The baptism of children: for the beauty of the earth (and anxious parents).
“The Bible gives us baptism because it is a far different thing for a child to learn faithfulness from inside the home than learning faith performance from the outside, trying to get inside.”
Sometimes as parents we say things we don't really mean. Of course we all do this. We say things like, "I want my kids to figure out what they believe for themselves," or "I want them to come to their own belief in Jesus." But the reality is that no Christian parent does this - we don't want them to come to faith by themselves or in whatever they want, we want to seal them into those things that matter most.
But if we desperately need God’s help to save us, what hope do we have of saving our own children? We can’t. The Bible deals with this heartbreaking reality by showing us that where we fail, God is able. This is why we baptize our children.
Baptism is either a story of divine transformation, or of divine welcome. Both stories are beautiful, and the Christians who tell one story or the other are deeply committed to it. While I believe the Bible tells a baptism story of divine welcome, I can fully appreciate how lovely it is to understand baptism as the outer sign of a profound inner transformation. There are those in my own congregation who tell the first story, many who tell the second story. I love them all, and am so grateful they can worship in the same church. Both are great stories and are a part of the Christian story, but only one is the story of baptism.
When I think of why God would welcome children the way he welcomes adults in to the Church I think of a room, a place of real beauty. The room has the people who mean the most to you and they're enjoying one another. The truths you tell are more true, the vulnerability you feel is not frightening but heartwarming. You are safe. There are two ways to experience that room: from the inside, or from outside, through the window. The Bible gives us baptism because it is a far different thing for a child to learn faithfulness from inside the home than learning faith performance from the outside, trying to get inside.
The hope for children before Jesus was that a circumcised flesh would lead to a circumcised heart. That these Hebrew boys would grow up to have changed hearts, and that by their faithful living and obedience both men and women would come to trust in God. God took a male-led, representative community and he circumcised it in order that they would be holy for the sake of the whole world: men, women, children, the elderly, the outsider, the sojourner (Gen 12.3, 18.18, 26.4, 28.14). The sign and seal of divine welcome into the community ensured that parents treated them not like their property but like beloved members of the covenant, so that the rituals of faith would “circumcise” their child’s heart. Baptism has the same future hope, the same mission of good for the world.
So what was God’s plan, how was he going to overcome our inability to seal our own kids? He would elevate the place of children as participants in the covenant, and would act through whole families, or households, to gather these children to himself, adopting them into his care.
““The household itself is an institution of God, an organic whole, which shares in a common blessing or a common curse.” -Herman Bavinck”
The Bible has a unique view of children. Children are counted with their parents as prospering or suffering together (Exod 20.5-6; Deut. 4.40). Together children and parents even serve the Lord (Deut 6.2, 30.2; Josh. 24.15). The covenant is generational, working through families (Genesis 9.12, 17.7; Ex. 3.15). The reformer Theodore Beza puts it this way, “For the infants of believers their first and foremost access of salvation is the very fact of their being born of believing parents.” From the perspective of the Scriptures the children of Christians are clearly not spiritual “neutrals” and they are not the seed of the Devil. Paul addresses the children of believers as “holy,” that is, near to God in a special way, while the children of parents without faith were not viewed the same way (1 Cor 7.14). The presence of a believing parent changed their status. This is one reason why the Church of Jesus has historically championed the cause of adoption: they understood that they were not only giving a child a “good home,” but they were bringing the child into God’s home. A truth realized by many adopted Christian children, and their children’s children, to this very day.
Jesus himself makes clear children are not only heirs but participants in the New Covenant. They are welcomed to him directly (Matthew 19.14; 21.15-16; Mark 10.13; Luke 9.48), so that he can build their faith and bring them to belief in Him. Jesus defends the spirituality of these little ones - not because they're already believers, but because they already belong.
The household baptisms in Acts 16 and 18, and 1 Corinthians 1.16 show us how God intends to gather children on into the New Testament. Now the one who believes in infant baptism often says there must have been small children and babies in one of these houses that were baptized! Meanwhile the one inclined against infant baptism sees “household” to indicate a breakout of faith for the adults in the home, proving nothing about children at all. That view is harder to maintain when we see how God counts children as special persons and part of the “household” throughout the Bible. When the Bible says household, it counts children.
The theologian Herman Bavinck puts the issue well: “The household itself is an institution of God, an organic whole, which shares in a common blessing or a common curse.” Jesus blesses houses (Luke 10.5) and following Zaccheus’ conversion, Jesus says that salvation has come “to his house” (Luke 19.9). The New Testament, like the Old Testament, understands that the entire household receives a blessing, regardless of every person’s status of personal belief. This is why Paul preached in Philippi: “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household. (Acts 16.31).” Again, this should not provoke any crisis over whether faith in Jesus is necessary for salvation — of course it is! But if we’re going to follow the evidence we see that the ordinary means of salvation works through families, through “houses” rather than individuals.
All this emphasis on groups and households make us worry about the loss of personal freedom and initiative. But whether you baptize a person as a child or an adult, you can’t just let the baptism speak for itself. The Westminster Confession of faith uses that peculiar language when it tells us that we are to improve upon our (and our children’s) baptism (WLC 167). We have to mark the day and remind our children as they grow that they are God’s treasured guest, to learn and grow in his love.
God’s care over households is also a great comfort to believing parents: this household promise is why David had hope that one day he would meet his son who had died in infancy (2 Samuel 12.23). It is the hope of parents whose children not only die in the womb but for children who are born with serious mental disability. It is good to know that God does not treat these children of His children like outsiders. The best sense of how the Scriptures view “households” reflects one baptism, for young and old alike, with the same meaning: that salvation is from the Lord, and not by your own strength.
A friend of mine puts it this way, “they [baptizing parents] were bringing all those who lived under their household into the visible Church, not saving them but bringing them into the realm of salvation—from strangers and sojourners to citizens who now had access to God’s promise.”
“Christian history is heavily weighted toward the baptism of infants, especially the closer we get to the New Testament church. Infants were being baptized by wide acceptance no later than the mid 200s.”
Now, there’s no way to argue the fact that the baptism of adult converts was the dominant, almost exclusive, picture of Baptism given in the New Testament. Of course it was. But the New Testament is mostly narrative in form, telling us what happened, not necessarily why it happened or what must happen in the future. In our current day, in a pandemic, it would be a mistake to believe that human beings do not shake hands, or hug, or gather in one another's homes, or show their faces in public, just because we haven’t over the past year. The arrival of the mediator of a new covenant - a new promise between God and man - is as disruptive to religious living as our pandemic has been to social living. People were, for the first time, being engrafted into a covenant who had not been born into it. And others who were born into the last covenant required a new entrance into a new covenant. The practices were unique because the situation was unique.
Christian history is heavily weighted toward the baptism of infants, especially the closer we get to the New Testament church. Infants were being baptized by wide acceptance no later than the mid 200s. The work of early church scholars and fathers like Origen and Tertullian shows up in the Council of Carthage in 256, where they were no longer debating whether children should be baptized but whether one should wait an entire eight days for a child to be baptized. For perspective, the books of our New Testament were still being clarified as late as the 120s. That these issues have been complex and took time to be clarified, is not an indicator that they were somehow less “biblical,” but that the commitment of fidelity to the Scriptures made the long, more complicated road, necessary. The Trinity, for one, is never explicitly stated in the Scriptures. The full doctrine of the Trinity was not conclusively settled in the church until the fifth century, at the earliest, due to its complexity. We understand that the complexity of a doctrine does not mean that we should replace them with less-complicated doctrines.
If one says, "well it isn't a biblical argument unless the Bible says, exactly, baptize your babies," then we’ve created a serious biblical interpretation problem. We don't demand that the Bible speak with this kind of clarity on every issue. The Scriptures teach according to its original audience, in their original cultural setting. We do not, or should not, demand for instance that Genesis 1-3 speak about the creation of the earth as a scientific manual. God was communicating with the Exodus community, not ours, and he spoke accordingly. Covenants were well understood by God’s people, but not in a 21st-century litigious or individualist sense. We cannot in good faith demand that the Bible speak of covenants as we wish it would.
Now we still have to answer the question of whether there’s an explicit biblical connection between the call to be circumcised in the Old Testament and the call to be baptized in the New Testament. So is there? Yes.
In Acts 2 we read this at the end of Peter’s sermon at Pentecost, beginning with the prophet Joel and tracing the promise of God:
“Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?” 38 And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.”
Peter reaffirms the promise and how it’s connected to our children, mimicking the precise language of the OT where the promise to our children is connected to circumcision. And now he has connected baptism to the same household covenant. Peter is preaching the promise: God will continue to gather these children to Himself.
That’s a very strong connection between the new covenant sign and the old one. To deny it we have to believe that either (a) circumcision in Genesis 17 has nothing to do with the promise from Genesis 17, or (b) Peter is carelessly using the covenantal formula from Genesis 17 to a people who are deeply familiar with his language, and would have been hopelessly confused.
Imagine you’re on a first date, and you’re driving together on the way to dinner. Your date turns on the audio system and tells you this is his favorite song. A song begins to play, a long organ note in C-Major. Then the familiar strains of the Wedding March. You react with shock - you’re trying to figure out how to get out of there as quickly as possible. He sees your mistake, “no no, I just love the song! Don’t be so presumptuous. This isn’t just about marriage!” Well, you could be forgiven for seeing the wedding march as… belonging to weddings. When Peter uses this language, it’s hard to miss that he’s connecting baptism with the promise of circumcision, and he’s applying it to children. “It isn’t in the Bible” simply misses the point. It isn’t in the Bible; rather it is of the whole Bible. Peter’s playing the music of the circumcision rite. You can’t walk down an aisle to the wedding march without anticipating marriage, and you can’t say the promise is for you, and for your children after you without referring to Genesis 17 and the rite of circumcision.
Peter understood that the new era brought about by Christ did not automatically cut the children of believers out of God’s covenant people. Children of believers had always been included in the visible community of God. How does Peter mean that the promise is for your children? Peter is simply following the covenantal choreography in which he has been steeped his entire life. He need not tell anyone to baptize their children, he's already told them that the promise is for their kids, the unmistakeable language of divine hospitality and covenant.
So why baptize our children? Because in baptism they participate in the divine (and clearly powerful) mystery, where they are “engrafted” into Christ (Romans 6.3-4). God empowers their young lives in the Church; teaching them, authoring their faith, circumcising their hearts. Not only that, but the sign and seal train the heart of a child toward God’s welcoming of us as guests rather than earners. They learn why they’re in the room and are moved away from self-righteous pride. This training starts from the very beginning. At times in the past I have used the old baptism blessing from the Church of Scotland for our church’s baptisms. It’s really beautiful and captures the heart of what I’m saying. It goes like this:
For you, Jesus Christ came into the world.
For you, Jesus lived and showed God's love.
For you, Jesus suffered the darkness of the cross and cried at the last, "It is accomplished!"
For you, Jesus triumphed over death and rose to new life.
For you, Jesus reigns at God's right hand.
All this Jesus did for you, though you do not know it yet.
Our children do not make their own way but are brought in to the great feast, to the warm room, to the realm of promise. God gave us a sign for our children so that they could learn to love the One to whom it points, their whole lives. How can we say God did it “for you” before these little ones are even old enough to say God’s name? Because we hope in the direction of God’s promise to our children, a promise kept through Jesus’ loving kindness and sacrificial death, resurrection, and ascension to God’s right hand — from where, we hope, he is already knitting together the saving faiths of our little ones.
“Baptism is the response to our fearful parenting, the grieving and hoping, the late nights waiting, the in-utero anxiety. We wonder if God takes our children as seriously as we do, but he’s clearly committed, to the grave and back.”
One day when these children embrace Jesus Christ as Lord it will be because they’ve known the Lord their whole lives through his divine hospitality in the church. Never once were they left outside to watch their Jesus through the window, but were baptized into God’s love for them: first as loving Father through his welcome, then as redeeming Son through his atonement, and finally as indwelling Spirit through his fruit in their lives.
Still, in the process of parenting sometimes we might be haunted by the idea that all of these promises are just words, the signs and seals are just symbols. We might be tempted when our children or sick or struggling with mental illness, or heartbreakingly rebellious — to think that there’s nothing behind all of the ritual and covenant. But According to Colossians 2.11-12, God has done more than speak and sign and seal, he has shown that these promises are every bit as critical to his redemptive work as his death and resurrection.
11 In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, 12 having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead.
The sign of circumcision, a bloody "cutting off" ceremony, pointed toward the coming of Jesus Christ the Messiah, who would himself be cut off in a bloody sign of God's atoning love for his people. As Colossians argues, the bloody sign was buried with Christ, and when he rose we rose with him in a new sign of divine welcome, one directly given not only to men but to women as well.
Baptism is the response to our fearful parenting, the grieving and hoping, the late nights waiting, the in-utero anxiety. We wonder if God takes our children as seriously as we do, but he’s clearly committed, to the grave and back. In baptism we anchor our parenting strength within the strength of God’s own dedication to our children. Like when Jesus tells us to be yoked to him, parents who baptize their children in faith are strong because God is strong.