One of the weirdest arguments for paedobaptism has become quite prominent in recent times. It goes like this.
Credobaptists (those who advocate for believer’s baptism) argue that the Bible doesn’t instruct us to baptise infants, therefore paedobaptists are arguing from silence. However, this assumes that the burden of proof is on the paedobaptist to prove that we should baptise babies. However, the first Jewish believers would have assumed that their children were already in the covenant and so it would have been a shock for them to discover that their children were excluded. Therefore, the burden of proof lies with credo-baptists to show why children are being excluded from the covenant.
It is worth noting a couple of things early on. First, when someone makes attacks a particular proposition and seeks to refute it, my first question is “Who is actually saying that?” So, who actually is saying that children should be excluded from God’s covenant. The mistake here is to assume that because some people are arguing for baptising infants that the opposite position is to baptise adults. However, the opposite position is not “baptise adults” but rather baptise believers. Age is not the issue, faith is.
Secondly, this particular paedobaptist argument does rely on the view that there is a continuity of covenant between old and new, that Christians are all grafted into the covenant with Abraham. If you believe in two distinct covenants, then the argument doesn’t even arise. I personally do believe in covenant continuity. However, I’m not sure that this makes too much difference to the outcome. Here’s why.
Those arguing that those first coverts would have been shocked to discover that their children were not included automatically in the covenant and were being booted out of something they already had mention of miss something vitally important. In Acts 2 and other places, the big question being asked is “What must we do to be saved” and the response is “Repent and be baptised.” In effect, this means that those hearing preachers like Peter on Pentecost were recognising that they were themselves at that time outside of the covenant blessings. They were living under curse and judgement. To be saved, was to receive the benefits of the covenant, to be brought by YHWH God back into his presence under his protection and provision as his people.
So at Pentecost, the people were not asking “what about my children” because they had a prior concern, “What about us.”
What they were recognising was that God had made a covenant promise to Abraham, a promise that would be passed on. However, the promise was not passed on through physical, ethnic, genetic descent. First, this was because the promise was specifically about and to Jesus. This meant that you benefited from the promise to and Abraham only in and through Jesus. This is the argument that Paul develops in Romans 9-11 and in Galatians. All the way back from Isaac over Ishamel and through Jacob over Esau, God was making it clear from the start that the covenant was not to do with ethnicity, not to do with physical descent but to do with faith in the promise.
This means that it was always the issue that those who did not have faith were therefore not the heirs of the covenant. Paul is clear that it didn’t matter if they were circumcised or not, it didn’t matter either whether or not they were physical descendants, “Abraham believed and it was credited to him as righteousness.”
The problem therefore is that this form of paedobaptist argument doesn’t just argue from silence, it actually goes against the overt argument made in Scripture.
Faithroots 