In finishing up a five-year season of church-planting, I wanted to make some updates to the Constructive Conversation booklet Baptism & Its Significance. This is one of two new bonus tracks I’ll be adding. As always, I welcome your feedback. Also, the pictures above and below are of some of my favorite people and memories from last year. They were taken at Mantua Creek’s final baptism service held at Ashland Church in Voorhees, NJ on Sept. 15, 2024.
I wanted to include this section for a couple of reasons. The first is I have a special heart and affection for my Baptist brothers and sisters. As this is my own background– even graduating from a Baptist seminary, I understand their perspective and concerns. The second is it has grieved me, especially in recent church-planting work, to see some Baptists give so much weight to their views on baptism that they either, on the one extreme, won’t join with other gospel-centered paedo-baptist churches, or, on the other, won’t commit themselves to the paedo-baptist church they’ve chosen to attend.
In this latter scenario, to avoid controversy or offense, the topic of baptism takes a background role and is rarely talked about. Something precious and essential is minimized, and some children grow up having never identified with Christ’s Church through any form of baptism. When this happens, everyone misses out on an important celebration and faith-strengthening event. It’s like boycotting the family Thanksgiving feast because the host family isn’t serving a certain brand of turkey. Again, this is sad, but it can also be destructive to efforts to move the kingdom ball down the court in an increasingly secular age. Further, these boycotts or disengagement are often based on misinformation and inconsistencies that I hope to challenge below.
When Baptists first began as a denomination in the early 1600s, how insistent were they on baptism by immersion only?
The issue that first distinguished Baptists as “Baptists” was their opposition to infant baptism NOT their insistence on a particular mode (sprinkling, pouring, or immersion). The mode of immersion, however, does seem to be a distinctive of those who came to be known as Particular Baptists. Additionally, as Pastor Derek Radney at Trinity Church (PCA) in Winston-Salem notes, it is “a strange view held by many Baptists: Only immersion counts as real/valid baptism, but grape juice instead of wine will suffice in communion.”
How did the Baptist perspective on baptism offer an important corrective to the Church at a key moment in history, but then go too far?“
Again, Pastor Radney’s reflections are helpful:
“I changed my mind on baptism (credo to paedo) largely because I began to see that in both the Old and New Testaments, Scripture regards children as little Christians and encourages Christian parents to regard their offspring as ‘in’ until proven otherwise. As the Dutch Theologian Herman Witsius from the 1600s put it:
‘God has given that pledge to pious parents that they may regard their little ones as the children of God by gracious adoption, until, when further advanced, they betray themselves by indications to the contrary, and that they may feel not less secure regarding their children dying in infancy than did Abraham and Isaac of old.’
This is, in part, what Paul means in 1 Cor. 7:14 (italicized in the larger context below) that children of a believing parent are holy:
‘Now, I will speak to the rest of you, though I do not have a direct command from the Lord. If a fellow believer has a wife who is not a believer and she is willing to continue living with him, he must not leave her. And if a believing woman has a husband who is not a believer and he is willing to continue living with her, she must not leave him. For the believing wife brings holiness to her marriage, and the believing husband brings holiness to his marriage. Otherwise, your children would not be holy, but now they are holy. (But if the husband or wife who isn’t a believer insists on leaving, let them go. In such cases the believing husband or wife is no longer bound to the other, for God has called you to live in peace.) Don’t you wives realize that your husbands might be saved because of you? And don’t you husbands realize that your wives might be saved because of you?’
1 Corinthians 7:12-16, NLT
Baptists were right to challenge the way the Church had blended this covenantal Christian identity with national citizenship. In other words, state churches carried this assumption too far, automatically extending Christian identity by infant baptism to any person born under the reign of a Christian magistrate.
However, Baptist’s challenge overcorrected and invented a very narrow conception of regeneration and conversion, which was adopted more broadly by British and American evangelicalism.
Rather than regarding the children of believers as little believers until proven otherwise, they are viewed with the same skepticism as the children of non-Christians, and then required to have an individual, cognitively mature, and intentional decision to follow Christ before they are regarded as a Christian. This overreaction has caused unnecessary anxiety for covenant children who feel pressured to have a crisis experience that guarantees that they are really a Christian with genuine faith. Sadly, for these children, every advance in their faith brings with it the doubt that they were ever truly saved to begin with. Again, Baptist’s initial and important corrective went too far.”[1]
[1] Pastor Radney’s thoughts above are from a series of tweets from 7.18.20. Since he was dealing with a limited word count in that format, I have edited and expanded his thoughts for flow and clarity.