Devotional 150: The Subjects of Baptism: Believers and Their Infant Children

The Confession Read

Not only those that do actually profess faith in and obedience unto Christ, but also the infants of one, or both, believing parents, are to be baptized.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 28, Section 4

Introduction

The minister's voice is low, and the congregation has grown still. In his arms lies a child too young to speak, too young to answer a single question of the catechism, too young even to lift her head from the blanket in which she is wrapped. She knows nothing of the promises that are about to be spoken over her. She cannot profess one syllable of faith, and she cannot yet feel the water that will soon touch her brow. And yet the font is prepared, the triune name is pronounced, and upon this little one the sign of the covenant is laid. Dear listener, if ever a single act of the church has divided Christians, it is this one. Some who watch think it tender but mistaken, a custom left over from an age that had not yet learned that religion must be a matter of personal, conscious choice. Others think it nearly magical, as though the water itself could wash a soul clean without a word of repentance. Both of these judgments miss the mark, and both of them were old errors long before the Westminster Assembly ever sat down to its work. In one carefully constructed sentence the divines swept aside both the scruple and the superstition, and in doing so they laid hold of something at the very heart of how God deals with men. He does not deal with us as isolated individuals who must each climb unaided to heaven. He deals with us in families, in households, in covenants; and from the very beginning the children of his people have stood inside that covenant, not outside it. This clause of the Confession is not a sentimental afterthought appended to the doctrine of baptism. It is the necessary conclusion of everything we have already learned about the covenant of grace and about the sacrament of initiation. Let us consider it carefully.

Scripture Foundation

We begin where Peter began, on the day of Pentecost, with a text that has been called the hinge of the whole question. The crowds had heard the gospel preached and were pricked in the heart, and they cried out, "Men and brethren, what shall we do?" Peter answered with the full counsel of the covenant: "Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost" Acts 2:38. That much any Baptist could preach. But Peter did not stop there. He pressed on with words that reach straight down into the nursery: "For the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call" Acts 2:39. The little word promise is the weight of the whole verse. In Greek it is epangelia, and every Jew standing in that crowd knew exactly which promise Peter meant. It was the promise God had sworn to Abraham, the promise that runs like a golden thread through the whole Old Testament: "I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations" Genesis 17:7. God had never dealt with Abraham as a solitary soul. He had bound Abraham and his seed together in one covenant, and the sign of that covenant, circumcision, was laid upon the male child when he was but eight days old, long before he could confess or even know anything at all Genesis 17:12. Now Peter stands before a new-covenant congregation and announces, with the breath of the Holy Spirit still fresh upon him, that the promise has not been narrowed but widened: it is to you and to your children. The Greek word translated children is tekna, and it means offspring, the little ones who come after you, your descendants. Peter does not say the promise is to you and to your children when they grow old enough to decide. He says it is to you and to your children, now, because they are your children and they stand with you inside the covenant. When the adults in that crowd came to the waters of baptism, the children were not left standing on the far bank. They were brought too, for the promise belonged to them as much as to their parents. Paul makes the same point from a different angle, and with a word that has stirred a thousand debates. Writing to a church where one spouse had come to faith while the other remained in unbelief, he says: "For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband: else were your children unclean; but now are they holy" 1 Corinthians 7:14. The word for holy is hagios, and the verb behind sanctified is hagiazō: to set apart, to consecrate, to mark off for God. Paul is not teaching, as Rome would later suppose, that a believing parent automatically regenerates a child by some physical transmission of grace. Nor is he teaching that every child of a believer is certainly elect. What he teaches is far more modest, and far more comforting: the children of even one believing parent occupy a distinct and privileged position. They are not outside the covenant, standing in the dark with the world. They are holy, set apart, brought within the sphere of God's covenant dealings, because one of their parents belongs to God. And if they are holy, if they are already set apart to the Lord by their birth into a believing home, then it is no strange thing that the sign of that holiness should be laid upon their brow. The question is not whether such children should be baptized, but rather on what ground anyone could dare to withhold from the covenant child the very sign of the covenant he already possesses. Then there is the scene our Lord himself enacted, and it is the tenderest proof of all. "They brought unto him also infants, that he would touch them" Luke 18:15. Luke chooses a precise word here, brephē, which means a babe at the breast, a nursing infant, the very youngest of the young. These were not children old enough to walk up to Jesus and answer questions about the kingdom. They were babies, carried in their mothers' arms. And when the disciples, in their spiritual pride, tried to turn them away, what did the Lord do? "But Jesus called them unto him, and said, Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God" Luke 18:16. Mark adds that he was "much displeased" with the disciples Mark 10:14, and that "he took them up in his arms, put his hands upon them, and blessed them" Mark 10:16. Think what this means. The kingdom of God belongs to infants, by our Lord's own declaration. They do not earn it, they do not understand it, they cannot even ask for it. And yet he says the kingdom is of such, and he lays his blessing upon them. Now if the kingdom belongs to these little ones, shall the church of Christ refuse to them the sign of entrance into that kingdom? If Christ opened his arms to infants, shall we close the door of the font against them? The Anabaptists of the Reformation era answered with a kind of logic that would have made the disciples blush: let the children wait until they can profess their own faith. Our Lord's answer still stands in the record against them: forbid them not. One more strand of evidence runs through the book of Acts, and it is so quiet that we might miss it if we were not watching for it. When Lydia, the seller of purple, received the gospel at Philippi, we read that "she was baptized, and her household" Acts 16:15. When the Philippian jailer believed that same night, we read that "he took them the same hour of the night, and washed their stripes; and was baptized, he and all his, straightway" Acts 16:33. The Greek word for household is oikos, and in the ancient world the oikos was not an empty word. It meant the whole family, the parents, the children, the servants, the infants, everyone who lived under one roof. Three thousand were baptized at Pentecost, and Scripture singles out for special mention that entire households were baptized at Philippi. Luke does not say the household was baptized except the children. He says the household, and he says all his. The early church evidently understood that when the head of a household came to Christ, the family came with him into the visible church, and the sign of the covenant was administered to the whole oikos. This is not an argument built on silence. It is a pattern woven through the very fabric of the New Testament: God deals with families, and the faith of the parent carries the household into the covenant. This household shape of God's dealings is no invention of the new covenant; it is the very grain of the biblical story from its opening chapters. When the flood was coming upon the earth, God did not say to Noah, Come thou into the ark, as though the patriarch were to be saved in solitude. He said, "Come thou and all thy house into the ark" Genesis 7:1. The covenant mercy that rested upon the man reached out to cover his whole household, and the door of the ark shut them all in together. The same pattern held when the deliverer brought Israel up out of Egypt, for the little ones were not left behind in the darkness; they went out with their fathers beneath the covenant blood of the Passover Exodus 12:26-27. It is not the covenant that has changed with the coming of Christ. It is only the sign, and the sign has not narrowed its reach to those who can speak for themselves. The God who shut Noah's household into the ark, and who sprinkled the blood upon the doorposts of the fathers and their children, is the God who now says to the believing parent: the promise is unto thee, and to thy children.

What the Divines Meant

The Westminster Divines were not writing in a vacuum. When they set down this single sentence, they had two living errors before their eyes, one on the left and one on the right, and the sentence is shaped to answer both. On the one side stood the Anabaptists and their spiritual descendants, who insisted that baptism belonged only to those old enough to profess a personal faith, and who called the baptism of infants an invention of man with no warrant in the word of God. Against them the divines argued that the covenant of grace has always included the children of believers, that the children of the covenant are holy by federal relation, and that the sign of the covenant, whatever its outward form, has always been administered to the seed. Circumcision was not for adults only. It was for the eight-day-old infant Genesis 17:12. Baptism has taken the place of circumcision as the sign of the covenant of grace, and what God commanded to be given to infants under the old administration he has not forbidden to infants under the new. The child of a believer does not become a member of the church by being baptized; he is baptized because, by his birth into a believing home, he is already a member of the covenant and of the visible church. On the other side stood Rome, which had made baptism a kind of charm, a rite that worked by its own automatic power, conferring regeneration upon the infant by the mere performance of the act. Against this the divines set their careful silence. Notice what this sentence does not say. It does not say that baptism regenerates the infant. It does not say that every baptized child is certainly saved. It says only that the infants of believing parents are to be baptized, and it says this because baptism is the sign and seal of the covenant, not the conveyor of an automatic grace. The child is received into the visible church, and the promises of the covenant are sealed to him, but whether those promises are inwardly and savingly applied rests in the secret counsel of God, to be unfolded in his own time. This is the very truth the next section of our chapter will press home, and the divines have already planted its seed here: the sign is not the thing signified. Notice also the precision of the phrase "one, or both, believing parents." The divines knew the hard case of a home where one parent trusts Christ and the other does not. Paul had already settled that case in Corinth: the believing spouse sanctifies the household, and the children are holy 1 Corinthians 7:14. So the child of even a single believing parent is not to be denied the sign. The covenant claim of the one believer reaches across the whole household. And mark the word believing. The divines do not say the infants of all parents everywhere are to be baptized, as though the church should sprinkle the whole world and call it a covenant. Nor do they say the infants of regenerate parents, for regeneration is a secret thing that no minister can read in another man's heart. They say believing parents: those who profess faith in and obedience unto Christ, and whose profession the church can see and judge. The outward criterion is profession of faith, and the children of those who profess are received with their parents into the visible church. Here is the sober balance of the Westminster mind: no magical regeneration, but a real covenant; no baptism of the whole world, but a baptism of the covenant family. There is also a quiet dignity in the word infants. The divines did not choose the word babies, or the word children, though either might have served. They chose infants, the very youngest, to close the argument completely. If the sign of the covenant belongs to the eight-day-old child, then there is no age at which a child may rightly be refused it, and no age at which he is too young to be received. The covenant does not wait upon a child's understanding. It embraces him from the first breath he draws.

Theological Depth

John Murray, in his study of Christian baptism, presses this covenant ground with a clarity that leaves very little room for evasion. Baptism, he insists, is first of all the sign and seal of the covenant of grace, and the covenant of grace has always been administered to believers and to their seed. The promise runs in a single unbroken line from the day God first spoke to Abraham: I will be a God to thee and to thy seed after thee. Murray argues that the burden of proof does not lie upon those who baptize infants. The entire history of God's dealings is one long testimony to the inclusion of children in the covenant, and if anyone would now exclude them, he must produce an express command of God annulling what God himself had established from the beginning. No such command exists. The New Testament nowhere revokes the ancient covenant order; it everywhere assumes it, and Peter's words on the day of Pentecost declare it afresh: the promise is to you and to your children. Calvin pressed the same argument against the Anabaptists of his own day with a passion that has not cooled in nearly five centuries. In the sixteenth chapter of the fourth book of the Institutes he reasons from the unchangeable character of the covenant itself. If God is the God of the seed, then the children of believers are not strangers to the covenant but heirs of it, and to withhold from the heir the sign of the inheritance is an act of injustice against the very ordinance of God. His most telling point is drawn from the words of Paul to the Corinthians. The children of believers are holy, Calvin writes, not because of their own faith, which as yet they have none, but because of the covenant promise in which they are comprehended with their parents. He adds a rebuke that still stings: if the children are holy, by what right do we treat them as profane and shut them out of the church? "If the covenant of God is common to the children," he asks, "why shall the sign be denied them?" The infant is not baptized that he may become a child of God. He is baptized because, by the promise and the birth that has placed him within a believing household, he is already accounted among the people of God. A. A. Hodge, in his commentary on the Confession, gathers the scriptural strands into a single cord. The covenant, he reasons, is not made with isolated individuals but with a man and his house; the church has always been a community of families; the sign of the covenant has therefore always belonged to the children of the covenant; and baptism, being the sign of the covenant under the new administration, belongs to the infant members of the church no less than circumcision belonged to the infant members of Israel. Hodge is careful to mark the boundary. The child is baptized, not upon the ground of his own faith, for he has none, but upon the ground of his covenant relation to God through his believing parent. He is received into the visible church as an heir of the promise, and the church then undertakes, before God, to bring him up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord until he makes the faith of his fathers his own. Turretin supplies the rigorous distinction that keeps the whole doctrine from slipping either way. Between the bare profession of the Anabaptist and the automatic grace of Rome there is a third thing, which he calls federal or covenant holiness. The child of believers is holy, not with an inherent, saving holiness, but with a federal holiness: he belongs to the covenant, he is separated from the world, he is under the special care and promise of God. Turretin insists that this federal holiness is the true ground of infant baptism, and that to confuse it with regeneration is to fall into the error of Rome, while to deny it is to fall into the error of the sectaries. The sign seals what the covenant promises, and the covenant promises are the child's from the cradle. Robert Shaw, in his Exposition of the Confession, reduces the whole matter to its plainest and most pastoral form. The infants of believing parents are to be baptized, he writes, because they are born within the covenant, because they are members of the visible church, and because they are federally holy. There is no mystery here that need trouble the tender conscience. The God who said "I will be a God to thee and to thy seed" has not forgotten his word. The child of a believer is the Lord's child, and the church, in baptizing him, does but acknowledge on earth what has been established in heaven. Owen adds one further note that steadies the whole matter. Working from that same text in First Corinthians, he reasons that the children of believers, being holy by covenant relation, are rightly to be accounted members of the visible church, and therefore rightly to receive the sign of that membership. The child does not claim the font on the strength of his own faith, which has not yet been born, nor on the strength of any inherent worth, for he has none. He comes on the strength of the covenant in which his believing parent stands. Owen keeps the vital distinction unblurred, as do all the sound divines: the child is in the covenant, and that is enough to warrant his baptism, while his salvation remains the secret and sovereign work of the Spirit in God's own appointed time. The parent may bring the child to the water with a clean conscience, and then commit the rest to the God who alone can make the sign come true.

Puritan Application

Notice first the tenderness of God toward the little ones of his people. The God who commanded that the eight-day-old son be brought to the covenant, the Christ who took infants up in his arms and blessed them, has not changed his heart toward the children of his people. If you are a believing parent, dear listener, then your children are not strangers to grace. The promise is to you and to your seed. Bring them to the font, then, not with a heavy and anxious heart, but with joy and holy hope, for you are not asking God to do something foreign to his nature; you are laying hold of a covenant that he himself established and swore to keep. The question is not whether your little one deserves the mercy, for no one deserves it, least of all we who are grown and ought to know better. The question is whether God has promised to be a God to you and to your children, and he has. Then weigh the obligation that baptism lays upon you. The sign is not a charm, and to bring your child to the font is not to be done with him. It is to bind yourself before God and his church to bring him up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord Ephesians 6:4. The water upon his brow is your own solemn vow: that you will teach him the word, that you will pray over him daily, that you will lead him by the hand to the cross until the day he takes hold of it for himself. A baptized child left unbidden to the world is a covenant broken, and the judgment of it falls first upon the parent. Guard against that most subtle of presumptions, which whispers that because the child is baptized he is safe and needs no further care. The sign does not save. It obliges. It calls your child to the very faith you profess, and it calls you to be the means of that call. Let every Sabbath, every family prayer, every answer you give to a child's question be the outworking of the vow you made at the font. There is comfort in the covenant for the grieving and anxious parent. There are mothers and fathers who lie awake at night over the souls of their children, wondering whether their little ones are in the ark. To such the covenant speaks peace. God has been pleased to place your children within the circle of his promise, to declare them holy, to number them among the visible people of his grace. This is not a ground for presumption, but it is a ground for hope, and it is no small thing. You may plead the covenant before the throne of grace as an argument with God himself: Lord, thou hast said the promise is unto me and to my children; do as thou hast said. For the parent who has laid a little one in the grave, this truth is a pillow in the valley of the shadow. We do not presume to read the secret counsels of God, but we may entrust our covenant children to the covenant-keeping God, and rest in the mercy of him who gathered the lambs in his arms and blessed them. Nor may we pass over the sin of despising the ordinance. The next section of this chapter will declare that it is a great sin to contemn or neglect baptism Luke 7:30. If the children of believers are to be baptized, then the parent who willfully withholds his child from the font, or who treats the sign as an indifferent ceremony that may be put off and put off, sins against the ordinance of God and against the covenant of grace. He robs his child of the sign of the promise, he robs the church of a member, and he treats as light what God has made holy. This is no mere matter of taste or of church custom. It is an act of obedience, or of disobedience, to the revealed will of God. Examine your own heart in this. If God has given you children, and you profess his name, have you brought them to the covenant? And if you have not, what does your delay say of your love for their souls? Finally, there is the recovery of the household in our day. The book of Acts records that when the jailer believed, his whole house was baptized, he and all his Acts 16:33. God would have our homes be little churches, our families be nurseries of grace, our tables be places where the faith of the parents overflows to the children. The baptism of infants is a standing witness against the individualism of our age, which would have every man stand alone before God. It declares that God still deals with houses, that the faith of a father and a mother may carry a whole generation into the covenant, and that a believing home evangelizes as nothing else does. Do not despise the nursery, as though the great work of the kingdom were done only in the pulpit. The covenant God who blessed the infants in the arms of their mothers is still at work in the cradles of his people, gathering his church from generation to generation, one household at a time.

Prayer

O thou who art the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who wast a God to thy servant and to his seed, we bless thee for the covenant thou hast made with us and with our children. We praise thee that the promise is not to us alone, but to our offspring, and that thou hast been pleased to number the little ones of thy people among the members of thy visible church. Thou who didst take the infants up in thine arms and lay thy hands upon them and bless them, we bring our children to thee now, for they are thine. We have signed them with the sign of the covenant, but the water cannot wash the soul; only thy Spirit can do that. Grant, O Lord, that the children of this congregation may not rest in the sign, but may come to the thing signified, even to the blood of Jesus Christ which cleanseth from all sin. Give to the parents of these little ones grace to keep the vow they made at the font, to teach, to pray, to warn, and to woo until their children know thee for themselves. Where faith is weak, strengthen it; where a home is divided, do thou stand as the covenant God of the believing one, and sanctify the household; where a parent grieves over a child, be thou the Shepherd who gathereth the lambs with his arm and carrieth them in his bosom. We confess that we have too often treated thy ordinance lightly, and too often trusted in the outward form while the heart went unbidden. Forgive us, we pray, and make us faithful in our generation. And hasten, O Lord, the day when all our children shall be taught of thee, and great shall be their peace. In the name of Jesus Christ, who was born of a woman and took little children in his arms, we pray. Amen.