Thanks Bill.Rich, this not far removed from RB practice. Obviously, we only baptize those who profess faith in Christ. Like Presbyterians, we lack perfect knowledge. We cannot look into the soul and know for certain that anyone is saved. Besides a credible profession, we are looking for the evidence of faith in the life of a professed Christian. Things become a bit murkier with children that are raised in the church. Most confessional RB churches are different than the fundamentalist Baptist strain. There is a strong emphasis on a conversion experience in the fundamentalist camp (the camp I came out of). In many of the RB churches I am acquainted with there is more of an emphasis on confessing the truth as opposed to a moment-in-time conversion. For instance, a child grows up in an RB family and is exposed to the Gospel at home and church. Since RB churches are less likely to push for a decision, there may come an unrecognized time when the child comes to faith in Christ. The child grows up believing the Gospel and displays evidence of faith in their life. While no conversion experience can be pointed to, the child readily confesses the Christian faith and lives according to it. This becomes clearer when the professed believer submits to the waters of baptism. At that time they are publicly confessing their faith in Christ.
From my vantage the whole discussion about what the real supposition of Reformed Baptists (or Particular Baptists) is often obscured about points of disagreement where the RB is really trying to emphasize something about the Abrahamic or the Mosaic that they can point to in order to tie the circumcision of children to a historical imperfect dispensation of the Covenant of Grace. If you're a "1689 Federalist" you come at it a different way by really trying to say that all these other Covenants are not administrations of the Covenant of Grace but, again, the real aiming point against PB's is to say: "Look, there were Promises and such such that the elect were saved by the CoG in Christ but there's all this other historical stuff that is passing way. Notably, we have this circumcision thing that includes children but that's most formally about making sure that Jesus comes to earth historically in a people preserved from mixture."
Naturally, I'm summarizing it in a broad brush fashion but it's all aiming at the same thing: The NC is not like these old dispensations where you had imperfect and provisional things that loosely signified Christ. All we have now is the perfection of the NC with a perfect Mediator and ordinances that are no longer shadows but part of a fulfilled worship that brings us into the heavenly sanctuary.
OK, things aren't completely off the rails at this point. There's some truth to with Presbyterians could provisionally agree but RB's take this a step further and try to argue that the perfection of the NC somehow demands some sort of historical administration where God has somehow commanded the Church: "Look folks, I was OK with unbelievers being in my Covenant people in the OC because, hey, it was passing away. Times have changed now and part of your mission is to reduce the footprint, as much as is in you, to make sure that you never apply the sign of the NC to someone who just might turn out to be regenerate. Oh, and by the way, what better way to start than with your own children because you can't know for sure if they're regenerate and so you better not baptize them with a sign of regeneration until you have the maximal confidence of that reality. I know you're finite and so here's the best you can do: A mature profession of faith. I know you'll make some mistakes but I'm counting on you to at least make sure that everyone, even the children of believers, crosses this threshold of maturity so that you let in a few people as possible into membership into the local Church because I do not want my perfect NC to be visibly populated with people who might be unregenerate. Don't forget - children of believers are a sure way to reduce that population of the 'might be unregenerate.'"
I'm being a bit dramatic here and I hope it doesn't seem like I'm mocking. I'm trying to honestly express the logic of the matter. At the end of the day, the whole discussion about the nature of the NC brings you no closer than the Presbyterian on whom to baptize. We believe that the CoG was made with Christ and, in Him, all the elect. We believe that baptism does not convey the graces signified but is only sealed by the sovereign work of the Spirit. We believe the NC is the fulness of the CoG and that prior dispensations had types and shadows.
What puzzles me is how RB's can make the logical leap from the nature of the NC to the idea that, in the NC, God has commanded the Church to aim for a regenerate Church membership with profession as the goal. We can't find any verses that establish this and I've never really seen a GNC argument presented. I also question whether RB's really think that God was ever "OK" with unbelief at any time in history of Israel if it served some temporal purpose that Jesus would end up coming by a clear ethnic line. Last time I checked there were a lot of ways a person could be cut off and God did cut off people.
At the end of the day, the nature of the NC gets RB's no closer to excluding children from baptism. They regularly convince themselves of that fact but do not regularly defend the "OK, now what?" connection between what they think about the NC and baptizing their children.
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