Matt C.

There will be a book!

Joe

I’m open to ideas on when to baptize. We baptized our kids around 10 years old. It’s what was going at the time. And it seems to have worked OK. Their faith is strong. Even baptists have no business baptizing kids who haven’t been “trained” by the gospel. Also, by then they had seen enough baptisms, and watched Communion enough to know that inclusion there required something beyond their heredity. They never felt left out, and it meant much more once they were included.

The thing that makes our kids different is not baptism but the gospel. The Spirit is convicting them of sin. So that doesn’t make them Christians, but it doesn’t make them pagans either. It makes them children of the first Adam. If there is such a thing as an unrepentant, unregenerate “Covenant child,” it is a child under the gospel, not under the vows that come with salvation. The family is one Covenant, the church is quite another. This allows the Church to include all families, tribes, nations and races.

On the last question, I’d see it as a kind of knighthood, or coming of age (like the Jewish robe). Before baptism, they were accountable to the Church through their parents. After their baptism, they answer directly, and are open to discipline by the Church (obviously this all takes a lot of wisdom case by case). So, there’s certainly a grey area, but we had no doubts about our kids’ faith by that stage. A robe is a symbol of authority. Circumcision was about who could come in. Baptism is about who can go out. If kids are helping out with ministry in the Church, they should have church authority, and so be baptized.

But as I said, still open to ideas. I’m not a pastor, but I do have kids. Baptism shouldn’t tell kids they are inherently special. Baptism tells them Jesus is special. And on top of all this, for some strange reason a credobaptism is a lot more fun, and a much greater blessing for the saints.

I’ve been pulling ideas together for a book that combines a Baptist perspective and Federal Vision theology, but you’re already there. Go ahead and write it.

As a baptist who gets the logic of the paedo position, this is helpful. I’m still feeling the tension between how we parent (treat our children as Christians so that they become Christians) and excluding them from the font and the table. I’m attracted to something you wrote previously about the Covenant as a shelter. Our children are like the birds nesting in the branches of the kingdom tree. So I guess I have three questions (not true, I have more, but I’ll restrain myself):

1. Are the children of believers different in some sense (any sense?) from the children of unbelievers (I’m thinking 1 Cor 7 here)? Are they “little pagans”? Or are they covenant children?

2. At what approximate age would you say baptism is appropriate? Old school baptists would wait until children were adults (16-18). I’ve been more inclined to the position that we should baptism our children young, when they make a basic confession. The challenge is that my two year old is making a basic confession (“What’s the Bible about?” “Jesus kills the dragon and gets the girl.” So how does God save us? “By grace.” So what should we do? “Trust Jesus and his cross.”) It seems to me that your understanding of baptism would place you in the Old School camp.

3. Practically, how do you regard young children. Do you call them “Christians”? Do you say “we” believe in Jesus? And if so, why would you withhold baptism from them? And how would you communicate that to them so as to avoid a devastating form of rigorism, in which they learn that belief in Jesus isn’t “enough” to be baptized (and thus we teach them to doubt, instead of teaching them to believe)?

Thanks.