Lesson 8 - The Subjects of Baptism

Question 1

What is the argument for Infant Baptism?

Answer 1

Ligon Duncan:

1. ) Is baptism a covenant sign?
2. ) Are the children of believing parents part of the community of the covenant of grace under the new covenant like they were under the old?
3. ) If God gave promises and a sign to believers and their children in the Old Testament, should we give the sign of the promises that he makes to believers and their children in the New Testament, to both believers and their children?
4. ) From the beginning of God’s redemptive plan, God has graciously embraced believers and their children in his covenant.
5. ) This covenantal embrace of believers and their children is an expression of God’s exorbitantly gracious character, a character that is unchanging.
6. ) In the eschatological realization of God’s promises in the New Covenant, God continues to graciously embrace believers and their children in his covenant.
7. ) If the covenant promises belong to the children of believers, then the covenant sign belongs to the children of believers as well.
8. ) In sum, infant baptism is one of the signs that the New Covenant provides the ultimate realization of God’s paradigmatic, foundational, and irrevocable promise: “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Gen 12:3)

Question 2

What is the argument against infant baptism?

Answer 2

1. ) The pattern
2. ) The meaning of baptism
3. ) The New Covenant brings a change in the nature, structure, and therefore administration of the covenant
4. ) The significance of Abraham’s physical offspring is fulfilled in Christ, who is Abraham’s physical offspring
5. ) The abrogation of the covenant family in the Church, which is the family of God
6. ) The mode of baptism: immersion

Question 3

How does Booth address the “household” in scripture to argue for infant baptism?

Answer 3

“Families fell in Adam, and it is families that God will redeem from the fall.”

• • The OT society was ordered by God and was dominated by the household and tribal structure.
• • God makes covenants iwth people and their household
• • The OT emphasis on the covenant household continues in the NT.
    1. An elder must manage his household (1 Tim. 3:4)
    2. Feeding of the 5,000 – by household
    3. It was normal to think terms of covenantal family units.
    4. 9 people were baptized in the NT (2 were unmarried, two unknown, 5 head of households) In every single case where a known head of a household believed and was baptized, we are told that the entire household was also baptized).

–The family unit, or covenant household, is central to God’s work of redemption in both the old and the new covenants as he continues to set apart believers and their children.

Question 4

How does Venema argue against paedobaptism as encouraging nominalism and complacency?

Answer 4

1. ) There’s a difference between a proper and improper use of the sacrament.
   - - Improper practice is that many churches baptize believers and their children, but fail to emphasize the obligations of faith & repentance in baptism. The privileges of covenant membership do not diminish, but rather accentuate, the responsibilities of the covenant.
   - - The argument of infant baptism produces nominalism could equally well be used against the OT practice of circumcision.
   - - The practice of believer’s baptism does not ensure against nominalism.

Question 5

What does Bierma identify as the common themes in the confessional texts for infant baptism?

Answer 5

1. ) The Covenantal Unity of the Old and New Testaments
   - - The church of Christ is not just a NT phenomenon, but “has existed from the beginning of the world and will last to the end.”
   - - From the beginning, children were involved in the covenant community and received the sign of the covenant promises. There is a covenantal basis for infant baptism.
2. ) The Unique Status of the children of believers
   - - By their baptism, the children are formally recognized as members of a peculiar people, a special community in which God has promised to work graciously through the corporate relationships in which his people exist and to extend his salvation through the generations.

Question 6

How does Strawbridge relate the spirituality of circumcision to baptism?

Answer 6

1. ) No spiritual qualification was necessary in order to receive circumcision. (Gen. 17)
2. ) Those who speak of circumcision only being a “national sign” are mistaken, since Ishmael received the sign, yet was not in the nation of Israel (Gen. 17:20-25)
3. ) In the Biblical theology of Genesis, circumcision had a spiritual significance, since in the covenant of circumcision (Acts 7:8) the Lord is to be God to you and to your descendants after you.
4. ) Circumcision was a sign and seal of the righteousness of faith to Abraham, and he himself administered this seal of the righteousness of faith to many of his own children, it is all the more certain that these circumcisions represented to Abraham what was spiritually significant and covenantally promised.

Question 7

How does Wilson define a “theology of children?”

Answer 7

• • Both the OT and NT unite in teaching that children are a blessing, that they are to brought up within the covenant of God, and that God promises his kindness to them and to their children in turn.
• • God has placed our children in our presence, and we are in covenant with the God who has done so. We will either treat our children as though they are in this covenant together with us, and teach them terms of it, or we will treat them as strangers to that covenant, as outsiders.