A Case for Covenantal Infant Baptism
I have started to come to a conclusion about infant baptism that is different from what the majority of my church believes. Here I lay out the case as I understand it.
Introduction
Here I've reproduced a portion of a letter to a church that Gregg Strawbridge wrote to his church, which I think captures a lot of what I wish I could say in words better than mine:
I believe that I have a good reason for my present beliefs, while at the same time I realize my own frailness and fallibility. I am sure that I could be wrong about my convictions of covenant theology and covenantal infant baptism... But in this fallen world of the best laid thoughts of mice and men, the best that I can do is to reflectively evaluate each component of my conviction in light of God's Word. I can say, coram Deo that I have done that. I intend to do it more and I sincerely ask for your prayers. I sincerely ask for your challenging questions and responses in the fear of Christ...
I respectfully ask you to carefully read this outline, as well as the full text of the Scriptures cited. I know my own heart's desire to jump to the bottom line of a written argument, but unless we reflectively consider the verses denoted and whether these theological assertions based on them are accurate, little advance will take place on this issue, on either side...
First, let me point out that the popularly understood Roman Catholic understanding of Infant Baptism, that the ritual is directly salvific, is outside the bounds of Scripture, which teaches clearly that faith is the instrument of salvation. No ritual, whether it is infant or adult baptism, or a more modern innovation like the Sinner's Prayer, is sufficient for salvation but only a living and active faith in Christ. (Rom 3:28, Gal 5:4-6, Jas 2:17)
Secondly, it is readily admitted that there is no Biblical example of infants being baptized, so if the argument is on the grounds of "there must be a verse that directly commands it or shows that it occurred with ostensible apostolic support" then the argument is lost before it is even made (potential babies of the jailer would not be enough). However, we must question whether that is the correct way to "do exegesis" with regard to Biblical doctrine of the sacraments.
The reality is that there is no verse that commands or shows an example of a woman receiving communion. Therefore, if the doctrine requires that particular level of scriptural support in order to be acceptable, then we should be consistent in our application of that principle and stop giving women communion.
But, of course, when we discuss women in communion we realize that that is not the correct approach to answer the question. We instead speak about the status of women in respect to the church and then extrapolate to whether they should therefore get the same treatment as male members of the church.
The analogy is clear, I hope. The absence of direct scriptural command or evidence for the application of the sacrament to infants is not a principle we can consistently follow without major reworking of other aspects of our doctrine. Rather we must try to understand the full Biblical teaching of the covenant of which Baptism is the sign and then try to discern the proper application to infants based on their status in that covenant.
The Covenant
There are several "covenants" described in Scripture, as you know, and great overlap between them. There are 282 references to "covenant" in the Old Testament alone, which should help us to understand that covenants as such are a consistent framework by which God operates with his people.
The first covenant generally recognized by theologians is the covenant with Adam, that he has life as long as he does not disobey God's command. If he does so, the punishment is death (Gen 2:17), for him and for his children. (Rom 5:12-14; 1 Cor 15:22)
The second is with Noah, in which God made a covenant with Noah and with his children (Gen 6:18) and ultimately, it becomes clear that this covenant is with "all flesh" (Gen 9:11-12). The covenant was that he was going to judge the world, but save Noah, and never again cause the floods to destroy the earth.
The most important covenant for our purposes though is the covenant made with Abraham (Gen 15:18; 17:7). This was the covenant to him and to his children, that he would have land and that all nations would be blessed through his family. This was the first covenant that required a sign to be put on the people with whom the covenant was made (the sign of Noah's covenant was the rainbow). That sign was circumcision (Gen 17:10).
We know that Abraham was not simply promised the land of Israel, which was fulfilled in the time of Joshua (Jos 21:43) but the whole world (Rom 4:13). We also know that while everyone who was circumcised was in some sense in the Abrahamic covenant, we know that fundamentally the promise was conditioned not on the ritual of circumcision but on faith (Rom 4:11-12).
We also know that the circumcised included non-believers (1 Cor 10:5, basically all of Paul's letters). And that circumcision of the flesh was intended to picture the greater reality: circumcision of the heart (Rom 2:29; Jer 4:4) which is the same salvation by the Spirit of God that we receive in "baptism of the spirit". These two pictures are of the same reality (Col 2:11-12).
We know that these are the same reality because Romans 4 is our guide to the nature of the Abrahamic covenant. It was by faith, not by the physical ritual. And while adults can be circumcised (and therefore baptized) after receipt of faith, as Abraham was, so also did he circumcise his children when they were eight days old in anticipation of the future circumcision of the heart done by the Spirit (Rom 2:29 again).
So we understand then that the Abrahamic covenant, that which is pictured by circumcision, is a covenant with the physical offspring of Abraham, which is fulfilled by justification by faith (Rom 4 again). We also know that the circumcision as a sign was not enough to guarantee that such faith would issue. It is worth noting that you could also convert to join the covenant through circumcision as an adult along with the males of your household (Exo 12:43-51).
You see that, in a sense, the covenant with Abraham was unconditional, in that Christ would ultimately fulfill it. But in another sense it was conditional upon faith, even though the sign was given to all the children before their faith could be known, as those who did not have faith in the same way as Abraham did not inherit the blessings (Rom 4:16). This conditional/unconditional aspect is true of all of the covenants. Even the Davidic covenant (2 Sam 7:16) is going to be fulfilled, but each in David's line could have his particular line cut off from inheriting that promise (1 Kings 11:11). The New Covenant likewise is conditional upon a living faith, but one can be in the covenant and not have such faith (Heb 10:29-31; Heb 6:4-8; John 15:2-6; Galatians 5:4).
Now we look to the fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant, Christ (Gal 3:16). The promises of all of the covenants were ultimately fulfilled in Christ. In him there is a New Covenant (Heb 9:15; 12:24). This new covenant retroactively saves all that had faith (Rom 3:25). This then becomes the true form of all the previous covenants, which is why it is is associated in scripture with each of the other covenants (Deut 30:5-6; cf Rom 2:28-29) (Rom 4) (1 Pet 3:20-21) (Luk 1:50, 54-55).
We know this New Covenant is a "better covenant" (Heb 8:6) and while it was made to "Israel and Judah", it is fulfilled in the church (all of Heb 8). This is why Peter and the apostles were not certain that the Gentiles should be included (Acts 10-11) until the Spirit was poured out upon them just as it had been upon the Jewish believers, thereby signifying God's inclusion of the Gentiles in "Israel and Judah". Much ink in the New Testament is given over to this issue of whether the Gentiles are full and equal members in the people of God, or whether in order to be truly inheritors of the covenant promises they must also be circumcised (Acts 15, Galatians, Eph 2-3, etc). The Bible gives us an emphatic "No" to this question. There is one people of God, made up of both Jews and Gentiles, who are inheritors of the promises and blessings of God (Gal 3:28).
Incidentally, this means that we cannot take the New Testament alone as an exhaustive explanation of the faith and practice of the church. The Old Testament's commentary toward and about Israel is directly applicable to the church (Acts 17:11). While it must be harmonized with the New Testament, we understand that the apostles spoke with the backdrop of exhaustive knowledge and deep familiarity with the Old, as well as assuming the continuity of the people of God. This is demonstrated in many ways such as the continuance of the laying on hands (Acts 6), the questions about circumcision (Acts 15) and unclean food (Acts 10), the application of Old Testament law to settle disputes about the church practice (1 Cor 9:9) and the fact that Paul explicitly says that his message of salvation by grace through faith is articulated in Deuteronomy 30 (Rom 10:8) among many other examples.
Then we go to the issue of baptism, which is only commanded in the Great Commission without much detail. To whom is the command to be baptized given? To the "nations" (not the disciples). We are to "disciple the nations". This is admittedly vague, as we can't baptize a country as an entity, it must somehow be related to the people in the country.
So then we have laid the groundwork of the concept of covenant and covenant inclusion, we must ask, what is the status of children in the covenant?
They are included. Acts 2:38 explicitly says that the covenant they are being baptized into is for them and their children (See also Deut 30:6, Jer 31:36-37). Just like every other covenant of which this is the fulfillment. Children are called "holy" (literally "saints") if they have a single believing parent (1 Cor 7:14). The view of infant baptism is that it corresponds to circumcision, both being signs of the covenant (Col 2:11-12). While the external sign is given to everyone, only those who have the internal circumcision of the heart/baptism of the spirit are actually saved.
This is best illustrated in Rom 11, where Paul points out that believing Gentiles are grafted into the tree that is the people of God and unbelieving Jews are cut off. But he then reminds us that Gentiles might also be cut off. Who are these gentiles that are cut off? It can't be the true believers, for they can never be cut off. It must be the unbelievers who are nevertheless grafted into the tree. Likewise we have the illustration in Hebrews of those in the covenant who are potentially not saved (Heb 3:14-4:3). This was given to us as a warning that we should not fail to have faith (Heb 4:6, 11, 1 Cor 10:6).
The illustration of the Hebrews in the wilderness as the template for the people of God in the New Covenant is explicitly tied to baptism and to communion (1 Cor 10:1-6). These people of God included children and most of them were not believers (Heb 3:14-4:3 again).
So children are included in the covenant, just as they have always been. The covenant is ultimately dependent on faith, so therefore not everyone in the covenant receives the blessings of it (Gal 3:29) and this covenant that we have is the same as the covenant to Abraham.
In conclusion, the covenant is a covenant with God's people. That is to everyone who believes, and to their children. What is the promise to their children? That he will be faithful to them, to a thousand generations for those who love him and keep his commands (Deut 7:9; Psalm 112:2; Psa 119:90). We baptize with the anticipation that God will save them through faith alone and thus call upon his promises to be faithful to our children. We disciple our children from the earliest age for the same reason.
We also know from analogy what the doctrine of household baptism is (Exo 12:43-51); it is everyone in the household. Since we also know typologically that the Passover is kept in Christ (1 Cor 5:7), the same rules apply.
We do not know who is saved, we can only guess at salvific status. To wait until we "know" someone has saving faith to baptize is an impossibility. As for children, when do they get saving faith? We have no idea. John the Baptist had it in the womb. For others it may come later. But we baptize in faith that God will be faithful to save them. His spirit works primarily through his appointed means, and one of those means is baptism. We baptize our children to exercise our faith in his promises to be faithful to our children. We essentially call on him to fulfill that promise.
To hold off would then seem to imply that we do not believe the covenant is for our children, but that they must come to faith atomically, apart from their family. By denying them the sacraments we hinder them from fellowship with Christ (Mt 19:14). We cancel out the "and to your children" and all the promises to future generations by asking that each one start from scratch. The argument that children are no longer included in the fulfilled covenant is explicitly denied by Peter in Acts 2, and would make the new covenant have a reduced scope from the ones of which it is a fulfillment.
The Alternative
This is a critique of so-called "believer's baptism". It is based off of the way I have seen it play out in my church specifically, and is not intended to cover all possible alternatives of how this may be practiced.
The goal of "believers' baptism" is simple enough. We wait until a person is a believer to baptize them, with the intent that only those with saving faith are baptized. The argument from Scripture is that the apostles baptized people after they believed, and therefore that is what we should do.
Of course all baptistic viewpoints have a category for baptizing those who come to faith later in life as adults. The scriptural evidence that this happened does not argue against baptizing children. It is also noteworthy that the book of Acts is written about the initial spread of the church, and we should not necessarily expect that the church would look the same when it has been established for several generations. Therefore, I do not think that the few examples of baptism in Scripture is enough to dismiss the claim that children ought to be included.
We must also note that Paul did not necessarily directly address every possible controversy. While we live in an era where the argument is very live and very volatile, we should not therefore export our confusion to the apostolic era and assume that if it were intended it would have been directly spoken about.
Third, it should be acknowledged that we do not know who is a believer and who is not with certainty and it is not our business to try and make the church coterminous with "true believers" (Mt 13:24-30; 13:47-49). This does not remove our requirement to do church discipline. We are to judge based on fruitfulness (Mt 7:15-20) and lack of apostasy (1 John 2:19) without attempting to render judgment as to their final eternal state but leave that to God (Rom 14:4).
Thus, a church body cannot practice so-called "believers' baptism" as we do not know their status as believers. Rather, we practice a baptism that boils down to "anyone over the age of about 13 who says they believe in Christ"-baptism. This unnecessarily excludes people who have faith as infants and children and includes people who have no true saving faith at all. Rather than drawing the line at "believer", we draw it in an arbitrary spot that does nothing to solve the "believer/unbeliever" distinction and instead substitutes a "sounds good enough to me" distinction.