Trevor Laurence
Though there are a number of common arguments put forward in defense of credobaptism, the one that to my mind is the most biblically and theologically robust—and that presented the greatest challenge in my own years-long journey from credobaptism to paedobaptism—concerns the nature of the new covenant.
Jeremiah 31:31–34 proclaims of the new covenant:
[31] “Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, [32] not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the LORD. [33] For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. [34] And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
Verse 34 suggests a profound shift from the old to the new covenant community. Whereas the old covenant community comprised national Israel, including both those who trusted and those who rebelled against Yahweh and his promises, the new covenant community is made up of those who know the Lord by faith, who have been granted new hearts and the abiding internal presence of the Spirit (cf. Ezek 36:26–27).
Peter Gentry and Stephen Wellum work out the implications of this significant passage for the credobaptist position:
In the new covenant community, however, one does not become a member by physical birth but rather by the new birth, which requires faith on the part of every person. Thus only believers are members of the new community: all members are believers, and only believers are members. Therefore in the new covenant community there will no longer be a situation where some members urge other members to know the Lord. There will be no such thing as an unregenerate member of the new covenant community. All are believers, all know the Lord, because all have experienced the forgiveness of sins. . . .
Jeremiah 31:34 is important since it shows that the Presbyterian understanding is flawed. There are no covenant members who are not believers.1
The relevance to the question of baptism is clear. Baptism is a sign and seal of the new covenant, the initiation rite into the new covenant community. The new covenant community only includes believers. Ergo, only believers ought to receive the sign and seal of baptism. Despite paedobaptist arguments for the continuity of the covenants, insofar as paedobaptists contend that baptism is rightly applied to the unbelieving children of Christian parents such that unbelievers are intentionally admitted into the membership of the new covenant community, the practice of infant baptism appears to run at odds with Scripture’s teaching about the composition of God’s new covenant people.2
It is unsurprising, then, that credobaptists have frequently maintained that the typical contemporary covenant theological formulation in defense of paedobaptism “hasn’t fully accounted for the newness of the new covenant.”3
Nevertheless, my contention here is that this conception of the newness of the new covenant is not itself a defeater position for the practice of infant baptism. That is, I will suggest that one who believes that the new covenant community includes only those who trust the Lord and, consequently, that baptism should be reserved for those who trust the Lord ought to joyfully give the sign and seal of baptism to the children of Christian parents. And I will make this case from a perhaps surprising starting point—the psalms.
“You Made Me Trust You at My Mother’s Breasts”
The Psalter is full of heartfelt declarations of faith, but on a few occasions, the psalmists speak to Yahweh about the Godward trust they exhibited from the earliest moments of their existence.
In Psalm 22:9–10, David prays,
[9] Yet you are he who took me from the womb;
you made me trust you at my mother’s breasts.
[10] On you was I cast from my birth,
and from my mother’s womb you have been my God.
Perhaps because of the profound Christological resonances of Psalm 22, we might be tempted to pass quickly over the comparatively uneventful statements of vv. 9–10. But if we linger for a moment, we find David making a staggering claim.
Yahweh took David into his arms like a midwife from the moment of David’s birth, claiming possession of him from his entrance into the world. The Lord made the future king trust him even while David nursed at his mother’s breast, bringing David into an experience of faith in the earliest days of his infancy. David was cast upon the Lord, presumably by his faithful parents, from birth—thrown upon God, entrusted into the hands of Yahweh, by forces outside of his control. And yet David interprets the agency of God and parents in directing his newborn life not as an unwelcome imposition, but as a gift that precedes and empowers his agency toward God. The conclusion is that God has been his God from the womb, that he and the Lord have been bound in covenant relation even as David was being knit together in the hidden places.4
Integrating the declaration of infant faith with a Christological reading of Psalm 22, Charles Spurgeon inquires of these verses, “Was our Lord so early a believer? Was He one of those babes and sucklings out of whose mouths strength is ordained? So it would seem.”5 Indeed, for Jesus to live a full human life of faith—to sanctify womb and infancy and childhood—David’s greater son must have exhibited, and even exceeded, the early belief David professes in his prayer.
Lest we assume that David’s claim of infant faith is an utterly unique experience in Israel, the untitled and anonymous Psalm 71 prays a similar story to Yahweh:
[5] For you, O Lord, are my hope,
my trust, O LORD, from my youth.
[6] Upon you I have leaned from before my birth;
you are he who took me from my mother’s womb.
My praise is continually of you.
Like David in Psalm 22, the non-Davidic petitioner of Psalm 71 presents a collection of mutually interpreting images to describe his faith-full orientation to God from the dawn of his existence. The God who is the psalmist’s hope has been the psalmist’s trust from childhood. Pressing back even further, the psalmist maintains that trusting dependence has characterized his relationship with God from before birth. This petitioner leaned upon an other—as the smallest humans are so adept at doing—but the other upon whom he leaned was none other than Yahweh. In the psalmist’s telling of his personal history with the God who took him from his mother’s womb, the posture of faithful reliance that is true of his adulthood began as he was formed in the darkness, before his eyes ever opened.
These prayers proclaim to Yahweh without equivocation that the psalmists participated in the life of faith that befits the people of God from childhood, from infancy, even prior to birth. They were cast upon the Lord, taken by God unto himself from the womb, made to trust Yahweh at the breast, leaning upon God from the beginning, engaged in covenant relation with the Lord. Psalms 22 and 71 demonstrate that in at least two instances, the youngest and least developed of Israelites were involved in trusting God, believing God, from life’s first cry.
But here we must appreciate that the psalms are more than reports of the experiences of particular individuals. As the inspired songbook of Israel, the psalms are words from God given to animate the community’s words to God. The psalms put words in the worshiper’s mouth such that everyone who prays with the Psalter claims and appropriates the psalmists’ speech as his or her own. The psalms, then, are not merely individual reflections, and neither are they merely channels for personal expression—they are pedagogies of prayer that form our speech, affections, and imaginations before God.
As pedagogical prayers intended to be rehearsed by all of God’s people, Psalms 22 and 71 not only rehearse David’s and an anonymous psalmist’s infant faith in God but actively train every psalm-singer to narrate his or her own experience in like terms. These prayers shape Israelites born to faithful parents to conceptualize their personal histories as the field of God’s sovereign and gracious agency which elicited a disposition of trust from before they can consciously remember: “Yet you are he who took me from the womb; you made me trust you at my mother’s breasts. Upon you I have leaned from before my birth; you are he who took me from my mother’s womb.”
The Psalter’s proclamations of early belief exercise a norming function in the imaginations, memories, and personal narratives of God’s people. And insofar as Psalms 22 and 71 teach every singer raised in the covenant to interpret his experience of childhood and to tell her story of infancy as one defined by faith, they also teach fathers and mothers to interpret the experience and to tell the story of their children as one of lifelong participation in covenant trust.
The implicit anthropology of the psalms indicates that human beings made in the image of God for fellowship with God are capable of a kind of communion with God marked by dependence and trust even at the earliest stages of development—long before mature capacities for conscious deliberation and decision making have blossomed. The psalms do not share the modern notion that faith is essentially an individual, rational choice that can only be exercised by image-bearers who have attained certain degrees of cognitive and psychological development. Nor do they envision identity as something primarily constructed and decided upon by the uninfluenced, solitary, authentic “I.” In the psalms, identity is received from outside, not created within, as the individual first experiences the world and the self within the network of relationships, narratives, values, and commitments of a larger community. In the psalms, faith is an activity of the least and the littlest, a kind of orientation toward God into which one may be thrust and formed by divine grace and familial participation even as one grows up into more mature apprehension.
The individual brought up among God’s people who sings and prays the Psalter together with them will over time learn to adopt that psalmic anthropology in his self-conception and in her regard for the small ones in her midst. The community nourished and shaped by the Psalter will learn to regard their children as little believers who must be discipled to maturity in the faith.
Baptizing Baby Believers
When presented with the question, “When did you first believe?” it is not uncommon to hear an adult Christian say something like, “I was born into a Christian home, and I can’t remember a time when I didn’t believe.” This manner of narrating the past—so natural to so many—is precisely what the psalms envision and promote.
And this psalmic vision of children matches so many narratives of Christians born into believing families because it runs with the grain of God’s world. God has structured his creation such that the family is the first and principal context for the formation of a child’s most basic conception of the world and most fundamental loves and allegiances. It is no accident that, in general, children from their first words profess and embrace the faith and values of their parents. It is no accident that, for better or for worse, human beings spend their whole lives responding from and to the shaping that occurred in their youngest years.
Within the family, children are inducted into a storied vision of reality, discipled in household practices, instructed in self-understanding, oriented toward a particular understanding of the good, taught in every moment who or what is worth worshipping. Though sin results in families exercising their formative vocation in all sorts of distorted and sometimes traumatic ways, grace restores nature, and in the covenant family, God graciously works such that the creational design of the family forms the child to conceive of and inhabit the world as the domain of the living God. Just as God works concurrently with the laws of nature that he authored and upholds to keep the earth spinning, to make rain fall from heaven, and to give food from the ground, he very often works concurrently with the ordinary means of the faithful home to accomplish his gracious purposes for the salvation of sinners.
Significantly, the way that the Psalter teaches us to regard children nurtured from birth in the believing community is reflected in the way the New Testament talks about children as well.
In Eph 6:1, Paul directly addresses the smallest members of the congregation: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.” Paul notably does not commend naked obedience on the grounds of apostolic fiat. He calls the children of the church to obey their parents in the Lord—as fellow partakers of the gospel, as those united to Christ together with their parents by faith, as those for whom the good news of God’s grace in Jesus supplies both motive and power for obedience.
Elsewhere, Paul exhorts Timothy to persevere in the belief in and devotion to the Scriptures that he has exhibited his whole life:
But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy (ἀπὸ βρέφους) you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. (2 Tim 3:14–15, NIV)
Earlier in his letter, Paul expressed confidence that the “faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice…dwells in you as well” (2 Tim 1:5). And here, the apostle reminds Timothy that he has known God’s word—learned it, received it, entrusted himself to it—from his infancy, through the faithful discipleship of the women to whom God entrusted him. Paul conceptualizes Timothy’s experience not in terms of an incapacity for faith that finally gives way to conversion but in terms of familial faith into which he is born, by which he is shaped, through which he is inducted into the knowledge of the Scriptures that must continue and expand every subsequent day of his life.
The same term Paul uses to refer to the smallest of children occurs in Luke 18:
Now they were bringing even infants (βρέφη) to him that he might touch them. And when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. But Jesus called them to him, saying, “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. (vv. 15–16, ESV)
When Jesus is approached with infants, he bids them welcome and announces that the kingdom of God belongs to them. In almost psalmic fashion, parents bring their children to Jesus to cast them upon the Lord from their birth, and the Son of God receives them as inheritors of the kingdom he is bringing by his life, death, and resurrection. The fact that John the Baptist is filled with the Holy Spirit of God from his mother’s womb (Luke 1:15) and as an unborn child responds by leaping for joy at the presence of the unborn Christ (Luke 1:41, 44) only underscores the reality that God’s works and gifts may extend even into the womb.
If the psalms teach us to regard the children of believers as little believers themselves—a perspective that is shared by the New Testament’s treatment of children—and if the sign and seal of the new covenant is rightly applied to everyone for whom we have scriptural grounds to regard as Christians, then the children of believing parents ought to be baptized not as potential Christians who might grow up into faith and repentance but as presumed Christians who are to grow up and be nurtured in the faith and repentance that we regard, on the authority of God’s word, as in some manner already present.
Of course, not every child of Christian parents will follow the Lord and confess the faith when they enter adulthood. Some will forsake the gospel and run after other gods. But a charitable, generous, hopeful, and—as I have argued—scriptural judgment of our children will lead us to regard them as brothers and sisters, baptize them, and live with them as those who belong to Jesus until they show themselves to be unbelievers by their willful abandonment of Christ and his church—much as we receive adult converts by profession until unrepentance manifests the falseness of their alleged faith. Epistemic uncertainty about the actual status of the individual is an inescapable reality of every baptism, regardless of the age of the one baptized (cf. Acts 8:13–24). There is always the chance that we are wrong in regarding another as a Christian. It is not given to us to know the heart of another. But church discipline, not the withholding of baptism, is the way the church is to address our incomplete knowledge and the presence of unbelievers in our midst: we charitably receive as believers those whom we have biblical grounds to regard as Christians, and we remove from the fellowship of the church in the event that any does not continue in the faith.6
In baptism, Christian parents who have cast their children upon the Lord in faith and prayer proceed to cast their children upon the Lord in action, marking them out from the world as members of the household of faith, as those who trust Jesus at their mother’s breast, as tiny Christians.7 If we follow the psalms’ lead and regard our children as little participants in the covenant who lean upon the Lord from their earliest days, exercising the kind of dependence of which even the smallest among us is capable, then every infant baptism is a believer’s baptism.
Such a conception brings clarity to the numerous household texts in the book of Acts. Lydia’s heart is opened to attend to Paul’s words, and she is baptized, “and her whole household as well” (16:15). Paul and Silas preach to the Philippian jailer “and to all who were in house” (16:32), and he is baptized at once, “he and all his family” (16:33), and the entire household rejoices together in the jailer’s faith (16:34). In Corinth, a synagogue ruler named Crispus believes in the Lord “together with his entire household” (18:8) as many Corinthians believe and are baptized. An angel tells Cornelius that Peter will visit him: “he will declare to you a message by which you will be saved, you and all your household” (11:14), and the whole company is baptized (10:47–48).
Rather than making the altogether implausible suggestion that these ancient households in which everyone was baptized contained no infants or young children, and rather than bypassing Luke’s testimony that entire households believed the gospel prior to baptism, we may conclude that the pattern in Acts is for whole households—including the children—to be baptized because whole households—including the children—are regarded as believers in the apostolic word. Insofar as young children are understood as little participants in the orientation and trajectory of their families, we may say as unapologetically as Luke that entire households believed and were baptized.
Importantly, this understanding of Scripture’s teaching on the place and agency of children in the covenant family shifts the pivotal question before us in our considerations of infant baptism. The question is not, Ought we to baptize non-believing children into the new covenant community or grant baptism only to believers? Rather, it is, How will we regard our children? Will we regard them as non-believers until they undergo a conscious conversion experience and are able to supply a mature profession of faith? Or will we regard our children as Scripture teaches us to regard them—as little believers who must grow up into conscious apprehension of the God upon whom they’ve been thrust—and grant them the baptism that is rightfully due every Christian?8
How we answer this question has profound implications for the life of the church. If children are assumed to be non-believers until they reach the developmental capacity to offer a quasi-adult articulation of faith and are admitted to baptism, what of those children who in God’s providence will never possess those capacities? Disability may prevent certain image-bearers, despite advances in age, from ever consciously comprehending the gospel, cognitively understanding speech, forming words of their own, or intentionally engaging in meaningful communication. Are those children incapable of trusting Jesus, incapable of being Christians, incapable of experiencing the salvation that comes through faith? Are they forever barred by disability from the waters of baptism and inclusion among God’s covenant people?
Other children will never see adulthood, whether because of miscarriage, disease, or some other tragedy that cuts their fragile lives short. Most communities rightly seek solace in the hope that the perished children of Christian parents are with the Lord, but if a church will not mark children out as belonging to the Lord in baptism because they have not met criteria of consciously cognitive credible belief, how can that church comfort grieving parents that their little ones belong to the Lord in glory when the unspeakable occurs? To treat living children as non-Christians and yet treat departed children as heirs of Christian hope presents no small tension.
If, however, we regard our children as the psalms and the New Testament do, as baby believers cast upon the Lord, disability will be no barrier to baptism. Recognizing that the faith the psalmists profess of their own infancy is a kind of dependent trust in the person of Yahweh that even the most cognitively immature may exercise, a trust that itself develops as the image-bearer’s capacities develop, we will receive our disabled children as little brothers and sisters in the Lord who are exhibiting faith according to their providentially-ordained abilities, and we will baptize them as those precisely to whom Jesus’ kingdom belongs. And if we regard and baptize believers’ children as little Christians, then when they are taken from us, there will be no shadow of inconsistency in our confidence that they are indeed with the God upon whom they leaned from before their birth.
Our answer will also inform the everyday ways we parent those entrusted to our care. Where children are presumed to be unbelievers until they satisfactorily demonstrate otherwise, they must be parented as unbelievers and cautioned from too quickly understanding themselves as belonging to the Lord. A child’s prayer may be correct in substance, but it will be regarded in actuality as ineffective and unacceptable to God because unconnected to the mediation of Jesus. A child may be taught to obey God’s word, but she will not be taught to obey from the security and thanksgiving the gospel empowers because she is not perceived as a gospel believer. A child may express in childish ways love and trust toward Jesus, but his immature overtures of faith will be received with suspicion and skepticism until he is older and able to articulate more precisely; he will be encouraged not to conceive of himself as a Christian just yet; he will be treated as an outsider in need of conversion, perhaps exasperatingly so, despite embracing according to his capacity the faith of his household.
But where children are presumed to be Christians together with us, we teach them to pray, “Our Father,” as those for whom such words are truly true, and we instill in them the confidence that God accepts their little prayers through the mediating work of Jesus. We proclaim the gospel to their hearts to draw forth their worship, and we help them walk in the obedience that such gospel-animated worship makes possible. We receive their overtures of Godward faith and love as genuine expressions of a growing trust, as Spirit-empowered ministries from the most easily overlooked members of Christ’s body. We train them in the rhythms of repentance and faith which we too must embrace and inhabit in new depths daily. In such a home, Christian parenting is an exercise in the discipleship of tiny believers, a walking alongside our children on the path toward maturity which is every Christian’s journey.
Recovering the Forgotten Tradition
Though it does not appear widely in contemporary discussions of infant baptism, the notion that the children of believers are to be regarded and baptized as little believers themselves has a rich history in the Reformed tradition.9
In the fourth volume of his acclaimed Reformed Dogmatics, Herman Bavinck draws his extended defense of infant baptism to a close thus:
All these considerations abundantly demonstrate the legitimacy and hence the duty of infant baptism. For if the children of believers are to be regarded as Scripture teaches us to regard them, then, according to the divine institution of baptism, they have a legitimate claim to this sacrament in the same measure as, and even in greater measure than, adults who make profession of faith. Certainly, in neither of these cases can we obtain absolute certainty. We can no more judge the hearts of senior members of the church than we can the hearts of infants. The only possibility left for us who are bound to externals is a judgment of charity. According to that judgment, we consider those who make profession of faith to be believers and give them access to the sacraments. By that same judgment we count the children of believers as themselves believers because they are included with their parents in the covenant of grace.10
Louis Berkhof quotes the Conclusions of Utrecht of the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands:
And, finally, as far as the fourth point, that of presumptive regeneration, is concerned, Synod declares that, according to the confession of our Churches, the seed of the covenant must, in virtue of the promise of God, be presumed to be regenerated and sanctified in Christ, until, as they grow up, the contrary appears from their life or doctrine…and that further the judgment of charity, with which the Church presumes the seed of the covenant to be regenerated, by no means intends to say that therefore each child is really regenerated, since the Word of God teaches that they are not all Israel that are of Israel, and it is said of Isaac: in him shall thy seed be called (Rom. 9:6, 7), so that in preaching it is always necessary to insist on serious self-examination, since only those who shall have believed and have been baptized will be saved.11
Abraham Kuyper proposes a similar position:
In our days Baptism is generally conceived of as being administered in hope of subsequent regeneration, whereas Calvinists have always taught that Baptism should be administered on the presumption that regeneration has preceded. In those days people still had an insight into the organic character of the work of God, and were taught to make a clear distinction between the various parts of the plant of faith. First there was the seed of faith, by which the power to believe is implanted in the sinner, coinciding with regeneration proper; further from this seed by a second work of grace the stem of faith is made to sprout, which then is seen to bud in conversion and finally to bear fruit in the works of faith. Now, of course, with an infant every act of faith, or budding of faith, or sprouting of faith is excluded. We may speak, however, in such a case of a seed of faith. Where this seed of faith or the faculty of faith has been implanted, regeneration has taken place, and, in case of death, salvation will follow—things which constitute a clear title to the seal of the covenant and Holy Baptism.
On these grounds Calvinists have taught: 1. That children of believers are to be considered as recipients of efficacious grace, in whom the work of regeneration proper has already begun. 2. That accordingly they are to receive Baptism as being sanctified in Christ. 3. That, when dying before having attained to years of discretion, they can only be regarded as saved. Of course, Calvinists never declared that these things were necessarily so. As they never permitted themselves to pronounce an official judgment on the inward state of an adult but left the judgment to God, so they have never usurped the right to pronounce absolutely on the presence or absence of spiritual life in infants. They only stated how God would have us consider such infants, and this consideration based on the divine Word made it imperative to look upon their infant children as elect and saved, and to treat them accordingly.12
Geerhardus Vos cites numerous theologians who assume in principle that the children of Christian parents “possess the Holy Spirit from their earliest childhood and so are born again and united to Christ”:13
Ursinus says: “This is sure and certain, that God instituted his sacraments and covenant seals only for those who recognize and maintain the church as already made up of parties of the covenant, and that it is not His intention to make them Christians by the sacraments first, but rather to make those who are already Christians to be Christians more and more and to confirm the work begun in them. . . . Hence, if anyone considers the children of Christians to be pagans and non-Christians, and damns all those infants who cannot come to be baptized, let him take care on what ground he does so, because Paul calls them holy (1 Cor. 7), and God says to all believers in the person of Abraham that He will be their God and the God of their seed. . . . Next let him consider how he will permit them to be baptized with a good conscience, for knowingly to baptize a pagan and unbeliever is an open abuse and desecration of baptism. Our continual answer to the Anabaptists, when they appeal to the lack of faith in infants against infant baptism, is that the Holy Spirit works regeneration and the inclination to faith and obedience to God in them in a manner appropriate to their age, always with it understood that we leave the free mercy and heavenly election unbound and unpenetrated” (quoted in Südhoff, Olevianus und Ursinus, pp. 633f.). . . .
Junius argues against the Anabaptists: “We call it false to argue that infants are completely incapable of faith; if they have faith in the principle of the habitus, they have the Spirit of faith. . . . Regeneration is viewed from two aspects, as it is in its foundation, in Christ, in principle, and as it is active in us. The former (which can also be called transplanting from the first to the second Adam) is the root, from which the latter arises as its fruit. By the former elect infants are born again, when they are incorporated into Christ, and its sealing occurs in baptism” (Theses Theologicae, LI, 7).
Walaeus writes in his disputation on baptism: “We reject the opinion of the Lutherans who tie the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit to the external water of baptism in such a way that, either it is present in the water itself or at least the principle of regeneration will only work in the administration of baptism. This, however, is opposed to all the places in Scripture, where faith and repentance and hence the beginning and seed of regeneration are antecedently required in the one who is baptized. . . . Therefore, we do not bind the efficacy of baptism to the moment in which the body is sprinkled with external water; but we require with the Scriptures antecedent faith and repentance in the one who is baptized, at least according to the judgment of love, both in the infant children of covenant members, and in adults. For we maintain that in infants too the presence of the seed and the Spirit of faith and conversion is to be ascertained on the basis of divine blessing and the evangelical covenant” (Synopsis Purioris Theologiae, XLIV, 27, 29).
Similarly Cloppenburg argues against the Anabaptists: “We posit that the children of believers are incorporated into Christ by the immediate secret work of the Holy Spirit, until, whether in this life or at the moment of death, the period of infancy is completed, so that, whether in the flesh or not, they may confess by faith or sight what God has given them and us together by grace” (Exercitationes, I, 1097).14
Herman Witsius contends, “Still God has given that pledge to pious parents that they may regard their little ones as the children of God by gracious adoption, until, when further advanced, they betray themselves by indications to the contrary, and that they may feel not less secure regarding their children dying in infancy than did Abraham and Isaac of old.”15 And John Calvin, responding to the objection that “baptism is a sacrament of repentance and faith,” maintains of the infant children of Christian parents that “even though these [repentance and faith] have not yet been formed in them, the seed of both lies hidden within them by the secret working of the Spirit.”16
Tracing this conception of covenant children through the Reformed tradition from Calvin to the Westminster Standards, Lewis Bevens Schenck refers to presumptive regeneration as “the historic doctrine of the Presbyterian Church concerning the significance of infant baptism.”17 Schenck laments that, though the church has inherited a “glorious doctrine” from her forebears, “the church as a whole does not know it. The historic doctrine of the church concerning children in the covenant and the significance of infant baptism has been to a large extent secretly undermined, hidden by the intrusion of an aberration from this doctrine.”18
Should this chorus of voices be correct, then a conception of covenant children that regards them as little believers—however foreign it may be to contemporary paradigms—is not an innovation within the Reformed tradition but is indeed the originating stream of the tradition. And in this originating stream, the newness of the new covenant that is appealed to in the best credobaptist objections is not elided but upheld.
If we recover the vision of our children commended to us within the Psalter, assumed in the New Testament, and explicated in Reformed thought, we may perhaps find that our baptismal divisions can be bridged in new covenant waters that baptize believers, including the smallest believers among us.
Trevor Laurence is the Executive Director of the Cateclesia Institute and the author of Cursing with God: The Imprecatory Psalms and the Ethics of Christian Prayer (Baylor University Press, 2022).
Image: Anthony van Dyck, Let the Children Come to Me
- Peter J. Gentry and Stephen J. Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant: A Biblical-Theological Understanding of the Covenants (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), 510. Emphasis original.[↩]
- Cf. Erroll Hulse, “Where I Buried Old Erroll Hulse: A Journey in Believer’s Baptism,” in Why I Am a Baptist, ed. Tom J. Nettles and Russell D. Moore (Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 2001), 79–80.[↩]
- Stephen Wellum, “Best Defense of Reformed Paedobaptist Covenant Theology—Review: ‘Covenant Theology: Biblical, Theological, and Historical Perspectives,'” The Gospel Coalition, November 13, 2020, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/best-defense-reformed-paedobaptist-covenant-theology/.[↩]
- Cf. J. Clinton McCann, Jr., “The Book of Psalms,” in vol. 4 of The New Interpreter’s Bible (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 763.[↩]
- Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Psalms (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1976), 102.[↩]
- See Vern Sheridan Poythress, “Indifferentism and Rigorism,” WTJ 59, no. 1 (1997): 13–29. Available at https://frame-poythress.org/indifferentism-and-rigorism/.[↩]
- See Vern S. Poythress, “Linking Small Children with Infants in the Theology of Baptizing,” WTJ 59, no. 2 (1997): 143–58. Available at https://frame-poythress.org/linking-small-children-with-infants-in-the-theology-of-baptizing/.[↩]
- The shift from the old to the new covenant community, then, is not a move from the inclusion of children to the exclusion of children but from the inclusion of children in households connected to Abraham’s physical line to the inclusion of children in households connected to Abraham’s promise-fulfilling seed, Jesus Christ.[↩]
- See, e.g., Michael Lynch, “Presumptive Regeneration: An Untold Story,” Modern Reformation, January 15, 2021, https://modernreformation.org/resource-library/web-exclusive-articles/presumptive-regeneration-an-untold-story/. Several of the exemplars of this position cited below were brought to my attention by Lynch’s illuminating essay.[↩]
- Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 4:530–1.[↩]
- Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 4th ed. (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1939), 640. Emphasis original.[↩]
- Abraham Kuyper, “Calvinism and Confessional Revision,” The Presbyterian and Reformed Review 7 (July 1891): 388. Emphasis original. I have inserted a paragraph break for ease of reading.[↩]
- Geerhardus Vos, “The Doctrine of the Covenant in Reformed Theology,” available at https://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/sdg/vos_covenant.html.[↩]
- Ibid.[↩]
- Herman Witsius, “On the Efficacy and Utility of Baptism in the Case of Elect Infants Whose Parents Are Under the Covenant,” trans. William Marshall, ed. and rev. J. Mark Beach, MJT 17 (2006): 128. Available at http://www.midamerica.edu/uploads/files/pdf/journal/17-witsius.pdf.[↩]
- John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1960), 4.16.20 [2:1342–3].[↩]
- Lewis Bevens Schenck, The Presbyterian Doctrine of Children in the Covenant: An Historical Study of the Significance of Infant Baptism in the Presbyterian Church (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1940), 3. The quote is from the title of Schenck’s chapter.[↩]
- Ibid., 158.[↩]