Our children are members of the covenant people, but that does no guarantee that they are true members of the covenant people (the elect, or those in union with Christ).
Mike,
This statement I find confusing - if our children are part of the covenant, then why would you withhold baptism from them? Think of it this way, it's like saying, my child was born in the United States, but I don't know if he's really a citizen - and I'm just not willing to recognize him as a legitimate member of society until he expresses a credible profession of faith in Republican Government.
I was raised a baptist's baptist, one thing I noticed that really stuck out to me when I was working through the baptism issue when studying the Reformed Faith is that baptists are covenantal
toward the State.
They all see their children as legitimate members of society, and most will enumerate their babies into "social security" before they ever leave the hospital. While the ritual isn't the same, the idea is - one of communion and living in covenant community, it's just a statist communion. I don't know many baptists that don't get their infant children social security numbers - they don't say, "
Well, ya' know, I'm going to wait until they grow up and see if they really believe in socialism, then they can make a credible profession and join." No, the parents sign the SS-4 "under penalty of perjury" without a second thought, those little babies can't know or understand what is happening to them or what that does to their legal status or anything. Their future labor has just been pledged by their parents in service to the State, into something they might not even believe in and worst of all, it is completely and totally non-redemptive.
The question you need to ask yourself is Christ Lord or not? Who owns the children? God or the State? Why can a child receive all the signs and seals of citizenship in the civil realm, but not in the ecclesiastical? Why do baptists rail against receiving those signs and seals in the ecclesiastical but not in the civil?
This may be a little different approach to the issue than what you are used to hearing, but this was the lynchpin for me. As a baptist I never realized that I was actually a "paedobaptist" just as much as the "baby spinklers" I chided. I was just baptistic in the realm of the Church and paedobaptistic in the realm of the State. Once I realized that the issue of baptism was a
jurisdictional issue and not a soteriological one, the pieces fell in place for me.
If you are a believer, then your children are holy (1 Corinthians 7:14) - Christ is King and High Priest, He may not be every baptized childs intercessor, but He is their King whether they believe in Him or not. He has total Covenantal jurisdiction over them because they born unto Covenant members. Hence, we are commanded to baptize them - not asked to do it, commanded to do it. It's the law of our Lord no different than the law the baptist claims requires him to be covenantal toward social security.
The credo position, considered as a fully orbed doctrine, seems to me to postulate a Platonic division in the incarnation of Christ - and at root seems to be a form of Arminianism to me. It's an inversion of the parable of the wheat and tares - we know that the Lord commanded us not to pull up the tares, lest the wheat be uprooted also. Somewhere though, someone got the idea that if we try to make sure that no tares are planted, we've done a holy thing. Officially planted at least. All that does is destroys the unity of the Church by exempting children of believers from the jurisdiction of the Church, but make sure you bring those little heathens with you to every function, because we love children!
Anyway, you might consider expanding your thinking a little bit, are you going to rethink the credo position and apply it consistently to the whole person in every jurisdiction he lives in? Or are you just going to wrap baptism, the sign and seal of the
Covenant, the whole Covenant, in a
soteriological flag and miss the forest for the trees? Can Christ only be King to those He is High Priest unto, or is He priest to the elect only and King of all?
Christ is both God of very God and man of very man, two natures, one person - He is not divided against Himself, neither should we divide our children against Him pretending we can make His respective offices applicable in the present administration of His Covenant, by restricting the sign and seal of the Covenant to those that recognize His priesthood.
Cordially,
Thomas
