Infant baptism has fallen by the wayside in much of evangelical Christianity.  So, when you post about this topic you get some good conversation via tweets and different formats where some great questions are asked. I wanted to answer these objections and questions in a post.

1. What about those kids who get baptized and don’t walk with God?  That’s a very good question. I think that the first thing is to realize that God is on a different time frame than we are.  Just because someone has not yet responded to the gospel does not mean they won’t.  The sacrament is not a guarantee to faith.  Infant baptism provides an opportunity for the people of God to walk along and trust him to save this child. This is about God not about us. Finally, the sacrament is also to show that the child of believing parents is a member of the covenantal community and that we can look forward in hope that they will publicly profess their faith. (This is edited, thanks to Laura who helped clarify some poor logic in the comments below.)
2. I heard that infant baptism is believed to actually give salvation to the infant, is that true? This is true or false depending on your tradition.  The two major divisions are catholic and protestant.  The catholic understanding of the sacraments is very different than that of the protestant tradition. The catholic understanding of the sacraments is that they procure grace for you.  The protestant understanding is that the sacraments are a means to experiencing grace. This means that in the protestant tradition salvation is not procured by infant baptism.  It is an external promise that  will some day become an internal reality. It is a marking that the children of believing parents are members of the covenant community of faith. In baptist traditions children are not part of the community of the church but are viewed as outsiders until they “make profession of faith”.  This is in stark contrast to what we see in the Scriptures where children have always been included in the community of faith. So, infant baptism does not secure salvation but inclusion in the community of faith with the promise of future salvation.
3. Should I get re-baptized now that I have trusted Christ and am no longer a part of a tradition that does infant baptism? I would say, “By no means!” Why?  This is because the day you were baptized there was a promise made over you by God.  He has made good on this promise.  If you choose to re-baptize then you are saying that you do not care about the fact God has made good on his promise.  I would argue that you should praise God for his faithfulness and rejoice with those around you about how God saved you and did so in covenantal faithfulness to you.

I am sure there are more objections.  These are the one that seemed to come up the most.  Please post others in the comments so that we can dialogue about them.

In the world of parachurch ministries the idea of infant is relatively foreign. It is akin to saying that you are going to sew a third arm to your baby.  Why? I think it’s because the dispensational and baptist movement has become quite pervasive in many parts of American Christendom.  Presbyterianism, Methodism, Lutheranism, and other American denominations that practiced the historic sacrament of infant baptism moved toward liberalism and removed themselves from the public life of the church. Their conservative counterparts are small and as a result lost influence in the general Christian world.

This has resulted in a loss of covenantal theology and the biblical doctrine of infant baptism. This is one of the great tragedies that the church has faced. This loss is tragic is because it means that there is a loss of vision for the emerging generations.  They have simply become a missionary object as opposed to valued members of the community who need to be discipled and cared for.

Why did we baptise our kids?  We baptized them because they are members of the community of faith.  We baptized them because we believe that God is going to draw them to himself. We baptized them because we believe that this promise is visionary for their life.  We baptized them because we believe that the people of God are part of our family and that they have a responsibility to be a part of these kids lives.

This means quite simply that we experience something beautiful, authentic, and Christ-centered in their celebration. In an age where we talk about “multi-sensory” preaching and object lessons it is as if we have forgotten the beauty and raw power that is to be found in these ancient acts that tie us to “the great cloud of witnesses“.

A couple of years ago I wrote a few posts on these issues.  One of them was an argument for paedobaptism and I would encourage you check it out. I also wrote a post on communion that lays out some initial thoughts and in the comments a friend suggested that I dig deeper.  I hope these next days my metaphorical shovel will reach a new depth.

Before writing in earnest I want to say thanks to Eugene Peterson (not that he’ll ever read this).  His text, Christ Plays in 10,000 Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology has been really helpful in shaping some of my thoughts about both baptism and communion. When possible I will give him credit but so much of what he has written has become a part of my own views and sometimes I may not be sure where his thoughts begin and mine end.

To kick things off, I am curious do you remember your first communion?  What was it like? Did it mean anything to you?

Ethan: Do I get some of that?

Me: No son.  We need to make sure that you truly follow Jesus by faith and that you believe that he is your Lord and that he has forgiven you.

Ethan: I do Dad.

Me: Well, you have to get up with Pastor Doug and tell everyone that you do.

Ethan: By myself?

Me: Yep.

Ethan: I’m not ready for that Dad, but I can’t wait!

Amazing!  This ties the whole thing together for me.  We have confused the sacraments. For believing children communion is the place for the public proclamation of their faith.  For the new convert it’s baptism.

Can you imagine what that day will be like when he stands before the world and proclaims his faith in the risen Messiah and claims him as his own and then joins with the community through The Meal?

Infant baptism, communion, all tied together.  This is the beautiful way.  This is the covnenantal way of our promise keeping and ever faithful God!

Yeah, it’s a different world. The change that has taken place has left many disillusioned, frustrated, and wondering if there is anything left that matters, that will be what it says it will be.

Many of the college students that I work with are looking for stability.  They are desirous that somethign will deliver.  They can see through all the bull crap that’s out there and so they are cynical.  Who can blame them?  Every week it sems that another “holy” man has turned out to be a pedophile or morally degenerate in some way.  Every week sub concsiously they exclaim with the little boy, after the Black Sox trial, “Say it ain’t so Joe!”

This is where infant baptism comes in. More than that this is where the covenant promises of the holy, triune God comes in. He brings about the things that he promises to bring about.  He makes sure that they happen, because he can.

I had a conversation one time with a gal about baptism.  She was baptised as an infant in a “liberal” “church” of some sort.  She had been going to a church in town and they were pressuring her to be baptised now that she was walking with Jesus.  They informed her that her “first” “baptism” meant nothing since she was a baby and didn’t choose it and that her parents weren’t even Christians. Yet, to me it is amazing that the day she was bapised her parents, the congregation, and the officiant promised to lead this girl to Jesus. They covenanted with God and he made good. The promise was on him to make happen and he did. As she reflected on that reality she was deeply moved and drew nearer to the God who had called her as a freshman in college.

As I think about my two kids and their baptisms I am amazed at how the Lord is making good already. Our pastor prayed during  Ethan’s baptism that he would be an evangelist and that he would take the gospel to the world.  His first few weeks as a kindergartner, the first time he was ever around kids who weren’t “churched” he began inviting his classmates to know about God. I didn’t tell him to. He did it because “they need Jesus like me dad.”

In a culture, a world where no one makes good on their promises. God does through this rite of passage into the covenantal community of believers. God shows his faithfulness over and over again to the child who is baptised in the triune name of God. It does not save them but it initiates them into the community.

I can hear the naysayers already, “it doesn’t happen for everyone”.  I know. I don’t know why, it’s a mystery.  It seems more often than not in my experience that these promises made in faith turn out.

The God of the Bible is a God who covenants with his people and includes the children in that covenant.  He always has, always will.  Why are we afraid to trust him for our children?  Why act like he doesn’t care, when he does?  Why not show a cynical world the beauty of our promise keeping God as we remind our children, our friends, and those around us of their baptism and the promise that God is making good on?

Oh, for the world to see promises kept generation after generation.

I have begun emailing with a close friend about Baptism. So, I thought I would begin my thoughts here.  This first post is rough and raw.  It’s the baseline argument for infant baptism.  It’s not as nuanced as I would like, but, that will come later, maybe. The point of the following posts hopefully will be to show it’s importance in our culture.

The basic argument from my perspective runs like this:

1. God is a covenantal God and works out his will through the work of covenants.  The ultimate covenant being that of the new covenant in the person of Jesus.  The sign of the covenant began with Abraham as that of circumcision. This was the marker of God’s covenant people and was applied to male infants at eight days old. In Christ the covenant was no longer with an ethnic people and so the marker of the covenant was moved to baptism, this is now the sign of inclusion in the covenant community.
2. The NT references to baptism consistently speak of household baptism which is most easily and normally understood to include children.
3. Jesus blesses the children.
4. There is no statement of change to the inclusion of children in the covenant community.  A change this radical would require at the very least Apostolic teaching, if not Messianic teaching.
5. Believers children should be baptised as  covenantal members of the community of God’s people.
6. This in no way means that they are saved, it is simply the outward expression of God’s promise to bring about their salvation and that their parents and the body of believers will bring them up in the fear and admonition of the Lord believing him in his covenantal faithfulness for their salvation.

The Baptist argument creates a distinction that I do not believe exists in the Bible between Old and New Testament.  I believe that it is a coherent whole which builds upon itself and finds culmination in Jesus. The Baptist position seems to argue for a decisive distinction between Old and New where once the NT was complete the OT becomes obsolete and is understood as a relic. That’s a bit over the top, but, well, I am on vacation.

The covenantal understanding of the story of the Bible is the only one that stands up to coherently reading the whole story of God. The Baptist position does great harm to Biblical coherence.  In so doing removes the children of believers from the community of God’s people.  It also does harm to the significance of communion which is truly the sign, biblically, of the adult who has “searched himself” and partakes with Christ at his table.  The Baptist position does harm here as well by making the Communion table something that means little more than a once a month, or so, ritual of saltine scraps and warm juice concentrate.