Protestants made their bones protesting the sacerdotalism of Roman Catholicism. The Protestant faith has always been that salvation comes through faith alone. Yet at the same time, the lion’s share of Protestants since the Reformation have baptized their Babies. When we consider the great magisterial Reformers, Luther, Calvin, Bucer, Zwingli, they all believed both that salvation comes by faith alone and that babies of believers ought to be baptized.
The Baptists have always held that this was a fault of the Reformation and that this is an example where the Reformation didn’t shed itself of all its Roman Catholic influence. The Baptists have insisted that one simply can not consistently believe both in salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, and infant Baptism. Our Baptist brethren hold our position to be an absurdity.
So, the first question we ask this morning is, “is it the case that infant baptism is an absurdity? Have we a contradiction in our thinking? This is what we want to speak to this morning and then we want to follow by trying to limn out how monumentally important our position is as the implications teases themselves out.
If we understand “Faith” to be our human response to God’s regenerating power then the question of “can infants have faith,” becomes the question “can infants offer the human response of faith to God’s regenerating power.” Certainly, everyone believes that God can regenerate infants but can infants have the human response of faith, or, we might put it this way, “can infants, being infants, respond to God?”
Well, before we reason about this we want to say that the Scriptures authoritatively weigh in here with a few words,
“Yet you brought me out of the womb; you made me trust in you, even at my mother’s breast.” Psalm 22:9
Here the Psalmist offers that indeed he did, as an infant, have a personal relationship with his Creator. The Psalmist, speaking to God says, “you made me trust in you, even at my mother’s breast.”
So, here we learn that if the question is “are infants able to respond in trust-faith to God” the answer is definitive yes.
Infants respond to their parent’s voice… infants demonstrate a ‘trust’ of their parents vis-a-vis a stranger. If this is true, and it manifestly is true, why would we contend that infants can’t trust their God?
And that in the face of Scripture which tells us of one example where that was true (Psalm 22:9).
So Scripture does not allow us to posit that infants are less available to God than other non-infants are. God can and has per Psalm 22:9 worked in the lives of infants to trust Him.
Now consider how we as parents build up our relationship with our babies. We use symbols called words. We talk to them. Nobody thinks it is odd if they see Anthony or Rachel talking to Louis. Well, in Baptism God uses the symbol of water to speak to us the visible Word. We should no more find it odd for God to speak to His covenant seed in Water than we find it odd to find a Mother speaking to a child who does not yet have the dictionary memorized.
And of course, as we have mentioned as a child responds to the parent so an infant can respond to His creator.
Now I can hear those on the other side saying, “but the child cannot say, ‘I love Jesus.’ He has no ability to make his commitment clear. You are presuming upon God.”
But Louis likewise cannot say “I love Mommy and Daddy.” Louis likewise has not the ability to make his commitment to them clear. And yet who of us would say that it was that we are presuming upon Anthony and Rachel to suggest that Louis belongs to them all because Louis is not yet informing everyone of his commitment to his Mommy and Daddy?
And herein is the divide between us. We see Baptism as primarily God’s claim on us whereas those who disagree with us see Baptism as primarily our claim on God. We see the helpless child brought to the Baptismal font to be claimed by God and we see the perfect picture of salvation. We being helpless in every way God does all the saving. We bring nothing to our salvation. Even if we come to baptism as adults we understand that our profession of faith is not a something that we are bringing that earns us the right of being marked by God in the waters of Baptism.
The insistence that a child must own his identity as Christian before he can be marked as Christian in Baptism is as odd as saying that a child must own his identity as a McAtee before he can be given the name of McAtee.
Dr. Peter Leithart offers here,
“The sociologically consistent Baptist should, it seems to me, allow children to name themselves. Otherwise, they are inevitably “imposing” an identity on their little boys and girls. “
Before moving on I’m going to push this envelope here just a wee bit.
This Baptist thinking that a child can’t be baptized until they choose for themselves their own religious identity leads to some strange places if the logic is followed through.
What is the difference between Baptist parents insisting that their children have to be epistemologically self-conscious about what religious identity they want to choose and Modern parents now who are insisting that their children have to be epistemologically self-conscious about what sexual identity those children want to choose? What we are saying here is that there is a harmony found in Baptist parents refusing to baptize their children and many modern parents today refusing to “baptize” their children into a predetermined gender believing, just as the Baptists believe, that their children should be able to have a say in the matter of what gender they will have.
Modern parents insisting that children must choose their own sexual identity is just the logical extension of Baptist parents insisting that children must choose their own religious identity.
Our Baptist opponents will shriek here that there is a difference between a child who is obviously male or female and a child that is questionably a member of the covenant. However, per scripture, we see these children that God has given us as obviously covenant members as the Baptist sees little boy babies be little boy babies and little girl babies to be little girl babies. For the Reformed, it is more obvious to us that a child of the covenant is a child of the covenant and so should receive the sign of the covenant than it is obvious that a little girl baby is a little girl baby and so be raised as a girl.
The point here isn’t that there is an exact one to one correspondence on this matter. The point here is that when you start with the sovereign individual who must be consulted before covenantal realities are determined apart from his or her approval the end result, naturally enough, is sovereign individuals who must be consulted before any number of realities are determined apart from zhis or zhers approval.
Consistent Baptist thinking lends itself to the atomized individual and once the individual is atomized then he or she is free to be self determinate in every area of life from religion to sexuality to who knows where else.
You can see that the implications of this non-Reformed thinking have the potential to be HUGE.
So, we do not wait for our children to profess their commitment to us before we claim them. Just so God does not wait for His covenant seed to profess their commitment to Him before He places His claim upon them.
In Baptism God places His claim upon His people’s people who are now His people. We do not believe that every child Baptized will always have faith but we do believe that every child baptized should be given the judgment of charity regarding their standing with God. They have been brought into the external community of God. They have been given all the benefits of the Kingdom. And so we deal with them as little Christians. Consistent with the great commission having first baptized them we now begin the discipling process, which continues throughout one’s life. Everyone recognizes that the children of believers should be taught to observe the commandments of Jesus
Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord (see Eph. 6:1–3, 4),
However, the great commission indicates that they should be baptized first and then discipled.
baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit: 20 teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I commanded you
Now the objection could well be raised,
“You admit that not all of your infants who are Baptized do not always end up with saving faith in Christ. Does this alone not prove that you should not baptize until you know for certain that people have faith?”
And the answer to that is, “we never know for certain that someone has faith in Christ. Never. We quite admit that some, or many even many of our baptized children do not end up owning saving Faith. But we note at the same time that many adults who confess Christ and are baptized as adults by Baptists don’t end up with saving faith. People fall away from the faith, whether they were born in Christian homes and baptized as infants or whether they made confession of Christ as an adult. The fact that baptized infants sometimes don’t end up having saving faith no more means that they should not be baptized then the fact that baptized adults sometimes deny the faith means that adults who come making a credible profession of faith should not be baptized.
Turning to the Scriptures again we quite concede that the record we find in the New Testament is a record wherein we find adults being baptized. But do keep in mind that that is precisely what we would expect in the gathering of a first-generation Church. The Church was the Institution that while contiguous with Old Testament Israel was at the same time differentiated from Old Testament Israel. With this differentiated church, there came the necessity to collect a differentiated first generation of Christians who would, over time, come from every tribe, tongue, and nation, and of course, we would expect the biblical record to reflect that the first generation Church gathered would be of adults being baptized. But while Scripture gives us examples of adults being baptized it also explicitly tells us that the same promise upon which adults were being baptized was also the promise for their children. (Acts 2:38)
“39 For to you is the promise, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call unto him.”
What promise?
That God would be their God to them and to their children to a thousand generations.
And so in light of this promise of God and not upon the promise of the sovereign individual to be faithful we bring God’s children given to us by God to the Baptismal font where God again ratifies His covenant to be God to us and our seed…. where God speaks to us His intent to gather us up, not as a collection of individuals, but as covenantal families as first gathered with a distant patriarch and then gathered anew in every subsequent generation of that often forgotten first patriarch.
Honestly, time does not allow me to tease this out but this Christian conviction of covenantal realities is alone what can cure what is wrong with us as a Church and as a people. Having given up this covenantal thinking and the Reformed emphasis of covenantal continuity in generational lines with its attendant idea of hierarchy and patriarchy we have drifted off into the Church of atomized individuals who have no history longer than our memories. Apart from this emphasis on covenantal continuity — a continuity where God gathers us in our generations — one is left only with the Church of what’s happening now. The Church becomes just an organization as characterized by individual voluntarism as opposed to a breathing organism whose origins and ways recede into a past characterized by God’s faithfulness and in which we are only the most recent residents and members.