The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is the largest evangelical Christian denomination in the USA reporting a total membership of 14.8 million (of whom 1/3 attend weekly). The SBC is Baptist in name and practice but about 99% of the other 45 million American evangelicals are also Baptist in theology, piety, and practice if not in name. This reality shapes the way Americans tend to think about baptism, the way they read and interpret Scripture, and the way they understand the message of Scripture. From a historical point of view, our situation in anomalous. Until the middle of the 19th century the situation was reversed. Prior to the middle of the 19th century, the overwhelming majority of Christians worldwide and even in the USA were paedobaptist, i.e., they baptized infants. Now, to be sure, they did so for different reasons. Romanists baptize infants because, in part, they believe that the mere use of the sacrament imparts saving, regenerating grace. Lutherans (both mainline and confessional) also confess that the use of baptism confers new life (regeneration). Mainline (liberal) denominations such as the PCUSA, the EPCUSA, the UMC, the UCC baptize infants mainly because it is traditional or out of sentiment.

What Baptism Does And Does Not Do

This sociological and historic reality creates challenges for those who still believe and confess the historic Reformed understanding of Scripture, that God has promised to be a God to believers and to their children (Gen 17:7), who do not baptize out of sentiment (“isn’t that nice”), tradition (“that’s the way we have always done it”), or because they believe that it necessarily confers saving saving grace to every baptized person (magic). In the Reformed understanding baptism is a sacrament, i.e., a sign of promised grace and a seal, a promise of saving grace to those who believe. To be sure, according to the Reformed confession, Christ is received sola gratia (by grace alone), sola fide through faith alone. Grace is not a magic or medicinal substance (Rome). Rather, it is the unconditional favor of God toward sinners earned by Jesus Christ for all his people. By grace alone God is favorable to all his people (composed of all sorts of people, from all tribes, languages, and nations) for the sake of the righteous (e.g., obedience) of Christ imputed (credited) to sinners and received through faith alone. By faith we mean, trusting, resting, receiving, knowing, and assenting. Baptism signifies what Christ does for his people (washes away their sins and clothes them with his righteousness) and seals the promises made to those who have new life, who believe that all that Christ has done for them. As a seal, it says to believers that what they have read in Scripture, what they have heard in the preaching of the Word is really truly theirs.

This is what we confess in Heidelberg Catechism (1563) 69:

69. How is it signified and sealed to you in Holy Baptism, that you have part in the one sacrifice of Christ on the cross? Thus: that Christ instituted this outward washing with water and joined therewith this promise: that I am washed with His blood and Spirit from the pollution of my soul, that is, from all my sins, as certainly as I am washed outwardly with water, whereby commonly the filthiness of the body is taken away.

Against the Romanists and the Lutherans we confess explicitly that baptism does not, by its use (ex opere operato) become salvation any more than the bread and wine of communion literally become (by transubstantiation) the body and blood of Christ:

72. Is then the outward washing with water itself the washing away of sins? No, for only the blood of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit cleanse us from all sin.

To put it plainly, a baptized person who does not believe is damned and an unbaptized person who, by grace alone, does believe has been saved.

Still, Jesus instituted baptism as a sign and seal of his grace because he is pleased to communicate his promises to us not only through the Word but also visibly through the sacrament (but only through the two sacraments he has instituted).

The Biblical Basis For Infant Baptism

We baptize infants because we understand from Scripture that God’s promise in Genesis 17:7 is still in effect: “And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your children after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your children after you.”

On the basis of this verse and its many echoes throughout the rest of Scripture, not the least of which is Acts 2:39, the Reformed Churches confess:

74. Are infants also to be baptized? Yes, for since they belong to the covenant and people of God as well as their parents, and since redemption from sin through the blood of Christ, and the Holy Spirit who works faith, are promised to them no less than to their parents, they are also by baptism, as the sign of the covenant, to be ingrafted into the Christian Church, and distinguished from the children of unbelievers, as was done in the Old Testament by circumcision, in place of which in the New Testament Baptism is instituted.

“The covenant” to which we refer here is this covenant, which God made with Abraham in Genesis 17:7.

This is also how we speak in the Belgic Confession (1561) in art. 34:

For that reason we detest the error of the Anabaptists who are not content with a single baptism once received and also condemn the baptism of the children of believers. We believe our children ought to be baptized and sealed with the sign of the covenant, as little children were circumcised in Israel on the basis of the same promises made to our children.

And truly, Christ has shed his blood no less for washing the little children of believers than he did for adults. Therefore they ought to receive the sign and sacrament of what Christ has done for them, just as the Lord commanded in the law that by offering a lamb for them the sacrament of the suffering and death of Christ would be granted them shortly after their birth. This was the sacrament of Jesus Christ.

Notice two things. First, the dispute between the Reformed and the Baptists is, on this score, identical to the dispute the Reformed had with the Anabaptists in the 16th century. Thus, however different post-1630 Baptists are from the Anabaptists (and there are genuine differences), as regarding the reading of redemptive history, the Baptists remain Anabaptists. Second, the promise we invoke here is the promise that God made to Abraham in Genesis 17:7.

The Abrahamic covenant or promise is central to the Reformed understanding of the unity of the covenant of grace under the Old and New Testaments. We say that there is one covenant of grace with multiple outward administrations. The New Covenant did not first appear in history in the New Covenant. The Old Testament believers were not simply looking forward to the covenant of grace. They were participating in its outward administration in, with, and under types and shadows.

Abraham Was Not Moses

Whereas most American evangelicals today assume that the Abrahamic promise has expired, that Abraham was only really an anticipation of Moses, with whom God did not enter into covenant for 430 years after Abraham (Gal 3:17). Paul, however, contrasts the Abrahamic covenant with the Mosaic. The latter he says has been annulled whereas the Abrahamic was “previously ratified” and is based on a promise and as distinct from the Mosaic which he characterizes, for his purposes here, as ” law” (vv. 17–18). In short, Abraham was not Moses. The Abrahamic covenant is not the Mosaic. The Abrahamic was in no sense a covenant of works. It was a covenant of grace.1

In contrast to Abraham, the Old, Mosaic Covenant (2 Cor 3; Heb chapters 7–10), had a dual character. Fundamentally it was an administration of the covenant of grace. No one under Moses was saved by works. Yet the Mosaic covenant was, in certain external respects, a re-statement, a re-issuing of the covenant of works that God had made with Adam before the fall. There is a “do this and live” (Luke 10:28; Lev 18:5 ) aspect to the Mosaic covenant that is not present in the Abrahamic. Paul says that the Mosaic law was a pedagogue (παιδαγωγὸς) to teach the Israelites the greatness of their sin and misery (Gal 3:24). Many of our Baptist friends, however, know a priori that Abraham and Moses are both covenants of works and so they dismiss them together and miss the fundamental unity between the Abrahamic covenant and the New Covenant. Because of this assumption they tend to misunderstand the contrast in Jeremiah 31:31–34 between the Old Covenant and the New even though Jeremiah says the New Covenant will not be like the covenant he made with Moses. He does not contrast the New Covenant with Abraham because he knew that the New Covenant is the new administration of the Abrahamic covenant (see the resources below).2

Resources On the Abraham in the History of Salvation

NOTES

1. Here we must not follow my beloved professor and colleague Meredith Kline when he writes, “Though not the ground of the inheritance from heaven, Abraham’s obedience was the ground for Israel’s inheritance of Canaan.” Meredith G. Kline, Kingdom Prologue (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2006), 325. Here Kline did the very thing to which he rightly objected: taking a Baptist position. He has turned Abraham into Moses. Abraham was given the seed and land promises in Genesis 12 and 15 and gracious grants from a sovereign King, God the Lord. The Obedience that God required of Abraham in Genesis 12, 15, and 17 was a consequence of the grace received not a prior or antecedent condition in order to receive.

2. We also dissent strongly from his rejection of the Abrahamic promise as the basis for infant baptism:

This also means that when we are establishing the ground for baptizing our children into the church the ground for baptizing our children into the church our appeal should not be to the “promise,” for the promised seed is the election and the covenantal constituency is not delimited by election, nor do we know whether or not our children our children are elect.” Kline, ibid., 364.

Kline was right to distinguish election and covenant (which he did in the paragraph just above the one in which this passage appears) and he was right to distinguish between the external administration and the internal, spiritual relation to the covenant of grace. What he missed here, in the passage quoted, was the proper application of these distinctions.

We do not confess that we baptize our children because we believe them to be elect. That would be essentially a Baptist mistake. We do not baptize them because we believe that they necessarily have new life and true faith. Again, that would be essentially a Baptist mistake. We do, however, baptize our children because God has promised to be a God to believers and to their children. He has promised to bring his elect to new life and to true faith through the external administration of the covenant of the covenant of grace. All the elect will be regenerated. That is the promise but God has ordained to administer that promise in the church by baptizing believers and their children.

One suspects that Kline was reacting to the Kuyperian view of presumptive regeneration, which was declared by Synod Utrecht (1906) to be speculative. Synod rightly rejected presumptive regeneration in favor of the external administration of the sacrament of baptism in obedience to the divine command, under the divine promise of Genesis 17:7 and re-expressed in Acts 2:39: “For the promise is to you and to your children…”.