Spark Notes from the Baptism Q&A

For those who were unable to attend the Baptism Q&A but may be interested in the spark notes, you can find them below. There were common threads in the questions that we’ve distilled for streamlined consumption.

1-Are the children of believers covenant children by virtue of their parentage or by virtue of their baptism? What is the status of an unbaptized believer’s child?

God gives believers children so that we can give them back to Him. He has already claimed them (Gen. 17:7); we honor and acknowledge that claim when we hand them over in baptism. For the period of time that a believer’s children remain unbaptized, those children are denied something that we believe God desires to give them. So the children of believers are covenant children which is why they ought to receive their birthright: baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and full communion with the saints, as saints.

2-What about rebaptism? If a child is baptized as an infant, but later comes to personal faith and wants to be baptized, should they be?

We do not believe that they should. We believe that baptism is initiatory, not confirmational. It is the beginning of the discipleship journey, not a way of marking a particularly glorious stop on that journey. Baptism marks you as one of God’s people and incorporates you into the body of Christ. That only needs to happen once.

3-What, if anything, does baptism have to do with eternal salvation/security?

The Bible unashamedly connects water baptism to salvation (1 Peter 3:18-22). Not because water applied to the body in the name of the Father, Son, and Spirit has some kind of magical effect, but because God has determined to use water applied to the body in the name of the Father, Son, and Spirit to bring a person into the body of Christ, the Church. And it is in the Church where God has deposited the riches of salvation and every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. To be placed in the Church is to be given a real share in the life and gifts of Christ’s body and therefore to be positioned for final salvation—though, sadly, not all who come into Christ remain in Christ.

4-If I’ve come to the conviction of Paedobaptism and I have some older children who are baptized and some younger children who are not—since we missed the infancy window, should we now wait for a profession of faith prior to baptism?

Maybe. It depends on the age and development of the child. We believe that Baptism and the Supper belong to the child and ought to be given. When our children are little we don’t ask them if they want a bath and we don’t ask them if they’d like to eat—we simply bathe and feed them. As they age, that dynamic changes and their agency and will matter more than they did when they were toddlers. If a child actively protests baptism and rejects Christ, that child ought not be baptized against his will. But any older children in a faithful Christian household who willingly consent to baptism ought to be baptized. God claims the children of believers as His own—we’re meant to give them to Him in baptism.

5-You guys (CC Elders) are appealing to the Old Covenant to explain how the New Covenant functions, but doesn’t Hebrews, quoting Jeremiah, say that the New Covenant isn’t like the Old Covenant?

All Christians grant that there is both similarity and difference between the Old and New Covenants. Paul says that what happened to the Old Covenant saints was written down as an example for New Covenant Christians (1 Cor. 10:6, 11), so clearly the New Covenant is not new enough for the Old Covenant to be irrelevant. Furthermore, the categories of the Old Covenant are used to explain what’s happening in the New Covenant—we’ve been made priests, we’re a holy nation, we offer sacrifices to God—these are all Old Covenant categories that apply to New Covenant realities. The New Covenant has transformed and transfigured these things, but we can see plainly that it has not done away with them. This means that the language of Jeremiah 31 and Hebrews 8 is 1) not exhaustive, because clearly not everything in the New Covenant is unlike the Old Covenant, and 2) it is hyperbolic. When Aladdin meets Jasmine it’s “a whole new world,” despite a bunch of things remaining the same. Similarly, Jesus mediating the New Covenant changes everything, despite a bunch of things remaining the same.