Lost your password?

I originally wasn’t planning on writing multiple posts about infant baptism, but Richard Beck’s kindly saying that he was eager to follow my thoughts on the matter made me reconsider. I don’t have anything terribly profound to say about infant baptism on top of what I’ve already said, but I would like to discuss (in a very simplified manner) the nature of God’s covenants with us and how that applies to infant baptism.

A portrayal of Jesus’ baptism

Salvation and spiritual rebirth – which occur at baptism (John 3.5) – are, I think, best understood as gifts given to us when we enter into covenants with God. I say “covenants” because my current understanding is that we have not entered into a single collective covenant with God (as could perhaps be said of Israel), but rather into multiple individual covenants with God – all covenants of grace, but different covenants nonetheless.

It could very well be that this understanding of the New Covenant(s) is prejudiced by Western individualism or by my non-pædobaptist upbringing. (In fact, there are many dimensions of our spiritual states which I consider to be fundamentally communal; for example, it seems that we do not suffer because our own sin alone, but rather suffer because the world is drenched with the sin of mankind. If this reminds you of original sin, bear this in mind: The observation that a child of abusive parents suffers for sins that are not her own is empirical, not theological.) Nonetheless, the centrality of faith in the New Testament – something difficult to forget after the Reformation – leads me to conclude that we enter into covenants with God only after volitional, individual responses from us. If that is the case, infant baptism simply cuts across the grain of New Testament theology.

What are the alternatives? Covenants could be not at all contingent upon us – but that runs into all sorts of problems that I won’t bother addressing here. Another option is covenants based on the volitional responses of others (e.g., the parents) – but the main example of such a covenant (circumcision) is also the main example of what the new covenant is replacing. Proponents of infant baptism (or just any opponent of what I’m saying) can appeal to Acts 16.15 and 16.33, as well as 1 Corinthians 1.16 – but the evidence from those passages is inconclusive.

This is all a very roundabout way of getting at the real heart of the matter: Why should baptized infants be afforded any spiritual status different than that of unbaptized infants? Better yet: Why should any infant be afforded any spiritual status different than that of any other infant?

Those are the questions that I have yet to see be successfully answered.

Previous ArticleA Time for Everything
Next ArticleDark and Powerful and Beautiful: Sex and the Single Christian

Related Posts

4 Responses

  1. Richard

    Joseph,
    Thanks for posting a bit more on this topic. Given my faith tradition I agree with you on all this. Although I’m not a particularly dogmatic person about any of this, it has always been sort of a head-scratcher for me about why infant baptism is the norm when every case of baptism in the New Testament–including Jesus–involved adults.

    That said, I felt the theological pull of infant baptism when I became a father and, per our tradition, my young children couldn’t participate in the Lord’s Supper, something that was reserved for the “saved.” During moments like this you do experience the odd tensions in believer’s baptism churches, were young children are both “in” and “not in” the community of the saints.

  2. JamesBrett

    my comment has less to do with infant baptism and more to do with individual versus collective decisions and covenants. i do think our views are tainted a great deal by western ideas of individualism, however i would agree that, as best i can tell, in Christ each one of us has his/her own covenant with God.

    where i would disagree is upon your conclusion that we enter into these covenants only after individual responses or decisions. the new testament contains several examples (i believe the majority) of entire households coming to Christ together. i know there is room for these folks to have individually responded to the gospel, but i don’t believe that to be the case in that culture.

    i’m serving as a missionary in tanzania and, in rural areas especially, there are many decisions made as a village or some other collective group. each individual doesn’t have a say in those decisions, yet the decisions is as firm (and fair) for them (as an indvidual) as are our decisions in the west. missionaries have done a great disservice to africans (and others) by insisting at times that an entire family or village cannot come to accept Christ together, at the leading of an elder or father(-type) figure. though, i would argue even more harm has been done by missionaries who have understood this form of decision-making and, so, have convinced entire villages to become Christian by promising bicycles to those elders who have the lead in these decisions.

    i don’t, however, practice infant baptism.

  3. J. Joseph Porter

    As the child of missionaries to Brazil – Church of Christ missionaries, no less! – I respect what you are doing in Tanzania. (Another thing we sort of have in common: My great-grandparents are from Alabama.) I will admit that I am not exactly sure about what to do with the households – but I find it hard to believe that members of different households could have been baptized only because one person in the household believed. It is hard to say one way or the other, however – which is precisely my point.

    It is definitely important for us Westerners to keep in mind the contingency of our own cultural perspective so that we have room to make sense of situations like those you describe in your comment. I guess we just do our best and try to stay faithful to the gospel.