Peter Leithart believes that baptism is the ground for Christian education. I agree with him. But when it comes to whose baptism, I think it can be demonstrated that he departs from the biblical pattern.

TRANSCENDENCE

In Baptized Education, he writes:

The Christian school has to function as a fruit of the Christian church. That does not mean it has to be administratively connected to a church.

So far so good. A state education is no longer semi-Christian or non-Christian. It is decidedly anti-Christian, to the point where anything except Christian doctrine can be taught to our children. At least in the USA, Christian education is something valued more by Christians from Reformed Churches than Baptistic ones, as this guest post from Sarah Culbertson describes. The failure to raise our children in the nurture of the Lord has resulted largely from a misplaced trust in the state.

HIERARCHY

But to be Christian it has to take the church’s ministry as its given starting point. Specifically, I have in mind the sacrament, rite, or ordinance of baptism. What does baptism have to do with education?

Certainly, but what is the Church’s ministry? Is it witness to the nations, or out-breeding them? Right at the point when we ought to be discussing whether or not to invite and include children from non-Christians families into our Christian schools, Leithart wants to sacralise Christian education and build a fence around it.

I do understand his reasons. American Baptist culture has lost a generation or two to secularism, and the two main reasons were a failure of Christian fatherhood and a lack of Christian education. The emphasis on fatherhood and education is the strength of the Federal Vision. But the foundations for Christian fatherhood and Christian education are not to be found in the significance of the value of “Covenant children,” but in the value of all children and indeed all people, and the transforming power of the Gospel of Christ which must be heard to be believed.

ETHICS 1 – PRIESTHOOD

So, what does baptism have to do with education?

We might think very little. Kids from Christian schools are subjects of Christian nurture simply by virtue of their birth. But that is not a sound premise. They are members of the people of God not by virtue of birth but by virtue of baptism.

This paragraph contains the linchpin of Federal Vision thinking. If it can be pulled out, the entire construct falls apart. What disturbs me, and should disturb my FV friends, is how easily it can be pulled out.

I maintain that baptism cannot become familial, tribal or civic without losing its power to transcend those barriers. Paedobaptists avoid the obvious by claiming that even though the very reason certain persons “qualify” for baptism is indeed familial, tribal or civic, the rite of baptism negates, or even slays, those human ties, by rendering this person a “Christian.” It should be obvious to anyone that all this practice does, by attaching itself to these human ties, is sacralise them. Suddenly, they become divine! The foolishness of this is only apparent to those on the outside of the particular family, tribe, city or culture, to whom it is plain as day that this rite is a means of exclusion rather than inclusion. Instead of transcending all those ties and putting them under the authority of Christ, it exalts them into the heavens. This is exactly how Judaism, and indeed Christendom, were turned into Babels. The Gospel of Christ is first and foremost ethical, with social outcomes, not the other way around.

ETHICS 2 – KINGDOM

They are to be nurtured in Christian faith not because they are human but because God has claimed them.

Paedobaptists maintain that this rite includes their children in the Covenant. I maintain that all children, all humans, are already in the Covenant. All were claimed by Christ at His ascension, which mean that what paedobaptism actually does (if it really did anything at all) is put everyone else outside the Covenant, just as Gentiles were not included in the Jewish social identity or its Covenantal promises and obligations. So the supposed “claim” on these children is an Old Covenant one, the Law of Moses.

Raising our children in the nurture of the Lord is simply a Christian obligation, part of our ministry of faithful witness. Our children need the Gospel just like all children do. There is nothing special about them. They are not part of any fleshly Messianic line or heredity “Covenant succession.”

ETHICS 3 – PROPHECY

This has several direct implications for how teachers carry out their work. Whenever and however administered, baptism is a renunciation of the world. It is a liturgical initiation into a people that rejects and resists the liturgies of the world.

Instead of focussing on the faithfulness of Christian teachers, and baptism as a sign of the New Covenant Oath, the public profession of the name of Jesus Christ, Leithart is stuck on the children, those affected by the Sanctions of the Oath. Has the teacher renounced the world? Does the teacher faithfully instruct the students in the ways (and thus the liturgies) of God? This is the weakness of the Federal Vision. Instead of transformation it offers legislation. Instead of representation it offers demarcation. Covenant obligations were always the concern of those in authority, whether familial, tribal or civic. They were the ones accountable to God, and they were to image Him to those in their care. This is how it was in Eden, how it was in Israel, and it is how it is now for baptised (invested) Christians among all nations.

OATH/SANCTIONS

A teacher can appeal to the students’ baptisms as grounds for moral exhortation and formation. “You have been bought with a price,” a teacher says, “you belong to Jesus. Therefore, don’t give your soul and your loves to David Tennant or Benedict Cumberbatch or the latest rock star. Your life is in Christ, therefore does not consist of possessions…

What if there are students from non-Christian families in the school? Are they exempt from moral exhortation and formation because they have not been baptised? Has the entire world not been bought with a price? Does not every soul already belong to the King of Kings? Is that not the grounds for preaching the Gospel to every creature? Appealing to somebody’s baptism (particularly a paedobaptism) is the soteriological equivalent of the Bootstrap Paradox. And there are young people who, although baptised and thus supposedly “in Christ” come to resent these supernatural obligations inherited via their natural identity.

SUCCESSION

…Your people are the people of God, and so your loyalties are first of all there. You are baptized, therefore you are not the kind of person to despise the wisdom of the aged. You are baptized, therefore you live and study in patient faith.”

Finally, we come to the carnal terminal of all human demarcations, including familial baptism: human seed with claims to divinity. Even within the Old Covenant line, the carnal succession jumped tracks quite a number of times and included scandalous people to remind us that this succession was not a work of the flesh.

And now, with the genealogical promises complete, and all the records incinerated at Jesus’ hand in AD70, the Spirit is free not only to jump from person to person, family to family, tribe to tribe, but also from nation to nation. God simply will not allow us to glory in the flesh, and baptism is evidence of that. It does not sacralise human ties as paedobaptism does. It transcends them entirely. There is no boundary on the work of Christ, and baptism should not be contorted into one. Paedobaptism glories in the flesh, a carnal succession.

Conclusion

There is no need for a baptismal fence to keep people in. Baptism is not a mining claim. Christ owns the entire world. Baptism is for the gold, silver and precious stones mined out of it, purified through repentance and faith, then baptised and put to work in the house of God and in battle out in the field. Baptism is investiture, not initiation. In educational terms, it is the graduation gown, not the beginning of schooling.

People do not “enter” the Church via baptism as ancients entered Israel via circumcision. Circumcision transformed no one. But baptism is for the transformed, and that transformation comes only from beholding Christ. The Church which focusses on maintaining its own glory always becomes Babel, and the Spirit departs. However, when people are pointed to Christ, the Church gathers of its own accord — around Him.

Any system which must continually point people back to their baptism instead of pointing them to Christ is not only far from the focus of the New Testament, but far from recognising what an actual Christian is, and how somebody becomes a saint. Given this sort of power by unwitting sacramentalists and Covenantalists, the sacraments replace the Gospel in the minds of children. And as it was for the Jews, as the generations pass we end up exalting and rejoicing in bread and wine while Jesus Himself is left outside the door. Let me ask you, do you have a relationship with Jesus because you were baptised, or were you baptised because you have a relationship with Jesus? The difference here is crucial.

The world does not need baptism first. The world needs Christ first. And the same goes for our children. Baptism is for parents and teachers, legal witnesses, message bearers. Baptism sets these speakers apart as living sacrifices, but there is no fence around the audience. All are called to repent and believe.

“In the days when our courts are declaring that good is evil and evil is good, the recovery of baptism as a delegation of divine legal authority rather than a sign of ‘limited Covenantal obligation’ is crucial.”

Every biblical Covenant is a word from heaven designed to bring a response from the earth. When the laws in the Ark of the testimony were given to Israel, the response of a legal oath was required, intended to culminate in the legal witness of Israel to the nations. Thus, every biblical Covenant is also a process which leads to maturity, beginning with cultivation and ending in representation.

A child must be schooled before he can be employed. A man must be a disciple before he can be an apostle. Adam was to be qualified before he could represent God as a just and merciful judge on earth. But the difference between cultivation and representation is the difference between circumcision and baptism, and this facet of the biblical Covenants is something paedobaptists are unable to accept, at least in its full glory.

Leaving Home

My friend Peter Leithart, once again, has written a brilliant article concerning this process of maturity.

Can we protect our kids from the world and prepare them for it?

Parents can draw guidance from an unexpected source: Paul’s letter to the Galatians, where Paul describes Israel’s history as a centuries-long process of child-training (Galatians 3–4). When Yahweh first brought his son from Egypt, he gave clear, detailed commandments and exercised strict discipline. Israel was, Paul says, “no better than slaves.” But this was always intended to be a temporary arrangement. The law was a tutor, but when faith comes, then “we are no longer under a tutor.” Israel was under guardians and stewards, but then God sends Jesus and the Spirit so that “we might receive the adoption as sons.” Overall, it’s a progression from childhood slavery to mature adulthood.

We can see this progression within the Old Testament. Early on, Yahweh created a comprehensive world that was at once a protection and a pedagogy. He gave his creatures stories, songs, structures, and rules—many rules. By the time of the kings, Israel had grown up. Instead of being withdrawn from the nations, Israel began to make good on the Abrahamic promise to be a light to the nations. Kings and queens streamed to Jerusalem to hear Solomon’s wisdom. Exile was both a judgment and a commission: By the time Nebuchadnezzar deported the Jews, they had become true children of Abraham, capable of leaving home for a land they didn’t yet know.

All this adds up to a rough but useful pattern for child-rearing. On the one hand, parents should have no problem treating their children as “slaves” during their youngest years. “No” is not a swear word; eight of the Ten Commandments begin with “No” (in Hebrew), and one of the two positive commands is “Honor your father and mother.” We don’t send toddlers into combat, and we shouldn’t send them into the warzone of the world. Should we sequester young children in an artificial cocoon of peace, love, and virtue? Absolutely.

On the other hand, the goal is to prepare them to leave, and to keep their heads as they pass through the big world outside. Like the God of Israel, we prepare them by gradual manumission. Some years ago, I read in a now-forgotten book that a parent moves from commander to coach to counselor. We give orders to little kids and require obedience. We coach them through the challenges of young adulthood, giving them room to make decisions, fail, and try again. By the time they’re ready to leave home, the commands should be second nature, and we offer advice to help them over the rough patches.

As Christians tell it, at the end of Israel’s story, the Lord doesn’t command Israel to “return.” Instead, Jesus, the God of Israel made flesh, sends the new Israel of the disciples away: Get out of the house. Fill the corners. The Hebrews started as priests, serving in Yahweh’s house, living under command. They grew to be kings, conquering and ruling a land in wisdom. They were sent out on a prophetic, then an apostolic mission, no longer slaves but sons, heirs of God. It’s the perfect pedagogy of the perfect Father, and we do well to imitate it.¹Peter J. Leithart, Rearing Slaves, Rearing Sons, www.firstthings.com

Leithart describes perfectly the purpose of cultivation as preparation for representation, of training our children that they might leave home to change the world. Yet once again he fails to make any connection between this process and the difference between circumcision and baptism.²See Exposed to the Elements. Circumcision was about cultivation (“Hear O Israel” — word as seed). Baptism is about representation (“Go and tell” – profession/witness as fruit).

Judicial Maturity

For the Covenantalist / sacramentalist, the New Covenant sign means pretty much the same thing as the Old one did: cultivation. The sign is somehow believed to contain maturity in “seed form,” and Leithart has to read Galatians backwards to cram the judicial maturity of New Covenant baptism into something that can be applied to infants. See Reading Galatians Backwards. However, if Israel was in training until Christ, and only then was baptism as we now know it instituted, how can baptism ever be a sign of earthly pedagogy? Surely a personal confession by our children (and a desire on their part for baptism) is the time to celebrate a parenting job well done?

Adam heard the law but did not “image” God legally. He listened but failed to “Go tell” when the Word was challenged by the first false teacher. Unlike Adam, Noah heeded the word and became the first true prophet. Each was under the sword (cultivation) but only Noah took it up (representation as a judge).

We see the same contrast in Israel in Egypt (under the sword) and Israel at Jericho (wielding the sword). In the big picture, this is the difference between the Old Covenant and the New. This might be why the Covenant has moved from circumcision/Land to baptism/Table. We are following the life of the harvest from its natural origin on earth to its supernatural destiny as a communion between heaven and earth. The process begins at the root, works its way to fruit, and finishes at the table of God. The food on the table is the “qualified and glorified” representative of the cultivated land.

Culmination and Initiation

Now, the paedobaptist might object by saying that life is a continuous process of cultivation, and indeed it is. But these levels are not the same. An infant’s gown is not the same thing as a graduation gown or a wedding gown. There is “cultivation” in the womb, there is the “cultivation” of childhood, there is the “cultivation” of study, and of courting, and there is “cultivation” as a minister of God. Infant baptism is thus the breaking of the waters in the womb and cutting of the umbilical chord. This is the only way “paedo” can ever be linked with “baptism.” Physical birth ends cultivation in the womb and begins physical representation of the parents by the child.

Breaking the waters signals the end of something old and the beginning of something new. So baptism is a new beginning, and is thus both culmination and initiation. But what does baptism bring to an end and what does it allow to begin? Where does baptism fit among all these varied stages? Well, what does a biblical baptism picture? Death and resurrection. Baptism is linked inextricably to a ministry as a living sacrifice, a martyr for whom death is gain, given the power to bless and curse as a spokesman for God.

Unlike circumcision, baptism does not speak of being a child of men but a son of God, that is, a legal representative, a prophet. It ends the period focussed on submission to heaven and begins the subsequent dominion of earth. Noah’s Great Flood “baptism” ended the old world and began the new one, but the new order was one of greater maturity and more authority in office. Noah blesses and curses with the full authority of God, a chosen ambassador. Baptism ends “legal” childhood under the stoicheia and begins a ministry of legal representation of God.

Baptism is about office, not flesh. It is supernature, not nature. Jesus spoke of a new birth, but He was not talking about more sons from Sarah’s or Rachel’s wombs. He spoke of the firstborn from the dead, and the legal witness which would follow. Paedobaptism confuses the Covenant “Oath” (Adam’s faithfulness) with the Covenant “Sanctions” (the resulting gifts from God), the same error made by the Jews and Judaizers in the first century. It is a subtle seizing of the Tree of Kingdom without prior submission to God.

Conflated Births

Each era of cultivation speaks to the others, but conflating them is an enormous mistake when it comes to the meaning of baptism as legal representation. Baptism accompanied the sign of tongues and the explosion of prophetic ministry across the world. To claim it is about cultivation rather than representation is a backward step. This puts the criticism of the Christian Jews in Hebrews 5 into context. They were still “hearing” like Israel, but stuck on the Old Covenant basics.

About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. (Hebrews 5:11-14)

Hebrews refers to the physical cultivation of childhood to describe spiritual cultivation. The saints should have been on the wine (strong food), and past the “milk” of the Covenant basics. Despite being raised as Jews, they were still getting a grip on the basics (cultivation) when they should by now have become teachers (representation). The author is not saying that these people were actual babies. Since they conflate the first birth with the second, paedocommunionists give wine to actual babies, which exposes their paradigm as a profound misunderstanding of some very basic things. The Church is the “nursery” of culture, but the Federal Vision unwittingly turns the church into an actual nursery. The earthly image is mistaken for the glorious reality, rather than merely a stage in the process.

This answers Dr Leithart’s strange case against us baptists who “talk to our babies.” He misguidedly conflates two very different stages of human life. Advocates of paedofaith quote Psalm 22:9-10 without thinking too deeply about it. David himself poetically conflates the care of his heavenly Father with the care of his earthly parents, but only poetically:

…you are he who took me from the womb;
you made me trust you at my mother’s breasts.
On you was I cast from my birth,
and from my mother’s womb you have been my God…

One certainly images the other, but these levels of cultivation are not the same. David’s parents were representatives of God in David’s boyhood cultivation. The ministry was from the hand of God but it came via mediators. In the New Covenant, we are no longer under an order administered by angels. We are now the angels, the messengers. That is the point of baptism. To claim that these very different periods of cultivation are the same thing is to claim that a child of men is, without ethical qualification, a son of God. But as in Hebrews, these are not the same thing. Although there is continuity between the child and the adult, a child is not an adult, and the flesh is not the Spirit.

The sacralizing of the first birth rather than the second unwittingly feminises the New Covenant. The New Covenant is about God’s sons, not ours, which is what Jesus’ baptism was all about, and why He had no physical children. The Church is not a nursery for the training of infants but a barracks for the training of soldiers. The Federal Vision’s hybridised New Covenant, with its “two tier” baptism, is just Abrahamic foozball in the clubhouse. Nurturing our children in the Lord is certainly a grave responsibility, but the real game is with Jesus out there on the field. Abraham’s inheritance was his own children. Jesus’ inheritance is the nations of the world.

Jesus’ Baptism

Based on Jesus’ baptism, the rite is a ceremony of graduation from the authority of Joseph the carpenter to the Craftsman of all Creation. Each stage prefigures the next, but the stages are not the same, just as the first birth is not the second birth, and just as the regeneration of one individual is not the regeneration of the world. The image is not the reality, yet although it is a part of it, conflating them is a form of idolatry, an over-realised eschatology. This explains the “sorcery” of Israel, whose leaders thought their earthly lineage made them acceptable to God. The Pharisees were indeed sons of Abraham (image) but not sons of God (reality). They were Jews but not what Judaism imaged or pointed to, thus not true Jews. “Dominion” was thus seen to be the result of breeding rather than legal witness.

The “baptism of the Spirit” was what officially ended the time of cultivation of the disciples and officially began their apostolic witness as representatives of Christ.

Jesus’ baptism signified the end of His personal cultivation on earth and the beginning of His representation of heaven. However, Jesus had four of these events, and even these must not be conflated, since they are stages of growth in stature and maturity: Circumcision (earthly father), Baptism (heavenly Father), death and burial (Table), ascension and return (enthronement). This process works from earth to heaven, from the Bronze Altar, through the Laver, into the Holy Place and ends on the kapporet. We see this exact sequence in the architecture of Exodus 24, which was the culmination of Israel’s physical cultivation as a nation, culminating in only the legal representatives dining with Yahweh on the mountain.

Likewise, in the life of Jesus, each of these events ended a period of cultivation and began a greater level of representation. The “baptism of the Spirit” was what officially ended the time of cultivation of the disciples and officially began their apostolic witness as representatives of Christ. This might be why the martyrdom of the saints in Revelation 14 is presented as a “fractal expansion” of the death of Jesus: the white harvest of the oikoumene (cultivation) was cut down and gathered for the table of God (representation).

Israel’s Baptism

Paedobaptists mistakenly think that Israel’s corporate baptism supports their errant rite, but even the nation of Israel was baptised for the sake of legal representation. Israel was not baptised into Abraham but Moses. Why? Circumcision was about cultivation (Abraham to Joseph) but Israel’s baptism was about representation (Moses to Joshua), her mediation for the nations.³See Destroy This Temple And within Israel, it was only the Levitical priests and the sacrifices — those who represented Israel before God — which were washed as mediators. The priesthood of all believers, the sign of which is believer’s baptism, came only at the end of Israel’s history. Israel’s annual feasts were also a process of cultivation (preparation for ministry) and then representation (witness) to the nations at Booths. Like the end of her annual feasts, this was the completion of her cultivation under the Law of Moses and the beginning of her ultimate ministry to the nations.

As Leithart fails to mention, protecting our children from the influence of the world until they are ready to influence it illustrates for us in microcosm the purpose of circumcision in history. The children of Israel were taken out of the nations that they might be matured, able to judge between good and evil, and then put back among the nations as a corporate image of the justice and mercy of God.

The Old Testament is claimed to offer support for paedosacraments, but even within the history of “Israel according to the flesh” we can see that circumcision and baptism meant very different things.

As we have seen, the institution of circumcision culminated in Israel’s “baptism” through the Red Sea and the “table” on the mountain. But just as the events from Abraham to Joseph were cultivation (Canaan to Egypt as Forming), and the events from Moses to Joshua focussed on legal representation (Egypt to Canaan as Filling), we also see these two elements within this secondary stage in legal terms, that is, legal cultivation and legal representation. The nature of Israel’s baptism as a sign of judicial maturity is the point paedobaptists miss when they note Paul’s allusion to these events. Since they are satisfied that their erroneous practice is vindicated, they fail to think any further about it. This is not only terrible exegesis, it is a failure in “Covenant theology” from its traditional experts.

The process in Israel’s journey from Egypt to Canaan is entirely legal, moving from external law (childhood) to internal law (adulthood), and this is why Paul refers to it in 1 Corinthians 11. The “exodus” of the Church from the Egypt of Herodian worship was fundamentally Ethical in nature. It had nothing whatsoever to do with being set apart genealogically as Israel was. It amazes me that this fundamental difference is consistently ignored.

Between Egypt and Canaan, the judicial maturity of Moses the prophet was to be “measured out” in the hearts of Israel. Israel was given the “Nos” of the Law and possessed Canaan only when the new generation said “Yes.” The process follows not only the Creation Week, but also the pattern of sacrifice. What began as raw flesh and blood was offered voluntarily to God and became a fragrant cloud of smoke, a pleasing testimony. Whereas the narratives of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob focus on the reversal of physical barrenness (Sanctions), the wilderness journey is all about “ethical fertility,” that is, richness towards God (Oath).

To claim that Israel’s corporate baptism is any kind of foundation for paedobaptism is to misunderstand the difference between circumcision and baptism. The Old Testament is claimed to offer support for paedosacraments, but even within the history of “Israel according to the flesh” we can see that circumcision and baptism meant very different things.

The Land of Israel

Circumcision was a boundary for farming, fencing off a people and Land for cultivation. The promise of fruit from the Land and fruit from the womb cannot be separated, either in Adam or in Abraham. This is why animals are always treated as part of the Old Covenant household of faith. The animals were the only truly “blameless representatives,” serving as substitutes for Israel as the firstborn of God, both her physical sons (cultivation, Exodus 4:22) and her ethical sons, the Levite priests (representation, Numbers 3:22).⁴See The Case for Covenantal Animal Baptism. If this twofold process seems strange, we must remember that Israel gave a tithe of its harvest to the Levites (cultivation) and the Levites then gave a tithe of that tithe to the Lord (representation). Man’s table is not God’s table. Differentiating between the sons of men and the sons of God under the New Covenant should not be difficult for theologians since it is woven throughout the very fabric of the Old Covenant.

Paedobaptistic ecclesiology is still working on the Abrahamic microcosm, the hobby farm.

Israel was set apart from the nations by circumcision, and cultivated by the Law. When Gentile believers mocked the Jews, Paul reminded them that this cultivation was of great benefit.

Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision? Much in every way. To begin with, the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God. What if some were unfaithful? Does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? By no means… (Romans 3:1-3)

The oracles of God were beneficial, just as our preaching to our children is beneficial. Whether or not it produces fruit, the process of ploughing, sowing and watering is a holy one. But when circumcision was ended through the death of Christ, the time of cultivation was over. It was time for the harvest. Paul also reminds those in Rome that both Jew and Gentile were still “under sin.” In Christ, the focus moved from seed to fruit, from cultivation to representation. Circumcision and uncircumcision meant nothing once there was spiritual fruit. When one brought forth spiritual fruit, the field from which one came, cultivated or uncultivated, Jew or Gentile, became irrelevant.

Baptism is not about seed but about fruit. Paedobaptism misguidedly sets a boundary of cultivation (planting the seed), which might explain why infants are “sprinkled.” But biblical baptism is about harvest, and Matthew 28 says there are no longer any fences. God harvests where He will. Paedobaptism tries to make the Church the field to be farmed, when the Church is actually a silo for the harvest, and a barracks for the workers. Paedobaptistic ecclesiology is still working on the Abrahamic microcosm, the hobby farm.

Since the “field” is now the entire world, the “nurture in the Lord” is not merely for our children but for all people everywhere. When one believes, one becomes a representative, a speaker. Since circumcision is gone, there is only the Gospel (cultivation) and witness (representation). There is no sign for cultivation, any more than there was before the time of Abraham. Baptism is only for legal representatives.

Paedobaptism makes the New Covenant as parochial as the old, as this comment from a paedobaptist demonstrates: “When you try to evangelize and disciple people who do not have the Spirit and who have no faith, you have no guarantees or promises or statistical probabilities.” This assumes that the Gospel has no power unless there is some kind of “fence” to contain it. Not only does this make no sense, we have no such guarantee anyway. We are simply told to sow the seed, water, and trust God for the increase.

The four “household” events recorded in the book of Acts were signs of the end of the old order, shifting the Covenant from the sons of a man to the sons of God, from physical forming to spiritual filling, from vessels to treasure, from cultivation to representation. If infants had indeed been baptised, this would make the New Covenant a limited obligation, a limited cultivation, like the Old. So it cannot logically be the case. It must therefore be a sign of representation, the sign of circumcision of flesh fulfilled in the circumcision of the heart of the believer.

Imitating Christ

To make baptism about cultivation under the Gospel rather than authority as an ambassador of the Gospel is to misunderstand the temporary purpose of the nation of Israel as a bootcamp for prophets. One must hear (cultivation - Land) before one can speak (representation - Table). Although Abraham was not baptised, he was qualified at various stages and only then ate before God with Melchizedek. Hebrews 5 says the same thing of Christ Himself, who was qualified before being given His great office.

If we want to celebrate parenting, baptism surely comes at the end of a job well done, at the beginning of ministry. The glory of a newborn is not the same as the glory of a child who chooses wisdom over folly. This glorious New Covenant rite is not one to be dismissed as “individualism.” Israel was baptised into Moses the prophet, but now all the Lord’s people are prophets, legal representatives, wise judges of what is good and what is evil. In the days when our courts are declaring that good is evil and evil is good, the recovery of baptism as a delegation of divine legal authority rather than a sign of “limited Covenantal obligation” is crucial.

At which point were the apostles sent out? In the big picture, it was after the institution of baptism. The Covenant moved from commander to coach to counselor — priesthood, kingdom, prophecy. As Leithart says, “We do well to imitate it.” But he does not. His ecclesiology is stuck in the Abrahamic childhood of the Church, and his sacraments are all about earthly parenting. Israel was baptised into Moses’ “No.” A believer is baptized into an uncoerced “Yes,” the testimony of Jesus Christ, the first sign of spiritual maturity. It is the day when a son or daughter becomes an eternal brother or sister.

After conversion, our “judicial” cultivation certainly continues until our baptismal investiture is fulfilled in resurrection. Only then will we truly represent God, enthroned with Him not only by faith but also by sight.

_______________________________
ART: The Ambassadors, Hans Holbein the Younger

Wilson: Who’s Harvey?
Miss Kelly: A white rabbit, six feet tall.
Wilson: Six feet?
Elwood P. Dowd: Six feet three and a half inches. Now let’s stick to the facts.
(Harvey, 1950)

It is a pity that this imaginary Covenant-of-obligations cannot be photographed and fingerprinted, let alone identified in the New Testament. Oh wait, it is mentioned in the New Testament. It is called the Law.

The best place to learn about biblical Covenants—what they are, what they look like, and how they operate—is the hallowed halls, past and present, of Reformed Theology. Strangely, this is also the worst place to learn about the New Covenant. It seems somebody did not get the system upgrade.

When most Reformed theologians speak about “the Covenant” as it applies today, what they are referring to is nothing more than an imaginary friend, a puck or pookah¹”The pookah takes many forms, but is most famous when he appears as a giant, six-foot white rabbit — which is the form most Americans know from the play and film, Harvey. Whatever form the pookah takes, he retains the special ability of his species, which is like that of Thoth in Egyptian legend, Coyote in Native American myth or Hanuman the Divine Monkey in Hindu lore – he can move us from one universe, or Belief System, into another, and he likes to play games with our ideas about ‘reality.’” Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger, Volume II. that stands in for some imagined deficit. For sacramentalists, what is missing is the Law of Moses. They know they cannot have it back, so they peddle moral standards as “Covenant obligations” for a segregated community. The problem they have is that the New Covenant is an entirely different animal.

Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions, until the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made. (Galatians 3:19)

“The Covenant” is no longer the imagined security of a “gated estate” like the nation of Israel or the Jewish identity as it built synagogues across the empire. The Covenant is now a Man,²See Jesus and Covenant – 1 which means that just about every reference to it by sacramentalists is entirely erroneous.

Doug Wilson’s pastoral heart is always apparent in everything he writes, but unfortunately this leads him to set up the New Covenant as a picket fence, a stand in for the wall which separated Jew from Gentile. The blurb for his 2002 book Reformed Is Not Enough: Recovering the Objectivity of the Covenant, gets to the heart of the matter on the main arguments he presents, and allows us to nip them in the bud rather than dealing with their well-intended but terribly misguided fruits.

 Covenant Breakers

Suppose a husband is committing adultery. Is he still a husband? Being a husband is not just a state of mind; it’s not just a private decision. Being a husband is a public relationship made from a public exchange of vows, an objective covenant. An adulterous husband is a covenant-breaking husband but still a husband. Being a husband is what makes his infidelity so horrendous.

So good, so far. The problem is that paedobaptists continually use marriage vows as an illustration of baptismal vows. The only time marriage vows are taken by proxy by one’s guardians is for the purpose of betrothal, in arranged marriages. My Reformed friends are very bright people, but when it comes to some of their fundamental assumptions, they entirely fail to think things through. They resort to the Old Testament to turn baptism into an “objective” sign, like a revised unisex circumcision, yet never mention the fact that the infants of Israel were exempt from the Mosaic Covenant vows taken at Sinai. This leads to some stunning misunderstandings, the most gobsmacking of which is that the next generation of Israel surviving the wilderness and entering the Land is seen as evidence for the importance of “Covenant children” rather than evidence for the exemption of infants from the Covenant vow. Go figure.

But my main point here is that a betrothed baby is not a husband. There is a promise and an intention, and a training up to come, but the only public relationship a paedobaptism can ever be is a superstitious “sanctification” of one which already exists. Parents and “god parents” make promises to keep obligations which they already had, so this is nothing like a marriage. And this brings us to the real reason for this renewed focus on “Covenant.” It is a magic marker used in exactly the same way the Lord used the Law to preserve the nation of Israel. The Law cannot bring life, but it can certainly highlight our sin. And the sin which “Covenant” highlights is our culture’s horrendous failure to raise our children in the nurture of the Lord.

So “Covenant” is used to put a burden on people who do not have the Spirit of God, to make their sin more apparent. Why not just point them to the Law of Moses? That is the purpose it serves today. It is to bring us to Christ. The only reason the Law was introduced is because the children of patriarchs in many instances were nothing like their faithful father Abraham. The Law was like the “gutter guards” used by children at the ten pin bowling alley, or trainer wheels on children’s bicycles. The law was a leash that Israel might not stray. The point of the New Covenant is that dogs who have the Spirit of God hear their Master’s voice and stay by their Master’s side without a leash. Douglas Wilson’s “Covenant” is nothing more than a Mosaic leash, and the online testimonies of those who have misunderstood his love for them as a brutal legalism is evidence of this fact. They are considered to be “Covenant breakers” when in fact they already were, simply by being in the old Adam. For somebody so well versed and insightful in other areas, this is an enormous blindspot. An ex-Baptist abusing the New Covenant in such a way is simply falling off the other side of the horse. The dark side.

Christian Identity

In the same way, when people are baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, they are ushered into an objective, visible, covenant relationship.

It is a good thing to “recover the objectivity” of the Covenant, but what Pastor Wilson has recovered is not what he thinks it is. He just has an old boot on the end of his fishing line, and it seems he will keep kicking us with it for years to come.

Apparently, the New Covenant is something outside of us, something done to us that does not require any response, including our permission. (The reaction of some paedobaptized unbelievers in Europe has been to get themselves rebaptized in bull’s blood to undo the rite and thus the claim of the Church, which they never asked for, but which still obviously troubles their consciences.) And Wilson is exactly right. But he thinks it is that old boot.

This objective act which replaced circumcision was not the establishment of a “bap-cision.” God did not simply replace our old trainer wheels with newer, shinier trainer wheels, and ones which the girls can use too. Circumcision was fulfilled and made redundant once-and-for-all in the death, resurrection and ascension of Christ, enthroning Him above all the kingdoms of the world, making the Jew-Gentile distinction utterly irrelevant. But the flesh wants to go back to Egypt. In their misguided Lord’s table, sacramentalists mistake the “manna” of obedience for a sacrificial meal of carnal identity. There is no longer any such identity, which means clubbing people with it cannot produce the righteousness of God.

It amazes me how sacramentalists cannot seem to get their highbrow heads around the idea that everyone is already “in” or “under” the New Covenant. A sprinkling of water cannot put you into something you are already under—an obligation to repent and believe in Christ. And a reverse baptism of bull’s blood cannot take you out of it, either. There is simply no escape from Jesus, so sacramentalism is incredibly small-minded. The New Covenant is bigger than any exhumed Abrahamic construct can ever be. Such an imaginary fence merely creates sacramentalist zombies who can only stay alive by eating Jesus’ flesh and blood. This is not the new life which Jesus spoke about. The New Covenant is about the dead living, not the living dead.

The “Covenant relationship” is already there, which is what the Great Commission is all about—the claim of the true God for priestly submission from Jews only now extended to all nations. So “Covenant membership” in Abrahamic terms no longer exists. Everyone is under the Covenant, but not everyone is a member of the Body of Christ. Only those who hear and answer the call. It is worth noting that these exact distinctions existed within Israel after the establishment of the Levitical priesthood, and Peter Leithart even wrote a book about that. But the logical consequences for baptism as a priestly ordination rather than a new circumcision somehow did not occur to him.³Peter Leithart, The Priesthood of the Plebs.

Visible Saints

Regardless of the state of their heart, regardless of any hypocrisy, regardless of whether or not they mean it, such people are now visible saints, Christians. A Christian is one who would be identified as such by a Muslim. Membership in the Christian faith is objective—it can be photographed and fingerprinted. In baptism, God names us and imposes gracious obligations upon us.

It is a pity that this imaginary Covenant-of-obligations cannot be photographed and fingerprinted, let alone identified in the New Testament. Oh wait, it is mentioned in the New Testament. It is called the Law. Muslims know all about the Law, and the fact that it brings death. They deal in death all the time. They revel in the sword, both in the home, in their cursed lands and abroad. The sword is the answer to everything.

The Christian sword is the same as that of Christ, since baptism is a knighthood. It is testimony. A Muslim will identify a Christian on Islamic terms: obligation and coercion. And it is sad that Pastor Wilson believes a Christian can be identified in this way.

No, a Christian is one whose heart gives God pleasure, which is exactly what occurred at the baptism of Christ. When we believe, and only then, does God put us into Christ, and in Christ He is also pleased with us. This is why the claim that paedobaptism puts an infant “in union with Christ” just about makes me physically ill. (It’s a good thing the blows of a friend are faithful, because it makes me want to punch many of my friends when they spew forth this anti-Christian bilge.) Nothing could be further than the truth. What the infant is under is the worldwide objective call to repent and believe the Gospel. That is the ONLY gracious obligation for the unregenerate regarding access to God.

While Pastor Wilson’s “Covenant” is nowhere to be found, the Bible never speaks of the Church as being either visible or invisible. It simply does not make that distinction. The whole point of Pentecost was that sacrificial flesh (visible, like circumcision) and holy fire (the invisible Spirit of God) were united, resulting in an audible testimony.⁴See School of the Prophets. While a deluded Muslim can only identify a Christian with social criteria (baptism as circumcision, and don’t Muslims love circumcision!), saints are actually identified by their testimony. The true Christian is an audible one. While Pastor Wilson loads unkeepable demands upon the unregenerate, he also maintains that if they are baptised, they are saints. Paedobaptism causes this sort of stupid confusion wherever it goes, simply because circumcision of flesh and circumcision of heart are entirely different things.

Against Pietism

Paedosacraments are merely a social identity, and the Old Testament, which is no friend to them at all, reveals them to be a superseded commodity.

The sacred, triune architecture of the Garden Sanctuary (Most Holy Place – Adam and Eve), the Land (their offspring as firstfruits) and the World (the intermarriage of Abelite priesthood and Cainite kingdom resulting in diverse nations united by one Spirit) runs throughout the Bible. Consequently, it reveals to us the purpose of both circumcision and baptism. Circumcision was a split between the later Cains and Abels, preventing the intermarriage which resulted in an eclipse of worship, that is, kingdom without priestly submission to God. It was a fundamentally Social demarcation, whereas “Christian” is fundamentally Ethical.

Sacramentalists condemn pietists for making the New Covenant all about personal faith, and they have a point. Doug Wilson likes to make fun of the song which speaks of spending time alone with Jesus in the Garden “while the dew is still on the roses.” Many evangelicals and others are certainly stuck in the Garden, retreating to be with Jesus in private devotion, but the solution is not to resurrect the Land of Canaan as paedosacramentalists do and get stuck there, waiting around in the maternity ward for the promised Seed to come. This is actually more misguided than pietism, because it is only those serving as Prophets in the World who have access to the Garden.

Baptism as a rite is the induction of the saint as a ruler like Noah, one who is able to bless and to curse. It is the individual who rises from the Flood and begins a life of submission to heaven and rule on the earth, creating a new Social order through prophetic words, in our case, the Gospel of Christ. The solution to pietism is to get out of the Garden like Mary and the other women did, and tell everyone about the resurrection, everyone in the World. The Abrahamic Gospel was about the firstborn from the womb. The Christian Gospel is about the firstborn from the dead. Pastor Wilson maintains there are two kinds of Christians (those by birth and those by faith)⁵See Doug Wilson, One Kind of Baptism Means Two Kinds of Christian but, theologically, he is really just trying to keep a foot in both Covenants, which means one foot is in the grave.

So while Doug is quite rightly trying to get the baptists out of the Garden and into the Land (under Mosaic-style obligations “because of transgression”), Jesus has already ripped the Land in two, dividing between those circumcised in flesh from those in heart. I want to get Doug out of that Jewish fable and into the World, theologically-speaking.

But What Did God Say?

Multitudes of faithless, corrupt Christians show that they do not believe what God said at their baptism. They live like adulterous husbands. But the tragedy is that many conscientious conservative Christians also do not believe what God said at their baptism.

God did not say anything at your paedobaptism. Like circumcision, it just said you were the child of your father. Jesus’ baptism is our model. He went and preached straight away, with the authority of the Father in heaven. Baptism is a delegation of authority, which involves accountability to the Church.

So what did God say? Repent and believe. And that call is for every man, woman and child on the planet. Pastor Wilson and others preach the Gospel faithfully, but alongside it, they tolerate this perverse rival, one which maintains that “Judas was a Christian.”⁶Reformed Is Not Enough, ch.1. No, Judas was a Jew (Social) but he was not a true Jew (Ethical). His father on earth was Abraham (circumcised flesh), but his “father in heaven” was the devil (uncircumcised heart). Baptism is about vindication by the Father in heaven. Just because Judas was baptised does not mean we have to redefine what a Christian is.⁷Any more than we have to redefine marriage because a couple of guys went through the ceremony. So how do we handle false professions? I know! Let’s baptise everybody, and disconnect baptism from conversion altogether. Smart move. If you are the devil.

Do we not have the Spirit of God? Are we not called to discern the spirits as God does? When the Son of God comes and shines His light, the demons all start crawling out of the woodwork. The New Covenant brought about a move from Social identities to the Ethical animus in every individual. It got to the heart of the matter. Attempting to prove that a) every baptised person is a Christian, and b) that because there is one baptism there must be two kinds of Christians, the once-born and the twice-born, misses the purpose of the end of circumcision. Baptism is only about circumcision of heart. Jesus’ heart was circumcised before God, and this bore fruit. Judas’ bowels were spilled across the Land, prefiguring the fate of all those who maintained they possessed a Covenant identity by mere inheritance.

The opposing error is that of straight hypocrisy. This is the idea that mere covenant membership can replace covenant faithfulness as the one thing needful. The lips draw near while the heart is far removed from God. But such snakes within the covenant have the worse lot of all.⁸Wilson, Reformed Is Not Enough, 21.

There is no longer any such thing as “Covenant membership” in Abrahamic terms, so the “Reformed” which is “not enough” is not in fact anything at all. Attempting to bolster it up with “Covenant obligations” makes it even worse. It becomes a substance similar in nature to the skubalon which Paul detested.

Everyone is under obligation to repent and believe, and thus be faithful. But only those who do so are actually “members” of Christ. There is no Covenant with men any more. These all grew old and failed. There is now only a Covenant with one Man. We are either in Him and the Law is fulfilled, or outside of Him and it is unfulfillable, but all are under obligation to Him to repent and believe. This means that the “Covenant people” are not so much “in here” as “out there.” The New Covenant is not “Hear, O Church!” but “Go and tell!” There is an enormous difference.

So your “Covenant” is a six foot rabbit, an Easter bunny contrived to keep you in line by making you feel special.

Frank: I’ve been watching you.
(Donnie Darko, 2001)

Elwood P. Dowd: You see, science has overcome time and space. Well, Harvey has overcome not only time and space, but any objections.
(Harvey, 1950)

…all of the Old Covenant sacraments, like the flood, were future tense and testified to the destruction of the flesh.

[A report from our London correspondent, Chris Wooldridge:]

A week ago, I attended two conferences delivered by Peter Leithart on the subject of the Sacraments. The first one was aimed at anyone interested; the second was addressed more to ministers and theological students.

I’m about to share with you a summary of what I heard at the first conference. If you’re interested in hearing the whole thing, head over to the Emmanuel Evengelical Church resources website.

He began the first conference by speaking about the definition of a sacrament. First he spoke about the traditional Reformed understanding of the sacraments as “signs and seals” of the covenant. He explained that this would involve marking out a certain group of people as belonging to God. Whilst not disputing the traditional Reformed understanding, he went in a slightly different direction after this point, citing older thinkers who began with the Old Covenant when considering the nature of a sacrament.

He started in the Garden of Eden, demonstrating that creation itself is ‘sacramental’. At the centre of the garden were two trees, food as a means to communion with God. He spoke about how the two trees were not merely visible signs, but effected an actual change in Adam and Eve. He then moved on to speak about the fall as an abuse of the sacraments. He then mentioned that after the three ‘falls’ in Genesis 3, 4 and 5 (Adam’s eating, Cain’s murder and prophetic intermarriage), God declares that all humanity is “flesh”, that they are wicked, which seems to anticipate Paul’s negative usage of the term in his letters. In response to this, God destroys all of the ‘flesh’ on the face of the land, sparing only Noah, his household and representative animals and birds.

He explained that all of the Old Covenant sacraments, like the flood, were future tense and testified to the destruction of the flesh. Circumcision, for instance, was the cutting off of the flesh of the foreskin. Likewise, animal sacrifice was the cutting and burning of flesh in holy fire, that it might become transfigured into smoke. He concluded that Jesus Christ destroyed the power of the flesh once and for all in his death on the cross, bringing an end to the Old Covenant.

After the first break he spoke about how, unlike ‘future tense’ Old Covenant sacraments, New Covenant sacraments are ‘present tense’, signifying the accomplished destruction of the flesh in Jesus Christ. His focus was more on the individual believer and he talked about the fact that in Baptism we are given a new name, which makes us a new person. He turned to 1 Peter 3 and noted the contrast between Baptism and the purity rites of the Old Covenant. Unlike those purity rites, which involved the temporary preservation of the flesh, Baptism marks the destruction of the flesh in the one Baptized.

He also spoke about Romans 5-6. In Romans 5, Paul contrasts Adam with Christ and in Romans 6 Paul associates Baptism with the overcoming of the old Adamic world and entry into the new world established in the resurrection of Christ. He drew similar conclusions from Colossians 2, noting that the immoral practices mentioned are overcome by believing what God has spoken in Baptism. He finished by speaking about the Lord’s supper and how we eat it not at a distance (as Israel did in her feasts), but in the presence of God, suggesting once again that New Covenant sacraments are ‘present tense’, marking the fulfilment of the promise.

After lunch, Peter spoke about ‘Sacraments and us’, about the kind of community formed by the sacraments of the New Covenant. He began by contrasting the Old and New Covenants again. Under the Old Covenant, no Israelite would come into the presence of God to drink wine. The priests on duty in the temple stood all day and didn’t drink wine. The Church of the New Covenant sits and drinks wine in God’s presence. Even things like our postures testify to the fact that we are now welcomed into the presence of God through Jesus Christ.

He then moved on to Galatians, and in particular Galatians 3. Paul rebukes the Galatians for eating separately. This testifies to a false gospel by suggesting that the divisions of Abraham (Jew and Gentile, male and female etc.) have not been overcome in the death and resurrection of Christ. He pointed out that Baptism is associated with “clothing” at the end of Galatians 3, which suggests that all of the Baptized are part of the same people, wearing the same uniform. Baptism tears down the racial and cultural divisions which define human communities, making us one new people in Christ. He pointed out that the modern emphasis on ‘diversity and inclusion’ is therefore rooted in Christian principles, however much it may have become distorted.

He drew similar principles from 1 Corinthians. The factions which existed in Corinth were supposed to be overcome by the Gospel, which is why Paul rebukes them so strongly for abusing the Supper in chapter 11 – it was supposed to be the sign of their unity! From 1 Corinthians 10, we see that the Eucharist is supposed to testify to the fact that the many Corinthians are one body, since they partake of ‘one loaf’.

He began his final talk, entitled ‘Sacraments and them’ by speaking about how each member of the body of Christ plays a different part, yet all parts (both weak and strong) are necessary. He drew this primarily from 1 Corinthians 12, which speaks about Baptism as the rite which incorporates us into the body. He spoke about infant baptism as a way of expressing the fact that the Church contains weak members as well as strong ones, as per 1 Corinthians 12. He also suggested on this basis that infants (as the weakest members) should be included in the Lord’s Supper.

He then moved on to speak about the mission of the Church, which begins with being what the sacraments call us to be. He contrasted pagan gods who cannot do anything (speak, see, move etc) with the true God, who can do all things. He applied this to the sacraments by pointing out that they involve doing things like moving, eating and drinking. He also applied this to the whole liturgy of worship which drills us into an army fit to serve God in the world. In other areas of life, such as sport or music, a lot of repetition and practice is required in order to become proficient. The same is true in worship, we learn to do things habitually in order to be like the God we worship. He spoke about the various aspects of the liturgy (calling, confession, hearing, speaking, offering, communion, commissioning) and how they train us to understand the mission of the Church.

A few conclusions: Firstly, the overall message is extremely important and not heard enough in the Church today. The Old Covenant was about the world of the flesh and anticipated the destruction of the flesh in Christ and the New Covenant. This should be the beginning, not only of our understanding of the sacraments, but of our understanding of everything in the Bible. Peter Leithart should be commended for the breadth of his biblical vision.

However, in a few small ways his conclusions went against this overall picture. Although not mentioned very much, his preference for pouring/sprinkling as a mode of Baptism goes against the wider pattern that he painted. In 1 Peter 3, there is a deliberate contrast drawn between the sprinklings of the Old Covenant which temporarily preserved the flesh and Baptism which is associated with the destruction of the flesh. The flood destroyed the power of the flesh active in the world by drowning it. The Old Covenant priests were consecrated by being washed in the laver so that they might serve God. They were immersed again after administering purification for those who were defiled by contact with the dead. When I asked Peter about this, he reverted back to the sprinkling rites of the Old Covenant and to the fact that the righteous in the flood and who passed through the Red Sea were sprinkled with water from above. However, this misses the wider picture, that they were passing through water, just as in Baptism we representatively ‘pass through’ death and into new life in Christ.

Whilst there are arguments which could be made for infant Baptism, his arguments drawn from 1 Corinthians 12 were not very convincing. It’s certainly the case that there are ‘stronger’ and ‘weaker’ members in the body of Christ, however, it would be begging the question to assume that infants are the ‘weaker’ members which Paul had in mind. The story he gave about a sick baby who ministered to the wider body through the support that they gave could also be true of anyone who sought help from their local Church, regardless of whether they were even a believer!

However, these are minor criticisms. The real strength of the conference laid in the fact that it emphasised whole-bible thinking applied to every area of life. This particularly came to fruition in the final section of the conference, in which he spoke about the need for patterns of worship which train us to think and act biblically, reflecting the character of the God we serve. Peter Leithart is to be commended for his extensive biblical knowledge and his deep applications of biblical patterns to today’s world.

Since Jesus loves little children, and Jesus is the Great Shepherd, our little children must therefore be His lambs.

About whom was Jesus speaking  when He asked Peter to feed his “lambs”? John 21 is used in support of the practice of paedocommunion, but such an argument sees only what it is looking for. If we allow the passage to speak for itself, what is it saying?

Tim Gallant, a friend and scholar who is the author of Feed My Lambs: Why The Lord’s Table Should Be Restored to Covenant Children, writes:

Paedocommunion is the practice of giving the Lord’s Supper to baptized children. Such children participate apart from a coming-of-age ritual such as confirmation or profession of faith…

Rather surprisingly, many who hold to infant baptism reject paedocommunion. They suggest that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are radically different in kind. Biblically speaking, however the two are tied very closely together. Baptism incorporates one into Christ and His Church (1 Corinthians 12:13). Meanwhile, the Lord’s Supper is precisely the meal of the Church. The Church is the one body together precisely because it partakes of the one bread together (1 Corinthians 10:16–17).

Tim is correct in his statement that the sacraments, baptism and table, are not radically different in kind. Paedobaptists who do not allow their baptised infants access to the table have a lot of explaining to do. While I agree with their reasons for refusing access to young children, they are not being consistent since they give them access to baptism. Baptism and table do belong together. The problem with paedocommunionists is that they unite the sacraments at the wrong end of the process of conversion.¹More on this “process” in the next post.

Since there is no support for paedobaptism in the New Testament (despite some wishful claims to the contrary), its proponents make their arguments from the Old Testament. The problem is that they only see what they are looking for, and all the evidence to the contrary in the Old Testament Scriptures is overlooked or ignored. Rather than allowing the texts to speak to them, they do what the worst Bible teachers do and pick out support for what they already “know.”

Beginning with Jesus, baptism painted a big red target on the one baptised, placing the baptizand directly in the cross hairs of the world, the flesh and the devil.

What is a lamb?

Since Jesus loves little children, and Jesus is the Great Shepherd, our little children must therefore be His lambs. We can imagine nothing more comforting than our infants safe in the arms of Jesus. But nothing could be further from the truth. Beginning with Jesus, baptism did not put anyone in safe arms. Instead, it painted a big red target on the one baptised, placing the baptizand directly in the cross hairs of the world, the flesh and the devil.

Paedobaptists see Jesus’ blessing of children as proof for paedobaptism, but it is in fact the opposite. Jesus was the baptised one because He was not a ravenous wolf like Cain but a lamb like Abel. Jesus could bless the children because He would bear the curse coming upon them as their guardian. What does He say?

“See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that in heaven their angels always see the face of my Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 18:10)

This verse does not say that the children of Israel were “sons of God.” Paedobaptists will twist any text that involves children to fit their paradigm, and miss what the text is actually saying. He is threatening those who would harm even infants in their quest for power, noting that these were under the protection of angelic guardians like the Angel of Passover who took vengeance upon Egypt for the slaughter of the Hebrew children. It is not the infants who see the face of God, but the sons of God, those invested with authority to represent heaven on earth. The lost sheep on earth are not the sacrificial lambs which ascend to heaven. The sons of Abraham (or you) are not the sons of God. Circumcision of flesh only pictures circumcision of heart. Any claim otherwise is Judaistic and potentially demonic.

Jesus blessed the children because He was not a king like the Herods. He was a priest-king, and His baptism was a sacrificial washing, preparing Him to be offered. It was His baptism which set Him on a path to depose the Herods, and it would result in bloodshed that would touch every Israelite. True baptism is about an authority which comes only after humiliation, the only kind of authority which comes from God. All else is a demonic grasp for power like that committed in Eden.

The authority which comes through baptism is Covenantal, but the Old Covenant only gave us types of this kind of power. Baptism is about the authority to bind or loose, curse or bless, not only on earth but in heaven, since it comes from the heavenly Father and not our earthly fathers. Paedobaptism is all about being bound like Isaac under a Covenant made with earthly fathers. Seen in the light of the New Covenant, the practice is carnal, cultic, and exactly the sort of thing which had the apostles spitting fire to preserve the Church from elitist, Judaistic doctrines.

A lamb is not a little child. A lamb was a blameless mediator whose blood would be spilled. When Jesus said “Feed my lambs,” He was not talking about Christian parenting. Jesus was talking about martyrdom, the shedding of the blood of men and women who would testify for Him and die as He did. To take these words and twist them to support paedosacraments is to undermine the entire point of Pentecost and the apostolic witness, and indeed the ministry of all the prophets through the ages, beginning with Abel, the first priest murdered by a godless king.

A New Covenant lamb is a mediator between heaven and earth, that is, a human sacrifice. A paedobaptistic ecclesiology is exactly the kind of kingdom offered by Satan to the Jewish leaders, and by Satan to Adam. It was also offered by Satan to Christ shortly after His baptism, but Jesus knew who His real Father was, and His circumcised heart continued to please Him.

A blameless death

Much commentary on Jesus’ words in John 21 misses the meaning of the passage because it is not taken it in its entirety. Certainly, Jesus lived in a generation where literacy was not enjoyed by everyone, so the teaching of the apostles was crucial. But this teaching was not the end but the means. It is clear from what follows that Jesus is asking Peter to fatten the believers for the coming slaughter, the “tribulation of the saints” which would come before the end of the age, the conclusion of the Old Covenant era with its Temple and animal sacrifices.

Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted, but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go.” (This he said to show by what kind of death he was to glorify God.) And after saying this he said to him, “Follow me.” (John 21:17-19)

Both baptism and table are sacrificial in nature, and the institution of these sacraments by Jesus as continued “memorials” of the death and resurrection of Christ was foundational to the end of the Old Covenant. Why is this? Because baptism and table replaced the ministry of the Temple.

The saints indeed did greater works than Jesus, by multiplying the ministry of the cross.

The sacrifice of “blameless” animals was no longer required because there was now a blameless man. Not only that, but those who believed in Him were also considered blameless, without spot or wrinkle, by God, and thus considered to be acceptable sacrifices. Baptism and the table, the water and the blood, were not only for the cleansing of the priests. The sacrificial animals also had “access” to the Laver. The animals stood in for the priests just as the slaughter of animals stood in for Adam. The Laver is only for mediators.

Jesus spoke these words to Peter after His resurrection. When He said “Follow me” He quite obviously required a voluntary response. Moreover, it is Jesus Himself, as the Angel of the Lord, who swings the sickle in Revelation 14, harvesting the saints — those who ate His flesh and drank His blood — as a great body of grain and grapes, flesh and blood. Through the ministry of the twelve, the Lord’s Table was measured out across the entire “four cornered” Land of Israel, and the blood flowed from the winepress like a river and became a sea, up to the bridles of the horses of the Herodian Pharaohs.

As the blood of Christ rent the Veil, so the blood of the prophets would rend not only the Temple, but also the city and the Land. The saints indeed did greater works than Jesus, by multiplying the ministry of the cross.

What is the Table?

The continued need of my Federal Vision friends to explain the meaning of “the table” feels more like a shell game than the Lord’s Supper. It is a nebulous cloud of “meaning” where it is impossible to put one’s finger on the actual meaning. Apparently these is so much going on that it defies a simple explanation. However, the more complex something is, the more likely it is to be contrived. And sacramentalism is entirely contrived.

What is the meaning of the table? We voluntarily, willingly, identify with the death and resurrection of Christ. We eat His flesh and drink His blood so that when we suffer as martyrs, it is His flesh being torn and His blood being spilled. The idea that this Table is for infants and children as “lambs” is an insult to Christians suffering around the world (regardless of whether their traditions commune children or not).

The more I think about it, the less I would be inclined to take communion at the table of a sacramental church – especially while the murder of Christians around the world keeps me in mind of what this table actually meant for Jesus and His disciples, and what it was intended to mean for us. The call to the Table is not the call to salvation, but a call to those already saved to come and die.

If someone actually finds the pea of “meaning” in this abhorrent shell game, I will be surprised. I think it has rolled under the baptismal font and will never be seen again until some iconoclast rightly tosses that Roman piece of furniture into the trash where it belongs. Baptismal fonts make me angry. What they stand for is against the fundamental tenets of the New Covenant.

But what does it mean to partake of Christ? It is more than the offerer identifying with the sacrifice by leaning his hand upon it. It is more than the priests eating of the sacrifices. It is not a call to come to Christ for salvation. It is to become a sacrifice through voluntary, public identification with Christ.

Now, one might argue that plenty of children of Christians have also been murdered. But is this the flesh and blood of the body of Christ?

What is a son?

The murder of infants is certainly tragic, but there is a reason Adam was created an adult and his willingness to obey God tested. There is a difference between the sons of men (which includes the offspring of Christians), and the sons of God, those who represent heaven on earth. Physical offspring is the “first birth” and spiritual offspring are the “second birth.” Circumcision of flesh concerned physical offspring. Circumcision of heart concerns spiritual offspring. (It amazes me that this must be explained over and over to such people of understanding. I guess that is the power of a corrupted paradigm. Whatever does not fit is rejected, even if Scriptural.) Only the second birth protects one from the second death. Members of my family and your family are not members of the family of God, not without repentance and obedient faith, anyway.²See Children of Heaven.

Thus, our children represent us in history, as God’s children (those who can hear and obey God) represent Him. As Adam represented God to his children, and also represented his children before God, He was a mediator. Thus it is not Christ’s flesh being torn in our children. It is our flesh. The circumcision of Isaac was also the cutting of the flesh of Abraham. This is why the Jews referred to themselves as the children of Abraham. It was a carnal membership, a community of sacrificial flesh protected through animal substitutes.

The baptism of Christ, however, was a step of obedience as a sacrificial washing. Like all baptisms which followed, it was an ordination for ministry, and brought a testimony of acceptance from the heavenly Father, ending the significance of both the Abrahamic lineage and the Aaronic priesthood. Christ was the “son of the herd,” an expression in the Law which is distorted in English translations.³See James B. Jordan, The Lamb of God, Part 1, Biblical Horizons No. 39.

What about Passover?

Paedocommunionists use Passover to support the access of infants and children to the Lord’s Table. The problem is that there was, and is, more than one Table in the book of Exodus.

Jesus ripped a “Levitical tithe” out of the Passover meal and lifted it to God.

The Passover separated the priestly nation of Israel from the kingdom of Egypt. The meaning of this can be traced right back to Noah’s curse upon Canaan the son of Ham.⁴See Cutting Off Canaan. Passover was the Table of Israel, a national feast which highlighted Israel’s identity as the shepherd nation. The Egyptians despised shepherds. Passover was about the separation of Priesthood and Kingdom, Abel and Cain. However, the Lord’s Table in Exodus 24 was about Prophecy. The architecture measured out in the children of Israel was a replica of the Tabernacle which would soon be built. All Israel was gathered at the base of the mountain and sprinkled with blood, but only Moses (as the Ark) and the elders of Israel (as the Incense Altar) ascended and dined with the Lord, whom they saw walking on a sapphire pavement, the Crystal Sea, which was the heavenly court of the angelic Sons of God.

We see the same two tables at the Last Supper. The Passover was celebrated, but after the meal, Jesus served a second one, and it was only served to these new elders who dined with Him. Just as the Firstfruits followed Passover but occurred during Unleavened Bread, so Jesus ripped a “Levitical tithe” out of the Passover meal and lifted it to God. The Passover animal could be a lamb or a kid, a priestly brother or a kingly brother, an Abel or a Cain, a Jacob or a hairy Esau, but the Firstfruits sacrifice was always a lamb, a priest who would inherit the kingdom by faith.

So what is the significance of the Lord’s supper? It is not about our offspring having Jesus as their sacrificial substitute. By dining with Jesus, the apostles partook of His ministry. Jesus turned the disciples into sacrificial lambs, men who would no longer need sacrificial substitutes, because they themselves would be blameless. For an entire generation, their blood would “fill up” the sufferings of Christ as a testimony to the Jews and then the Gentiles.

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised— who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, ”For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” (Romans 8:31-36)

This leads us to the irony of the final Herodian Passovers, celebrated it seems in spite of the well-known prophecies of Jesus. After the completion of the Temple, millions of lambs were slaughtered every year. Reading the Old Testament prophets concerning Israel’s abuse of the sacrificial system, we can understand the seriousness of the offence of these offerings to God after the murder of His Son.

Post-Pentecostal Judaism adored Passover because it despised Jesus. Passover itself became the leaven of the Herods, and this sentiment is subtly contained in paedocommunion, a rite which appeals to the flesh, a demarcation between “us” and “them.” The idea that we Christians can somehow minister the new birth to our own children in place of the hand of God is exactly what the Circumcision revelled in. It stands in stark contrast to repentance and faith, at least in the godly logic of the New Testament. The Table of paedocommunion is exactly the kind of Table which Jesus turned into a snare for those Jews who cursed Jesus because God had come in the flesh and ended the Circumcision.⁵See Their Table Made A Snare. The Seed of Abraham had now grown up and exposed their household as a nest of serpents.

Even Abraham understood what paedosacramentalists refuse to believe.

Ironically, this focus on physical, “Passover” offspring turned Jerusalem first into a new Egypt, through Herod’s slaughter of the innocents, and then into a new Jericho. Where Israel was circumcised “a second time” before the destruction of Jericho, it was the murder of Christian Jews in Jerusalem which left the city desolate at last.

Jesus ripped the Lord’s Supper out of the corpse of Passover in the way Yahweh brought Eve from the side of Adam, and the Spirit brought the Bride from the side of Christ. Passover died in Christ, along with the Covenant of earthly sons. The division between Priesthood and Kingdom, Jew and Gentile, Cain and Abel, was consumed in the coming of The Prophet.

When Christ died, the message was the same as that given to Abraham, “Not your son but mine.” The Jews who rejected Christ answered, “Not your Son but ours.” The ministry of the apostles was, “Not your sons but my Sons.” The judgment of AD70 was the final object lesson, the last dark saying. Even Abraham understood what paedosacramentalists refuse to believe.

Sheep Among Wolves

The identity of the New Covenant “lambs” is very apparent in Matthew 10, where Israelites according to the flesh are referred to as “lost sheep” not because they are children but because they have been led astray. As Jesus’ lambs, the disciples are also to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. The standard for “lambs” is entirely ethical. It concerns spiritual maturity, so Tim Gallant’s use of the word “lambs” to describe paedocommunion is carnal at best and unwittingly anti-Christian at worst.

Jesus describes the treatment of these “lambs” as he later described the manner of Peter’s death. He cannot possibly be speaking about infants or children, or even earthly households. Let the scales fall from your eyes and read the words of Matthew 10 afresh, words spoken to men who would not only die like their master, but rise again as He did. The speech is all about testimony, witness, the martyroi. To consider Jesus’ lambs as anything else is to reject the New Covenant. Is there an infant Jesus on the throne?⁶No doubt, some will get to the end of passage, and reject the obvious in favour of an errant interpretation of “little ones.” Jesus is actually working His way through a hierarchy based on the Ten Words, ending with the lowly servants of the New Covenant household, the least of His brothers. The New Testament follows the Old Covenant pattern consistently, however, where the Old most often refers to physical offspring and family at Succession, the New always speaks of spiritual offspring. An example would be the greetings to the saints at the end of many of the epistles.

The structure of Matthew 10 is itself sacrificial, and you will notice that it is the disciples who are now the angels ministering life or death to the households of Israel. They themselves are the lambs at the door. And their martyrdom served as the final warning, the last trumpets, to Old Covenant Israel.

TRANSCENDENCE

HIERARCHY

ETHICS

OATH/SANCTIONS

SUCCESSION

Notes on Douglas Wilson’s
21 Theses On Assurance and Apostasy

“Paedofaith is like the New Testament, but with midichlorians.”

Doug Wilson likes to quote the Proverb that says God draws straight with crooked lines, so my post title is a little cheeky. Anyhow, I thought it would be helpful, for myself at least, to work through his thoughtful list with a red marker. A red, permanent marker.

1. There are only two final destinations for human beings after the day of judgment, those two destinations being the final damnation of the old humanity in Adam, and the final salvation of the new humanity in Christ.

Agreed, but what is this “new humanity”? The hope of the saved in the New Testament was not salvation (from God’s judgment) but resurrection.

2. Throughout all history, God has kept a visible covenant people for Himself, intended to declare, model, test drive, instantiate, train for, grow toward, and otherwise approximate that final redeemed humanity.

Certainly, but this statement points out the similarities between Israel and the Church and does not mention the vast differences, the major one being the union between the visible and the invisible: the filling of the Spirit, and the ability to discern the spirits and fight them. The way to deal with a misguided focus on the invisible Church is not to shift to an equally misguided focus on the visible Church. That leaves us with something akin to circumcision. The telos of the Old Covenant was God with us, but the New began with God in us. And the first sign of God in us is profession, some kind of testimony as a firstfruits of the Spirit.

3. Depending on location and era, that visible covenant people has ranged between a grotesque parody of that final redeemed humanity and a genuine approximation of it. As history grows toward its glorious consummation, the historical progress toward that final eschatological goal will be more and more unmistakeable.

Very optimistic, and I agree in many respects once again. But where we disagree is the hangover from Christendom when it comes to the definition of “Christian.” Is a Christian someone under the sound of the Gospel, or a someone who has heard, responded and is now proclaiming that Gospel? Any “boundary of flesh” is just a revived circumcision, the Church as zombie Israel.

4. But in either case this means that the rosters of names involved, those of the visible covenant people, and the final redeemed humanity, the elect, are not identical rosters.

Firstly, the real difference here is Pastor Wilson’s very Abrahamic definition of “covenant.” If the Church is a “Covenant people” like Israel was, then there are those who are “inside” the New Covenant and under its obligations, and those who are outside of it, which would logically mean they are not under any obligations. Even Gentile believers were under no obligation to join Israel, but they could certainly repent and believe. The New Covenant, however, is global. There is no one outside of it, not one. This is why the New Testament does not speak of a “Covenant people” but of a royal priesthood. The Church is visible gatherings of regenerate people working as priests within all nations. The “Covenant community” is thus not in here but out there.

Regarding the rolls in heaven and on earth, we cannot judge people’s hearts but we are called to know them by their fruits. The Church is quite clearly called to make the roll on earth resemble as closely as possible the one in heaven. That is what Church discipline is for.

The fact that we cannot know men’s hearts is no excuse for resorting to institutional Christianity. The question here is not whether we can know, but the biblical definition of what a Christian is. Being “Christian” is nothing like being Jewish. There is no tribal or national identity involved at all, which is exactly why both circumcision and uncircumcision were superseded. If paedobaptism had been the Old Covenant rite, Paul would have said that both baptism and un-baptism were now meaningless. The cultural expression of the indwelling (invisible) Christ is the outflow, not the source. A true Jew is someone whose religion begins in the heart.

So defining the Church outwardly is a wrong move, and it has consequences.

5. God has always given His visible covenant people visible covenant markers. In our time of the new covenant, these markers are gospel and sacrament. God is sketching His preliminary drawing of His final redeemed humanity in charcoal — Word and water, bread and wine. It does not yet appear what the final oil painting will be like.

Very poetic, but once again, the differences between Old and New are conveniently ironed out. And although Israel was a type of the Church, the Church is not a “people” in the sense that Israel was. The “mark” that Israel bore was like the mark of Cain. It was a sign of mercy. Baptism is not a sign of mercy but a sign of authority. I’ve argued this for years and so far nobody has responded. It’s very clear in the text. The role of the Church is witness, including martyrdom. Where Israel’s mark meant that animal substitutes carried their sins, the New Covenant marker makes us the actual sacrifices. The baptizand now speaks of Christ with the authority of the Church. Arguing that baptism is all about a declaration from heaven (as Peter Leithart does) totally overlooks what Jesus was commissioned to do after His baptism.

6. The visible covenant people therefore necessarily contains two kinds of people, regenerate and unregenerate — lines that will be used in the painting forever and lines that will be erased.

This is truth mixed with error. The New Covenant marker is supposed to be a sign of regeneration, not a sign that somebody is merely under the sound of the Gospel. Even during Jesus’ ministry, the disciples were not merely those who heard (Israel first), but those who heard, recognised God’s voice, and followed. Again, the question is not whether there are unregenerate people in the Church but the standard itself. The misguided idea that “Christian” and “regenerate” are two different things is the source of all the silly fights. These gents act as though this issue is tough to work out from the Scriptures, as though it is highly nuanced and that various shades of interpretation are possible. Guess what? The Baptist preacher on the street with an IQ half yours is way ahead of you on this one.

7. Christ is always present and offered in His gospel and through His sacraments. When an unregenerate covenant member does not close with Christ, the issue is his absence, not Christ’s. With their lips they approach Him, but their hearts are far away. Christ was not far away, they were far away.

It’s one thing to argue that the sacraments are efficacious. But logic dictates that one should first work out from the Scriptures what those sacraments are for, and thus what they are actually doing when they are efficacious. Most of the Reformed world simply refuses to submit to the obvious on this one. When presented with a New Testament text, they take you back to the Passover, as if it wasn’t the Lord’s Table itself which put Passover to death! Jesus killed Passover and pulled the Lord’s Supper out of its side like a freshly washed rib. If Judas had lived a few more decades, he would likely have celebrated Passover with no problem at all, being Jewish.

My main issue here is the despicable idea that there is a “New Covenant membership” which is divorced from regeneration. No. Everyone is already a member of the New Covenant when it comes to obligations to Christ. He is King of Kings. If Pastor Wilson is correct, then the body of Christ has members which are dead in their sins. He would argue that Jesus cuts off the branches that don’t bear fruit, but that was a text concerning Israel. Its membership was Abrahamic, tribal, genealogical, earthy. The fruit which God is after is spiritual, and it is that fruit, the fruit of righteousness rather than the womb and the Land, which is the baptismal entry standard.

Personally, I think the idea that Christ is offered to people in the sacraments in a salvific sense is akin to heresy. It turns the sacraments into a rival Gospel, which is basically what Paul was arguing against in Galatians: a set of “Covenant obligations” from which the Spirit of Christ frees us. I could go on about the specifics, but the heart of the matter here is that the New Covenant sacraments are not offered for salvation but as means of testimony. To what do they testify? Repentance and faith. Faith comes by hearing, so the sacraments are not object lessons to us to call us to Christ. They are object lessons to the world. Pastor Wilson’s Abrahamic definition of the New Covenant no doubt springs from a pastoral heart, but it boils down to legalism.

8. When covenant members who are not elect are erased from the preliminary drawing, this means there was something wrong with their presence there from the beginning. God is all wise, and so their presence was no mistake. At the same time, that presence does not function at all like the presence of the elect.

I have covered the mistaken definition of Covenant, so here it is probably better to point out how parochial this thesis is. When Paul spoke about vessels of destruction within Israel, the Abrahamic era was not yet over. But it is over now. The Church is not a tribe or nation but a priesthood. The standard for service is election, and the government of the Church is supposed to be Spirit-filled. The chasm between carnal Church government and the government of the Spirit is not to be bridged by defining the Church in pre-Pentecostal terms. Yes, there are unregenerate people in the Church, but the reason they are there is usually because the Church itself has lost sight of its mission. When the saints get out and witness the “non-elect” can rarely keep up the act. If they are sincere but unregenerate, it usually leads to conversion. In the Reformed world, it seems to me that since the standard for “Covenant membership” is not regeneration, the non-elect set the standards, and the bar is very low. All Christians are prone to legalism, but this philosophy institutionalises it — from birth. It creates exactly the kind of culture out of which Christ eventually calls His people.

9. Because the covenant markers can be abused by unregenerate covenant members, these covenant markers cannot be a ground of assurance. True evangelical faith can and should use them as a means of assurance, but never as the ground of assurance.

This is the kind of muddy thinking that results from hybridising a social demarcation (circumcision) with a spiritual/ethical one. Certainly, Abraham believed God, but he was not given a spiritual marker like baptism. Circumcision was about who was in school (“Hear, O Israel!”) whereas baptism is about who can teach (“Go and tell…”).

Peter Leithart seems to believe that baptism actually is a ground of assurance, but I could be mistaken. This whole debate is so confused simply because these gents won’t submit to the New Testament. Can you every imagine a Jew wondering if he really was a Jew checking under his robe for assurance? (I’m not sure what the females did.) If being a Christian is merely a social demarcation, then check your paedobaptism certificate, silly. But if you think that this social demarcation also somehow magically infused you with the Spirit, and you are relying on your baptism for either the means or ground of assurance (this is just semantics), you’ve just discovered how mistaken this philosophy is. A credobaptism is a testimony that somebody has looked to Christ. A baptism is not a means or ground of anything for the baptizand, except authority to witness. Dr Leithart rightly says that the baptism texts are disempowered by most paedobaptists, but why does he never entertain the idea that those text might in fact not be talking about the kind of baptism that could ever be carried out on an infant?

10. Covenant markers can never be a ground of assurance because unbelief and/or apostasy can be hidden and secret. Countless hypocrites have had all their external papers in order. If externals were a ground of assurance, then hypocrites could have true assurance. But a true Christian is one inwardly, and real baptism is of the heart, by the Spirit.

Somebody needs to take the Covenant markers away from Pastor Wilson. He keeps colouring outside the lines drawn by the New Testament, and then wants us to honour those lines. How about colouring inside the lines? Certainly, we baptists misjudge the line every now and then, but at least we know what the standard is.

And someone also needs to ask him if an infant can have a real baptism of the heart. If so, did the infant know it? Did the infant repent and believe? If a true Christian is one inwardly, then a baptised infant is by definition a false Christian until he or she hears the Gospel and repents. Why be a false Christian factory? The fact that he a mentions a baptism of heart rather than a circumcision of heart is telling. What was a true Jew? A person whom the law had wounded and brought to faith, whether Jew or Gentile. That is the kind of person who was and is baptised. And circumcision always comes first. Pastor Wilson, if you are reading, it’s never going to work. Give up now.

11. Believers who struggle with assurance should constantly be encouraged by pastors, family and friends to look to Christ wherever He has promised to be — in the proclaimed Word, in His people, in the sacraments, in the reading of Scripture and prayer.

Good stuff. My take on this is, if you are worried about assurance, and are not resting on your works, that’s a pretty good sign you are regenerate. Non-believers don’t care.

12. When such believers continue to struggle, they need to be strongly encouraged to repent of and abandon false and unbiblical notions of what a “true” conversion must look like. If God had wanted everyone to have a Damascus road experience, He would have given everyone sandals and a horse.

The experience of a pastor. Very glad that conversion is at the heart, here. Peter Leithart extends conversion to infant baptism, which redefines conversion like letting women into the men’s club redefines men’s club, or gay marriage redefines marriage. It becomes a meaningless definition, or something else entirely, like when a friend tells you they have “converted” from Catholicism to Judaism. No thanks.

13. When a professing believer comes to question his assurance, and his life is one characterized by drunkenness, fornication, a foul mouth, bitterness, backstabbing, out-of-control parties, pot smoking and the like, questioning his assurance is exactly what he ought to be doing, and about time. It is not pastoral care to try to squelch questions that have been a long time coming. People who live that way will not inherit the kingdom of God, and should not be allowed to think they are going to.

Yep. Church discipline is a bit like witch dunking in this regard. If the one disciplined repents and is restored, they were always regenerate. And if they weren’t regenerate, they are now, so who cares? The standard has not been compromised by well-meaning sociology and carnal fears for offspring.

14. To repeat, for such persons, we ought not to ask why Christ didn’t show up in the covenant markers for them. Christ was always present there. Somebody else didn’t show up.

Well, for a start, with the NEW Covenant marker, used obediently, this would not be such a tough question. “Why did you choose to get baptised?” would be the question. Baptism is not a social marker like circumcision. The baptizand did show up. The question is why? Were they coerced? Did they just go along with the crowd? Did they fear being ostracised? Baptist baptism theology needs a lot of work, too. The best candidates for baptism are those who truly desire it to identify them with Christ’s testimony and suffering.

And the idea that these “Covenant markers” are a priestly calling is just Judaizing. The entire point of the second birth is that it makes the first birth redundant. A Christian baby is not a baby Christian. This really is not hard to understand.

15. A person who shows up physically to the covenant markers with habitual and characteristic sin in his life, of the sort that Scripture repeatedly says is inconsistent with inheritance of eternal life, does not need to be told to “believe.” He needs to be told to “repent and believe.”

Repent always comes before believe, unless you have messed with “believe” and invented paedofaith so babies can be Christians without repenting. I guess if you do paedobaptism, you’re going to have all sorts of weird paedobaptism problems. Paedofaith is like the New Testament, but with midichlorians.

16. When they are genuine, repentance and faith are two descriptions of the same motion, considered from two different vantage points. Sin and salvation stand opposite one another, and so to turn away from the former and toward the latter can be described as two actions — either as repentance or as faith — while being at the same time the same motion.

Cool. Now show me a baby that can do that. One that doesn’t look like Baby Herman.

17. This means that repentance and faith are inseparable. One cannot be removed without simultaneously removing the other.

Well, if you hadn’t redefined faith as something a baby can do, this thesis would not be necessary.

18. Therefore faith in the presence of sermons or sacraments that does not result in actual detestation of sin is not the kind of faith that can derive any grace whatever from any of the available means of grace.

I agree with this in the way Oswald Chambers put it, concerning thoughts which were mere sentiments but not acted upon, a faith which is merely “sentimental.” But in this case it is probably a way of dealing with those who have been given the Lord’s Supper since before they can remember, and now that bad tree of wild redefinitions is bearing its bitter fruit.

“But you told me I was a Christian? You told me that I belong to God?”

“Yes, but it seems you are a vessel fashioned for dishonour, a chamber pot, a servant not a son.”

This is where confusing the sons of Abraham with Abraham the son of God gets you.

19. Wise pastoral care does not want to in any way encourage this kind of impotent faith. It is not a faith that gets it part way right, not in any meaningful sense. A corpse is not partly resurrected, and dead faith is not most of the way there.

A baptism that doesn’t resemble putting a corpse into the ground isn’t a good place to start. Just saying.

20. It is possible to encourage weak believers who have a true but wavering  faith and simultaneously disrupt the hypocritical assumptions of those who want to hide from God by dint of great noise and observances. Sound preaching is good for both of them, and the same kind of preaching is good for both of them.

Yes! The Gospel! Yes!

21. The new birth is the one thing needful. It is the only reality that creates repentance and faith together, which is the only way any of this makes any sense.

Agreed. So why divorce the definition of “Christian” (or “Covenant member”) from the new birth, if that is the only thing that is needful, the clarity of the sharp black lines inside which we must colour? As I have written before, I believe the Federal Vision focus on faithful parenting is a good reaction to the failures in modern Western Christian culture, and the tireless attempts to get into the minds of our children. But turning to paedosacraments and God-parents, all markers of the first birth, is not the solution. They are not only not “needful,” they are entirely redundant. The New Covenant is bigger than that.

What is the solution? The Gospel is the solution.

I think I remember Pastor Wilson saying that he came to Reformed Theology like falling down the stairs. There is a certain amount of logic in the Reformed view, but the Abrahamic view of the New Covenant is not logical, and in fact contradicts the New Testament at many points. It is like finding your way around London with a first century street directory. This is why a Reformed commentary on Galatians is as clueless concerning Paul’s main argument as is a Dispensationalist commentary on Hebrews.

To sum up, lots of good points, but I think the teaching of “Covenant membership,” or membership of Christ without personal regeneration, confuses not only the people in the pew, but also those who teach it. And there is no end in sight.

“A baptism which does not discern between the fruit of the womb and the fruit of the tomb is anti-Christ, denying He has come in the flesh.”

This post follows on from Exposed To The Elements.

An online paedobaptist friend commented that he had never heard sacred architecture offered as an argument for credobaptism before. My experience with the brilliant Bible teaching by the various Federal Vision gents is that I get a principle under my belt, then automatically begin to see its implications for all of Scripture. But then numerous times I would be surprised when no one had thought of applying it consistently. The main offender is paedobaptism. Despite their claims, it is a rite that does not spring naturally from Scripture. In fact, it has to be protected from Scripture, from the very principles I have been taught by paedobaptists.

There’s a reason that people with Asperger’s are being employed to find bugs in software. We can hold a lot of data in “working RAM” at once, which means we can “spot the difference” visually. Penelope Trunk writes:

 I have a feeling that what gave me the ability to bridge from a quirky writer to a marketable writer was focusing obsessively on Generation Y. Nobody could memorize the facts as fast as I did, and because they were all in my head I could synthesize them faster than everybody else and come up with trends. [1]

My friend Chris Wooldridge is a data analyst. His job is to find trends in data and present them pictorially. I have no doubt this is why he has picked up the Bible Matrix so quickly and is parsing passages like an old hand. To some degree, this ability requires having all the other key instances of the matrix in a “holding pattern” so they can be overlaid and compared. It is immensely beautiful, and it is one of two reasons why the practice of paedobaptism irks me so much. It is the fly in the ointment, the bug in the software. The Bible Matrix is the DNA of the Scriptures, which, like DNA, have a mechanism of self-correction. The matrix process of maturity rejects paedobaptism in every instance. Not only is the practice never described or commanded in Scripture, forces the redefinition of Christian, Church, Gospel, faith and just about everything else in its perverted path, the very DNA of the Bible treats it as a foreign body to be neutralized, a bug to be exterminated, an error to be corrected. The structure of the Scriptures themselves is as fussy as someone with OCD.

Now that I have many of my readers in defensive mode, I would like to take a look at a very simplified version of the architecture which makes paedobaptism the impossible doctrine. This has to do with the definition of “son of God.” Are sprinkled babies children of God? Both James Jordan and Peter Leithart maintains that the Gospel “redeems” natural patterns. I agree with them to some point. But their conflation of the image with the imager is an unwitting form of idolatry, with infants as the idols. They claim that paedobaptism is a New Covenant version of circumcision, at least as far as defining the boundary of the Covenant people (Jordan rightly says that circumcision is not baptism, and we strangely agree on many other points.) But a son of God is not a son of man. Paedobaptists love to abuse the Covenant with Abraham to support their well-meaning but perverted rite. I want to undermine that by taking us right back to the Garden of Eden.

Jesus called Himself “the Son of Adam,” a fact made clearer by the use of the phrase concerning the prophet Ezekiel, in whose book it appears over 90 times. I believe the reason is that Ezekiel is the only prophet given access to the heavenly Sanctuary, the throne of God. He is made, as Jordan observes, a kind of “rival High Priest in exile,” much as was Jesus many centuries later. The prophet is symbolically slain, falling on his face, then lifted up and filled with the Spirit of God. As a new Adam, he goes through a process of death and resurrection, and the rest of the book describes the same process measured out upon Israel.

But Jesus also called Himself “the Son of God.” This has an entirely different meaning. It is not genealogical, since it does not refer to an earthly father but the heavenly Father. An earthly father is most certainly an image of the heavenly Father, but the two cannot be conflated. The Pharisees who challenged Jesus had Abraham as their earthly father, and the devil as their heavenly father.

You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and bhas nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. But because I tell the truth, you do not believe me. Which one of you convicts me of sin? If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me? Whoever is of God hears the words of God. The reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God.” (John 8:44-47)

Based upon the relationship between the Father and the Son in heaven, that which is at the heart of earthly sonhood is Representation. This is why the Succession step of the matrix process often concerns physical offspring in many Old Testament passages. It refers to genealogical Succession in history, God’s faithfulness to many generations of the faithful. But the New Testament moves the goal posts. Instead of physical offspring, it puts Gospel messengers at this point in every instance. The emphasis has moved from earthly sonhood to heavenly sonhood, from sons of Adam to sons of God. The switch began at the baptism of Jesus, the only Adam who was both.

At Jesus’ baptism, the Father chose Him from among all the other circumcised sons of Israel. It is the same scenario as that which brought about the anointing of David. All the possible choices were circumcised in the flesh, but God looked upon the heart of Jesus. This heart alone pleased Him. David’s name means “Beloved,” and I have no doubt that this is why the heavenly Father says, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” Since Christ was the only one who truly displayed Priestly submission, He was chosen to be King.

From that moment, Jesus, like David, was no longer under the authority of His earthly father. This was hinted at in the event of Jesus’ disappearance at age 12, a kind of “Firstfruits.” Baptism for every Christian is the point when the individual becomes directly accountable to his new Father, to Christ, and to Christ’s Church. As Jesus did, the baptizand bows to the authority of heaven that he or she might speak with the authority of heaven.

At the instant of Jesus’ baptism, there was only one true Jew, a brand new Adam. Just as Adam was a man without genealogy, whose Father was God, so for Jesus, all heredity, all circumcision and non-circumcision, was left behind in the water of baptism. This included allegiance to Abraham, the earthly father, since the heavenly Father had now revealed Himself for the first time in history.

So, what of circumcision? This is simple, indeed, so simple that it amazes me that so many bright Reformed theologians and Christians have not thought things through with any consistent logic, especially the ones who are aware of the dominion promises in Genesis 2. If Adam was faithful as the son of God, God would make Adam a father. Both the womb and the land would be opened to him, producing their fruit in season, just as Adam had produced the fruits of righteousness, a circumcised heart, to his own Father. In Abraham, the “Great Father” who was by nature barren, both the curse and promise concerning the land and the womb were repeated. Canaan was initially barren, but we will deal with that another time (it’s quite fascinating!) and of course Sarah was barren. Circumcision was given to Abraham because he was faithful. It was a symbolic “pruning” that both the womb and land might be opened. At every point, the Firstfruits was to be given to God, including Isaac. Baptism is a rite not for the inheritance but for the inheritor. The “architectural” background of all the Psalms is Edenic.

Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord,
the fruit of the womb a reward.
Like arrows in the hand of a warrior
are the children of one’s youth.
Blessed is the man
who fills his quiver with them!
He shall not be put to shame
when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.
(Psalm 127:3-5)

Blessed is everyone who fears the Lord,
who walks in his ways!
You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands;
you shall be blessed, and it shall be well with you.
Your wife will be like a fruitful vine
within your house;
your children will be like olive shoots around your table.
Behold, thus shall the man be blessed
who fears the Lord.
(Psalm 128:1-4)

You can see from the diagram above that baptism is a rite that concerns circumcision of heart (things above: the Edenic Laver/Spring) that God might bless the believer with fruitfulness (things below: the Bronze Altar-Land). With the coming of Christ in the flesh, the promises to Abraham were fulfilled. The relationship of heredity to the Covenant was removed forever. It no longer mattered whether one was a Jew or a Gentile. The only household is the household of faith. The only sonhood is submission to the Father by the faith of the Son. A baptism which does not discern between the fruit of the womb (Land: below) and the fruit of the tomb (Garden: above) is anti-Christ, denying He has come in the flesh. Why do many of the world’s best Bible teachers, including many friends, fail to see this practice for what it is, especially those who know their way around biblical architecture?

Baptism is thus not about generation but regeneration. James Jordan claims that “regeneration” refers not to individuals but to the regeneration of the world in general, thus unregenerate offspring can be included in this process. But that is not the picture given in Scripture at all. Once again, the image is conflated with the original, the source confused with the result. And all the support given for paedobaptism relies on “Abrahamic” verses, texts about the earthly image. [2] In paedobaptism, the heavenly Father is conflated with earthly fathers, and the heavenly Son who, like Melchizedek has no genealogy, no earthly father, is confused with the sons of Aaron for whom genealogy was crucial.

If the Lord had slain Adam and Eve for Adam’s sin, it is obvious that the fruit of the womb and the land also would have been cut off. But Adam’s death was the source of this lack of natural fruit. Adam’s death had to do with his relationship to the heavenly Father. So baptism is not related to either the fruit of the Land or the fruit of the womb. It has to do with the fruit of righteousness, and these other things are only the result of that initial “Garden” fruit. Jesus’ death as Adam was prefigured in His baptism. He was not sprinkled or poured upon by John. He was submerged, slain, like the entire world during the Physical Flood, like Israel under Babylon and Rome in Social Floods. Only submersion pictures the complete end of the Old Order and the beginning of the New. The dove is never present over the Land, but only over the waters. If you have never been immersed, you have failed to publicly testify as Jesus did, that the old is gone and the new has come.

A paedobaptism is a false testimony. It says that a son of Adam is by nature a son of God. Even Jews would never claim such a thing. Every “begat,” every “bar,” was a testimony to earthly lineage. Even they understood the difference between physical offspring and those who represented not their earthly fathers but the heavenly Father. A son of God is one who has Sanctuary access not by the flesh but by the Spirit because they please God, having been slain and lifted up like Ezekiel, leaving that fiery courtroom as His representative on earth, to divide between light and darkness with his words as Adam did not and Jesus did. Jesus did not come to have earthly sons but heavenly ones (Hebrews 2:13), images of Himself not Physically or Socially but Ethically.

Now, my friends like to claim that their sprinkled children have Sanctuary access because they received the Spirit in their baptism and are now a child of God. Some even claim that infants who have not heard the Gospel have faith in God (the stupidity of this still blows me away. Who needs the Gospel, then?). This all stems from their unwillingness to discern the difference between earthly parents and the Eternal Parent, the image and the reality. Here is an example from my otherwise wise friend Toby Sumpter, who tweeted:

 Christians who spank their kids in love are high sacramentalists: they believe the Spirit saves souls through material means (Proverbs 23:14).

This is as confused as the claim that infants are believers because they trust God on their mother’s breast (Psalm 22:9). The Psalmist conflates the heavenly with the earthly poetically because one leads to the other, but they are not the same thing. The natural comes first, and then the spiritual. It is a process of maturity. The entire point of baptism is that one no longer needs to be spanked by one’s parents because one now serves the Father in heaven. Again, baptism is for the inheritor, not the inheritance, for the earthly father, not his babies. When Jesus blessed the children, who was the baptised one? It was Jesus. Somehow, everyone overlooks the obvious because they are looking for support for something else.

The blindness involved in such teaching mystifies me. Baptism is for heavenly sonhood and confers Sanctuary access as a representative of the Father. The only choice for paedobaptists is to eliminate the efficacy of baptism (and deny Sanctuary access) or to maintain the efficacy and minimise the requirement for heart circumcision. Both are really stupid, unbiblical ideas, and the solution is incredibly obvious. But I have no doubt they’ll keep fighting over this for decades to come, trying to unite heaven and earth by the will of man rather than by the true work of God in the hearts of contrite men and women, relying on badly composed, complicated statements by Reformers whose typological skills were not far removed from the sophistries of Rome, and thinking that because they have been sprinkled, witnessed so many sprinklings, and perhaps even performed their own sprinklings, this perversion must be the work of God. (I would draw a helpful diagram to demonstrate the difference between a womb and a tomb, but I haven’t got a crayon. I’m sure you can work it out.)

I hate paedobaptism because I love the Bible, which spits it out at every opportunity. But I also hate paedobaptism because I love the Gospel of repentance and faith, and an inheritance of the Spirit which expresses itself in willing identification with the sufferings of Christ. If this is offensive to you, you neither understand the promises to Abraham, or the promises in Christ. They are very different things, as different as the heavens are from the earth. They are obscured by well-meaning but carnal doctrine.

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[1] Penelope Trunk, 3 Things you need to know about people with Asperger’s.
[2] With such a misguided foundation, it is little wonder that my friend Luke Welch takes things to such shocking but logical conclusions. Apparently, the children of Christians are like Aaronic priests, who were symbolic sacrifices for sin.

The history of mankind is one of good gifts turned into idols. Blessings abused become curses in the hands of those who won’t look God in the eye.

For those of us who know the Bible, the idolatries become more subtle. This was the case for the Pharisees. The exile had purified Israel of old-school idolatry, so she invented a new school: an elitism bound by an Abrahamic heritage and energized by the abuse of Moses and the Law as a means of salvation: heritage instead of faith; obligation instead of salvation. The good things given as gifts once again became the gods.

In a day when Christians fall into similar traps (Jesus-and-a-second-blessing, Jesus-and-speaking-in-tongues, Jesus-and-homeschooling, Jesus-and-organic-food, Jesus-and-communal-living, Jesus-and-education, Jesus-and-poverty, Jesus-and-prosperity, Jesus-and-Israel, Jesus-and-nationalism), two things become clear: a) we don’t really understand or want Jesus, and b) despite our claims concerning the leading of the Holy Spirit, what we really want is legislation. Being Spirit-led is too awkward, too much like looking God in the eye.

Jesus did not deal with the Essenes, and He hardly bothered with the Sadducees. He targeted the Pharisees because they were the evangelicals of the day, the ones closest to the truth. And yet they were the ones who handed Him over to be crucified.

Their idolatry at the end of Israel’s history was the most subtle lie of the serpent: rather than disregarding the Covenant like Esau, or disobeying it like Israel’s kings, the Covenant itself was hijacked and turned into an idol. “We are God’s people.” Paul warned the Roman Christians against falling into the same error. The Church becomes the bride who only has eyes for her wedding dress.

The renewed interest in Covenant theology is a great blessing. By this I mean the shape and nature of the biblical Covenants, how this structures the historical outcomes throughout the Bible, and how it informs the interpretation of many of the obscure passages of the Bible. It opens everything like the canopener from heaven. But like all blessings from God, in the hands of those who will not look God in the eye, the gift becomes a curse. Well-meaning people start opening other cans: cans of Herodian worms.

We live in an age where the dropout rate of young people from Church is higher than ever. Of course, the human reaction is to curb the rate of spiritual delinquency. The solution is found in searching the Scriptures, of course. After the mostly disastrous childrearing efforts of the patriarchs, the Law of Moses dictated means by which children might be raised in the nurture of the Lord. This was a beneficial discovery, but the desire to solve a New Covenant problem has led to what is likely the most subtle error of serpent. He used it to sidetrack the Pharisees, and he is using it again today. The error is Jesus-and-Covenant.

What do I mean by this? Any idolatry is the taking of one’s eye from the giver and an unhealthy focus on the gift. Jesus did not give the New Covenant to the nations as Yahweh gave the stone tablets to Moses or as He gave the promises to Abraham. Certainly, there was sacrificial bloodshed and holy fire involved in every case, but at the Last Supper, Jesus gave Himself. Jesus is the Covenant.

This innovation, the union of the giver and the gift, God incarnate, would seem to be the solution to idolatry. In the New Covenant, Jesus is our nearbringing, and in Him we behold the very face of God, unveiled by the Spirit to those who believe. But however the Lord draws us near, the flesh is always prone to shrink back in unbelief, to seek water from cisterns dug with human hands.

The invention of “Covenant children” who are put “in Christ” in “baptism” and need “spiritual nourishment” through Communion is an exaltation of the flesh over the Spirit. I know many will find this offensive, but this construct is simply one more way of avoiding God in the face of Jesus Christ. Every one of these acts evades the real nature of the Gospel, and indeed, of the Last Supper: willing communion with Christ in His sufferings and His resurrection. This subtle perversion of the New Covenant replaces repentance and faith with heritage, and true salvation (conversion) with legalism disguised as a Covenantal obligation. It puts Christ where He is not, and in the process obscures where He is really to be found. Ironically, it often seems to be the case that those who have the least understanding of biblical Covenants, yet walk with Jesus, have the real thing. They have Jesus Himself, who is the Covenant.

NEXT: Raising Cain.

ART: Portrait of Herod by Giuseppe Arcimboldo

My Federal Vision friends believe baptism is an important subject, from both theological and pastoral points of view. I agree, but for me it is also an issue of aesthetics. The Bible has a wonderfully consistent internal logic, and paedobaptism crunches the gears at every turn.

Peter Leithart just posted something concerning baptism, and it’s worth answering, not only “because somebody on the internet is wrong,” but also because it is an issue I’ve just finished dealing with in The Shape of Galatians. It should be noted that Trinity House is hosting some lectures on sacraments by a baptist, so Dr Leithart and his colleagues have a spirit that should be imitated by theologians everywhere. My own posts here are always bait in the hope of a bite, a friendly disputatio, so don’t take them the wrong way. If a friend has soup on his tie, or wax in his ear, or a fertility rite in his sacrament, what sort of friend isn’t going to point it out!?

Dr Leithart writes:

Paul calls circumcision a “seal of righteousness” in Romans 4:11, and that same phrase has historically been applied to baptism.

But what does it mean to be a “seal of righteousness”? A seal (Greek sphragis) is an identifying mark. The word is used to describe brands on animals, identifying tattoos on slaves, signs that identify a man’s regiment in the military. To be sealed is to be identified in some way.

A “seal of righteousness,” it would seem, is a mark that identified the one sealed as “righteous.” That’s true for Abraham: He trusted Yahweh’s promise, Yahweh counted it for righteousness and thus considered Abraham to be righteous, and the seal of circumcision imposed that status on Abraham’s flesh. Abraham would have explained his circumcision as a seal that Yahweh considered him righteous.

But then that same seal is applied to the infant Isaac, and then many other infants, on the eighth day. It’s still a “seal of righteousness.” Changing Isaac’s nappies, Sarah could have seen Isaac’s circumcision and thought, “Yahweh sealed my little son as a righteous one! Praise to Yahweh!”

When we apply this logic to baptism, as paedobaptists are wont to do, what are we to conclude? Is baptism a “seal of righteousness,” also for our children?

Firstly, what does Paul actually say in Romans 4? Abraham became the father of a priestly nation because he believed. He believed first, and then received the Circumcision. The question here is this: if Abraham and the men in his household believed before they were circumcised, why wasn’t Isaac required to believe first? Because Abraham was sealed as righteous, and through him all Israel were given promises. It says nothing about Isaac being sealed as righteous. He was the fulfillment of the promise.

Notice that Dr Leithart doesn’t mention males, but infants. That’s the classic bait-and-switch. Circumcision wasn’t about child rearing but child bearing, about a physical seed. Yes, Sarah would have praised God every time she changed Isaac’s nappy. She would also have praised God every time Abraham was naked before her. Circumcision was a reminder of their previous barrenness, which was removed because Abraham believed God. Both the birth and circumcision of Isaac were a sign of Abraham’s righteousness, and nobody else’s.

So, why were Abraham and Sarah barren in the first place? Because they were a new Adam and Eve, the beginning of an “Edenic” nation which would carry the curse for all nations. Abraham plants trees and buries Sarah in a tree-circled grove. Thus, Circumcision was about the Land and the womb, the firstfruits and the firstborn. It was about cutting off Cain and cutting off Canaan. It was inherently Edenic, because the original promises were given to Adam and then distributed by Noah.

God promised fertility to Adam, constructed Eve, and then qualified Adam to receive that fertility as a gift. The Land and the womb would not be opened until Adam was qualified. He sinned, but the shedding of blood allowed God to bless him still with a fertility in Land and womb that was tempered, not cut off, by a curse. Circumcision was likewise a shedding of blood that would allow God to give a faithful Man a fruitful Land and a fruitful womb. But things had progressed, because although death was mitigated in Eden, human blood was still shed. The mitigating blood in Circumcision was now human blood. In a sense, every male Israelite was cut off as an Abel that he might not be a Cain. Isaac himself was a son offered as an ascension sacrifice. He was symbolically slain as a Cain and “born again by faith” as an Abel, hence the constant battle for Covenant Succession between firstborn and secondborn sons, right up to Christ and the Herods, upon whom all the righteous blood from Abel would be avenged.

Because of his faith, righteousness was counted to Abraham. Working through Galatians I noticed a structural correspondence between Paul’s reference to this counting, and the counting of the sons of Israel. The name of the book Numbers refers to the two censuses which bookend it, the generation which came out of Egypt (“my firstborn son”) but died in the wilderness, and the new uncircumcised generation which took possession of the Land. The children of Israel are numbered so many times it gets boring. But the point is that they are counted. As Dr Leithart has himself noted, Revelation 7 alludes to Numbers when it counts out the 144,000, the “firstfruits” of the Land, the first Jews who believed the Gospel. But notice that the Gentile believers are not counted. They are count-less, like the stars in the sky or the sand of the seashore. To be “counted” is to be a sacrifice, an ascension offering like Isaac. The counting of righteousness to Abraham resulted in the counting of sons and their inheritance in the Land. Israel’s physical and agricultural fertility were evidence of the faith of Abraham in the promises of God.

But the third promise was this countless blessing to all nations. The nations, generally speaking, were never under such a curse of barrenness. Their offspring were always countless, and their swarming hordes were held back by God when Israel was faithful, and brought by God upon Israel in a “flood” of judgment when faithless. And the famines also seem linked to the presence of Abraham and his sons. Indeed, it was the very fruitfulness of the nations (in both Land and womb) which deceived Israel into worshiping their gods of fertility, the Baals. Just as it was in the Garden, Molech was simply another dragon hijacking the offspring of the woman with an offer of certain food. [1]

So, what kind of sons is Paul talking about when he refers to Gentiles who have Abraham as their father? Obviously, it is those who believed.

Paedobaptists take this faith as “household by household” to tie it once again to offspring, but for Gentiles it was never about offspring, or the Land, which were always tied together, just as Abel and the ground were tied together. This question is answered by taking note of the nature of this great blessing for all nations. Once again, it takes us back to Genesis. Just as the Land and womb were opened by the mitigation of death, so also the curse upon Land and womb was swallowed up in the defeat of death. The resurrection of Christ made Circumcision, the Jew-Gentile distinction, redundant. [2] This is why the writer of Hebrews works his way from slavery to death (World), to the children of Abraham (Land and womb), to Adam’s temptation (Garden), in Hebrews 2:14-18. Jesus was a better Adam, then a better Abel, and then a better “son of God,” [3] a priest king after the order of Melchizedek, a priesthood of all nations:

Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. For surely it is not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham. Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.

So, the blessing upon the Gentiles was not a fertility which they already possessed. It was the removal of the fear of death. Israel bore their barrenness as a substitute, and then Jesus, as Israel, bore their death as well. The significance of the womb of Sarah and the tomb of Sarah were united in Christ. The very Land itself shook with birth pangs at His resurrection, and again just before the first resurrection, as Jesus predicted. There was never any need for a sign upon infants. There was a sign upon all Abrahamic males as  Cains who received God’s mercy and subsequently enjoyed the restoration of the fruit of the Land.

Now that the seed had come, and the old Land had “given birth,” a new sign was required, a sign which pictured a new Land rising from the abyss, a heavenly country. The New Covenant, and its sign, are not about the fertility of Christian wombs but about the fertility of Christian tombs. This is not hard to understand.

Baptism has nothing to do with physical fertility, but that is where the baptismal regeneration of the Federal Cision, er, Vision, takes us. A Federal Vision friend recently celebrated the birth of another child, and commented that this birth was another victory against Satan. That floored me, but this is surely the next logical step. The second and third generations of the Federal Vision are not going to be scared to claim the crazy things that the first generation would be reluctant to say out loud.

To claim that a baptized infant is “righteous” is not only to misunderstand and misrepresent baptism (and thus misrepresent the Gospel itself) but to misunderstand and misrepresent Circumcision as well.

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[1] See “Kids in the Kitchen: Passover in the Motherland” in God’s Kitchen: Theology You Can Eat & Drink.
[2] The New Covenant didn’t institute a refurbished distinction concerning offspring and territory, which is why paedobaptism historically has always been perverted into religious nationalism, the “Cainite” kingdom of the Herods, and indeed the very same offer which Satan made to Jesus in the wilderness. The reason this will always occur is because it is inherent in the “tribal”nature of the rite.
[3] Genesis 6 concerns the priestly line of Seth intermarrying with the godless, autonomous Cainite kingdom, which brought about the end of all flesh.

“The Lord’s Table is for dangerous people.”

If you are going to baptize infants, it makes sense that you would also allow them to take Communion. Baptism brings one into the priesthood (through the Laver) to the court of God, and Communion is fellowship in the priestly kingdom. To unite the two is consistent—as consistent as the two pillars flanking the threshold of Solomon’s Temple.

The inclusion of children in Israel’s religious meals is used to support the practice. Some of those against it have asserted that these meals, even perhaps the Passover, did not include the children. James Jordan has a fascinating chapter entitled “Children and the Religious Meals of the Old Creation” in The Case for Covenant Communion. Where many Reformed writers (including some other authors in this book) get tied up in knots by the Reformers and their own traditions, Jordan’s perspective is always fresh because he looks first to the Bible, not for proof texts but for principles.

Jordan makes a clear case for the inclusion of children in the religious meals of the “old creation.” He lists a number of age specifications for various Israelite offices, and notes that there is no age specified for participation in the Passover meal. He concludes that if God had wanted to, he certainly could have specified a minimum age for participation.

So, children were included in Israel’s religious meals, most notably in the Passover. Since Israel was the Covenant people, then the children in the Christian Church should participate in Communion. Or should they?

The Circumcision of Israel

This sounds logical, of course, but it is the same logic by which one would expect a bruised, bloodied Jesus to wake up in the tomb, crawl out and stagger around with His burial clothes hanging off Him. Paedocommunion doesn’t speak of resurrection so much as resuscitation. And despite the truth concerning the meals of the Old Creation, dragging them into the New Creation, as I have said before, is akin to heaving the bloody Bronze Altar with its flesh and ashes inside the tent. Paedobaptism and paedocommunion are a call for God to accept the flesh.

Appealing to the Old Testament to interpret New Testament events is extremely helpful, but what if the New Testament event is itself a deliberate reinterpretation? Jesus did this all the time, and one of the most important is what He did at His last Passover, or more correctly, what He did to the last Passover.

What was Passover about? Circumcision and Passover were about redeeming Israel’s males from the barrenness of the womb, and the barrenness of the Land, curses upon the Covenant Head which can be traced back to Genesis 3.

What did Jesus do to Passover? He ended it. He ate the Passover with His disciples, and then the meal which spoke of cutting off history (leaven speaks of historical continuity), was itself cut off. There would be no more Passovers because it was only a shadow, and the day was about to dawn. In Jesus, all Israel had been redeemed and grown up. It was time for something new.

During the Passover, Jesus instituted a new meal. A symbolic meal, a “taste,” of risen bread and shared wine was taken out of the old meal. A new Israel was being established out of the corpse of the old one, not spiritually, not socially, not physically, but all three together. The combination of the priestly and kingly pillars in Solomon’s Temple invite the third pillar, the prophetic Shekinah, to indwell. The table of God is a place reserved for prophets.

Now, I could argue that since there were no children present, children cannot participate in Communion. But there were no women present either, and we know that women have always been allowed to take Communion. So there must be something deeper going on here.

Feed My Lambs?

“Jesus’ commission to Peter after His resurrection was not to dole out bread and wine to infants. It was to fatten those who had taken up their crosses, to prepare them for the slaughter to come…”

Tim Gallant, who also contributed to the book mentioned above, authored another book entitled Feed My Lambs: Why the Lord’s Table Should Be Restored to Covenant Children. While I appreciate the pastoral heart behind the desires of these faithful men to see children raised in the knowledge of God, it seems to me they have missed the point of the Last Supper.

Firstly, the title of Tim’s book refers to Jesus’ threefold command to Peter after Peter’s threefold betrayal (John 21:15-17). But what was Jesus actually saying when He gave that commission to Peter? He was, as usual, taking Old Testament architecture and fulfilling it in the flesh as a human Tabernacle. From God’s Kitchen:

In Peter, Jesus takes the people of Israel from outside the tent of Moses to sit inside as priests and elders.

Peter warmed himself at a fire outside the house of the High Priest. Architecturally, he stood at the Bronze Altar. The Covenant Ethics are three tests, symbolized in the blood, the fire and the smoke—or flesh, eyes and life. When tested, Peter refused to identify himself with the Lamb.

Luke records that Jesus “looked” at Peter. Whenever Jesus “looks intently” in the Gospels, He is the Lampstand, the Law, the eyes of God, the watchman lifted up over Israel as sun, moon and stars. The lunar feasts were fast fading as the sun of righteousness arose. And the rooster heralded the dawn.

John records the dawning of a better day. This time the fire is not on the Land but by the Sea. The focus has shifted from the center of Israel to her borders with the wild nations. The resurrected Jesus invites Peter not to offer himself to death but to dine with One who has conquered death on his behalf. Architecturally, Peter has passed through the Laver—from death to life—to join Christ as an elder at the Altar of Incense.

Again, Peter is tested three times. Instead of Altar; Fire; Altar, it is Feed; Tend; Feed. In this way, Jesus deals compassionately with past failure and calls Peter to a better future (as He does with us every week at the Lord’s Table). But in Peter’s recommission, and in ours, there is a call to sacrificial life. There is a transfixing redness to the New Covenant dawn.

The “official” death-and-resurrection of Peter would be repeated in the Firstfruits Church. When Jesus told Peter to feed His sheep, they both knew those sheep, like Peter, were being fattened for the altar.

Animal sacrifices were no longer acceptable now that Jesus had died and risen again.

But in Jesus, human ones were.

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 8:35)

The reason there were only men at the Last Supper is because a new lamb was being selected for sacrifice: not only a head, but also a body. Following the Ascension Offering in Leviticus 1, the head would be offered first, and then the body would be washed and offered. Sharing in this feast with Jesus made these men members of the sacrificial lamb, that is, parts of its body. Jesus was the first human sacrifice which was acceptable to God. Because the Father accepted Him, as firstfruits, the full harvest, the body, was made acceptable also.

What I am saying here is that the disciples, through transformation into apostles, were human sacrifices. Just as Jesus’ death dealt with the serpent (the counterfeit head), their deaths dealt with the brood of vipers, the fiery serpents ruling Jerusalem (the counterfeit body). This is why there were not women and children present. Corporately speaking, the disciples were the “bones” of the Passover lamb which were not to be broken. They would form the structure of a new house, a new Tabernacle which was made entirely out of lambs. This was about the end of circumcision, which was not about children but about males.

After the resurrection, women are in the picture again, and in a big way. They are the first “witnesses” because the role of the Woman is the sacrifice of praise. After the serpent is felled, she sings and calls down the Covenant curses upon it. But once again, where are the children? Are they absent? No. But it is clear that the New Covenant is not about Jew and Gentile but about a new priesthood for all people. It is not about the cutting of flesh but about witness, about testimony, about telling what you have seen now that you have tasted death under the Law and your eyes have been opened. Having tasted death, as Jesus did for all men, innoculates one against death. It loses its sting. Baptism is for those who confess with their mouths that they are willing to lose their lives for Jesus’ sake and the Gospel’s. Baptism is an act of courage.

So Jesus’ commission to Peter after His resurrection was not to dole out bread and wine to infants. It was to fatten those who had taken up their crosses, to prepare them for the slaughter to come, through which they would bring down Jerusalem and then Rome—”every high thing which exalts itself against the knowledge of God.”

In the Law, a lamb does not speak of a young child but of a blameless son, like Jesus at His baptism. He was vindicated before His earthly father at age twelve and vindicated before His heavenly Father at age 30, ready for holy war. Baptism is not for babies or infants but for holy warriors, and there were no baby Nazirites (but there were women!). To make it so is to miss the point of union with Christ altogether, and make the New Covenant into something social, something carnal, a community according to the flesh. Paedobaptism is poison to the heart of the New Covenant.

To open baptism and Communion to infants is to take the Church back to the Old Covenant, the time of dark sayings and shadows. It is to say that Christ has not come in the flesh, and Christ is not risen from the dead, and this was exactly the motive behind the Herods’ years of glorious Passovers leading up to the destruction of their serpentine rulers, their women, and their children—the entire congregation was “circumcised.”

So, what about our children? We are holy members of the Lamb, bone of His bone, and flesh of His flesh, but also Spirit of His Spirit. The Lord’s table is not for “feeding” infants the Gospel. Look at the picture above. It is a group of subversives planning to change the world by laying down their lives. The Lord’s Table is for dangerous people, and partaking in the Table is itself a public testimony. It is for living sacrifices, and our physical children, as with all those who hear and have not yet repented, feed upon us. We are the cut up, washed “members” of the lamb on the Altar. We mediate Jesus to them. Only the Gospel transforms the sons of men into the sons of God, and all the sons of God are sacrificial lambs who have willingly taken up the cross. The New Covenant body is a human sacrifice.

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. (1 Corinthians 12:27)