowledge that there are continuities between the two.  But the covenantalists have a much greater bias towards continuity.

This is important because, in the Old Testament, there were certain features of covenant making which we covenantalists simply assume have continued into the New Testament era.

In the Old Testament we see a pattern where God enters into covenants with individuals and their families and that God gives a covenant sign to ratify the covenant.  In the Old Testament, that sign is circumcision. 

Because the Abrahamic Covenant included the children of the believer, we are going to be biased toward believing that the New Covenant will also include the children of the believer, unless there is explicit New Testament evidence to indicate that the children of believers are not included in the covenant.

The New Testament explicitly says that believers are the recipients of the promises of the  covenant with Abraham.  One of those promises was that God would be a God not only to Abraham, but also to his children.

So, again assuming continuity, we paedobaptists believe that the burden of proof is not upon us, but is upon others to prove that there are certain promises to Abraham, the prototypical Old Testament believer, which do not apply to the New Testament believer.

In some of the blog posts I have read on this subject I have found that there are many who would agree with the things I have just said, that the children of believers are, in some sense, recipients of covenantal promises.  However, they would deny that they are to receive the New Testament sign of the covenant.

I would counter this by arguing that there is a one to one correlation in the Old Testament between the recipients of the covenant promises and the recipients of the covenant sign.   I would lay the burden of proof on the one who wants to divorce the promises from the sign.

I mentioned before that we covenantalists do agree that there are some discontinuities between the testaments and the covenants.  But, by and large the discontinuities are discontinuities of expansion.

What I mean is that in the Old Testament, the people of God were represented as one nation.  In the New Testament, the people of God have expanded into an international body.  In the Old Testament, the life of the people of God was defined very narrowly in cultural terms.  Aliens could become members of the covenant community but in doing so they had to adopt the Jewish culture.  In the New Testament the covenant community can live in any culture (i.e. Paul can become a Jew to the Jews and a Greek to the Greeks).

Keeping this in mind, covenantalists are going to be biased toward seeing an expansion of blessing in the giving of the sign of the covenant, rather than a restriction.  And we see this - in the Old Testament, the sign of the covenant was only given to male children of believers, whereas in the New Testament the sign is given to male and female children of believers.

And this leads to the next building block of infant baptism, the doctrine of the church.

The Doctrine of the Church

When discussing the doctrine of the church in relation to infant baptism we are again focusing on a very narrow aspect of the doctrine of the church, and that is the place of the children of believers in the church.  The question is whether or not the children of believers have any place in the church and if so, are they entitled to any kind of covenantal sign.

Paedobaptists believe that the church is a covenant community and that members of a covenant commmunity are entitled to receive a sign of membership in that community.  And paedobaptists believe that the children of believers are members of the covenant community.

There are those who believe in believers baptism only who deny that children are members of the covenant community in any way.  In this view, the children of believers have no more status in the church than do any unbeliever.

But there are many who believe in believers baptism who have been more influenced by the reformed tradition and covenant theology who would agree that there is a sense in which the children of believers are members of the covenant community of the church.   However, they believe that baptism is a sign that is specifically limited in application to believers.  So, though there may be a sense in which the children of believers are members of the covenant community, the sign is not for them. 

In my experience, the rationale of most of this second group goes as follows.  Membership in the Old Testament Covenant community was a biological matter, whereas membership in the New Testament covenant community is a spiritual matter.  In other words, you became a citizen of Israel by birth and you become a citizen of the church by spiritual re-birth.  The sign of circumcision was given to mark biological birth into the covenant community of Israel and baptism is the sign given to mark spiritual birth into the covenant community of the church.

But this misunderstands the nature of the Old Testament community of Israel.  The Old Testament covenant community was a spiritual community.

Today we understand that ceremonial baptism is not what saves us, it is an outward sign of the true baptism which is spiritual (I Peter 3:21).  In other words the ceremony symbolizes the spiritual reality behind it.  The true spiritual baptism is the equivalent of regeneration or the equivalent of saving faith.

In the Old Testament ceremonial circumcision symbolized circumcision of the heart.  Hence all the warnings of destruction to those who were uncircumcised in heart.  A circumcised heart would be the Old Testament prototype of what we would come to know as regeneration or saving faith.

Thus, the argument that baptism symbolizes regeneration or faith and thus ought not to be administered to the unregenerate, if true, would equally apply in the case of circumcision.

Circumcision also symbolized regeneration in it's link to the circumcised heart.  So why not say that, because an infant in Israel could not have come to a place in his life where he could circumcise his heart, he ought not to have the covenantal sign applied to him.

The fact of the matter is that the Old Testament covenant community included believers and unbelievers.  You were not saved by virtue of your birth, or by virtue of your circumcision.  You still had to have the faith of Abraham and demonstrate that you had a circumcised heart.

Similarly, there is evidence that the NT covenant community includes both believers and unbelievers. I Corinthians 7:14 says:

For the unbelieving husband has been sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife has been sanctified through her believing husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy.

Several questions can be asked here.  To whom is the unbelieving husband sanctified and unto whom are the children of a believing wife holy?  It seems obvious that they are holy unto the Lord. 

But how can an unbeliever or an infant be sanctified or holy unto the Lord?  The best place to go for an explanation of this is to the Old Testament where we have a paradigm that fits.  The Old Testament paradigm tells us that there were believers and unbelievers in the covenant community and this would apply here.

The Old Testament pattern and the New Testament pattern shows us that membership in the covenant community is not equivalent to salvation.

To me this is the only way to make sense of those difficult passages in Hebrews like Hebrews 6:4-6:

⁴It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, ⁵who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age,   ⁶if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance, because to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.

And Hebrews 10:26-31:

   ²⁶If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left,   ²⁷but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God.   ²⁸Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses.   ²⁹How much more severely do you think a man deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God under foot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified him, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace? ³⁰For we know him who said, “It is mine to avenge; I will repay," and again, “The Lord will judge his people."³¹It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

Those passages give us fits.  Arminians have an easy explanation for those passages - they show that a true believer can lose his salvation.  Most of us, however, are unwilling to admit that salvation can be lost.  Yet here we are facing language that indicates that there are those who have shared in the Holy Spirit, tasted the goodness of the Word of God and been sanctified by the blood of the covenant who will end up going to hell.

But, the Old Testament gives us a paradigm by which we can understand this.  These were people who had membership in the covenant community who were yet unsaved. 

In all of this I am seeking to establish that the New Testament follows the Old Testament pattern of covenantal community where believers and unbelievers are present.  I am also seeking to establish that the there is nothing in the New Testament to indicate that the Old Testament pattern of giving a sign to members of the covenant community has been abolished.

So, that's enough for now, I'll try to add a few more thoughts tomorrow.

In the meantime, if you read the comments on my last post you will see that Stephen at Doggie's Breakfast pointed us to a page by a reformed baptist who retracted his baptistic convictions and became a paedobaptist - you can find it here.

Similarly, Gregg Strawbridge was on staff at a baptistic church and later changed his mind - you can find his Defense of Infant Baptism here.

And, since I am going to pains to defend the doctrine of infant baptism, allow me to extend the proper caveats and disclaimers here.  I do believe that this doctrine is one of the lesser doctrines.  It is not an essential for fellowship. Not that it is unimportant, but it is of lesser importance than what we believe about justification by faith and things like that.  I consider this an intramural debate and have the highest respect for my baptist friends.  Although I have some strong convictions in this matter, I do not consider my position to be a slam dunk.  I know there are difficulties with the doctrine, I just believe that the bulk of the biblical evidence favors infant baptism. Also, I would point out that in the church I pastor and the denomination of which I am a part, disagreement with our position on this matter is not a bar to membership to membership or fellowship.  It is a barrier to ordination, but not to fellowship.  We regularly have folks join us, who despite my best efforts, don't quite get on board with the doctrine of infant baptism.  They are welcomed warmly and serve in many places in the church. 

So please keep that in mind as you read this stuff.  Although I have strong convictions on this matter, this is really not a divisive issue for me or for our church.  I would challenge my baptist friends to take the same approach.  Having spent about half of my Christian life in baptistic churches I know that failure to believe and practice believers baptism is a barrier to membership and fellowship because you can't join the church unless you submit to believers baptism.  I would love to see our baptist friends argue strongly for their convictions on this matter, yet allow membership in their churches for those who disagree with them on this lesser doctrine.