More Arguments (from silence) Over Infant Baptism
By Timothy J. Etherington

Back in May 2002 at RazorMouth.com, Tristan Emmanuel posted a multi-part brief (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4) defending infant baptism. He seeks to defend "the practice of infant baptism not from a traditional basis, but a biblical one" and that, for my money is a Good Thing. We can argue tradition all day and in the end, it won't help us a stitch. Why? Because tradition can err. If we were to follow tradition without question, we'd have a Pope.

So how does Tristan fare in part one? Not particularly well; he really doesn't add anything new to this old debate. The misunderstanding stands, as can be seen from this quote: "For some reason they [infant baptism critics] have a hard time acknowledging the 'redemptive-historic' context of Peter's sermon [in Acts 2]." Tristan cannot see why we cannot see what he sees, see? Sí! And the reason is because presuppositions get in the way, his presuppositions and ours. What we all have to do is to test our presuppositions against scripture and adjust them accordingly. Tristan's presupposition comes out in this quote:

That is, he [the critic of infant baptism] would have us believe that they [Peter's hearers] clearly recognized a paradigm shift; that in hearing Peter's admonition to 'repent' and 'believe,' they walked away understanding that the covenant no longer applied to families, but only to individuals who chose Jesus. This would have been a radical change--a major paradigm shift.

What stands out in Tristan's exegesis of Acts 2 is that he focuses the entire issue on the change of covenant. The nail he hammers on in part one of his brief is the historical context of the statement made in Acts 2:38-39 and how those standing in front of Peter would understand it. His point is that children were included in the Old Covenant and were to be included in the New Covenant because nowhere does Peter say that they were no longer. A statement like that from the Apostle is the missing "radical change" he refers to above.

One problem with this is that there is no mention of covenant in Acts 2 at all. Peter's point was not "the covenant has change and you'd all better get on board with your children!" Peter was calling the crowd to believe on Jesus Christ whom they'd crucified, hence his call to repent and believe. Tristan's entire argument really hinges on Acts 2:39a: "for the promise is to you and your children" even though he never explicitly mentions it. Children were included in the Abrahamic Covenant, which Tristan claimes is alluded to, and are therefore assumed to be included in the New Covenant because there was nothing saying that they weren't.

There are so many problems with this assumption it is difficult to know where to begin. I guess I'd better begin by explaining that I am a covenantal theologian. I believe that the Covenant of Works and the Covenant of Grace were inaugurated in the Garden of Eden with Adam as our federal head. I believe that the Covenant of Grace is administered by later covenants. I believe that Sunday is the Lord's Day, the New Covenant Sabbath. I believe that the Ten Commandments summarize God's moral law and are binding on Christians today. I also believe that there are covenantal reasons why children of covenant members are no longer automatic members of the covenant. I am not a Dispensationalist who claims that what isn't repeated in the New Testament is not binding. Just so you know where I'm coming from.

While that little diversion was fun (or boring, depending on if you are like me), lets get down to Tristan's exegesis of specific texts in order to understand where he goes wrong. Here's one to start with: "Under the Old Testament administration, children were included in the covenant of grace. This practice was established with Abraham (Gen. 17:4-8)." And here is where the problem begins. As an ordained Presbyterian minister, Tristan (perhaps I should refer to him as Rev. Emmanuel, which, by the way, is an excellent last name for a minister) is, no doubt, immensely familiar with the Westminster Confession of Faith. Indeed, Tristan's quote I just cited falls in line with what the Westminster says:

This covenant [of grace] was differently administered in the time of the law, and in the time of the Gospel: under the law it was administered by promises, prophecies, sacrifices, circumcision, the paschal lamb, and other types and ordinances delivered to the people of the Jews - WCF 7.5

The problem is that Presbyterians are thrown off by their own confession! Do you see what is missing in both Tristan's and the Confession's statement? What about the time from Adam to Abraham? It is accidentally omitted from their covenantal schema. Showing my total and unabashed bias, let me quote the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith on the same subject:

This covenant [of grace] is revealed in the gospel; first of all to Adam in the promise of salvation by the seed of the woman, and afterwards by farther steps, until the full discovery thereof was completed in the New Testament - BCF 7.3

We don't omit the saints from Adam to Abraham (Heb 11:1-7). As Tristan admits, the practice of including children in the covenant of grace began with Abraham. A significant portion of redemptive history included people in the covenant of grace based on what? Faith if we are to follow Hebrews 11 (for those of you still following along, yes, we are to follow Hebrews, its in the Bible.)

Still, to be fair to Tristan and the Westminster, we are talking about the progress of redemptive history and even the thickest amongst us will recognize that the New Covenant comes after the Old Covenant. This is exactly what Tristan is trying to nail us for, ignoring redemptive history.

But wait a minute. I want to go back to Genesis (no, not that irritating Creationist radio program) and take a look at those children included in the covenant. Tristan's citation is a bit too narrow for me. I'd like to point out one little detail that gets overlooked every time. In Genesis 17:18 Abraham pleads for Ishmael, that Ishmael may be included in those wonderful promised covenant blessings. After promising other blessings, in verse 21 God is very clear, the covenant is with Isaac, not Ishmael. Ishmael is 13 years old at this point and God clearly announces that he will not be part of the covenant and yet Ishmael receives the mark of the covenant (v 25-26)!

What are we to make of this? A modern Presbyterian would never baptize a teenaged child who clearly had no interest in the covenant and yet Ishmael is excluded from the covenant by an even surer sign (God's voice, not man's) and the kid gets circumcised anyhow. What I think this means that the Abrahamic administration is not the archetypical pattern for infant baptism we would like it to be. Sure, infants were included in Abraham's covenant but rejected teenagers were too. Oh yea, servants were too. I'll use all this in a moment.

Another problem with Tristan's point about the missing paradigm shift in Peter's sermon is that if the Jews in front of him (Peter, not Tristan, please stay) assumed everything from the previous covenant and a parallel between circumcision and baptism, then wouldn't they have dumped their daughters with their wives and approached the baptismal font with Junior only? I mean, in making his assertions so far, Tristan isn't bringing anything new to Acts 2:29 except the historical context that went before.

When we come to part two of Tristan's brief, what we find is his application of all that he has said in the first half. Tristan has a lot of good stuff to say about hermeneutics along the way. Some of what I have to say may be a repeat from the first half but I think it will still be helpful.

I agree with Tristan on a whole bunch and I hope that my comments will take us at least a baby step closer to understanding and appreciating each other. I want to try to put any bad blood between Reformed Paedobaptists and Reformed Credobaptists behind us, way behind us.

Since I'm trying to be conciliatory and all, I'd better start off with a point of agreement:

The difference is that Peter didn't assume to know what those changes were without being divinely told. One could say that Peter's intuitive hermeneutic was, Assume continuity unless God reveals otherwise. After all, Jesus had told him, "Don't think I've come to abolish the law or the prophets" (Matt. 5:17).

Exactly! The Dispensational idea that everything comes to a crushing halt at the New Covenant is really handy but not biblical. It isn't how the Apostles handled the Old Testament and as Tristan points out above, it flies in the face of Jesus' clear statement to the contrary. Furthermore, the hermeneutic "if not repeated, not binding" is a presupposition based on thin air. There is nothing in the New Testament that supports that idea. Arguing against it is difficult, not because it is true but because any proof cited is repeated and therefore binding. Run around that track a few times and see what real frustration is.

Though I like Tristan's take on this, I don't think it will convert the ardent Dispensationalist. His points about explicit termination of dietary laws, ceremonies and circumcision are well taken. I just wish I could get other Baptists to listen!

Okay, enough Mr. Nice Guy. The group hug is over. Where Tristan heads with this truth is where we part company:

They will need to explain why it is that the apostles corrected the early church on all kinds of issues (dietary laws, new moons, genealogies, and circumcision) but never once mentioned the error of infant baptism.

Tristan has assumed that infant baptism naturally flows from circumcision. What he is guilty of is selective application. He says:

In all their [the Apostles] instructions, both personal, and of course, in their epistles, not once do they condemn, correct or correct the practice of infant inclusion; neither do they introduce a theological paradigm shift regarding the exclusion of infants-not once!

I've never studied it but from what I understand, Judo is a martial art that uses an opponent's momentum against him. When your opponent punches, the idea is not to block it but to make it do more than he'd intended. You grab is arm and just keep him moving in the direction of the punch. Make them overdo everything they try. Well, I'm going to lay some "theological Judo" on Tristan now.

Nowhere in the New Testament do the Apostles command a cessation of infant inclusion, that is true. But neither do they explicitly stop automatic slave inclusion either (Gen 17:12-13, 23). Nor did they introduce the age-of-accountability caveat that Tristan has injected for "older children". Based on what New Testament text are these people excluded from baptism? They were circumcised under the Old Covenant so shouldn't they be baptized under the New? Furthermore, while it can be demonstrated that adult women were baptized (Acts 16:14-15) there is no commanded paradigm shift to baptize female infants.

Tristan makes a great deal out of the silence of the New Testament on this matter but he doesn't recognize that it is a knife that cuts both ways. While Baptists lack a clear command to cease infant inclusion, Paedobaptists lack a clear command to restrict covenant inclusion to only believers and their children. Demand it from me but produce it for yourself too.

To examine all of this, we need to employ a fairly complex piece of not-so-modern technology. Join me in Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine™ and we'll travel back to that glorious Pentecost morning to see how this all plays out. Cue the dry ice, swirl the music and sway the camera a bit. Arriving upon the scene, we see Josiah, a new Jewish convert, coming to Peter for baptism. Josiah is carrying his infant son and has his male slave in tow.

    "We want to get baptized." Says Josiah.
    "I don't." announces Josiah's servant, Bothum.
    "Shut up. Don't you understand that you got circumcised because of me and so you have to get baptized too? Now be quite and let this nice man get you wet." Josiah replies.
    "Is this your entire household?" Peter asks glancing around, "Where's your wife?"
    "Come on Peter," Josiah says with a laugh in his voice, "my wife didn't get circumcised, neither did my two daughters. Why would they get baptized?"
    "I still don't want to get baptized!" Bothum blurts out. Josiah, smiling at Peter kicks his servant in the shin.
    "Well, see, this is the New Covenant," Peter begins, "and there is continuity and discontinuity between the signs of the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. Women now receive the sign of the covenant and your servant here can't since he's rejecting it." Peter looks over Josiah's shoulder searching for some sign of the man's family in the crowd.
    "Why didn't you mention all that in your sermon?" Josiah asks. "I assumed, due to the historical context of what you'd said, that you were drawing a fairly tight parallel between the covenant with Abraham and the New Covenant."
    "I was!" Peter exclaims, "but only in reference to your infant. Didn't you catch that? Now, let's get moving here, there must be about 3,000 people needing to be baptized today so we have to keep things rolling."

Returning to the present (with special thanks to Sherman for safely transporting us through time), what we see is that Tristan's demand for an explicit repeal of automatic infant inclusion in the covenant backfires on him. The changes are not outlined here in the manner that he wants them to be, neither for the Baptist nor for himself.

The way I see it (and I think Tristan does too) is, there is not "continuity and discontinuity" but rather "continuity and fulfillment" between the covenants. I fear that discontinuity is a category invented to cover over where our presuppositions don't fit. Fulfillment seems to me to be the way the New Testament looks at the Old (cf. Heb 7-10). If we don't find fulfillment, then we can assume continuity.

This leads us back to where we stared, with Acts 2:38-39. When it comes down to it, I think we need to deal with Acts 2:39 in a much more faithful manner than has been done so far. The quotes listed at the beginning of this paper are intended to call attention to where we go wrong. I find that I cannot handle this any better than Walter Chantry already has in Baptism and Covenant Theology:

The context has in view specifically spiritual promises, namely remission of sins and filling with the Holy Spirit. These promises cannot be said to attach themselves to all the crowd before Peter (the "you" of the text), but only to "as many as the Lord our God shall call." They could not be said to belong to "all that are afar off", but only to "as many as the Lord our God shall call." If that phrase qualifies the first and third parties mentioned, it must also qualify "your children". The promises do not belong unto the children of believers apart from effectual calling. Only those children who receive this saving grace of God may be conceived of as being heirs of the spiritual promises.

That is why I quoted that most eminent Post-modern theologian, Madonna, "please don't tell me to stop." In order to prove your point, don't tell me to stop reading part way through verse 39. We can avoid all these misunderstandings if we will just stay true to the text. This is one of the clearest New Testament texts to show who is in the covenant: those whom God will call to Himself.

In the end, my problem is not with infants per se. Children can be regenerate (Ps 22:9-10; 71:6; Jer 1:5; Lk 1:41.) I know that for some Baptists, this news comes as a shocker but there it is, right out of the Bible. Deal with it. The real issue with infant baptism is that it rests on the assumption that baptism replaces circumcision and that the concept of covenant succession abides in the New Covenant.

It is assumed that baptism is the sign and seal of the New Covenant, but it isn't. Baptism is never referred to as a sign of the covenant, but the Holy Spirit is (see 2Co 1:22; 5:5; Eph 1:13-14; 4:30). All that has to be done to prove me wrong is produce one text that says baptism is the New Covenant sign and seal. Let me save you time in your concordance, there isn't one. It can be inferred through some round about methods dealing with Colossians 2:11-12. The problem there is that the circumcision referred to there is done without hands (cf Eph 2:11), it is the putting off the body of the flesh ('flesh' is a common New Testament metaphor for the sinful nature) and is ultimately called the 'circumcision of Christ'. This, I would argue, is not Old Covenant circumcision even at its best!

This all serves to take the wind out of the "baptism is the sign of the New Covenant" sails, so now I'd like to move on to the question of covenant seed. Does that still apply in the New Covenant? My answer is "No" and that prompts two questions: why and show me the beef. No wait, the second one should read 'show me the biblical proof'. Sorry.

Why covenant seed does not apply to the New Covenant is the first question we have to deal with. The reason is that in every administration of the covenant of grace, God's people have been bearing and hoping in the promised Seed. In Genesis 3:16 the promise of a Seed who would crush the serpent's head is announced. That Seed is later limited to the children of Abraham (Acts 3:25, Gen 22:18) and then is announced to be a Son of David who would reign forever (Acts 7:46-50.) In every instance, that Seed promise is fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Paul couldn't be clearer about the promised seed of the Abrahamic Covenant "'And to your seed,' that is, Christ" (Gal 3:16). The reason for covenant inclusion of infants was so that the promised Messiah would come and be recognized. We're no longer looking forward to one who will crush the serpent's head, Jesus will do that under our feet (Rom 16:20.) We're no longer looking for a king to reign over us, King Jesus reigns from heaven (Acts 7:56). We no longer look for the promised seed of the Abrahamic Covenant who will bless the nations, that seed is Christ (Gal 3:16) and we are children of Abraham as we are in Christ (Gal 3:29).

Where's the beef? Well, apart from the side of Black Angus I laid out in the previous paragraph, how about if we look at the promise of the New Covenant. In Jeremiah 31:29-30 (which, by the way, is given long before Peter's sermon and so if they were thinking covenantally during that sermon, it would very likely also have been in the crowd's mind at the time also) God promises a "paradigm shift of covenant proportions" to borrow Tristan's own words. In the Old Covenant, a there was a proverb that fathers would eat sour grapes and their children's teeth would be on edge. The point wasn't a lesson about how really bitter bitter fruit can be; the point was the strong covenant tie between parents and children. God promised to visit judgment to the third and fourth generation and blessing to the thousands (Ex 20:5-6). But in the promised New Covenant, "each man who eats the sour grapes, his teeth will be set on edge" (Jer 31:30). The covenant curses won't pass along familial lines and I would argue that the curses and blessings flow in the same riverbed. If God cut off the curse, He cut off the blessings too. Indeed, "this is the covenant which I will make...I will put My law within them and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people" (Jer 31:33).

How does this fit with the New Testament witness? Well, if the Holy Spirit really is the sign and seal of the New Covenant, and it is He who writes God's law on fleshy hearts (2Co 3:3), and that the nature of the New Covenant is that God is exclusively our God, then I think this all fits rather nicely, thank you very much.

So where is the explicit biblical command to quit infant inclusion? I think it is found in Acts 2:39 as well as elsewhere. It is the very nature of the New Covenant that demands individual inclusion.  The prophecy of Jeremiah 31 and Ezekiel 36 speak of the New Covenant in most glorious terms. All that are in it will have the Law written on their new hearts of flesh. They will have the Spirit dwelling in them. Can these things be said of a baptized infant?

And I did all this without a single underwear joke when talking about Tristan's multi-part brief.

© 2002 Timothy J. Etherington
This document is available on line at http://www.byfarthersteps.com/Tristan.html