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

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

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

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

My responses are indented.

Leithart and the whale.

or Do You Really Want A Real Debate?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Baptists are right. Almost.

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

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

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

But there is. Calvin’s, for instance.

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

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

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

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

Such quotations can be, and have been, multiplied.

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

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

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

Again, the Baptists are right. Almost.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s time for a real debate.

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

*Twinkle*

What sort of question is the question of paedocommunion?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Martyrdom is more than a sign of impending doom. Martyrs are agents of apocalypse.”

Christian Formation in Our Apocalyptic Age

by Peter J. Leithart

Every summer brings another string of apocalyptic blockbusters to the movie theaters. Godzilla rises from the sea. A meteor smashes into the earth. Volcanoes threaten towns; viruses spread like wildfire; aliens invade. Robots take over, evolving into ex machinas. Terrorists storm the White House. Superheroes do their superheroics against the backdrop of inky Gotham cityscapes. Zombies occupy Pemberly, of all places, so it’s a good thing Elizabeth Bennet is a ninja. It’s as if every Hollywood studio has hired Left Behind creators Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins as script consultants.

If we can trust the signals coming from pop culture, we live in a world charged with what one film critic, following Kierkegaard, calls “apocalyptic dread.”

Continue reading at Touchstone Magazine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How the prolific theologian learned to face down failure.

Interview at Christianity Today.

The abandonment of the Son by the Father is made palpable not in the crucifixion of His body, since He willingly laid down His life, but in the darkness which covered the Land for three hours. But perhaps this darkness was a sign of the Father’s nearness rather than His distance.

Matthew, Mark and Luke document the darkness which covered the Land during the last three hours of Jesus’ life, and so do three extra biblical historians, Thallus, Phlegon and Africanus. But what was its purpose? It is wise to look for typological precedents for events in the Gospels, since Jesus fulfilled the Law and the Prophets. Concerning darkness we have the primeval world before the creation of light (Genesis 1:2), and the darkness which covered Egypt as the ninth plague (Exodus 10:21-23).

The details of this plague are interesting, since this was “a darkness to be felt” and “nor did anyone rise from his place for three days.” Only the land of Goshen where the Israelites dwelt was given light. Thus, the three hours of darkness at noonday were a sign of the coming three days in which Christ would be covered by the darkness of the tomb. But there is another instance of darkness and light as a judgment in Exodus, and that occurred at the Red Sea crossing (Exodus 13:19-20). The pillar of cloud gave light to the Israelites but the Egyptians were left in the dark. Thus the two were kept separate throughout the night.

My assertion here is that the darkness in each case was a visit from the glory cloud, the “mobile tabernacle” which served as God’s chariot until the Day of Pentecost. It was presumably this cloud which is described in Genesis 3:8, which would be better translated as “And they heard the sound/voice of the Lord God coming to the garden in the breath/spirit of the day and they hid themselves…” It is likely that this visitation was similar to the cloud which descended upon Sinai and upon the mount of transfiguration. It is also likely the same cloud which, when opened, provided a glimpse into heaven at the baptism of Jesus (with its allusion to Genesis 1, the Spirit hovering over the deep), at His ascension, and again at the martyrdom of Stephen. The Lord always comes “with” or “in” clouds, and when He does, He comes to judge.

Of course, judgment does not necessarily mean punishment. The Lord came down to judge Babel, Egypt and Sodom, and it each case the result was cursing. In the case of Ezekiel, it seems the prophet was actually taken up in or by the chariot in Spirit that he might witness the sins of Jerusalem, God and a “son of man” serving as two legal witnesses, explaining the phrase “Come, let us go down…” in Genesis 11:7, when God brought confusion. The pillar of cloud also brought confusion upon Pharaoh’s armies, and it was likely present when the armies of Midian were confused under the watch of Gideon. But when the cloud came upon the Tabernacle and Temple, upon the Son, and upon His saints on the Day of Pentecost, as a mighty, rushing wind, the Lord was happy to bless. The arrival of the chariot of God, unlike the chariot of Pharaoh, is a chariot which brings not only vengeance but also redemption. It is the chariot of the almighty ga’al, the one who bears a two-edged sword to slay the wicked and cut the bonds of the righteous.

So, is it beyond possibility that the chariot of God was the cause of the three hours of darkness, recorded across the oikoumene, while Christ was on the cross? After all, the final chapters of Ezekiel present this Jew-Gentile social construct as a temple, with the Land of Israel as its holy altar. The Lord was coming to His temple to inspect it for “leprosy.” According to the Law, the leprosy had to be cut out, but if it returned, the house would be destroyed. Jesus was crucified “outside the camp,” like a leper (see Leviticus 14, and The Leprous House). He was the one being “cut out” that the house might be spared. But as Jesus predicted, the cleaned house would be filled with even worse demons (see Seven Spirits More Wicked), and its response to being cleansed would be a return to corruption in an even greater way. The Veil of the Temple was torn, but when the Lord later returned “in the clouds” the Temple was torn down. Not one stone was left upon another.

And he shall break down the house, its stones and timber and all the plaster of the house, and he shall carry them out of the city to an unclean place (Leviticus 14:45)

This means that the entire Land was under judgment, and Jesus was at the center of the court. He had been condemned by the High Priesthood (Garden), by Herod (Land) and by Pilate (World), the entirety of the oikoumene “Tabernacle.” Now He was being judged by heaven, and for the will of heaven be done on earth required the “bowing of the heavens,” that is, a visit from the heavenly court via the glory cloud, a symbolic reunion of the waters above and below in a prefiguring of final judgment (see “Bowing the Heavens” in my book Inquiétude for more discussion.) God was visiting the Garden, and Adam was exposed in His court. The events that transpired recapitulate those of Psalm 18 – including the earthquake –with one major difference: the Father did not hear, and did not deliver, the Man who cried out to Him.

The cords of death encompassed me;
the torrents of destruction assailed me;
the cords of Sheol entangled me;
the snares of death confronted me.

In my distress I called upon the Lord;
to my God I cried for help.
From his temple he heard my voice,
and my cry to him reached his ears.

Then the earth reeled and rocked;
the foundations also of the mountains trembled
and quaked, because he was angry.

Smoke went up from his nostrils,
and devouring fire from his mouth;
glowing coals flamed forth from him.

He bowed the heavens and came down;
thick darkness was under his feet.

He rode on a cherub and flew;
he came swiftly on the wings of the wind.
He made darkness his covering, his canopy around him,
thick clouds dark with water.

What does this mean for the significance of the three hours of darkness? That the Christ who “became sin for us” was trodden underfoot like an enemy, or a serpent, the blood upon the kapporet, the footstool of God (see Peter Leithart, The Footstool of His Feet.) To conquer sin, He became sin. To make His enemies His footstool (Psalm 110:1; Luke 20:43; Hebrews 10:13), He would first be trampled underfoot, and it would please the Lord to bruise Him (Isaiah 53:10). The holy presence which overshadowed Mary at Jesus’ conception (Luke 1:35) now overshadowed the entire nation at His death.

This abandonment of the Son by the Father was not “spatial” but legal. The Father presided over the Son in the seat of Moses, surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. This courtroom “betrayal,” a perjury in the sense that He changed His previous testimonies concerning the blamelessness and authority of the Son, was as close-to-home as the kiss of Judas. In this final act, the Father crossed the floor and stood with Judas, with Ananias, with those who beat, spat upon and ridiculed Jesus, with Pilate, with the crowd, and with the thief who cursed Him on the cross.

The word “sacrifice” connotes the idea of “near bringing” (see James B. Jordan, Leviticus 1:2). It was this reversal of judgment, through substitutionary atonement, that the angels “standing at the four corners of the Land,” those who stood prepared to vindicate the Son by immediately destroying the city and the Land (as predicted in Daniel 9:25-26), were told: “Do not harm the land or the sea or the trees until we put a seal on the foreheads of the servants of our God” (Revelation 7:1-3).

At the Day of Pentecost, the brightness of the cloud was visited upon those who believed, and the darkness of strong delusion upon those who refused to believe. In the Gospel, this dividing “sword” was extended right across the empire. This “visitation” by the Spirit, whose indwelling turned every believer into a chariot (epitomised and signified in the miraculous travel of Philip in Acts 8:38-39), explains the inspiration and perseverance of the Jew-Gentile saints and the strong delusion which confused and confounded their Jew-Gentile enemies, who turned on each other, eventuating in their destruction at the coming of Christ with all His martyred sons, including Abel (Matthew 23:35), on white horses as a cloud of “witnesses” (martyrs) against the first century “Babylon.” These saints were God’s chariot.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:1-2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Leithart - CPT Conference, November 3, 2015

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.