When a paedocommunionist tells his fellow paedobaptists that the Bible trumps tradition, he has shot himself in the foot.

Peter Leithart recently published a paper entitled “Paedocommunion, the Church, & the Gospel.” As always, he is worth engaging with. The problem I have with doing so is that his arguments are sound but his fundamental assumptions are not. This means that the house which he builds is constructed with great wisdom but is also, unfortunately, located on the sand of the sea. Not only is the tide coming in, but there is also a Jonahic storm on the horizon.

Baptists and paedobaptists have rational, logical objections to the opposing position. In such protracted debates, the answer is usually a third way. I believe that third way is inherent in the biblical theology of James B. Jordan. However, this third way requires a paradigm shift at a fundamental level, and pulls the rug from underneath his entire ecclesiology and sacramentology. So far, my friends seem unable to think outside of their current paradigm, so instead of actually dealing with my position, discussion gravitates back to the same old obsolete chestnuts. They do not seem to be able to free their minds from obsolete Old Covenant definitions and demarcations even for a moment. This is a pity, because many other people do. The Theopolis crowd themselves have worked out the solution to the age-old debate but strangely it remains incomprehensible to them.

So, although “Bully’s baptism” as a doctrine begins in Genesis 3 and cuts paedosacraments off at the root, I present some responses here to Peter’s paper. As with Jordan’s lectures on the subject, Leithart begins with the assumption of paedobaptism, so this paper is really an intramural debate. The sad truth is that the actual solution to the problem is not apparent to either side because the problem is paedobaptism itself, that erroneous thing that they are unwilling to question. There is an Old Covenant corpse in their Sanctuary and they are arguing over whether they should open the windows or use air freshener to deal with the nauseating smell. I find this extremely frustrating. The answer is quite simple. Get rid of the corpse. But they like the corpse, so this intramural disagreement merely concerns how much of this cadaver should be in the Sanctuary. Instead of refusing to play sacramental Weekend at Bernie’s any more, the Theopolis gents double down and become more consistent, but also more consistently wrong.

My responses are indented.

Leithart and the whale.

or Do You Really Want A Real Debate?

Another response to a post on baptism, “Baptists Are Right, Almost,” by my friend Peter Leithart.

I’m not your standard Baptist. My position on baptism is the result of the teachings of James B. Jordan concerning investiture, and subsequent analysis of the structural correspondences between investiture in the Old Testament and baptism in the New within matching literary sequences. I respond to Leithart because he — unlike standard Baptists and standard Paedobaptists — is open to the Scriptures, a thinker, somebody who understands the way I think in general terms, disarmingly gracious, and a friend. He is worth responding to. That said, his ideas are fair game, and anything that seems harsh in what follows here is written with a twinkle in the eye.

Another note: I think much debate concerning baptism occurs in an arena based upon flawed terms. My responses go far deeper than the questions at hand. Why argue a minor point when you can shift the ground under your opponent to a more biblical foundation that makes his argument entirely moot?

Several essays in the book, Believer’s Baptism, observe the inconsistencies in paedobaptist defenses of infant baptism.

As I have written elsewhere, the solution to being inconsistent is not to become more consistently wrong. See The Wrong Question.

In the introduction, editors Thomas Schreiner and Shawn D. Wright focus on the issue of apostasy. If the warning passages in, say, Hebrews are real threats to people within the covenant community, then “some who have the law written on their heart and who have received the forgiveness of sins (Heb 10:16-18) are not truly forgiven.” This position puts “a wedge between those who are elect and those who are forgiven of their sins,” and they suggest that “paedobaptists would be more consistent if they argued that those who are saved can lose their salvation.”

The first problem here is the erroneous concept of “the covenant community,” and it distorts the thinking on both sides of the debate. Since the end of the Circumcision, this no longer exists. Baptism is not the boundary of the covenant but the staff uniform of its administrators. Since it is a rite of ordination for prophetic office (as a witness with the testimony of Jesus), apostasy is the removal of that external office based on the revelation of one’s internal unregenerate state. If we use the analogy of a knighthood, a knight who is exposed as unworthy of his king is no longer fit to be the king’s representative, and thus — hopefully temporarily — loses his office. He is no longer worthy of access to the “round table” of Jesus.

In short, they pose this dilemma: If paedobaptists take the warning passages straightforwardly, they’ll end up Arminian; if they muzzle the warning passages in pseudo-Calvinist special pleading, then why do they continue to baptize babies?

Once again, both sides are fumbling around in the dark because of their misunderstanding of covenant history. What is the context of the warnings in the book of Hebrews? It was written to Jews who were being tempted to return to the shadows of Temple worship and its system of atonement through animal sacrifice and the Laws of Moses. The Temple was still standing, and the “standing” lambs were being offered morning and evening. What they were being warned against was only secondarily eternal judgment. The imminent judgment of Jerusalem as Jericho was a call to persevere and not die the spiritual “wilderness” of first century Judaism, with its Balaamites and fiery Pharisaical serpents. The particular stripe of apostasy spoken of cannot be committed today. The warnings must be correctly interpreted before they can be properly applied.

The Baptists are right. Almost.

They are right to argue that Reformed paedobaptist must have a doctrine of apostasy, and a robust one. Otherwise, they have no business being paedobaptists. They are not quite right because they don’t believe there is such a thing as a robustly Calvinist doctrine of apostasy.

Leithart’s commitment to baptismal regeneration comes from his genuine attempt to apply the descriptions of baptism in the New Testament to paedobaptism. Of course, that just makes him even more wrong than the inconsistent paedobaptists. He’s trying to fit a V8 engine into a Matchbox car, and the resulting (and patently ridiculous) doctrines of paedofaith are the result. He rightly wants a doctrine of baptism in which the rite is efficacious, but the question is this: What is baptism actually for? His Frankenstein of a doctrine, a bapcision that is both flesh and Spirit, conflating and confounding circumcision of flesh with circumcision of heart, is not only something that “saves” without conscious faith, it is a contradiction of the clear teachings of both Old and New Testaments.

Leithart would retort, “Baptism saves you” (1 Peter 3:21). Once again, the context makes the Apostle’s meaning clear, and his audience is very similar to that of the author of Hebrews. The Jews who believed and were baptised were no longer answerable to the demands of the Law. As worshipers, they could now be “blameless” according to the Law — having a good conscience before God — without actually observing the Law. What they were “saved” from — delivered from — is the old order, hence Peter’s reference to the Great Flood, an image of the coming destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple. In the Flood, the old priesthood centred around the Sanctuary in Eden was destroyed forever. This is a context that I learned from Jordan and Leithart, and their commitment to paedobaptism seems to make them blind to it when the texts are used to prop up this false doctrine of bapcision. Garden-variety non-preterist Baptists at least have some excuse in their ignorance, and even in that state they understand that an infant has no conscience yet developed to speak of.

But there is. Calvin’s, for instance.

On Hebrews 6:4 (which Schreiner and Wright cite, oddly, as evidence that “no one can even be a partaker of the Holy Spirit . . . and not belong to the elect”), Calvin says: “he falls away who forsakes the word of God, who extinguishes its light, who deprives himself of the taste of the heavenly gift, who relinquishes the participation of the Spirit.” The apostate turns “from the Gospel of Christ, which they had previously embraced, and from the grace of God.”

The discussion is already off track due to the wholesale failure to take the “transitional” historical context into account. But as is the norm, Reformed theologians resort to the writings of the Reformers rather than Scripture. This would not be so bad if the Reformers themselves were not so confused and self-contradictory in their (mis)understanding of baptism.

What does it mean to “partake” of the Holy Spirit? Although there a many previous “Pentecosts” in the Bible, covenant history is fractal in nature, and the Day of Pentecost was the ultimate shift from external law to internal law, from the stoicheia of childhood to the stoicheia of the Spirit of adulthood. The same pattern is evident where it was established in the testing of Adam. He was to listen, act, and speak. The work of the Spirit was initially external, and through obedience it would become internal. Once filled with the Spirit of God, Adam would legally represent God as a priest-king with a prophetic voice. Adam’s disqualification for this office is why the word “covenant” is never used until the ministry of Noah. “Partaking” and “tasting” the Spirit, and then extinguishing its light, does not mean that a person is an actual believer. The process of conversion in the book of Acts follows the rite of sacrifice in the Old Testament. Once transformed from bloody flesh to fragrant smoke via holy fire, there is no going back. Whether one is actually transformed becomes apparent over time, but the Apostles were willing to take people at their word.

On Hebrews 10:29, Calvin adds, “to do despite to [the Spirit], or to treat him with scorn, by whom we are endowed with so many benefits, is an impiety extremely wicked.” We are to “learn that all who willfully render useless his grace, by which they have been favored, act disdainfully towards the Spirit of God.”

Such quotations can be, and have been, multiplied.

How did God harden Pharaoh’s heart? Through the testimony of Moses, that is, conviction of sin. The purpose of the warnings was to reveal what was already in Pharaoh’s heart. One who has truly received the Spirit of God will heed the warnings of God. That is, the external exhortations of the Law will bear internal fruit. Both faith and unbelief are then revealed in external works through various trials. The warnings separate the sheep from the goats, the Jacobs from the Esaus. Both brothers were circumcised, but only one was circumcised internally. That circumcision is what baptism is about. Such “faith comes by hearing,” four words that demolish Leithart’s baptismal house of cards. Apostasy also comes by hearing, which is why preaching must be compassionate but blunt.

Schreiner and Wright also complain about paedobaptism inconsistency with regard to the Supper. Most paedobaptist churches baptize babies but withhold communion, “but such a divide between baptism and the Lord’s Supper cannot be sustained from the NT,” nor from the OT for that matter.

Rather than reuniting the sacraments as rites of investiture for ethical office — much like knighthood and the round table of King Arthur — Leithart reunites them as a magical circumcision, one which sacralises human ties (familial and tribal) rather than transcending and inhabiting them as the Gospel was intended to. The New Covenant is not about forming but about filling.

Again, the Baptists are right. Almost.

They are wrong because they go on to say that admitting children to the table means admitting “unbelievers” who are going to eat and drink judgment to themselves. Grant the point. My two-year-old may be hardened in unbelief and sin.

The Baptists are right, but only accidentally. Baptism does not correspond to the Abrahamic circumcision but to the Mosaic Covenant Oath, one which only adults took and were accountable for. It was the Egyptian generation that died in the wilderness. By God’s mercy, their children were not slain along with them, but a “new covenant” was made with them in Deuteronomy, just like the second set of tablets at Sinai, and the “new covenant” made with Israel and Judah after the exile. The failure of both sides here is in their understanding of the fractal nature of humanity. If Adam was a child before God, God would make Adam a father on the earth. That is illustrated in the faith of Abraham and his subsequent offspring. Abraham’s faith in God (Oath – priesthood) resulted in fruitfulness in land and womb (Sanctions – kingdom). Leithart’s conflation of the two is as serious — at least in potential — as every usurping of priesthood by kingdom throughout covenant history. Adam despised the Oath and attempted to seize the blessings of God (Sanctions). So did the kings of Israel. This fundamental flaw was the cause of the death of European Christendom. Priesthood is not something that a child can bear. Certainly, Israel was a priestly nation, but that distinction is gone forever. That leads to Leithart’s next point.

But then I suspect the same was true of two-year-old Hebrews at Passover, Pentecost, and Booths, and Yahweh still wanted them among His people at His table. So, this point stands only if we accept the whole Baptist argument. Which we don’t.

Leithart’s failure is also architectural. In contrast to Egypt, Israel was God’s firstborn among the nations, even though it was not the oldest nation. This alludes to Jacob being the younger twin, and Joseph being exalted over his older brothers because of his faithfulness to God. But within Israel, the actual firstborn never approached God personally. God took the Levites in place of the firstborn of Israel (Numbers 8:18). That is, the infants only approached God through legal representatives, those who not only received no land but also ministered to protect the fruit of the womb. The context is Genesis 3, where Adam and Eve could be naked before God and each other (in the Garden) but needed to be invested with authority, robed in righteousness, before entering into the promised Land.

This pattern is made clear even before the establishing of the Levitical priesthood. In Exodus 24, only the elders dined on the mountain with God, Moses representing Israel and the 70 elders representing the Gentiles. Women were excluded because the Sanctuary would not be safe until the serpent was crushed. This is why the phrase “both men and women” carries so much import in the book of Acts. Women cannot be priests but they can be co-regents like Esther, and prophetesses like Anna. The irony here is that Leithart subscribes to “Covenant Renewal Worship” (as do I), a liturgical pattern based upon the sequences which can be traced through the ages of Church history right back to the book of Genesis. Exodus 24 also follows this pattern, and aligning the two makes the grievous error of paedocommunion stand out like a dog’s hind leg. (See Covenant Renewal Worship vs. Paedosacraments.) The children were present in worship but only their legal representatives actually ate with God. All men, women and children in the world are already included in the New Covenant. Baptised believers are “elders” who represent the nations — and all children — before God. That is the reason for the Great Commission. All are now called to repent. What Leithart fails to mention is that Passover, Pentecost and Booths were the tables of men, Israelite men, certainly, but still the tables of men. Israel and its tribes on “dry land” were a microcosm of the nations of the world, after all. Allowing children to dine at God’s table is putting them into government, at least liturgically. That never occurred at any time in Bible history. When did Jesus bear the government upon His shoulders? Not at His circumcision, but at His baptism. The Father was not please in Jesus’ flesh but in His voluntary obedience. That is what baptism is about. That this has to be stated at all boggles the mind.

Centrally, Schreiner and Wright complain about the inconsistency of proclaiming salvation by faith alone and then giving “the sign of that faith (baptism) to those who have not exercised faith (infants).” They agree with Paul Jewett’s alarmingly italicized statement: “To baptize infants apart from faith threatens the evangelical foundations of evangelicalism.”

The Baptists are right. Of course, baptizing infants threatens evangelicalism. Infant baptism is a gauntlet thrown down to evangelicalism, because evangelicalism is Baptist through and through.

If the suggestion is, however, that infant baptism is a threat to Protestant theology, nothing could be more mistaken. Obviously, Protestantism began as a paedobaptist movement. We can toss the charge of inconsistency back to the Baptists: How can you venerate a Protestant tradition that undermines the foundations of the gospel?

Ultimately, in his defence of baptismal regeneration, Leithart has nothing to appeal to but tradition. The obvious answer, one that even a run-of-the-mill Baptist could come up with, is that Leithart himself is not reformed enough. The doctrine of the Reformers concerning salvation and baptism was itself an inherently nonsensical and self-contradictory compromise with Roman teaching, and thus needed further reformation. Leithart is thus as guilty of as much closed-mindedness as the Paedobaptists who separate the sacraments based upon age. The fly in the ointment is paedobaptism itself. It cannot be both a carnal and a spiritual demarcation. Like a stool with only two legs, it will forever fall one way or another, and in either direction it is a fall which exposes it as a human hybrid, a contrived fabrication which is not of God. The sons of men can become Sons of God, but only through the hearing of the Gospel and a response of faith in that Word.

The Baptists are right on all kinds of things. They are right to say that paedobaptists need to confront the problem of apostasy head-on. They are right to say that paedobaptists are inconsistent to baptize babies and refuse to feed them. They are right to say that paedobaptists have not done a great job of explaining the relationship of sacraments and faith.

I’ve said before that the reason why Baptist-paedobaptist arguments go nowhere is because it is a fraternal rivalry. Many paedobaptists, especially in the Reformed churches, are semi-Baptists. It’s a scrimmage, not a real game. Whichever side wins, the Baptist position triumphs.

Perhaps this development in history is the actual work of God. That is not to say that the Baptists are right due to any deep understanding of the Old Testament and its doctrine of investiture. If they are right, they are right only accidentally, through taking the New Testament at face value rather than attempting to undermine it by hybridising circumcision of flesh with circumcision of heart. I have a deep understanding of the Old Testament thanks to Leithart and Jordan, but that has led to the conclusion that the Baptists are indeed right, despite their ignorance.

It’s time for a real debate.

Dr. Leithart, you won’t get a real debate from run-of-the-mill Baptists or Paedobaptists. They are as one-eyed as you on this issue. If you really want a real debate, you know where I am.

*Twinkle*

What sort of question is the question of paedocommunion?

Peter Leithart just reposted the first part of a series on paedocommunion. Since many people (most of them far more godly, educated and well-read than I am) have expressed how helpful they have found my posts on baptism, I figured I would offer some responses. Leithart is passionate about baptism, and expresses his conviction that the stakes are high. I agree with him about the stakes, which is why I oppose his errant position. In biblical theology, there is a place for everything and everything should be in its place. The question of paedocommunion in Reformed circles is the sacramental equivalent of those who promote child marriage arguing over the age at which their (perversion of) marriage can be physically consummated. That is, it is the wrong question.

Should young children receive the Lord’s Supper? Should we practice paedo-communion?

Before we address the question of paedocommunion, we must specify both what the question is and what sort of question it is. First, what is the question of paedocommunion? It is not in essence a question about the age of admission to the Lord’s table. Some who do not adopt the paedocommunion position would admit toddlers as young as a year-and-a-half. If, hypothetically, some means were invented to gauge the level of “discernment” in infants, and children who registered a “6” were admitted to the table, that practice still would not constitute paedocommunion. Nor is it a question about force-feeding bread and wine to newborns; though some churches give the elements to newly baptized infants, no Reformed advocate of paedocommunion, to my knowledge, has argued for this practice. Most Reformed theologians are content to wait until the child is able to eat solid food before he begins to participate in the Supper.

What sort of question is it? It is the second question, the question you ask when you got question 1 wrong. This entire debate (as James Jordan admits in his talks on paedocommunion, episodes 43, 45 46 and 49 of the Theopolis Podcast) rests upon the prior assumption of paedobaptism as a sign of “inclusion” in “the Covenant.” Paedocommunion is indeed the logical conclusion if you are convinced of paedobaptism. But since drinking wine is a sign of adulthood, a biblical symbol of judicial maturity (as Jordan rightly observes), giving wine to infants is also a large sign painted in deep red that reads WRONG WAY. GO BACK. Thus, paedocommunion is not only the logical conclusion of paedobaptism, it is also the reductio ad absurdum, the point at which the outcome of your ideology is running against the grain of actual human beings, and thus should be questioned at its very origin. Any discussion of paedocommunion is an intramural disagreement between two people who took a wrong turn centuries back but are unwilling to retrace their steps to discover the source of the conflict.

Leithart asserts that gauging the level of “discernment” in children is wrong, since their membership of the Body of Christ is, at its foundation, completely “objective.” But really, how is gauging their level of mastication and digestion any different? Why not force feed bread and wine to infants? If we can wait until the child is able to eat solid food, surely that is some indication of the nature of the greater debate concerning wine and its symbolic relationship with judicial maturity in the Bible. Is giving bread and wine to small children that they might “participate” really any different conceptually to puréeing the sacramental elements and putting them into a baby’s bottle? If newborns do not partake, are they still part of “the baptised body”? If they are, then communion is not what defines participation in worship. The same can be said of miscarried infants, who are not baptised, yet somehow assumed to be part of that same “body” by mere heredity. If the sacraments are indeed efficacious in the ways that paedocommunionists insist, then they cannot have it both ways.

The specific practical question is, Does baptism initiate the baptized to the Lord’s table, so that all who are baptized have a right to the meal? Paedocommunion advocates, for all their differences, will answer in the affirmative. Nothing more than the rite of water baptism is required for a person to have access to the Lord’s table. Opponents of paedocommunion will answer in the negative. Something more is required—some level of understanding, some degree of spiritual discernment, some sort of conversion experience, and some means for the church to assess these attainments.

Paedobaptists insist that their “Covenant membership” can be entirely objective, but those against paedocommunion at least have enough sense to realise that the table is about spiritual discernment, some level of understanding about God, and a consciousness of accountability for sin. What is required is repentance and faith, both for baptism, and then a renewal of repentance and faith at weekly communion. The problem is that paedobaptists conflate circumcision of heart with circumcision of flesh, something which even the Old Testament does not do. Circumcision for male infants did not require anything more than being born into a Jewish family, or being part of a family which had joined Israel. But that Jew-Gentile distinction no longer exists.

Sadly, neither those who are for nor those who are against paedocommunion realise that their doctrine of a “binary” Covenant membership is Abrahamic, which makes their “objective” baptism redundant anyway.¹See The Myth of Covenant Membership. Since the ascension of Christ, everyone is already under obligation to Him, and that includes all infants right across the world. That is the “objective” element of the New Covenant, and it exposes the argument for “inclusion” for what it is: a reductive reversal of the global nature of the New Covenant back to a tribal demarcation like circumcision. For Leithart to bang on against “something more being required” means that he still sees baptism as a parochial fence around an Abrahamic (Judaistic) people of flesh. But baptism (even for the nation of Israel while it was temporarily set apart from other nations), was and is a rite of ordination, the conferring of an office, which is necessarily both objective and subjective: baptism is done to the baptizand with full consent, just like the reception of any official capacity. For any office, something more is indeed required. That is the whole point. And if nothing is required for an individual baptism except being born into the right family, Leithart is living in the wrong Covenant.

Second, and more fundamentally, what sort of question is this? If it is merely a question about the admission requirements to the church’s ritual meal, then the question may be answered by straightforwardly applying a rule. If we narrowly focus on the question of who partakes when, we could admit children without adjusting any other doctrines or practices of the church. If it is only a matter of adding a few names to the guest list, then why is paedocommunion so strindently opposed by some within the Reformed world?

The issue here is Leithart’s “umbrella” terminology, the church’s “ritual meal.” Paedocommunionists rightly point out that all the Israelites participated in the Passover meal, but that meal was related to the separation of Israel from the nations as a people. The division between Hebrews and Egyptians in the first part of Exodus was the “national” outcome of the division between Hagar and Sarah, and their offspring. Israel was baptised into Moses, not into Abraham, and this is because there is a difference between circumcision of flesh (which no longer exists) and circumcision of heart (which was always independent of the circumcision, since Gentiles could believe and yet remain Gentiles). The ritual meals introduced under the Levitical Law concerned not the tables in the houses (or tents) or Israel, but the table of God, a table where only legal representatives dined. The clearest example is the order of events in Exodus 24. Since the circumcision is gone, then the Passover meal was fulfilled once and for all in the death of Christ. It has no Christian equivalent. Why does Leithart overlook this crucial difference? Because paedobaptists see only what they expect to see.

Moreover, this failure to discern the difference between the tables of men and the table of God does indeed require the adjustment of many other doctrines and practices of the church. The practice of paedocommunion is opposed because many within the Reformed world are not willing – as Leithart is – to redefine “faith.” Leithart quotes all of the gutsy texts about baptism which give other paedobaptists the jitters, and rightly so, but somehow does not realise that his position is more consistent only because it is more consistently wrong than they are. If the sacraments were two tires on a bicycle, Leithart is arguing that since the front tire (baptism) is flat, so should the back tire be. The reason many Reformed are against paedocommunion is simply because the descriptions of the table of God in the New Testament cannot be as easily conflated with circumcision.

Paedocommunion is not only about admission requirements narrowly considered, but, like paedobaptism, is linked with a whole range of theological and liturgical issues. It is not only about the nature of the Supper, but also about the church, baptism, and, most broadly, the character of the salvation that Christ has achieved in the world. The gospel is not directly at stake in the paedocommunion debate. Opponents of paedocommunion honestly and sincerely proclaim the gospel of grace, and I am grateful to God that they do. Still, the ecclesial and theological shape that the gospel takes correlates significantly with positions on paedocommunion, and the coherence between the gospel and the church’s practice is at the heart of this debate. The stakes are not so high as they were when Luther protested indulgences and the myriad idolatries of the late medieval church. But the stakes are high, very high.

There is a lot to respond to here, so I will do it briefly. On theological issues, paedobaptism requires the redefinition in some way of just about every major Christian doctrine. That is a warning sign. On liturgy, I have already mentioned Exodus 24, and am still waiting for an explanation from the proponents of Covenant Renewal Worship on the discrepancies between their practice of paedocommunion and the fact that only legal representatives ate the meal on the mountain. This shows that they are actually beginning with the tradition of paedobaptism as their authority, and not the Scriptures.²See Covenant Renewal Worship vs. Paedosacraments. Concerning the nature of the salvation that Christ has achieved in the world, does it consist of promises limited to a subset of humanity as it did under the Abrahamic Covenant? Or are the promises for all people and all their children, or are most of the infants of the world – including those who are miscarried or aborted or die in infancy – excluded from any possible mercy? Is salvation received through heredity, or through hearing the Gospel and believing it? What Leithart perceives as inclusion is actually exclusion, because his understanding of the fulfilment of the sacred architecture of the Old Testament is stillborn: baptism is not the boundary of the Covenant. Baptism is the vow, the rite of investiture, of its earthly administrators.

Dr Leithart then poses some excellent questions, ones which his non-paedocommunion fellow paedobaptists cannot answer terribly well. But I can answer them because I am not trapped in an Old Covenant paradigm. I am not stuck in the Garden of pietism as most baptists are (Priesthood), or in the Land of physical offspring like paedobaptists are (Kingdom), but concerned with testimony to the World, the meaning of the office conferred in biblical baptism: Prophecy.

At the risk of oversimplification (and provocation), I will briefly pose the options on these wider issues:

• Is the Supper an ordinance of the church (paedocommunion), or is it an ordinance for some segment of the church (antipaedocommunion)?
  

The Church is not a carnal demarcation as was Israel. That demarcation was destroyed by Christ at the cross. However, although the Abrahamic division is gone, the Mosaic requirement of circumcision of heart remains. That is why Israel was not baptised into Abraham, and why the Bible never speaks of the Law of Abraham. Israel grew to maturity not only as a nation from a tribe, but also judicially. The ministry begun in Moses was expanded through the investiture of the priesthood and of other judges. That means some segment of Israel participated in certain rites and meals which the rest of Israel did not. But those legal representatives participated on behalf of the others. The priests and the sacrifices were washed with water from the Laver that they might have Sanctuary access as “heads” on behalf of the “body.” One could pose the same question to Leithart concerning his own ordination. Why do “Christian” infants not participate in that? Because it is an office. The Church is the same kind of body – a prophetic one – as was the school of the prophets within Israel. In architectural terms, this is the difference between the Bronze Altar (land and offspring, earth and blood) and the Incense Altar (eldership and fragrant obedience). Covenant history moved from death to resurrection, from a carnal body outside the tent to a prophetic body inside the tent. Once again, see Exodus 24, where the elders of Israel partook in a meal on behalf of all Israel, just like the knights of King Arthur ate at his table as protectors of the realm. All the citizens who were represented by these holy warriors partook of Arthur’s care in them via their voluntary submission: they put their necks under the royal sword that they might bear that royal sword. Who was the first man permitted to bear the sword on God’s behalf? Noah. Baptism is investiture with the prophetic authority of Noah over the nations.³See Exposure to the Elements.

• Is the church the family of God simpliciter (paedocommunion), or is the church divided between those who are full members of the family and those who are partial members or strangers (antipaedocommunion)?

This question expresses the heinous conflation of the sons of men with the Sons of God, and the fatherhood of men (such as Abraham) with the fatherhood of God. Earthly parents are to image God to their children. That is why God gave us Abraham. Jesus clearly perceived that there was a greater, unseen Father when He reached the age of 12. Joseph had done his job faithfully. At Jesus’ baptism, the process was complete, and the Father in heaven revealed Himself. Covenant history moved from earthly fathers to the heavenly Father, and so did the Covenant sign. The sacraments are for the Sons of God, the priest-kings who have submitted to God and now act on His behalf. The “Abrahamic” facet of the New Covenant is the faith of Abraham.

• Did Jesus die and rise again to form a new Israel (paedocommunion), or did He die and rise again to form a community with a quite different make-up from Israel (antipaedocommunion)?

In sacrificial terms, the “body” of flesh (as “one”) was transformed into a “body” of fragrant smoke (as “many”) by the fire of Pentecost. As mentioned, the Church functions within all nations as the priesthood and the school of the prophets functioned within Israel: as legal representatives.

• Did Jesus die and rise again to form the new human race (paedocommunion), or did He die and rise again to form a fellowship of the spiritually mature (antipaedocommunion)?

God works in fractals. If Adam responded to the Father in heaven as a child, then God would make Adam a father on the earth. The human race still exists as it always did, and the fellowship of the spiritually mature with God still exists as it always did. What has changed is the maturity and access of “Israel,” and this is given to us in sacred architecture. The demarcations within old Israel are now the demarcations of the new Israel.

• Does baptism admit the baptized into the covenant or symbolize his prior inclusion in the covenant (paedocommunion), or does baptism merely express a hope that the baptized one day will enter the covenant in some other fashion (antipaedocommunion)?

On this one, the definition of “Covenant” by both paedobaptists and baptists, is wanting. The New Covenant has no boundaries. Baptism is ordination into the New Covenant priesthood of all believers. Nobody is excluded from the New Covenant and its obligations, so paedobaptism is redundant.

• Does the covenant have an inherently historical/institutional character (paedocommunion), or is it an invisible reality (antipaedocommunion)?

I think the answer to this one is that the Church is not discerned through what is visible (flesh: Priesthood) or invisible (Spirit: Kingdom) but through what is audible (witness: Prophecy). At Pentecost, holy fire fell upon human flesh and the result was legal testimony. That is what baptism is about, so the answer is that the true priest-kings will be known by their testimony. That is the Church of God.

• Does grace restore nature (paedocommunion), or does grace cancel our nature or elevate beyond nature (antipaedocommunion)?

This is interesting. Is childhood redeemed by Christ? Certainly, but through mediators, that is godly parents. In The Baptised Body, Leithart asks if baptists talk to their babies. Certainly. And all babies – even non-Christian ones – respond to their parents. But as David points out for us in Psalm 22, God teaches us about the invisible through what is visible. There is a shift from being under guardians and parents to becoming a guardian and a parent. That shift, that rite of passage, is baptism. This conflation of physical childhood under parents with spiritual childhood under God is the reason why paedocommunionist churches are not simply a metaphorical “nursery of culture,” but actual nurseries. One would think that those who are so versed in typology would be able to discern the difference between type and antitype in this instance. Their prejudice concerning paedobaptism means they are unable to rightly discern the meaning of texts such as Psalm 22:9-10. Another example is the disciples bringing infants to Jesus (Matthew 19:14). Who was the baptised one in that account? It was Jesus. He had submitted to God (priesthood) and was thus a king who could be trusted with those in His care, unlike the Herods who committed adultery, slew infants, and rejected John’s baptism. Paedobaptists miss the whole point of the passage, and even see it as evidence to support their case!

• Does faith require conscious and articulable belief (antipaedocommunion) or is faith something of which infants are capable (paedocommunion)?

Leithart conflates trust in earthly parents with trust in God, but the movement is from natural (earthy) to spiritual (heavenly), from childhood (seeing the visible) to adulthood (discerning the invisible). When it comes to deciding what age is suitable for baptism, we are given no biblical examples of children who have grown up in a Christian family, but we are given Timothy. Based on the typology of fatherhood on earth and in heaven, and the position of the Red Sea baptism in Israel’s history, it would seem that baptism is a rite of passage for one who is ready to answer directly to the leadership of the Church, and not through their parents or other guardians. It is the beginning of personal testimony, and thus personal accountability. Baptism confers office, some level of authority, and also vulnerability to personal excommunication.

Like many theological issues, paedocommunion also poses the question of the relative weight of Scripture and tradition. The question is not what the Reformed tradition has taught on this issue; I concede that very few Reformed theologians have advocated paedocommunion. Nor is the question about Jewish custom, which opponents of paedocommunion often cite. (Why should Christians care what the Talmud says?) The issue is what Scripture teaches, and if we find that our tradition is out of accord with Scripture, then we must simply obey God rather than men, even if they are our honored fathers in the faith.

Amen, brother. Show me infant baptism in the Bible, and I will obey. Paedosacraments are nothing more than tradition, an errant extrapolation based (very badly) on the features of an obsolete Covenant. Why should anyone care what the Reformers (and what they say about baptism has to be the most internally contradictory load of propaganda I have ever read) have to say on the matter?

In the following parts of this essay, I focus on the ecclesiological issues raised by paedocommunion, which are simultaneously questions about the nature of the covenant, about the continuity of Old and New, about salvation, and about the gospel. Throughout, I am guided by an underlying assumption that the sacraments manifest the nature of the church. For centuries, sacramental theology in the Reformed and in other traditions has often focused narrowly on the effect of sacraments on individual recipients, and as a result, both the theology and practice of the sacraments have been horribly distorted. We should, in addition and even primarily, consider sacraments in an ecclesial context. The question should not only be what a particular rite does to me, but also what this ritual tells me about the community that celebrates it.

Certainly. But paedobaptism is obviously a tribal rite – a fact which is not as apparent to those within the tribe. To those without, joining the Church becomes a matter of joining the community of blood first, that one might then have greater access to God. Nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to the New Covenant. The message which a credobaptism by immersion proclaims loud and clear is that anyone can repent and believe, and then minister to one’s own tribe of blood out of that direct access to God. The Abrahamic Covenant was a social demarcation with an ethical telos. The New Covenant is an ethical demarcation (repentance and faith first) with a social telos, witness to those around us. I have shared this a number of times with Dr Leithart. We are no longer looking to the Holy of Holies. We are emerging from the empty tomb with the message that the Tablets of Moses have at last been satisfied.

According to Paul’s teaching, the Lord’s Supper embodies the nature of the church as a unified community. Because we partake of one loaf, we are one body (1 Corinthians 10:16), and because partaking of the bread and cup is a communion in Christ, it commits us to avoiding communion with demons and idols. The Lord’s Supper ritually declares that the church is one, and that this united community is separated from the world. This is why, according to Paul, the Corinthians were not actually performing the Lord’s Supper (1 Cointhians. 11:20).

Certainly, but we are one in Spirit, not in flesh. The Lord’s Supper is for those who have the mind of Christ as His “friends” and confidants, just like the disciples. It is for those who – as guardians, ambassadors, administrators and legal witnesses – go out into the world as living sacrifices, living epistles, and if necessary, blood oblations, repeating the life of Christ before the world. Christian community is the result of those representatives who submit to Christ in baptism and dine at His table, not vice versa.

From Paul’s perspective, the Supper and its practice provide a criterion for measuring and judging the church’s faithfulness to her calling and her Lord, and, conversely, the New Testament’s teaching concerning the church provides a criterion for assessing our sacramental life. The Supper is a ritual expression of our confession that the church is One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic. We should ask both, “Does the church’s life measure up with what we say about ourselves at the table?” and “Is what we confess about the church manifest at the table?”

Once again, ethical before social. Baptism and the Lord’s table are unity via voluntary death. This is not the carnal “unity” of the Circumcision. This is the unity of those who have repented, believed, and received the Spirit of God as Jesus and the disciples did. The substitutionary offering of Jesus was extended in the substitutionary offering of His followers, those who “filled up” His sufferings as a testimony. The sacraments are all about legal testimony, beginning with a public profession of faith.

Paul’s sacramental reasoning can be extended in many directions. We know, for instance, that the church is a body in which divisions of Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female have been dissolved (Galatians 3:28), and Paul severely rebuked Peter when his table fellowship failed to line up with this ecclesial reality (Galatians 2:11–21). A church that refuses bread and wine to blacks, or to whites, or to Asians, is lying about both the church and the Supper. More pointedly: Paul says that the church is a community where the weakest and most unseemly are welcomed (1 Corinthians 12:22–26). Does the Baptist refusal to baptize infants give ritual expression to that kind of church, or does it instead imply that the church welcomes only the smart and the strong?

Leithart’s point here is valid, but what he fails to realise is that despite his claims to the contrary, paedosacraments simply call up the Jew/Gentile division from the grave of Jesus. Abram was a Gentile when God called him. A Church bounded by paedosacraments is nothing but an unworkable hybrid with Judaism, which is why there is conflict between the divided sacraments of Leithart’s opponents, and why there is conflict between Leithart and his opponents. It is the conflict, the enmity, between a demarcation of flesh and a demarcation of Spirit. They lust against each other.

Again, Leithart totally misses the point of baptism as a rite of investiture for priest-kings, for guardians, for witnesses. Everyone is already under the care of Jesus, but through the ministry of saints, the baptized. God works through mediators. That is what Sanctuary access is about.

At the same time, the sacraments must express what the church proclaims in the gospel. This might be approached from various directions. That Jesus broke down the dividing wall between Jews and Gentiles is part of the gospel, and so the Supper expresses the gospel when it welcomes Christians from every tribe and tongue and nation. The gospel announces that God has initiated a new creation in and through Jesus, and our practices and theology of the Supper must express the scope of that announcement. The gospel is about the grace of God to sinners who have no ability to crawl their way back to Him, and the way we think about and perform the Supper must be consistent with that. According to Luther, the Supper is the gospel, for in it our heavenly Father offers His Son to us through the Spirit for our life; the Supper is first and last God’s gift, God’s gift of Himself, to His people. But saying that and enacting that in our table fellowship are two different things.

Luther was wrong. The sacraments are not something that make one a Christian, although that misapprehension is understandable in the old Christendom which was yet to break the conceptual bounds of the oikoumene. But that is gone, and a social or civic baptism cannot work outside of those Old Covenant grave clothes. The sacraments are something that Christians voluntarily do. The Spirit of God turned the world upside down, and baptism and table are not about God offering His Son so us. They are about us voluntarily offering ourselves to God, and us offering His Son to the world. Leithart’s focus here is entirely parochial. The field is not the Church. The field is the world. The sacraments are not about cultivation but representation.⁴See Cultivation and Representation.

In short, the Supper and its practice provide a criterion for measuring and judging the church’s faithfulness to the gospel, and, conversely, the New Testament’s teaching concerning the gospel provides a criterion for assessing our sacramental life. Jesus frequently described His preaching as an invitation to a feast, a feast that He Himself celebrated with tax gatherers and sinners throughout His ministry and that He continues to celebrate with sinners in the Eucharist. The gospel thus provides a criterion for judging our admission rules for the table: Is the invitation to the table as wide as the invitation to repent and believe?

Yes, but once again Leithart conflates obligation with response in his definition of “Covenant membership.” Actual repentance and faith is required from those who attend as the Bride.

We must think about baptism and the Supper in these (overlapping, if not identical) ecclesial and evangelical contexts if we want to grasp what is at stake in the paedocommunion debate. The question is not only who’s in and who’s out, but rather what our decisions about who’s in and who’s out say about the church we are and the gospel we proclaim. What kind of community are we claiming to be if we invite children to the Lord’s table, or, as is more commonly the case, what are we saying about the church when we exclude them? What do our ritual statements about the church say about the church’s relation to Israel and the character of salvation? Put our theologies and our sermons to the side for a moment: What gospel does our meal preach?

Paedosacraments “proclaim” that the Church is tribal, that the promises are for a select group of people and their children, and that membership of the body of Christ is about cultivation (coming to faith) rather than representation (witnessing to that faith). Pentecost turned everything around, but Leithart is still looking to the womb rather than coming out of the tomb.

Bill Smith spells out the reasons behind the exhortation for struggling Christians to find comfort and strength in their paedobaptism. And I respond.

Firstly, why should I respond? It is not for the sake of dyed-in-the-wool paedobaptists. I have come to the conclusion that they do not really care what the Scriptures actually say. They are willing to steamroll and redefine just about everything to accommodate this doctrine. Like same sex marriage, this is a rite that alters the very foundations of the order established by God. I respond partly for the sake of those who are confused or sitting on the fence or at least open minded. But mostly I respond because I can’t bear to see the “beautiful music” of my favourite book played so disturbingly off-key, even if this is done with the best of intentions.

Bill writes:

If you had to talk to another Christian about some sin in his life and the fact that he is presuming upon God’s grace, where would you begin the discussion? Go ahead, think about it. I’ll give you a minute…

If I were a pastor, I’d begin by reminding the person that sin has consequences for yourself and for those around you, and that a lack of conviction for sin might indicate that the person is not actually a child of God, since God disciplines His children. John tells us that sinning habitually without remorse is impossible for those who have heard and received the “seed of the Gospel.” That should be the end of the story but Bill has a doctrine to prop up.

Some might begin by questioning the salvation of the person. The question might be, “Has there ever been a time in your life when you prayed the sinner’s prayer and asked Jesus into your heart?” Others might not go that far, but may appeal to the person on the basis that he knows this isn’t the right thing to do. In our Protestant, evangelical world (which is the world in which I live) we will, normally, appeal to almost anything except what the apostle Paul appeals to in Romans 6: baptism.

Some might mention the sinner’s prayer, but that is a bit of a straw man. Bill’s intention is to point out that there is nothing we can contribute to our salvation. I agree. But by misrepresenting the biblical command to “repent and believe” he has removed the actual Gospel of Christ from the picture entirely. That is why this sort of talk makes me so angry. It also amazes me that those who are so focussed on the benefits of liturgy are willing to discard a prayer of faith and repentance because it has been abused as a magic mantra.

But it gets worse. Paul does not appeal to baptism per se. Paul appeals to Christ. Bill has rejected one apparent “error” (a magic prayer) for a more heinous one, a magic baptism. Paul is not appealing to infants. He is appealing to those who had voluntarily submitted to baptism and exhorting them to continue in that voluntary submission, a mortification of sin. There is not an infant in sight. To pervert baptism into an involuntary rite is to change its meaning entirely. It is not about obligation, since all are now obliged to repent and believe. It is about voluntary obedience. The only way this could be overlooked in Romans 6 is if the reader were looking for evidence to support a predetermined agenda.

Pointing to an objective baptism which the baptizand had no choice in and cannot even remember is actually worse than pointing to a prayer which may or may not have been prayed in faith. Paul is not pointing to a rite. He is pointing to Christ, who presented His own body as an instrument of righteousness voluntarily, who was crucified voluntarily, and who died voluntarily. He is calling the saints to identify with Jesus in these acts voluntarily.

For Baptists, if the person isn’t living right, that might mean that he “didn’t get his baptism on the right side of his conversion.” Consequently, his baptism didn’t mean anything. To appeal to his baptism would be useless because it was just an empty, external rite. For the Reformed, well, we’re too busy all the time telling you what baptism doesn’t mean. “Baptism doesn’t mean you’re saved.” “Baptism certainly doesn’t mean this, and baptism most certainly doesn’t mean that.” By the time some of our brothers are finished telling us what baptism doesn’t mean, we start wondering why God is wasting our time with it!

Certainly, if it turns out that someone was never a believer, then their baptism was not an act of faithful obedience to God. It may have been a deception, or a misunderstanding, or a desire to please family or friends. However, as a rite it did mean something, and that something is what baptism actually means: public submission to the Body of Christ, and a commission to preach the Gospel under the accountability which that public profession brought about. One thing that many Presbyterians do get right is the idea that baptism is a component in a Covenant oath or vow. The problem is that they assume this vow can be taken by proxy, since they conflate Abrahamic circumcision of flesh (obligation) with the Mosaic oath which called for circumcision of heart (obedience). These two circumcisions, external and internal, were separate things even under the Old Covenant, which is why not “all Israel” were Israel. Some were Jacobs. Some were Esaus. Did that make circumcision ineffective? No, because circumcision was obligation, not salvation. Thus paedobaptists like Bill make exactly the same error that the Jews of the first century did, since they “looked to their circumcision.” All people everywhere are now obligated to Christ. But baptism is for those who hear and respond to Jesus’ “If…”

And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. (Mark 8:34-35)

It seems that Jesus is very happy with a “subjective” response to His “objective” Gospel. Bill continues:

We Protestants are a little afraid of water. We’re afraid that if we speak like Paul in Romans 6 that we will be misunderstood. His language is too strong and absolute. “Do you not know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore, we are buried with him in the baptism into the death, in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, even so we also might walk in newness of life.” No qualifications. No, “If you got your baptism on the right side of your conversion” talk. No, “Well, you know baptism can’t mean that.” Baptism is participation in the death and resurrection of Christ Jesus. Period. Full stop. No way to get out of it. Baptism changes you.

According to Bill, who has misinterpreted Romans 6, baptism can bury somebody with Christ even if they have no clue what is going on. Besides the fact that Bill does not seem to understand the meaning of the word “participation,” if that is the case, what is the point of the Gospel? It becomes redundant. That is precisely what happened in many European countries where almost everyone was “baptised” but almost nobody was a believer. Because the Gospel is a call to everyone on the planet, paedobaptism is as redundant as circumcision or uncircumcision. Paul calls such rites and hereditary “identities” skubalon, something to be discarded as used up, useless and unclean. God is not wasting our time with paedobaptism. Paedobaptists are.

Some have tried to wriggle out of this language by saying that Paul is referring to some invisible inner work of the Spirit on the hearts of individuals. Paul is only speaking to those who have really been baptized; wink, wink, nod, nod. There are many problems with that. Paul has never met these people. He is writing based on what he actually knows about them and what they know about one another: they have all been baptized … with water. They don’t know everything that is going on in the hearts of one another. But he and they both know that they have all been baptized … with water. His appeal to them is to live in accordance with what has happened in this baptism.

This is a good point, but our inability to immediately discern the hearts of people is not a reason to reject that calling. The very fact that the Christians in Rome had submitted to baptism is a fair indication that at least many of them had indeed heard and believed the Gospel. He is not saying, “Well, you were baptised, so there is no escape now.” He is calling them to return to the faith which they demonstrated at the beginning, the faith which resulted in their baptisms. I would have thought this was obvious. It is faith in Christ that was central to Paul, not baptism. Faith is the “oath” (voluntary submission to heaven) and baptism is the resulting “sanctions” (blessings and dominion upon the earth). Paedobaptism puts these around the other way. It is the soteriological equivalent of the Bootstrap Paradox. Israel fell into the same error. “We are Jews, therefore God is pleased with us.” Under the Old Covenant, sacrifices were not magic, and the Ark of the Covenant was not a lucky charm. Without a conscious faith in God, all of these things were worthless. The sacrifices of God are voluntary confession, a broken spirit, and the “cutting off” of the flesh in a contrite heart (Psalm 51:15-17). Sons of men can become sons of God, but as with the Jews, that is not automatically so.

Your baptism has meaning. It doesn’t matter what you were feeling or not feeling at the time. It doesn’t matter if you were an infant, a teenager, or an adult. Your baptism means that you have become a part of Christ’s people. And it means that because God gives it that meaning. You don’t give baptism meaning. Baptism is not yours to give meaning. You receive it from God. It is his work, not your work or even the work of the person who baptized you.

This is good advice, especially for young Christians. Feelings are simply reactions to stimuli. But exhorting a Christian to trust in an “identity” which is basically hereditary and tribal (despite the ridiculous claims to contrary, since the only reason Pastor Bill, I assume, was baptised was because of whose family he was born into) is just another form of idolatry. It shifts the focus from subjective feelings to an object rather than to the Saviour. It depersonalises Jesus. Rediscovering the Old Testament is invaluable for Christians, but failing to comprehend that the “Covenant” is no longer written on tablets of stone is a serious error. This is why for many who were “bap-cised” as infants, their assumed obligation to Christ via their family is a terrible burden which they come to resent. They have no desire for Jesus Christ, and no one should be baptised without desire. Baptism is a demarcation of Spirit, not flesh, and paedobaptists are at constant war with each other because Spirit and flesh are at constant war with each other (Galatians 5:17). Circumcision of flesh and of heart cannot be conflated. Once again, it amazes me that this is still an issue. The solution is so obvious if we are willing to read the Scriptures objectively.

Because of this you can’t blow off your baptism by making it dependent on the meaning you give it. God re-defined your life in your baptism. You have obligations. The first, foremost, and fundamental obligation is that you respond to the gift of God with allegiance to Christ Jesus; that is, biblical faith. He is your Lord. Do what he says. If you don’t, the consequences are bad and everlasting. We should handle the gift of baptism with great caution. Don’t presume upon God’s grace.

This is rubbish. Baptism is not a revived circumcision. Jesus died to destroy the bifurcation of humanity. All people are now under an identical obligation to Christ, and all people are offered the gift. The entire world was “redefined.” Turning baptism into a “Covenant boundary” makes the New Covenant just as parochial as the Abrahamic Covenant was. Because Jesus “grew up,” so did Covenant history, and we are to put childish things – the stoicheia – behind.

This means that “You have obligations” is simply legalism for those who are not actually believers. This does not mean that exhortations and church discipline are without purpose. They are the means of discerning the hearts of men. Like the Gospel, those who not only hear but also do, that is, respond with repentance and faithful obedience, are the children of God.

But there is a flip-side to this. God defining you by baptism is also a great comfort. Baptism is God’s word to you in water. You belong to him. It is not dependent upon how you felt at the time or if you did this or that “just right.” Your heart will constantly be deceiving you, calling into question the promises of God in your relationship with him. Your guilt over confessed sin will keep you guessing if you really have a relationship with God. Baptism tells you, “You belong to God in Christ. Now trust him and continue to fight to overcome sin.” That is basically the message of Romans 6. That is God’s word to you.

Baptism is indeed a word to the believer in water, but it is a word which comes after the Word of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is not itself the Gospel of Jesus Christ. By making baptism the initial “word,” baptism becomes a rival Gospel. There is no problem with calling a Christian back to their first love, but paedobaptism is not a response to the Word. Faith comes by hearing, and that simple phrase destroys paedobaptism and the redefinition of “faith” by many who attempt to defend it.

Will we be misunderstood if we take the trek of the apostle Paul and appeal to someone’s baptism for caution and comfort? No doubt. But should we neglect the Scriptural appeal to baptism and replace it with our own conjured up traditions of men out of fear? By no means!

Paul never went on that trek. It is a dead end in the wilderness. It is the fate of those who appeal to circumcision and the Law rather than to God. The greatest irony here is that Bill fails to realise that his own baptism and his appeal to it is nothing more than conjuring and tradition.

Look to your baptism, and hear God’s word to you.

Yes, look to your baptism, and remember why you chose to be baptized. It was your trust in the finished work of Christ after you heard the Gospel, and willingly followed Him into the grave. Take up that cross daily, and rise again in power from that grave daily. That is what pleases God. And if you have not been baptised biblically, be baptised. That is the first step a believer takes after looking to Christ. Paedobaptism is an unwitting rebellion against the New Covenant order.

“I want to be like Doug Wilson when I grow up. My aim is to go full-Wilson in life. But to get there I must not go all-in Wilsonian…”

A guest post by Steven Opp

Doug Wilson is one of my heroes. I check his blog all the time, have read many of his books, and whenever a new interview or discussion with him appears on the internet, I tune in. When it comes to family living, cultural engagement, and politics he is probably the most influential person in my life. I love Doug Wilson and want to be like him when I grow up!

Wilson recently wrote a blog post titled “The Invisible Mainspring of Human Conflict.” It is a history of four major paradigm shifts in his theology over the years. They are:

1. Eschatology (he became postmillennial in 1985)
2. Soteriology (he became a Calvinist in 1988)
3. Covenant (he became a paedobaptist in 1993)
4. Girard (he became a partial-Girardian in 2006)

It was a fun read to see how the Lord has, over time, molded and sharpened Wilson’s views.

The article spends the most time on the fourth one on the list. The anthropologist/literary critic René Girard has a fascinating theory about the source of human conflict which Wilson says has helped him in understanding why clashes sometimes happen the way they do. He concludes, “Since I first read Girard, I have still gotten into conflicts. But I am not really mystified in the midst of them any more.”

While acknowledging Girard’s insights regarding desire and conflict as being extremely important in seeing what is really going on in the biblical text, Wilson also recognizes where Girard misses the mark. He says he finds Girard’s scriptural insights to be about 80% helpful, and where the good Frenchman falls short is mostly due to his views of the atonement.

Not only does Wilson only give Girard’s biblical analysis four out of five stars, he also warns of applying Girardian human conflict theory across the board lest it be abused. In other words, if you observe every motivation and discord through a Girardian lens you’ll miss the forest for the trees. Wilson explains, “perhaps you have absolutized the concept, which is another way of not grasping it. That is one of the reasons I don’t go all in with Girard—I find him too valuable, and don’t want to lose his insights. Going full Girardian means ceasing to be Girardian.”

I agree with everything Wilson says about Girardian theory, the fourth paradigm shift in his theological journey. What I would like to do in this essay is to show how in regards to Wilson’s other three paradigm shifts I am on board to a similar extent, about 80%. I find his views in these areas to be about 80% helpful. And where I believe he has gone 20% too far in each paradigm is where he loses its spirit. In other words, in these three areas going full Wilsonian means ceasing to be Wilsonian.

A Quick Stop in Narnia

Before doing this, let me first introduce a metaphor which I think will be useful in explaining what I mean.

In addition to reading much of what Wilson writes, I sometimes read what he recommends. One of the books he gives five out of five stars to in a review is Planet Narnia by Michael Ward. It is a very thorough and fascinating guide to seeing how C.S. Lewis intentionally themed each of his Chronicles of Narnia books after one of the “seven heavens,” the planets recognized by the medievals. I just finished Planet Narnia, thoroughly enjoyed it, and highly recommend it.

Ward explains how the first book in the series, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, takes place in the “world” of Jupiter. The themes and messages are all “jovial” (Jove is another name for Jupiter). Jupiter is the planet of merriment, royalty, and springtime. It is also the largest planet, and according to Lewis the most important, ruling the night skies. If you’ve read the stories, you know the first chronicle is about jolly Aslan bringing spring and enthroning the four children in Narnia.

The final book in the series, The Last Battle, has a Saturnine theme. Saturn, in contrast to Jupiter, is dark and cold. The positive word to describe the spirit of Saturn is “contemplative”. But Saturn is also regarded as the planet behind ugliness, old age, fate, irony, and death. All of these concepts are heavy in The Last Battle. An ugly old ape tricks the Narnians by covering a donkey in a lionskin in place of the real Aslan before one catastrophe follows another and eventually all the characters die.

Both Jupiter and Saturn are important and have their roles to play, but the contrast is sharp. Saturn is about contemplation. Jupiter is about play. Saturn is godly sorrow. Jupiter is godly joy. Saturn is Father Time. Jupiter is Father Christmas.¹Girard was born on Christmas Day and his middle name is Noël,  a fun foretaste of his wintery secularist anthropology in time converting and fleshing out so much of the Word of God. Girard’s work, which focuses on chronic envy, is ultimately a jovial gift.

The Last Battle, while being Saturnine, does not end with ultimate death. Rather, it ends with a beautiful eucatastrophe, Tolkien’s word for a surprise happy ending. Or, you might say, it ends with a Jupiter ending. The jovial tone of the final chapters of the story is more like the The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

The point Lewis makes is that though Saturn is big and important, he doesn’t get the final word. Rather Jupiter, king of the heavens, trumps gloomy Saturn and has the last laugh.

What I would like to do is to use Saturn and Jupiter to represent the difference between theology and the spirit of theology. Or, to put it another way, between the theology and the theologian.

Theology, like Saturn, is contemplative. When taken by itself, it is cold, dark ink on paper. Theology is important because ideas need to be presented in order to be understood. But for the words to truly be applied they must be transcended. They must be traced up to the spirit behind them, whether it be the deeper meaning or the character of the writer which the words fail to capture. This significance, the “take home”, is Jupiter above Saturn, what goes beyond the contemplation and has a life of its own.

Doug Wilson is a Jupiter. He is a jolly man. His theology is his Saturn, his contemplations. Where it is correct it is functioning in the appropriate Saturnine way, channeling truth and the character of Wilson himself in it so that others may jump on board. Where it is incorrect it morphs into things like oldness and fate and stillborn irony. Wrong theology is Saturn eclipsing Jupiter. Where I disagree with Wilson on his theology, the 20%, is where I see the contemplations becoming inflated and things going dark, hiding the real meaning and the real man. In other words, going full Saturn means ceasing to be Jupiter. Going full Wilsonian is ceasing to be Wilsonian.

I will now take you through Wilson’s first three paradigms and discuss where I see Saturn being contemplative and wise and where I see it hovering in the way of Jupiter’s spring.

Eschatology
Entering the Wardrobe

Wilson’s book Heaven Misplaced was the second book of his I ever read (after Persuasions) and it was like an oasis in the wilderness for me. It was also a big reason I started reading more of his work and began paying attention to what was going on in Moscow. The clear headed thinking in Heaven Misplaced that Jesus might not be back any time soon, and without any dream-killing disclaimers like “but no one really knows the day or hour so be ready (instead of going out and changing the world)” was wonderful to read.

In addition to learning about this positive eschatological outlook, I also saw it in action. Wilson’s church is full of people who believe in bringing Heaven to Earth in every capacity, and when I lived in Moscow I had the benefit of watching them do it, making schools, businesses, and families all with the kingdom building goals of dominion and legacy.

Too Much Chronicle and Not Enough Narnia

So why does Wilson’s postmillennial eschatology only get four and not five stars? Saturn refuses to give up his seat for Jupiter when the idea that the world won’t end soon extends into the assumption that it might not end for a very, very long time. I’ve heard Wilsonian postmillennialists use language like, “a hundred thousand years from now…” I find this to be irresponsible at best and unbiblical at worst.

First of all, it neglects to take nature into account. I understand that most environmental warnings today are hoaxes. But the oceans will fill with salt eventually, and the sun will one day burn out. To suggest that it won’t is making some of the same errors evolutionists make when they posit millions of years on the front end of things. This world is strong, but not invincible, and it cannot endure the beatings of Father Time for infinity in either direction.

From a more theological perspective, if the end comes when the world is discipled and the last enemy is death, to not put any sort of timeline on that limits the power of God. Just as atheists think they can hide the Creator Father behind a bunch of zeros when talking quantitatively about time past, so this sort of postmil thinking buries the Recreator Holy Spirit behind a bunch of zeros when talking about the future. God does not rush, but it will not take him a million years to wash the 10/40 Window (which is already much cleaner than it was twenty years ago), and we won’t be beaming to other colonies on other planets as we wait for peace in the Middle East. Syria will become Christian, Ceres will not.

Saturn has a Curfew

The spirit of postmillennial thought is wonderful. Let Christians be free and comfortable in this wonderful world. Let us faithfully endure death as we work to overcome all of the other enemies, building beautiful cities and cultures as we go. But let us not forget that Jove has the last laugh, and that Saturn’s old age will not define the future. Death must be with us for a time, but not for that long of a time.

Soteriology
Providence Picks a Picker

My friend David Salazar, now fifty, grew up a hard working kid filling baskets with the fruit that grew on the trees of central California. But when he wasn’t at work, he and his brothers did things their own way and his life was savage and base. One day when he was in his early twenties an evangelist came to his door and David bent the knee. The first book he read after that besides the Bible was Calvin’s Institutes, and it changed his life. He said that for the first time he understood what a loving father is, how he relates to his children, and that God himself is such a father.

My understanding is that this story of God’s grace and paternity encapsulates the “real Calvin”, so to speak. The Jupiter Calvin. The Calvin with no “ism” or “ist” attached. And when I think of Calvin, and reformed theology in general, I think of the sovereignty of God above all things, along with a rich and impactful church history.

Avoid all Isms Except for Prisms

Where I think Calvinists, Wilson included, fall short is in their “marketing,” so to speak. When the guy on the street hears “Calvinism,” he instinctually thinks of fatalism. He instinctually thinks of Saturn and not Jupiter. “But you don’t really understand Calvin” the Calvinist so often must explain. Well, is this a problem with the man on the street or with Calvinism itself? If the distinction is so important shouldn’t it be a bit easier to explain? A bit easier to understand?

One illustration Wilson uses to communicate the sovereignty of God is that God is writing history like Shakespeare would write a play. Can Hamlet challenge Shakespeare for how he wrote his part? Neither should man call out God for how he wrote his part. And the distance between God and man is infinitely greater than the distance between Shakespeare and Hamlet.

This is all true, but we also have to remember that the distance between God and man is infinitely smaller than between Shakespeare and Hamlet. Shakespeare never became one of the characters in his play. God did. To put it another way, as Mike Bull has tweeted, “Was Jesus a Calvinist or an Arminian? Both. The incarnation was the sovereignty of God and the will of Man united at last.”

Calvinism is helpful in emphasizing God’s sovereignty. But the Bible doesn’t speak in these sorts of terms much (predestination, reprobation, etc.) The Bible isn’t that Saturnine about it. But as long as they wear the label, the “ism”, Calvinists are being Saturnine about it, and those reformed beards start to look less like Calvin’s and more like the beard of Chronos. At a certain point this sort of contemplation bends towards fatalism and people don’t see the living Spirit of the Father in Calvin’s theology as Salazar did when he first read him. Rather, they just see a casket with tulips on top.

I Elect the Big Man

So I’m with Wilson 80% of the way on soteriology. But as for how to best communicate the mystery of the marriage of divine and human agency, I’ll fall for the gravitas of Chesterton every time. His cracks at Calvinism tickle my funny bone a little more than Wilson’s pokes at Arminianism. Jovial G.K., in this regard, takes the cake—and no one made him do it.

Covenant
Cair Paravel is for Real

Which came first, the king or his crown? Covenantal theology is wonderful because it emphatically says “Crown!” without any shame. Lewis’ goal in using planet imagery in Narnia was to emphasize that there are constant things going on beyond nature. You are born into something bigger than you.

Covenantal theology also makes sense of many other things as well, and is useful in debates regarding evolution, marriage, and politics, to name a few. It is very important for navigating one’s way in the world.

The fundamentals of the Federal Vision theology which Wilson agrees with affirm the connection between the sacraments and the covenant. This is important because it preserves the power of the sacraments. When someone is baptized into the kingdom of God, something objective happens. They are now enlisted, so to speak. And like a spouse in a marriage, they are in whether they like it or not. Union with Christ is real, and so are the means of entering into it.

Uncircumcised Application

So far so good. But when it comes to covenant theology administration, Wilson drives 100 where the speed limit is 80. And the lead (the Saturnine metal) in his foot is paedosacraments.

Wilson recently admitted on a podcast that at first glance at scripture the Baptists have a better argument when it comes to who to baptize than the paedobaptists do; you don’t see a bunch of babies being dunked, let alone sprinkled, in the New Testament. But, he argues, if you take the Bible as a whole you have a “juggernaut” of structural/typological evidence which supports paedosacraments.

Most Baptists can’t take down that juggernaut. They end up feeling outsmarted, shrug off the argument because they sense that paedobaptism is still weird, and go back to dunking converts. For me, I never wanted to be outsmarted so I took the paedobaptists’ conclusions on authority. But there was always a part inside of me that still thought it strange. It wasn’t until I started reading Mike Bull that I saw exactly why.

What appealed to me about Bull is that he didn’t try to fight the “covenant theology” juggernaut. He commandeered it. Standing on the shoulders of typological giants James Jordan, Peter Leithart, and Doug Wilson he actually took the juggernaut, figured out what a lot of the seemingly useless buttons and levers do, and showed how the paedobaptists had misinterpreted its trajectory. Furthermore, far from being the juggernaut itself, paedobaptism (what he calls “bapcision”, an ugly hybrid of baptism and circumcision) is in fact the rope tying the Federal Vision juggernaut to a stake and keeping it from being released and changing the world.

The main way Bull cuts the paedobaptistic cord is by acknowledging the similarities (covenantal juggernaut) between circumcision and baptism, but also the differences (Baptist horse sense). To understand these differences, you need to read more of Bull’s writing on baptism. You will need to immerse yourself in biblical symbols before it will begin to make sense but as you do, you’ll start to see how the pieces don’t just fit together, they fit in three dimensions.²See The Myth of Covenant Membership. As Bull says, “Bad theologians need to think in pictures. Good theologians need to think in moving pictures.” After reading Bull for a while, I started to see these moving pictures. And like Wilson says of Girard’s scriptural insights, “Once you see them there, you can never unsee them.”

Here is the main thing that those with a strong understanding of the covenant have a hard time wrapping their minds around because they still see it as flat: Every person on the planet, that includes Doug Wilson’s baptized grandchildren and the baby born to an ISIS leader, are born under the New Covenant. They are all born under the same King, Jesus Christ, and his circumcision, that is, his crucifixion, is the new blood boundary encompassing all people—not just Jews, and not just the baptized. Like the Jews under Mosaic Law, everyone within this boundary is under the same terms of faithfulness to the covenant: metanoeite and believe.³See Paranoia and Metanoia. To baptize a baby and say they are now in this covenant is therefore redundant. Christ is Lord of all, wet or dry, churched or unchurched.

So the covenant has to do with authority (the crown), and who wears it (Jesus Christ). But here’s the third dimension that makes paedobaptists go cross-eyed: to truly be baptized into Christ requires a confession. This confession is done in faith, which comes by hearing. It is not taken hold of by being born according to the flesh (Christian parents) but by being born according to the Spirit. It is not about being born into a Christian heritage (generations) but about being born again as a co-heir with Christ (regeneration). It is not about who your earthly father is, or your godfather, but who your Heavenly Father is, your Father God. Now you are not just under the New Covenant in Christ’s blood (like every child in the world since Jesus came), you are now an ambassador of the New Covenant in Christ’s blood, washed on the inside by it and adopted into His family. You aren’t just at the event. You wear the staff uniform. You don’t go from being outside of Christ’s realm to then being under the crown (complete with expectations to behave as a Christian, a new form of law) as “bapcision” would have you do. No, a biblical baptism takes from being merely under the crown to wearing a crown of your own.

Covenant theology that veers toward paedosacraments creates an add-on to the Gospel: Christ plus covenant (a word rarely used in the New Testament). But Christ is the New Covenant.⁴See Jesus and Covenant – Part 1. This is the key to truly understanding the covenant. Everyone is under him. But only those who have heard him and have seen him, who believe, who share His Spirit, are in him. You have to go to Narnia and meet Aslan before you are given a seat on a throne in the castle by the sea. You have to encounter Jesus. He is the Jupiter that outshines Saturn. And that impersonal extra 20% Saturnine paedosacramental covenant theology is covering the face of Jupiter, the face of the King.

I will make one final illustration about the bleakness of paedobaptism which goes undetected by those who practice it but is obvious to those on the outside who see a donkey tail poking out from under the lionskin. Saturn is the planet of irony, and that is good and necessary. But it can also fall flat when unchecked by Jupiter. Paedosacramentalists think they are revealing a cute irony in the gospel, that Christ saves us before we even realized we needed saving, that little children who have no knowledge are as valuable as the wise old sage, for God is no respector of persons. True as it is, the joke itself is in poor taste because the butt of it is still in diapers and isn’t playing along.

What makes a biblical baptism jovial is that the sinner who the joke is on is laughing along with Jesus as he or she intentionally follows Him in slipping on the banana peel of recognizing one’s own fallen humanity and voluntarily dying with Him in baptism in order to rejoice with Him when brought back out of the water as a royal (jovial) priest-king. Since confession is laughing at the ridiculousness of your own sinful rebellion because you’re a new person and on the other side of it, running this play on those who do not understand what is happening is cruel, dark, and leveling. Sending these little ones to the baptismal grave without their “getting it” is the kind of black comedy Saturn gravitates to when left to himself.

False baptisms create confusion and place a burden of law and accountability upon the shoulders of those who not only cannot bear it – like child soldiers or child brides – but also did not choose it. This is Father Time eating away at his kids with a spiritual responsibility they didn’t sign up for. Baptism is life to the “twice-born” but it is creeping death to the “once-born.” In dark seasons when children need comfort they are encouraged to look at a cold theological abstraction instead of their gifts, lest they become self-reliant. But “leaning” on a baptism you never chose, a rite which basically spiritualises everything natural, removes the opportunity to discover personally that the flesh isn’t enough. So an exhortation to “remember your baptism” is about as helpful as finding coal in your stocking. There’s nothing you can do with it. The true gospel paradox is that sinful children don’t need contemplation (law). They need Christmas.

Wilson (Not his Tamed Juggernaut) is on the Move

Doug Wilson is the jovial king of Christmas. He knows how to be merry. He knows how to enjoy the good things of life with a full heart. He has a tribe of joyful children and grandchildren to prove it. But this has nothing to do with paedobaptism and everything to do with faithful Christian parenting. It is a result of saturation love, not saturation water. It is of the gospel falling on soft ears, not water sprinkled on soft cranial tissue. It is a legacy of celebrating Christ’s birthday with gifts, not celebrating what family or church family you were born into by good fortune.

Of course, Wilson is not consciously boasting in his own blood or society, but his 20% counterfeit Saturnine covenantal theology is. Wilson’s children and grandchildren (the ones old enough to have spiritual eyes of faith) are believers not because they have looked in the mirror and seen a fake lion skin (bapcision) that some apish theology told them was Aslan. No, they believe because they have seen Aslan himself. And they have probably mostly seen Him not on but in and through their confessing father and mother who wear the royal robes of Christian witness.

Reaching for the Stars

Like I said, I want to be like Doug Wilson when I grow up. My aim is to go full-Wilson in life. I want to be a jolly and contemplative man with a grand and glorious legacy. I want five out of five stars! But to get there I must not go all-in Wilsonian. I find him too valuable and don’t want to lose his insights. So I will continue to follow him, staying close to the spirit of his work and the spirit of his person, but steering clear of those Saturnine traps of old age, fate, and flat irony which would cause me to miss out on the good faith of Jupiter: Christ in Wilson’s paradigms, the hope of glorious theology.

Christ’s Claim Upon Us, Or Our Claim Upon Him?

I am not worthy to untie the shoelaces of my theological betters, but it is my duty to point out to them when they have tied them together.

It has been a little while since we’ve had a baptism rant around here, mostly because I’ve written everything I could possibly write, refuting not only paedosacramentalism’s flawed foundations but every storey of the house of cards built upon them. Behold, the steel studded gauntlet remains on the ground right where I threw it down.

Peter Leithart has posted some quotes concerning baptism from Michael Horton’s The Gospel Commission, and although responding to them requires some repetition on my part, it can be done with a few quick flicks of my razor sharp credobaptistic rapier.

In his book on The Gospel Commission, Michael Horton includes several insightful pages on baptism. “Like circumcision,” he writes, “baptism is represented in the New testament as God’s decision and claim on us…

Insightful is not the word I would choose. Perhaps inventive. For a start, where is baptism ever represented as God’s claim upon anybody in the way that circumcision was a claim upon the males of Israel? Isn’t the point of the end of the circumcision that God now claims absolutely everybody on the planet?

Is the correlation between baptism and circumcision of heart in the New Testament not blindingly obvious? The Father was pleased with Jesus’ obedient faith at His baptism. Why did He not ask Jesus to marry and baptize His offspring in the way Abraham circumcised his offspring? Could it be that baptism concerns a different kind of birth, one which results in repentance and faithful obedience?

To assert that God chooses the children of believers as inheritors of the faith based upon their heredity means your theology is behind the times by about two millennia. And by implication, it claims that Christ has not yet come in the flesh.¹See Children of Heaven. The problem is that paedobaptists still have not really thought all this through in biblical terms. Their assertion that their baptised infants are “the offspring of Abraham” belies belief.

Although it obligates us to respond in faith and obedience, baptism is God’s sign and seal of his covenant oath. In this act, as in the preached Word, God pledges his commitment to us” (172). Instead of seeing baptism as a sign of my choice of God, it is God’s act toward us.

Another false assumption. Are there really obligations which bind those within the Church but not those outside the Church, in the way that Israel was bound by the Law of Moses but Gentiles were not?²See Because of Transgressions. Are those outside the Church not obligated to respond to the Gospel in faith and obedience? Is everyone not already under the rule of Christ and therefore accountable to the stipulations of the New Covenant?³See The Myth of Covenant Membership. If they are, then paedobaptism is entirely redundant.

If we actually read the baptismal accounts in the Bible instead of disparaging every single facet that we observe (purpose, mode, qualification) by importing obsolete Abrahamic definitions, we can see that it is the Gospel of the death and resurrection of Christ which is objective, something carried out on behalf of all nations, but that baptism is for those who personally respond to it.⁴See Baptism: God’s Work and Ours. God has not pledged His commitment to a renovated Judaistic demarcation.

This shift of perspective has enormous practical consequences: “When baptism is understood chiefly as a promise that I made on a certain date in the past, it loses its relevance for my life in the present, as God’s saving promise to which I continually return. . . . When faced with confusion, temptation, or doubt, I cling not to a decision that I made but to Christ’s public certification that he has claimed me and will not let me go. He will not forsake me, and he will not allow me to surrender myself to another lord who would bind and destroy me” (173-4). When baptism is neglected, “you can gain the impression that Jesus has to take you out of the church, alone in a garden, to really experience his grace. However, according to Scripture, the public ministry of the church is the garden!” (174).

The claim that some see baptism as a sign of my choice of God is not a diagnosis of the actual problem when it comes to assurance. Many, many Christians who were paedobaptized and told that because of this act they are Christians and “saved” also struggle with assurance. That is because “Christ’s public certification that he has claimed me and will not let me go” is a claim foolishly founded on the first birth, not the second, and plenty of sprinkled babies grow up to be history’s most hostile unbelievers.⁵See Raising Cain.

And honestly, how is a deliberate decision I made in the past any less relevant than an event I cannot even remember? The New Covenant is not about physical seed and hearing the law, but about the seed of the Word and the resulting legal testimony, beginning with one’s baptism. The call and the commission are both “objective,” but between call and commission there is a subjective response by each saint.⁶See Sealed for Witness. If baptism is a commission, a public delegation of authority, how many millions of Christians have been robbed of their baptismal commission?⁷See Christendom’s Great Unwashed.

Pointing those who struggle to somebody else’s decision for Christ on their behalf (the time when they had some water sprinkled on their head because they were “born into the right family”) is no better than pointing them to their own decision for Christ. The solution is to point them to Christ Himself. The solution to the flaws in credobaptistic theology is not an even more flawed theology of baptism. Paedobaptism says “You are special.” Credobaptism says “Christ is special.”

He cites a conversation he had with a youth minister: “Youth ministries are so important, he said, because they relate to kids on their own level, ‘where they are.’ ‘That’s just it, isn’t it?’ I asked. ‘Where are they?” Presumably, their location is ‘in Christ.’ They are baptized and are therefore members of the visible body of Christ, the covenant community. That’s their primary location” (174).

Paedobaptism seems to be the panacea for all ills. The problem is that it is a distortion of a biblical vow and thus requires the redefinition of everything around it, much like same sex marriage does. If I were this youth pastor, I would have patiently, slowly explained to Michael Horton that when I said, “Where they are,” I meant the young peoples’ level of understanding. The best preachers and teachers know that the only strategy that really works it to take people from where they are to where you are. You have to meet them on common ground. The Bible makes it clear that children and adults are different, both in understanding and in accountability before God. That is why only those men and women who took the oath at Sinai and broke it were held accountable. They were being prepared for ministry to the nations.

Now, if these children are Church kids, they already have a foundation, but that is not what Horton or Leithart are getting at here. What they are getting at is their desire to erase some natural human demarcations in their quest for “unity in Christ,” which is similar in some ways to the sexualisation of children and the blurring of genders in modern secularism. It is a grasping of the eternal state before God’s time. Same sex marriage does something similar in its idiotic quest for inclusiveness. It renders the marriage vow meaningless. A “blanket Covenant membership” that ignores even the distinctions within Old Covenant Israel and says that because everyone ate the Passover meal, everyone should take communion, including the infants, really should notice that even in the Old Testament, the Israelite household table was not actually God’s table.⁸See Covenant Renewal Worship vs. Paedosacraments.

Conflating the two births means that infants are somehow automatically “mature in Christ,” that they cannot only chew the bread but also swig the wine like troopers, and their cries are as terrifying to the devil as saints singing the Psalms. This placing of all ages “into Christ” regardless of any actual personal repentance and faith means that instead of the Church being the nursery of culture, it becomes an actual nursery.⁹See Exposed to the Elements. I’m not against having children in my car, but that doesn’t mean I will let them have the steering wheel. I’m not against having infants and children in the worship service, but concluding that their spiritual needs are identical to those of the adults based on an ideology of inherited “Christianity” is ill-considered. Moreover, it makes the precious Gospel of Christ somewhat irrelevant. If baptism is, rather, a rite of investiture, a “license to die” as a witness, and everyone else is already “in the Covenant,” then all of these definitional problems disappear.

Finally, nowhere does the New Testament speak about a “Covenant community.” It simply does not speak that way, because Jesus Himself is the Covenant.¹⁰See Looking God in the Eye. We are not set apart like the Jews were because the only Jew that really mattered is now in heaven. The Church is not a tribe. Let me repeat that. The Church is not a tribe, so let’s stop turning it into one. This is inherently carnal if not an outright satanic deception. A tribal identity says “KEEP OUT.” An assembly, however, like a political assembly, or even a rock concert, says “COME IN.”

Baptism is not a social demarcation. It is a demarcation of allegiance. It is a circumcision of heart, not of flesh. A communist understands baptism better than paedobaptists do.¹¹See An Atheist Gets Baptism. Do those in the US Navy, when faced with confusion, temptation or doubt, look to the fact that they were born into the Navy (nobody is!) or even their own personal military pledge for assurance? No. They look to the promises, power and authority of the leaders of the force in which they serve. In our case, this is Jesus Himself via the apostolic testimony. In our individual baptisms, we voluntarily identify with them.

Reformed theology is the best school in which to learn about covenant theology, yet it is also the worst place to learn about New Covenant theology. Why is this so?

Reading a to-and-fro between a baptist and a paedobaptist recently, it struck me that despite the fine manners and scholarly diligence on display in the responses of both gentlemen, neither of them really had a grip on what they were dealing with.

The prime example was the way in which each relied on the Abrahamic Covenant to support his case. The paedobaptist accused the baptist of spiritualising this covenant, while the baptist accused the paedobaptist of “carnalizing” it. Both of them were cherrypicking in order to support their take on God’s covenants in general.

Now, theologians love to generalise in order to avoid doing the grubby work of dealing with specifics, and one ubiquitous theological meme, dripping with clever evasiveness, is the statement that there is both continuity and discontinuity between each covenant, or each stage of the overall covenant of God with men. Apparently there is some entirely arbitrary “spectrum” of relevance in each covenant, and we are supposed to isolate the elements which are common to all covenants to discover what a covenant is. Then we can figure out whether “covenant membership” is based on faith, or heredity, or tribe, or all of the above.

“…both sides get an F when
it comes to covenant theology.”

On the “baptistic” side, things tend to slide into a realm where the physical rites, baptism and communion and even corporate worship, are considered to be less important than “my personal relationship with Jesus.” The New Covenant sign is “faith,” but since true faith expresses itself in willingness to submit to discipleship under Christ’s representatives, in examination of heart, in a desire to be with other saints, in prayer and good works and in legal testimony before the Church and the world, this error is easy to deal with.

On the “paedobaptistic” side, the focus on the rites, the “covenant signs,” leads to:

a) an illogical splitting of the sacraments in the withholding of communion until a baptised child comes of age;

b) united paedosacraments which merely serve as a legalistic “claim” upon the baptizand until they are truly born again; or

c) united paedosacraments which somehow regenerate the receiver without any requirement of actual repentance.

As I have written elsewhere, each of these three conclusions is an attempt to deal with the doctrinal fallout of the errant rite of paedobaptism in a slightly different way. The conflation of circumcision and baptism necessitates the redefinition, or scapegoating of something, somewhere. In order to preserve the tradition, the scapegoat chosen for sacrifice is either the necessity of personal conversion (and the redefinition of “faith”), or the global nature of the New Covenant, or the efficacy of the sacraments.

However, both sides, baptistic and paedobaptistic, get an F when it comes to covenant theology. The baptists are right when it comes to the necessity of hearing the Gospel and responding in faith as the defining characteristic of a Christian, but generally they have little idea of what a covenant with God actually is. “Covenant” is just a word to describe God’s “agreement” with Noah, Abraham and Moses. There is little understanding of a covenant as a process, with delegated authority, rules for success, desired results and accountability, and a use-by date. It is these “missional” elements which are the things common to every biblical covenant, yet somehow these are totally overlooked in the continuity/discontinuity debate.

“…the solution is an aspect
which both sides in this debate,
as far as I know, have either failed
to discern or failed to apply.”

The paedobaptists, generally speaking, at least understand what a biblical covenant is. The problem is that since they are stuck with their baptismal tradition, they pick the Abrahamic Covenant as their benchmark for covenants. This renders them enemies of many fundamental differences between the various covenants, which are simply the result of the fact that each covenant has a different mission. They are so keen on the maintenance of the notion of a “Covenant people” delineated by a sign that they force the covenants both before and after the Abrahamic Covenant into the Abrahamic mold. The rainbow is turned into a “sign” upon Noah and his family, when in fact it was a sign upon all creation, one which endures to this day. New Covenant baptism is turned into a “corporate” sign upon all members of a believing household, either conferring “covenant membership” (legalistic accountability) or “infusing” some level of faith without the hearing of the Gospel.

Paedobaptism is a mongrel of a doctrine, an ugly mix of conflicting designs and crossed purposes, which is why its meaning is impossible to define or agree upon even among those who practice it. But it gets worse. For some paedobaptists, the fact that there was no sign of “Covenant membership” upon females under the Abrahamic Covenant, as they believe there is under the New Covenant, means that they go looking for one. Some have suggested that the Levitical “purity rites” for Israelite women served as a sign of membership in some fashion. But although this is a rare assertion, it does demonstrate just how far off the track people will go when following an errant doctrine to its logical conclusion. Since every person within their imagined New Covenant boundary must be “stamped” by Jesus with their “hybridised” New Covenant baptism, this leads them to seek something similar under the Abrahamic Covenant when clearly there was no such thing. For a start, the Levitical rites can have no bearing on membership of the Abrahamic Covenant because they were not instituted until Moses, four centuries later. Females were under the Abrahamic Covenant without any personal sign. Even more inconveniently, there was no personal sign upon anyone whatsoever under the Noahic and Adamic Covenants. They have allowed the stipulations and purpose of the Abrahamic Covenant to distort their comprehension of the New Covenant, and then their perverted understanding of the New Covenant requires the distortion the Abrahamic Covenant. This is not “Covenant continuity” but enforced “equalisation,” the theological equivalent of gender neutrality. It is a wilful twisting of the Scripture to defend the indefensible, bordering on the brand of hermeneutical travesty committed by the Roman Catholic Church in defence of its own coercive and highly imaginative traditions. Yet regardless of how much they must sacrifice, doctrinally-speaking, and how many ludicrous notions they must consider to maintain this shibboleth, they consistently refuse to question their devotion to this age-old household god. I find this incomprehensible.

However, for two thousand years in God’s economy (not today), one was either a Jew or a Gentile, either in Abraham or not, so there clearly was some kind of “membership.” Is there a way that we can understand the history of the greater Covenant, taking into account each of its varied stages, including the ways in which each stage uniquely complements and contrasts with the others, that enables us to discern both what is continuous or discontinuous and why? Most certainly there is, and the solution is an aspect which both sides in this debate, as far as I know, have either failed to discern or failed to apply.

“In some sense, only a twist on
the Copernican revolution in
covenant theology can unite
the schizoid sacramentology
of the modern Church.”

When Covenant history is diagrammed by the experts on both sides, it is inevitably linear. This is understandable, since history itself is linear. But a journey from the boundary of our solar system to the heart of our sun is also linear, although the solar system itself is not. My assertion here is that the various covenants throughout history are not segments but spheres, not lines but layers. Passing from the orbit of Mars to the orbit of the Earth does not render the orbit of Mars redundant or non-existent.

Likewise, we must understand that the establishing of the Abrahamic Covenant did not nullify the Noahic. The Covenant with Noah was in full force in its original form at least until the end of the Abrahamic Covenant in AD70, for the Gentiles were still obliged to keep its basic stipulations. This fact was the basis for the judgment of James at the Jerusalem Council of the Church in Acts 15. There was no need to put believing Gentiles under the Law of Moses. Nor was there any need to circumcise them as members of the Abrahamic extended family, the dispersed tribal nation of Israel. Yet, (and what follows here we must understand if the disgusting fissures in our sacramental unity are to be closed and healed) these Gentiles were still “under Covenant,” just not the Abrahamic one. This is because the Abrahamic Covenant did not exist after the Noahic Covenant, nor even alongside it, but within it, just as the orbit of the Earth exists within the orbit of Mars. In some sense, only a twist on the Copernican revolution in covenant theology can unite the schizoid sacramentology of the modern Church.

Since Covenant history resembles the medieval concept of the celestial spheres,¹See also String Theory the “outer limits” consist of the reach of the covenant intended to be ratified in Adam. The word “covenant” is never used of Adam, and this is because he failed to qualify for kingdom. The word is not used until God spoke to Noah, the first man to qualify as a righteous judge, a man who could legally represent God on earth because he was found faithful in the eyes of heaven. However, the curse of death remained. This was because the Noahic Covenant was ratified within the Adamic one. All men were still in Adam.

“…the Mosaic Covenant
was ratified not in opposition to 
but within the Abrahamic one.”

When Noah’s offspring sinned in ways that can be corresponded to the offspring of Adam, another global deluge was on the horizon, covenantally-speaking: the destruction of all flesh. To keep the promises to Noah, God divided humanity in two in Abraham. However, the Noahic order of priest-kings, such as Melchizedek and Jethro and Job, still ministered among the Gentile nations as “sons of God,” which may explain the persistence of accounts similar to the early chapters of Genesis not only in the Ancient Near East but also in just about every culture around the world. Every human being was still a “member” of Adam, and a “member” of Noah, yet only those in Abraham’s household were members of this new genealogical-tribal covenant. Noah was not replaced. Like Adam, he was “divided” that he might later be conquered and glorified.

The main players in the Abrahamic line reversed, in many ways, the failures of Noah’s sons, but in Moses they were brought to maturity, both in size (as a nation) and accountability (in ministry). Israel was baptised into Moses and another covenant was established, and here we see centuries of wasted ink revealed for what they are as we understand that the Mosaic Covenant was ratified not in opposition to but within the Abrahamic one. Every Israelite was still in Adam, and still in Noah, and of course in Abraham, but not every Israelite was a member of the tribe of Levi. The Levitical order served within Israel as yet another layer, smaller and with even more concentrated standards of purity. Within the tribe of Levi, only males of a certain physical and moral standard were permitted to serve as priests, and even then under a roster of temporary vows, a division between the common and the uncommon in holy office. Then, of course, there was the High Priest, the focal point of this particular layer, but even here, since the Aaronic order was genealogical, God made a covenant within it, giving Phinehas the succession since he was found faithful.

This layered “geocentric” process can also be observed in the developments or refinements in the sacrificial praxes. Adam was to offer himself, but judgment for his failure was stemmed by God‘s mercy in the first substitutionary sacrifices. They were slain and offered whole but not burnt. The first burnt offering — or “ascension” — was presented by Noah, picturing his office as a mediator with authority from the heavenly court. Humans were now permitted to eat flesh, but not blood. In Abraham, picturing the division between Jew and Gentile, certain animals were chosen by God and cut in half by Abraham. Under the Levitical Law, animals were not only presented and cut to be offered by fire, but the various parts were allocated to different purposes, places and people. In a sense, the move towards the High Priesthood of Aaron was a cutting away at the flesh of Adam (or his substitutes) to get to the heart of the matter.

But of course, history did not stop there. The temple and priesthood were glorified under the inspired administration of King David, and here we observe yet another “eternal” covenant. Of course, you should by now understand that the Davidic Covenant existed within Adam, Noah, Abraham, and the Law of Moses (as expressed in the Psalms), being “under”, that is, accountable, to all of them, as they related to, operated within, mediated for and expounded upon each other. The holy center of this new, smaller, even purer, orbit, was not the hearing of the laws under priesthood but the incarnation of the law in true kingdom.

Following the failure of Israel’s kings, there was another division, and another covenant, this time with Jeroboam. His “orbit” was actually outside, larger than, the covenants with Levi and David, and his envy of their centrality was at the heart of his rebellion and idolatry. This envy was also at the heart of the rebellion of Korah, who apparently believed that every tribal leader in Israel should be a priest-king after the order of Melchizedek/Noah.

After the exile, a “new covenant” was established under Ezra and Nehemiah, Zechariah and Haggai, as predicted by Jeremiah.²See Jeremiah”s New Covenant. The priesthood would serve as keepers for the Davidic line, and now every Israelite, not just the priests, was required to prove his genealogical heritage. The latter prophets rail against the sins which led to the downfall of the previous kingdom, and this newly restored Israel, like the second generation in the wilderness, avoided the idolatries and adulteries of their forefathers. But the point here is that even this “new” covenant was ratified within all the previous ones.

Now we reach the center of this grand celestial construct, and it is of course the New Covenant in the blood of Christ, a covenant which was ratified within all the other covenants and yet fulfilled and succeeded them. In His baptism He was Noah, with the witness of the dove (Creation – Day 1). In His death, He was the circumcision of Abraham, cut off for the world (Division – Day 2). In His Ascension (Day 3), as the Lamb worthy to open the scroll, He was Moses on the mountain, receiving the Law of the Spirit. At Pentecost, He brought the kingdom of God, the law in the hearts of men (Testing – Day 4). In the testimony of the apostles, He was Israel scattered among the Gentiles, establishing New Covenant synagogues (Maturity – Day 5). In the destruction of Jerusalem, He was a new Israel freed from idolatry and adultery under “Babylon” (Conquest – Day 6). And with the covenantal knife finally reaching the heart of the matter, the construction of the Bride was complete, and it is in this light that we must understand the marriage feast of the Lamb in Revelation 19 as already fulfilled in history (Glorification – Day 7). All the old demarcations were eradicated, or more correctly, transformed.

Since our High Priest has entered into and recast the fiery center of the system, the entire Old Testament history is now a magnificent, seven-ringed “armillary sphere,” wheels within wheels, an apparatus of heavenly measurement which incorporates and employs in perfect harmony the specific authority of each of Jesus’ major Covenantal predecessors. It is now we who must follow Him from that center, from personal conversion into our families, tribes and nations to the outer limits, where the final enemy, death, will be destroyed, and the universe will be renewed. But all of these elements are already “in Christ” and thus already in our hands. In Emmanuel, God is with us, not only in our hearts, but to go up and possess our inheritance.

“All men, women and children
were always under covenant
with God in some form…”

The conclusion concerning “Covenant membership” and the concept of “Covenant children” in the binary sense as understood by many paedobaptists is that these were uniquely Abrahamic features and obligations, earthly stoicheia, carnal elements serving as stand ins for the heavenly parts of a much greater picture. Now it makes sense why God kept “moving the goal posts,” each level of promise and inheritance becoming redundant with the call to sacrifice it for something greater. Even Abraham understood that Canaan and his offspring were only object lessons for the possession of a heavenly country as tried, qualified and glorified sons of God, enthroned with Christ for rest and rule.

All men, women and children were always under covenant with God in some form, and the notion that baptism, especially paedobaptism, puts people “into the covenant” is absurd. Baptism is the foundation not for life, but for a life of service, of ministry, of accountability and discernment as a “son of God,” just as it was for the world under Noah, and for Israel under Moses.

All people, including all children, even the yet unborn (who cannot be paedobaptized if miscarried), have everything they could possibly have in the Gospel of Christ. The death of Jesus put them into this covenant, under obligation to the great High Priest and King of Kings, and also under His mercy. To limit His jurisdiction to some renovated or hybridised version of the Abrahamic demarcation is to grossly misunderstand Covenant history, defining the glorious New Covenant by one facet of its construction. Our “Covenant community” is not in here. It is out there.

This is why Reformed theology is the best school in which to learn about covenant theology, yet it is also the worst place to learn about New Covenant theology.

“The telos of baptism is not faith but resurrection.” Bull vs. Leithart again, this time a response to The Ambivalence of Baptismal Theology.

Modern individualism has resulted in a dislocated society, but ancient or medieval corporatism is not the solution to it. The Bible deals with people as individuals and as groups, so neither “ism” is a solution to the other. An understanding of the one and the many based on biblical theology reveals both “isms” to be unnecessary enemies. So then, what accounts for the fundamental difference in baptismal theologies? The answer is that history is chiastic. Circumcision was a corporate sign whose telos was the personal faith of each Jew, making him or her a “Jew indeed.” Baptism is the opposite. It begins with the believer as a “Jew indeed,” the individual with the circumcised heart, and gathers them into a prophetic body. The telos of circumcision was faith, conversion. The telos of baptism is not faith but resurrection.

This helps us to understand Peter Leithart’s recent lament concerning Presbyterians whose theology, despite the claims at the font, is functionally baptistic. He is right that they are being inconsistent and illogical, but they are, by godly instinct, being inconsistent and illogical with their defective theology. Presbyterians must sense at some level that the doctrine of paedofaith has no clothes.

Logic is fine if we start off with a correct definition of baptism. So, to deal with Leithart’s flawless logic, we must attack his flawed foundation. He writes:

In ancient Israel, the vast majority of those circumcised were circumcised as infants. If one were developing a theology of circumcision, it wouldn’t make sense to focus on the comparatively rare adolescent or adult circumcisions. What is normal in practice would naturally be the norm of theology.

Firstly,  as I have claimed before, paedobaptism requires a misunderstanding of both circumcision and baptism in order to create this double-minded hybrid which would better be termed as bap-cision. Pitting adolescent/adult circumcisions against that of infants reveals Leithart’s unwitting sleight of hand at the outset. In seeking for some kind of “norm” in the age of circumcision, Leithart ignores the very purpose of circumcision so that our baptismal debate can be wedged into it. The truth is that baptism has an entirely different purpose from circumcision.

I am sure that Leithart would respond that age was irrelevant when it came to circumcision, and he would be correct, but it does not follow that age is irrelevant when it comes to baptism. This is because circumcision was about physical generations, a separate family tree, and baptism is about an oath of allegiance which renders one’s heredity redundant.¹Jordan claims that paedobaptism renders heredity redundant, but if this is the case, why is one particular baby qualified and another disqualified for baptism? A sign that renders heredity/tribe redundant that is yet limited to or demarcated by heredity/tribe defies basic logic and reveals the level to which a paradigm can pervert our thinking. It is not only logic but plain common sense that has its throat slit at the almighty altar of the bap-cision font. The Abrahamic promises concerned the fruit of the land and the fruit of the womb. For the life of the world, Israel would bear two of the sanctions pronounced in Genesis 3 and reverse them by faith. The norm of circumcision had nothing to do with age simply because its qualifications related to one’s sex.

The Abrahamic miracle was the reversal of barren wombs, not some miraculous “paedofaith” possessed either from birth or circumcision. And, of course, the argument falls apart when the fact that females were not circumcised is factored in, revealing that the rite had nothing to do with personal faith but with a familial, then tribal, then national, identity.²Some have claimed that Levitical purification rites for females somehow served as Covenant markers, but the claim is ridiculous since these rites were introduced over four centuries after circumcision. Once again, paedobaptists come to the Bible with an agenda rather than allowing the Bible to dictate their agenda. Gentiles could certainly join or marry into Israel, but the foundation of the separation remained the setting apart of sacrificial flesh.

In the two-millennia history of the church, the vast majority of those baptized were baptized as infants. Yet, baptismal theology is often developed, even among paedobaptists, as if infant baptism were the exception rather than the rule. What is normal in practice should be the norm of theology.

Jordan and Leithart tell us that when it comes to the other sacrament, communion, theology defines practice. But Leithart has to consult historical practice to defend the supposed “norm” of paedobaptism. Baptists cannot make this claim, certainly, but they simply point to the New Testament Scriptures, the same place Jordan and Leithart rely on for the “norm” of the eucharist. Now, certainly, there is the possibility that once the first baptisms were carried out, the “norm” became generational, as it did with circumcision, and that adult baptisms were few and far between, like they are in paedobaptist churches. The problem with this claim is that we are given very different qualifications for baptism, and, as mentioned, they relate not to the sanctification of family, tribe, and nation but their subversion! The rite serves as a public profession of faith, in which the individual, the one, pledges allegiance to the only Israelite flesh which matters, He who was set apart as a sacrifice and “cut off” for all in the flesh, the true Isaac, the promised Seed. To be frank, it blows me away that paedobaptists claim that baptism is not circumcision and yet rely so consistently upon its practice as support for their mistaken tradition.

Yes, the vast majority of the church was bap-cised, but if we are still in the early days of Christianity, these are the foibles of the Church’s childhood. The fact is that Christendom has come to an end, having served its purpose, and a rite that is familial or civic in nature is now more clearly than ever revealed to be redundant. Worse, if the vast majority of the church was bap-cised, they were never truly baptised, which includes many Christians today. Dr Leithart has never been baptised, and many Christians in paedobaptist churches have never witnessed a real baptism. This might sound offensive, but it is the same kind of lament as Leithart’s, just based on a firm foundation — a more biblical theology. The forerunners of baptism were different from circumcision. They were the rites which spoke of a circumcision of heart,  the various Covenant vows and priestly investitures, including the robe with blue tassels worn by all adult Israelites to remind them of the laws of God. None of these had anything to do with infants, since they concerned qualification for ministry in various capacities.

Of course, Leithart does appeal to Scripture, but through the lens of his prejudice concerning bap-cision.

In some traditions, this appears in a disjunction between what the New Testament asserts about baptism and what is said about infants who are baptized. The New Testament says that those who have been baptized have died and been buried with Christ (Romans 6), that baptism saves (1 Peter 3), that baptism clothes the baptized with Christ (Galatians 3).

The texts that Leithart quotes have easy answers in the light the priesthood of Israel. It is the priests who served as living sacrifices. They were the ones whose bodies and clothes were washed, since they were mediators between God and men. Commoners were only sprinkled. The trickiest text is the apostle Peter’s claim that “baptism saves you,” but Leithart’s interpretation is an example of using a single obscure text to skew the meaning of many other clear texts. In context, Peter is simply telling Jewish Christians that baptism replaced all the requirements of the Levitical law under which they were previously bound by oath. They were delivered — “saved” — from the vengeance which would soon be visited upon Jerusalem and its superseded sacrificial system. And finally, Galatians 3 refers to priestly investiture, an idea which can be traced right back to Genesis 3, where Adam failed God and was clothed in death instead of a robe of righteousness. The curse upon his children was collateral damage, as it was for Israel in later history. Baptism is about the oath before heaven. Circumcision was about the sanctions on earth.

Yet, some paedobaptist churches, perhaps especially Reformed churches, refuse to apply the claims of these texts to the children baptized in a straightforward fashion. Even though infants are baptized, we cannot yet say that they have been united to Christ’s death, or clothed with Christ, or saved.

At other times, this ambivalence appears in systematizations of sacramental theology. On the one hand, one makes an argument for infant baptism; on the other hand, a baptismal theology is developed that assumes non-infant baptisms are the norm. If we take convert baptism as the norm, then the relation of faith and baptism will be described in one way. If we take infant baptism as our theological norm, the relation of faith and baptism will appear somewhat different.

I paint in broad strokes. That doesn’t mean my portrait doesn’t capture what it paints.

All this means is that the conflict between Scripture and practice is simply in a difference place for Leithart than it is for other paedobaptists. They are ambivalent about baptism, but Leithart is ambivalent about personal faith. Or perhaps ambivalence is not the correct word in either case. For Leithart, the rivalry between flesh and Spirit simply gets shifted to somewhere more noticeably out of step with the Gospel of Christ, which requires personal repentance and public allegiance. The choice is between a redundant baptism or a redundant Gospel. Leithart chooses the latter, a rite which “objectively” transforms the unwitting into “Christians,” many of whom, for some reason, later struggle to make their faith their own. The true “norm” eventually catches up with errant theology, which is why many Presbyterians minimise that errant theology in practice. At some level, they perceive that a rite concerning the flesh and a rite concerning the heart are mutually exclusive, yet their defiant tradition robs them of a rite that serves the purpose for which the Lord gave us baptism: unashamedly naming Jesus before men that we might not be ashamed before Him in heaven.

The difference between separation and preparation…

In a post on Kuyperian Commentary entitled Baptism Is God’s Work, my friend Steve Jeffery writes:

My friend Fred Thompson made a tremendously illuminating comment about baptism recently. With his permission (thanks Fred) I wanted to say a few words about it. Here’s what he said:

“I keep thinking of the Red Sea baptism, a baptism of a nation, a mixed multitude, a nation that did not know where she was going, a nation that did not understand baptism. It was a new nation that left Egypt and she needed grace above all else, grace given through water and manna to all.”

Fred has in mind the well-known typological connection between baptism and the crossing of the Red Sea during the exodus (e.g. 1 Cor 10). Pressing this point, it becomes obvious that many evangelical assumptions about baptism are at best only a part of the biblical picture.

For example, we readily treat baptism as an expression of our faith towards God, part of our response to him. But baptism is in the first instance an act of God’s grace towards us. Though of course Israel was called to trust the LORD, it would be a strange reading of the Red Sea crossing that placed the emphasis on the faithfulness of the Israelites’ response to God.

Steve makes some good points about the over-emphasis on baptism as a human act. But over-emphasising God’s work in baptism is simply falling off the other side of the horse.

As a “credobaptist” I believe the Bible clearly teaches that baptism involves both God’s work and the work of the baptizand (the one being baptised). It is a combination of both the subjective (credo) and the objective (baptism). I believe that baptism is a lay ordination. This means that pitting the objective and subjective against each other is going to minimise the scope of the rite as something which is not only a legal relationship (objective) but also a loving relationship (subjective). To help us understand Christian baptism we could consider the rites of marriage and knighthood. Do getting married or being knighted actually do anything? Most certainly! Must the ones being married or knighted have some idea of what is going on? Most certainly. That is the whole point. In the New Testament, baptism is presented to us as a vow which has similarities with marriage and with knighthood, and indeed with the Nazarite vow (which both men and women could take). All of these vows were (or are) taken voluntarily (subjective), yet each vow bestows some form of authority for service (objective). In each case, one submits to authority that one might receive authority. This is not rocket science. Even a centurion can understand a rite that requires both the work of God and the work of Man (Matthew 8:5-13).

So, what did Israel’s passing through the Red Sea have to do with authority? Paedobaptists love to quote 1 Corinthians 10:2 as evidence for paedobaptism, but not one of them stops to ask why Israel needed baptism. Just like Roman Catholics, they have a rite to defend, and as soon as they see something which looks like proof, they stop thinking. They fail to ask a number of crucial questions.

Firstly, “How did Israel’s baptism relate to Israel’s circumcision?” The events at the Red Sea and the Jordan River were not Israel’s circumcision. Passover was certainly a corporate vindication of the circumcision (all Israel as God’s firstborn), but baptism prepared Israel for ministry as a sacrificial nation. Separation is not preparation any more than choosing a “son of the herd” was the same as cutting it up according to the Levitical requirements. Circumcision and baptism were part of a sacrificial process which culminated in the offering of Christ. When Christ died, the “separation” of circumcision finally became meaningless. But what about Israel’s baptism? Did that also become meaningless? The answer is found in another question which paedobaptists fail to ask.

So, secondly, “Why was Israel baptised all at once, yet Christians are not?” Christians are not baptised “corporately” but one by one, and we must ask why there is this difference under the New Covenant. When reading the Bible, in all cases, we must observe not only what is the same, but also what is different. This is something we must do even within the first book of the Bible, let alone in our comparison between the various historical covenants. Dry land rose up out of the waters twice in Genesis, but there are differences as well as similarities. There is repetition but also development and maturity. The same goes for Israel’s baptism. After the “national baptism” came the Levitical ordinances and the establishment of the priesthood. The “one baptism into Moses” was expressed in a “many” baptism as the Mosaic law was administered. Christian baptism in the Gospels and the book of Acts resembles the individual baptisms of the Levite priests who had to wash their bodies and their clothes as mediators between God and men.

The overall question is this: What makes the Church less like national Israel and more like the Levites? The answer would be that the “national” division (circumcision) was torn down by Christ, and all that remains is ministry among all nations. In 1 Corinthians 10, Paul is not claiming that the Christians had escaped either nationally or geographically from a physical nation like Egypt. He is simply claiming that just as Israel’s preparation for ministry involved personal faith and accountability to a Covenant oath, so also does Christian baptism. Did those whose bodies fell in the wilderness understand the Covenant oath when they took it? Most certainly. This is why their children were spared.¹The fact that my friend Tim Gallant sees the sparing of the children as evidence for a continued focus on children through baptism reveals how distorted our thinking can become when we make the Scriptures fit our agenda: we begin to see the opposite of what is actually there.

Reading too much into our baptism from Israel’s Red Sea baptism can lead us into error. Paedobaptism is a confusion of circumcision and baptism which was not even found in Old Testament Israel. Baptism is a delegation of Christ’s prophetic authority with accountability to Him. It is neither God’s work nor Man’s work, since in the regenerate, these become as indistinguishable as they are in the incarnate Christ.

Paedobaptism’s Utter Failure to be Objective

My online acquaintance Alastair Roberts has written a piece on the “passivity” of the baptizand. I agree wholeheartedly with much of what he says. But like all paedobaptists, he sees only what supports his errant paradigm, and fails to comprehend the other half of the story.

(If the opinions expressed below seem uncharitable, please take them in the way we all take Paul’s condemnation of circumcision in Galatians, because I believe these rites are equivalent at a fundamental level.)

Yes indeed, Jesus was “passive” in His death. But why, oh why, is there no mention whatsoever of the crucial fact that Jesus willingly laid down that life. There is no mention of this because paedobaptism vanishes in a puff of logic. Still, Roberts does see half the story, so I will take the liberty filling in the blind spots in his otherwise helpful material. He writes:

Christians, even those who say much about ‘incarnational’ faith, can say surprisingly little about the way that God claims our bodies. Perhaps this is most striking in treatments of baptism, where the intensely bodily character of the rite would especially seem to invite comment. Even if the term ‘baptism’ were to be regarded as synecdochal for a rite that contains various other ritual elements, it is noteworthy that the core ritual from which the rite derives its name involves such direct action upon the body.

Agreed. My Federal Vision friends’ teaching is a good antidote to the gnosticism of modern Christianity. Baptism, communion, anointing of the sick and the washing of feet are all strikingly physical rites which offend modern sensibilities. But I would makes two points here: Firstly, if God claims our bodies, why are paedobaptists most often content with sprinkling a little water on the head, even when it comes to adults? Their arguments for this are ridiculous, and rate around the same level as Roman Catholic arguments for the divinity of Mary or the popery of Peter. Start with a tradition and defend it with all your might. But there is a more serious problem here, and that is the failure to identify what this bodily claim actually means. It is not merely that the baptizand is sealed for resurrection. The baptizand is sealed for resurrection via martyrdom. Baptism is not merely about claim. It is about legal witness, and this is where a baptism that is entirely “objective” hurtles off the biblical rails into the abyss.

The action of the ritual of baptism isn’t the act of the candidate, but of a minister of Jesus Christ, performed upon the candidate’s body. In contrast to the Lord’s Supper, where the communicant ‘takes’ and ‘eats’ in an actively bodily manner, the body of the baptismal candidate is passive in the act of baptism. While the body’s personal and purposeful activity and our bodily absorption of that which is external to us into our interiority are foregrounded in the Supper, it is the objectivity and exteriority of the body and self that are foregrounded in the rite that necessarily precedes it—baptism.

Full marks. But how did the baptizand get to the water? Was he carried as an uncomprehending infant? Was he dragged kicking and screaming, or under threat of ostracism, inquisition or even public execution? That is where an isolated “objectivity” leads, and it looks a lot like the Law of Moses and its errant counterpart in Medieval Christendom. Jesus’ baptism was nothing like His circumcision. Besides the fact that these rites involved totally different Fathers, the whole point of baptism was submission. How can this fundamental fact be so deliberately ignored by such educated people?

Because they are blind to all the actual instances of baptism in the Bible, and think that baptism instead looks like what they have seen in their churches, I have to use non-biblical analogies to explain my point. Knighthood is the best example I can think of. Is the rite of knighthood passive? Yes, it is. But what does that passivity mean? Well obviously, the person kneeling under the sword of the monarch is demonstrating willing submission to that sword, a symbolic form of death. These things are blindingly obvious in all the biblical instances of baptism, but once you relate it to heredity, it morphs into something else entirely, a rite which has no place under the New Covenant.

My body defies the distinction between subject and object: it is both the site of my interiority and subjectivity, yet also an object that exists in continuity with the world and as a part of nature that others can act upon. My body is the site of my consciousness, my sense of self, and my action, but before these come into being, my body receives meaning and identity from other sources. My ‘self’ is never simply my subjectivity: it is also my bodily objectivity and in this objectivity my body is the bearer of ‘given’ meanings that precede me, my subjectivity, my choices, and my actions.

Most certainly, but this only makes sense if we conflate “Christian baby” with “baby Christian.” Is baptism a social demarcation first, or an ethical/spiritual one? Is it actually transforming an infant into a “Christian” or is it just sacralizing the familial identity which the child already possesses? The real questions here are these: Is infant baptism the second birth? Is “Christian identity” just a souped up version of Jewish cultural identity? And is it remotely possible that, like the body, the rite of baptism defies the distinction between subject and object, just like a knighthood? These questions are not profound, yet they seem not to occur to people who only see what they expect to see. (It’s no accident that some autistic children draw photorealistic images of animals and people: they simply draw what they see, without any of the filters employed by normal children. I have a dash of autism, and I generally see things as they are, which is a sure fire means of annoying everybody, but especially paedobaptists.)

I am biologically related to other persons in a manner that entirely preceded and bypassed any decisions on my part. I am the bearer of resemblances and distinctive features that relate me to others and distinguish me from them. My body is the recipient of a particular genetic inheritance. I am called by a name I did not choose. My body is culturally located and assigned a place within social and cultural matrices of meaning and identity. My body is claimed by nature’s laws, which are powerfully operative within me, binding me to the physical and cosmic order beyond me. My male body, for instance, distinguishes me in a fundamental respect from—yet orders me towards relationship with—women, identifying me as a man, shaping and situating my sense of personhood. As part of the natural order, my body contains a life that ‘goes on without me.’ In all of these respects, the objectivity of my body means that I am ‘spoken’—by nature, culture, tradition, etc.—before I ever ‘speak’ as a subject: indeed, I could not speak were I not first spoken.

Certainly, but the faith through which we are “born of the Gospel” comes by hearing, by Word, not by baptism. Baptism is all about the response to that Word. If there is no response of any kind, then there is no Christian. The concern of circumcision was physical life and physical offspring. The concern of baptism is spiritual life, and not potential spiritual life. A paedobaptism is the Word returning void. Roberts, like Leithart, desperately wants to sacralize human birth, but human fathers are not the heavenly Father, which is why circumcision ended and baptism began, and why such childish, elementary rites were left behind. Baptism does not speak of the beginning of the earthly body, but of its end. It pictures the death of the saint, but more specifically the death of the saint, the “twice-born,” at the hands of the once-born. So why on earth are they baptizing the once-born? Because paedobaptism is a carnal rite. These are strong words, but any rite which promises salvation based upon familial, tribal, civic or cultural grounds is — technically speaking — an abomination. This is exactly why Paul got the knives out in his letter to the Galatians, to circumcise the hearts of those who had begun to rely on the circumcision of the flesh. Bap-cision is utterly opposed to the Gospel of Christ.

It is common in certain quarters to speak of baptism as our ‘act of obedience’ or the ‘expression of our faith’ and, in some respects, these claims aren’t entirely mistaken. Yet what they disguise is that, to the extent that baptism could be referred to as our ‘act of obedience’, it is the ‘action’ of passively submitting to the action of another; to the extent that it can be referred to as the ‘expression of our faith’, the faith ‘expressed’ is not primarily our subjective faith, but the Church’s one catholic and apostolic faith—faith in its communal and objective aspect. Baptism addresses itself directly to the objectivity of the body and seals us with a new identity. It speaks to the very foundations of our selves, to that which preceded the first sparks of our subjectivity (‘expression of faith’) and activity (‘act of obedience’). In salvation, God plucks us up by the roots.

Great to hear, at last, that baptism is not entirely objective. But do baptists really overlook the fact that baptism involves passivity? If they do it is because they understand this passivity as the voluntary, conscious submission of the baptizand. The claims of “passivity” here are the clever disguise, with the intention of sneaking infants into the gamut of those who qualify. An infant baptism involves no submission on the part of the baptizand.

Then follows an allusion to the idea that baptistic thinking is individualistic, like modernism, and that this somehow has led to the failure of modern American culture. Modernism is certainly individualistic, and this individualism, which includes the secret ballot, can be traced right back to the beginnings of Christianity. As Regis Debray has written, “We didn’t realise it, but Gide’s ‘Families-I-hate-you’ and Breton’s ‘Let-it-all-go’ are signed Jesus Christ: ‘Whosoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children … cannot be my disciple’ (Luke 14:26). The true fraternity will be the voluntary one, the ekklesia. One does not inherit; one is co-opted.” (See An Atheist Gets Baptism.)

But unlike modernism, baptism does not end with individualism. Repentance and conversion are indeed interior events, but the rite of baptism is what “adds” the believer to the Church. It is the act which takes the transformed individual and joins them to the Body. Modernism and paedobaptism have something in common: they are both missing the heart of the New Covenant, which is voluntary submission, a willing response to Jesus’ “Follow me.”

So, in salvation, God plucks us up by the roots. But paedobaptism simply sacralizes the roots. It is not salvation. It is not anything at all. And it robs Christians of the rite which actually does join them to the Body. A “paedobaptized” Christian is in fact unbaptized. Paedobaptism is a forgery, a lie, a fraud of the worst kind, as ineffective and insignificant as a circumcision. It gets me riled up because circumcision got Paul riled up. Paedobaptism and circumcision are all about roots. Baptism is about spiritual fruits.

In Romans 6, Paul relates baptism to Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection, events through which Jesus was brought into a new life ‘by the glory of the Father’ (verse 4). We should notice that in these events it is Christ’s bodily objectivity—not his subjectivity or activity—which is most prominent and significant. Arguably the primary New Testament paradigms of baptism—death/resurrection and rebirth—both present the objectivity of the body at their heart. In baptism we are united together with Christ ‘in the likeness of his death’ (verse 5). In death activity ceases and the body is dispossessed of its subjectivity, surrendering the body to pure objectivity. Baptism corresponds to such surrender, a dispossession through which we are given a ‘new’ body, which provides the basis for a new mode of subjectivity and activity.

Nothing to disagree with here. It just makes me wonder how paedobaptists fail to see that subjectivity and objectivity are not opposed to each other, any more than Word and response are opposed to each other. Look at Jesus’s baptism! Paedobaptism is out of step with Reformed “Trinitarianism.”

The body’s objectivity, materiality, exteriority, and priority, and its embeddedness in the natural order, in tradition, society, and culture are simultaneously preconditions for, yet also resistance to, the freedom of my subjectivity and action. The body constantly alerts us to the givenness of the self, to the fact that I am neither autonomous nor self-defined, but that I receive my identity in large measure from without. My freedom to ‘speak’ my own self necessarily presupposes that self has always already been ‘spoken’. I must always express myself from the unchosen site of identity and meaning represented by my body.

But Christianity is not an “unchosen” identity. That was circumcision / uncircumcision. Again, see Regis Debray, linked above. Baptism is a public declaration of allegiance which makes all “unchosen” identities irrelevant, much like becoming a Communist. Nobody is born a Communist. Nobody is born a Christian. Anybody can become a Communist. Anybody can become a Christian. Allegiance transcends identity, which is why Paul refers to all those things as dung. Baptism is the act of “putting off” heredity. The claim from some paedobaptists that paedobaptism “puts off heredity” is laughable. They will be offended by this, but their myopia here is astounding. God did not replace the old exclusive order with a “new” exclusive order.

Once again, this reveals problems with some popular language about baptism. When we speak of baptism as expressive of the candidate’s ‘decision,’ we either implicitly resist the givenness of our selves, or we fail to address God’s salvation to the most basic dimension of our humanity. Insistence upon the reality of original sin is, in part, insistence that alienation from God is an aspect of our givenness in a fallen world, not merely a result of our subjectively chosen action. The waters of baptism run deeper than action, deeper than choice, and even deeper than consciousness and subjectivity. They declare a new givenness, that my body is now defined by its relation to Jesus Christ and his body.

Hang on, what happened to surrender? Is “Choose you this day…” not a call to make a decision? What about “Follow me?” While I believe that all faith is a gift, it is the response to such an exhortation that demonstrates that gift. Moreover, any “faith” that does not include some comprehension of sin, some degree of repentance, some level of trust in the unseen God, is a fantasy. Is salvation something that can happen to you without you being aware of it? Adam was created without being conscious of it, I presume much like a human birth. But his intended “second birth” was a moral, ethical decision, and only something which later involved his physical body. As usual, the paedobaptist has to argue their way to a presumed destination, the defence of a superstitious rite, rather than allowing the Bible to speak for itself. The first birth and the second are different kinds of gifts. The first is “being” (Genesis 1) followed by “knowing” (Genesis 2) and then “doing” (Genesis 3).

On “attaching” infants to the Body of Christ, I believe this is fiction. There is no rite required that somehow makes a person more susceptible to the Gospel, or gives them a “Christian identity” and special favour with God. Paedobaptism is the “name it and claim it of Reformed Theology. These notions are entirely carnal.

From the moment we are conceived until the moment we die, our bodies are situated in a vast web of social meaning and relations that define and identify us in various ways. When we die our bodies are disgorged from this symbolic order—or ‘law’—of society, falling back into the realm of dust (cf. Romans 7:2). Resurrection, in reclaiming bodies from the dust, results in persons who are freed from the bondage that the symbolic order of a sinful world entails. Baptism is a reality-filled promise, sealing us for such deliverance.

Baptism seals us for resurrection, but only via willing martyrdom (“martyr” being the Greek word for “witness”). That is the picture we are given in the Revelation. Jesus unseals the New Covenant scroll, and the saints are sealed as little scrolls, little books. They are living epistles, and their seals will be broken as they deliver their message, their testimony, in their deaths. Testimony is only possible for legal representatives, blameless sacrifices, so baptism is only for the regenerate believer. Baptism is indeed a step of obedience, a step onto the altar as a sacrificial lamb. The “passivity” which turns the world upside down is not the passivity of the infant but the refusal to retaliate of the witnesses who bring the testimony of Jesus. This is why paedobaptism is such an offence to the Gospel of Christ. It completely undermines the meaning of “Word,” the biblical definitions of “faith,” “Church,” “new birth,”, “regeneration,” and also the means of the conquest of the world.

Resurrection isn’t rescue from ‘givenness’ as such, but from a form of givenness in which we are alienated from God, from each other, from ourselves, and from the creation. Resurrection is not the basis for pure autonomy, but a release into a new liberating superabundant givenness. In baptism, God declares that, whatever human families or backgrounds we may come from, we are now claimed for his family, sealed for adoption.

Once again, if baptism frees us from the existing “web of social meaning,” why does paedobaptism simply give these a stamp of divinity? Besides the fact that the entire world is now “claimed” by Christ, why do paedobaptists refuse to understand the chasm of difference between the womb and the tomb?

Whatever human loyalties and identities our bodies embed us within, these are at most penultimate to the ownership that God now claims of us. However deeply we may feel our bodies weighed down with the bondage of a creation subjected to futility, that creation—and our bodies with it—will one day be released into our liberty as the resurrected children of God. In baptism, God declares that, whatever histories our bodies once belonged to or possessed, they now belong to the great scriptural History that baptism evokes and encapsulates. This story arrived at its telos in the threefold baptism of Christ: his baptism in the Jordan, the baptism of his death and resurrection, and his baptism of his Church at Pentecost.

Baptism as telos was the circumcision of heart, not flesh. Circumcision of flesh was to lead to circumcision of heart. Baptism begins with repentance. It is the hearing of the Gospel, nothing else, which cuts human hearts. Our hearts either respond with some kind of profession of faith, or with gnashing of teeth, with blessing or with cursing, with life or with death. If there is no response, there is no baptism. Every true baptizand desires baptism because God has given new life. If there is no new life, then that person is still in Adam.

The meaning of baptism is principally prospective, rather than retrospective. Baptism is a pledge and seal that anticipates future resurrection, adoption, and the redemption of our bodies. In baptism God publicly and visibly marks out our bodies for this coming deliverance. As we have been baptized in the likeness of Christ’s death, we believe that we will also share in the likeness of his resurrection. In baptism God declares a truth and a promise about my body. He declares that the objectivity of my self—the bodily ‘me’ that precedes and lies beneath all of my consciousness, self-knowing, acting, and deciding—is in his hands. In my very frailty and mortality, I can entrust myself to him, assured in his promise to raise me on that Last Day.¹Alastair Roberts, Sealed for Resurrection: Baptism and the Objectivity of the Body.

Here is where the carnality of this theology is exposed. Jesus Christ rules all nations. In His death, He “circumcised” “all flesh,” the entire world, not some Judaistic concept of Christianity. All bodies are already His, just as all bodies came under judgment in the Great Flood. The division of flesh between Jew and Gentile, between “Abrahamic” bodies and non-Abrahamic bodies, is gone. Paedobaptism supposedly cuts off the old carnal body, but all it does is reassemble its parts on the altar as dead, bloody flesh. Pentecostal fire, the indwelling Spirit of God whose first sign is verbal profession, a legal testimony, incinerates the old body entirely and creates a new body of fragrant smoke, a memorial of good works before the throne of heaven. Jesus took circumcision, and all other carnal demarcations, into the grave. It is gnosticism to speak only of the Spirit, but it is Judaism to speak only of the body. A New Covenant saint is an individual burning with the Spirit whose flesh is not consumed, a burning bush from whom the voice of God speaks with authority. It is time to put away childish things and the sophistry required to maintain them.