Guest Post by Rev. Mr. Leon M. Brown. He is a veteran of the United States Navy, a graduate of Westminster Seminary California (MDiv, 2011; MA Historical Theology, 2012), Assistant Pastor of New City Fellowship (PCA) in Fredericksburg, VA, and is presently pursuing doctoral studies in OT and the Ancient Near East. Here is his YouTube channel and his Facebook page.

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If you have ever experienced a great loss, e.g., the unexpected death of a loved one, loss of employment, a broken relationship because of an argument with a spouse or close friend, you know what it is like to be at a loss for words, to have a terrible sense of uncertainty. Perhaps during such times you have broken down and wept? These experiences and emotions are quite normal. Read the Psalms and you will soon notice the wide range of emotions expressed there.

Such a sense of loss, however, is not always associated with one’s struggle with a particular doctrine. I myself had never seen it until about four years ago but apparently I was the perfect candidate.

If you were raised in a confessionally reformed tradition, you may have never had such an experience. Reformed doctrine (read: biblical doctrine) may be nature to you. But what about those of us who descend from the ranks of broader evangelicalism? Many of the doctrines that our elder brothers and sisters in the Reformed tradition take for granted are foreign to us gentiles grafted in to the Israel of God—they were to me. I spent many nights wrestling with a certain teaching until the early hours of the morning. And while I would never claim to be a latter day Jacob, I was not going to stop wrestling with God, or more specifically, this doctrine, until I was led to a proper understanding of it. So what was it? It was baptism—the doctrine that caused tears.

How could the doctrine of baptism cause tears? After all, it is so clear. Those who profess faith are to be baptized along with their children (HC Q. 74; WCF 28.4). Just as Abraham gave his children the sign and seal of the righteousness he had by faith, so, too, we should give our children the sign and seal of the new covenant, namely baptism (See Rom 4:11). Yet this connection was unclear for me. I believed the only proper subjects of baptism were those who professed faith in the Lord, especially in light of what baptism meant (London Baptist Confession 29.2). Baptism signified the washing away of sins, a renewal of mind and heart, death and resurrection in Christ, and membership into the visible church. How can an infant who did not repent and has no ability to understand the gospel receive this sacrament? These concerns were just the tip of the iceberg.

What about Matthew 28? There, Jesus commanded disciples to baptized. And disciples were those who had faith (John 4:1). Clearly, if Christ wanted infants baptized, he would have commanded the apostles to do so just like he commanded Abraham to circumcise his children. But what do we find in the New Testament? There is no such event. As B. B. Warfield (1851–1921) said,

It is true that there is no express command to baptize infants in the New Testament, no express record of baptism of infants, and no passages so stringently implying it.”1

This “Lion of Old Princeton,” a paedobaptist, expressed what I had been thinking the entire time. How could he maintain this position and say what he said about infant baptism? That led to further confusion.

The household baptisms in Acts were not particularly helpful because I lacked the biblical grid within which to understand them. All I desired to see was one infant baptized in the New Testament. I would even have settled for something implicit, but I never discovered it. I was not the only one. Pierre-Charles Marcel (1910–92), a French Reformed theologian and paedobaptist, noted,

We state here with all desirable precision that these passages [household baptisms] have never served and still do not serve, in good Reformed theology, as a basis or justification of infant baptism.2

What about Acts 2—the paedobaptist mantra?

The promise is for you and your children (Acts 2:38–39).

Is this not convincing? Peter is making an allusion to Genesis 17. I preferred, however, to think that Peter was referring to the promise that was mentioned in Acts 1, the promise of the Holy Spirit—not baptism (Acts 1:4-5; cf. Acts 2:33).

Quotations, such as these, became my resting place. They expressed the very thing that I believed, yet there was one major difference. Somehow these reformed theologians managed to maintain their paedobaptist conviction. What was I missing? How could one who saw no express command to baptize infants still baptize infants? This was the rub. I saw inconsistencies in the reformed position that I thought others were merely sweeping under the proverbial rug because of a series of reasons: the church has been baptizing infants for hundreds of years, the Reformers taught this, or the Confessions said it. None of this was good enough for me. If I was going to change my position, I needed to be convinced by the Scriptures that the reformed position was accurate. If I changed my position, I needed to be able to tell my wife with a clear conscience that some things that I taught her about baptism were incorrect. And what about the church? My convictions about baptism dictated the denomination in which I would minister and to which my family would belong.

Here began a journey that lasted more than 3 years, a journey that caused much frustration, many sleepless nights, and even tears.

Part 2

NOTES

1. Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, Studies in Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2003), 399.

2. Pierre-Charles Marcel, The Biblical Doctrine of Infant Baptism: The Biblical Doctrine of the Covenant of Grace, trans. Philip Edgcumbe Hughes (Exeter: A. Wheaton and Co., Ltd., 1959), 196.