The Baptism Debate | Theocast

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The baptism debate. Typically when I hear this, I cringe because it's not really done well.

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There's a lot of straw men. We don't represent each other's side and it becomes heated and emotional.

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We don't want to do that today. We want to talk about the differences and where they stand biblically and then why

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Justin and I would hold to a position known as the Credo Baptist position, the 1689

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Baptist view of baptism. We, most of all, we pray that you're informed and encouraged.

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We love our brothers who are Credo Baptist and we hope that comes out in this podcast.

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Stay tuned. If you're new to Theocast, you may not have heard of this word. It's called pietism.

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Have you ever felt like the Christian life is a heavy burden versus rest and joy? That you wake up worrying about how well you're gonna perform instead of thinking about what

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Christ has done for you? It's dread versus joy, really. That's pietism. Pietism causes

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Christians to look in on themselves and find their hope, not in what Christ has done, but what they're doing.

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And we have a little book for you. It's free. We want you to download it. And we're gonna explain the difference between pietism and what we call confessionalism.

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Reform theology, really. How it is that we walk by faith, seeing the joy of Christ, and when

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Jesus says, come to me and I will give you rest, what does that look like? You can download it on our website.

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Just go to theocast .org. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ.

01:41

Conversations about the Christian life from a reformed pastoral confessional law gospel. Hey, listen, we just talked about Jesus.

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And our goal is to remove the clutter off the gospel and then say, what does

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Jesus mean by seek first the kingdom of God? We wanna talk about that. Justin, it's good to be here with you, my friend.

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Your hosts today are Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina. I'm John Moffitt.

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I'm the pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee. And Justin, there's a conference you're putting on.

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There might be still some spots available. Go to covbapt .org to hear the none other than Chad Byrd.

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That's right, Chad Byrd will be preaching the glories of Christ in discipleship. Good stuff.

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And then if you haven't joined the community yet, there's a well over 1 ,200 people in there and having conversations.

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Godly, honoring, Christ exalting, advancing the kingdom kind of conversations. Memes and meanness are not allowed, but that doesn't mean we don't have some good discussions.

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You know what, Justin, I don't wanna waste time. I just wanna jump into this thing, man. We have a lot to talk about. We do not have a long time to do it.

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Before I throw it to you, I just wanna say this. The last three weeks, we've been talking about covenant theology, the distinctions between Baptist and Reformed, or I'm sorry,

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Baptist and Presbyterian. Today is a high view. If you were to say, John and Justin, I'm gonna sit down with a cup of coffee, whatever, and I'll say, look, just tell me in the next 30 minutes, what's the difference between the

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Pedo version of baptism and the Credo, the Baptist versus Presbyterian? Just give me a high level.

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That's what this is today. If you want more technical and you want it to be long and arduous, leave us a comment in the links.

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Maybe we'll do something like that. But for today, this is a basic overview for someone who's like, I don't really know what the differences are.

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That's what we're gonna talk about today. So, Justin, I throw it to you, my friend. Yeah, and not just that one of you baptized infants and one of you only baptized those who have professed faith.

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That is obvious on the face of it. What we're getting at is the why question. Tell me what's underneath that.

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And I'll acknowledge this. Sadly, in many Baptist circles, we can say this as Baptists, there's not a lot of good conversation about this, actually.

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There's a lot of, yeah, I don't know. I think well -intentioned folks who are

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Credo Baptist almost by default and don't really think deeply about these matters, and that's lamentable.

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That said, let's pivot. I wanna begin first, John. Exactly. I wanna begin first by talking about the

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Paedo -Baptistic, and Paedo meaning infant baptism, Credo meaning believer or believer's baptism.

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And can I jump in here? Not all infant baptism, just in really the Presbyterian line.

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We will deal with other forms of it. So we're not gonna talk about the Catholic view. We're talking about the Reformed. We're talking about in the

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Reformed world right now. We will acknowledge, yeah, we will acknowledge maybe our Lutheran friends toward the end.

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But right now, we're talking about the intramural debate amongst those who would claim to be Reformed. Between covenant theology, there's a difference.

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Between infant baptism versus believer's baptism, those of us who would hold to a covenantal framework. What I said a minute ago about Baptists not thinking deeply about baptism does not happen in the covenantal space as much.

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It's more in that kind of broad evangelical world. All right, now that we've done all that, we've said all that, we're just gonna laser focus.

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Here we go. I wanna begin by articulating the Reformed Paedobaptistic view in brief before we pivot to ours and then start talking about what baptism is.

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So in the Paedo understanding, the covenant of grace was formally established with Abraham.

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And the sign of the covenant of grace is circumcision. That's what it was, beginning with Abraham.

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And that sign of circumcision is administered via households to all of the descendants of Abraham.

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And then moving forward, carrying this, one covenant of grace in all of scripture, the old administration, moving it into the new administration in the new covenant, the

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Lord never repealed that household paradigm. And so the sign of the covenant of grace in the new administration is baptism.

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And it should be administered the same way, i .e. via household, just like circumcision was administered under the old administration.

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That is the, as I understand it, that is the Paedobaptistic presentation of why baptism is administered the way that it is given their covenantal framework.

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Now, what is our - I'll jump in there to say, I'll jump in there to say, and the reason why there's silence and nowhere in scripture to say to baptize children is because of that carryover.

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They're saying, well, there's no need to create clarity there because God has always intended the children of believers to be in the covenant, whether it's administrated in the old or the new.

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So that's why there's a silence of saying, you should baptize your children. The assumption, the default position is that children would receive the sign of the covenant.

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So then - And included in the covenant community, included with the community, not just the sign. In that formal sense.

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Right. That's right. Having received the sign, they're a part of the community. All right. Our position, to begin to talk about it, is that we understand that the covenant of grace, while promised and revealed in the

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Old Testament, was not formally established until Christ came. We do not understand, therefore, that circumcision was the sign of the covenant of grace, but rather was the sign of the covenant

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God made with Abraham pertaining to his physical offspring and the promises of land and descendants and kings and the like.

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So what this means for us is, as the covenant of grace is further revealed in the Old Testament and we get to the

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New Testament and the establishment of the covenant of grace in the new covenant with Jesus, there is distinction and discontinuity and baptism is the sign of the covenant of grace, period.

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We don't understand that there was any other one, but that baptism is the sign given to those who are a part of the covenant of grace, who have experienced the new covenant reality of regeneration in the indwelling of the

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Holy Spirit, professing faith in Christ, repentance toward God in faith. That's how we understand baptism and how we understand who the sign of baptism should be given to whom the sign of baptism should be given.

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So I hope those differences at a most basic level are plain, but I wanna, John, please add anything you want there before, then we're gonna talk at length about what baptism is and then thereby who would receive it.

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Yeah, I could go and we'll just go ahead and start there. I think your introduction was great. Those are brief comments, yeah.

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Yeah, so Justin, I say this with jest and a smile on my face for those of you that are listening to it on the podcast.

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So many people who love us and because of preaching about Christ and talking about Christ, they're just so thankful for what we're doing.

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And the comment we often hear is like, oh, just give it time, keep researching, keep studying. And Justin and I have, it's like, we've been really proclaiming

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Reformed theology for a long time. And it's not that Justin and I aren't concerned or haven't done the research.

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It's that this debate is not new. It's not part of a non -academic conversation.

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This really goes back to why the 1689 was, they embraced 97 % to 99 % of the

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Westminster Confession and the Savoy Declaration, but we're like, hey, we have some problems applying union with Christ to baptism.

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And so we're gonna make some adjustments here and they presented that. So that's where we're at with this is that, go ahead.

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No, can I just say really quick, I don't want anybody to misunderstand. If people were to ask us, what is baptism?

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We're probably gonna say this about 10 times. What is baptism about? It is about our union with Christ. That's right.

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So hear us say that. Yeah, and all the benefits and everything that comes from that. And so that's where we're going with this is that when we think about the word baptism, the way in which the

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New Testament describes, so we can talk about the administration of it here in a minute, not the form, but like who is it's administrator to?

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But when we look at how scripture reflects upon baptism, the spiritual nature of it symbolized in the physical nature of it, right?

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You are always being faced with high power gospel moments, right?

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That's what's just so complicated when we're talking about this sign is that it's symbolizing something, right?

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So like, for instance, we used this last week in the illustration of the burrito. If I'm looking, if I'm at a

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Mexican restaurant, I'm sitting there and I see the picture of the burrito, when it comes back out, I'm expecting it to be the burrito, right?

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Not half of it, not the ingredients of it, not the shell. I'm expecting the whole thing. Everything was in the description.

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That's what I'm expecting. The sign should be a reflection of the substance, of what it symbolizes.

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So what does baptism symbolize? That's what we're gonna talk about now. What does, when we say the word baptism, what does it all encapsulate?

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And so for us, you can't just say union in Christ because a lot of people may not know what that means. So let's unpack, what does it mean in union with Christ, right?

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Before I start throwing some verses on this. Yeah, go ahead. What is baptism significant of?

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Like even the fact that it is a sign, well, what is it a sign of? And we are saying union with Christ and we're about to unpack all that that entails.

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And John, let's just go ahead and begin at Romans 6 if you want to, unless you have somewhere else where you wanna start.

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Go for it, read it for us. Yeah, I think Romans 6 would be great. So Romans 6, four and five says, we were buried therefore with him by baptism into death in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the

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Father, we too might walk in newness of life. So this is connected to our baptism. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.

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And this is all connected to the symbolism of baptism. So that's where we would say on a high level, union with Christ is connected to baptism according to Paul.

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Yes, and union with Jesus, meaning in Paul's argumentation in Romans 6 and seven, the early verses of chapter seven, here's what he's saying.

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He is saying that we have been united to Christ in his death, i .e.

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in Christ, we died to the law, right? The death that Jesus died is our death.

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So we've been united to him in that. And the merits of his death are applied to us. And also, not only do we share in his death, we also share now in his resurrection life.

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Resurrection, the newness of life. That's the argument. That's right. Yes, and that's a significant thing in terms of even how

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Paul argues for the identity that the Christian now has and how he argues for sanctification in the

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Christian life. Baptism is a key piece of that because remember the objection he's answering. Should we just sin that grace may abound?

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By no means, because we've been united to Jesus. We've been baptized into his death. We now share it.

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We've been baptized into his resurrection life. And so things are different now for us than they were before. That's his argument.

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And we've been set free from the power of the law to condemn us.

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And we have now been set free to serve God by the power of the

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Spirit. That's significant. That's Romans 6, 1 through about 7, 6, right there.

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That's right. So just to kind of contrast this a little bit back, our paedo friends would say that when a child is baptized, an infant is baptized, they are brought into the covenant community to receive the benefits of the covenant community, the covenant of grace, the community that is there.

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And so the question we always ask is, okay, what benefits are they receiving?

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Because a verses like this creates a complication. It's not just a covenant community.

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That's not how Paul describes it. He says it this way. This is Corinthians, 1 Corinthians 12, 13. For in one spirit, we were all baptized into one body,

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Jews and Greeks, slaves and free, and all were made to drink of one spirit.

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So it's not that it's a community of believers where you're gonna have believers and unbelievers who have received the sign and we're waiting for them to reflect it in their confirmation of the faith.

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He is saying the sign of baptism is symbolized in that we are one in body.

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They're all a part of, and this is important, in one spirit, right?

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For in one spirit, we were all baptized into one body. So are you saying, and I know they're not,

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I know they're not saying this, but this is why we as Baptists have a complication in this. Are you saying that when you give a child the sign of baptism, that they are one in spirit with us?

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And they are one in covenant, but they're not one in spirit. And we were saying the new covenant doesn't have languages of dual membership.

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They would never say it's dual membership. I say it's dual membership, that you have some who have half the benefits and you have some who have all the benefits.

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So I always ask my paedo friends, what benefits are they lacking? And they have to say that the indwelling of the spirit is not in them, therefore they're not in the body.

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Therefore, the sign isn't matching how Paul is describing it. I'm just, we can read some more passages and just keep expounding on these things.

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This is Colossians chapter two, 11 and following. In him also, in Jesus, you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands by putting off the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ.

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And he's about to explain that even more. Having been buried with him in baptism. So there's that language again.

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In which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God who raised him from the dead.

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So there's that resurrection life again. And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh,

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God made alive together with him. So there's that regeneration, indwelling of the spirit, life in Christ.

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Having forgiven us all of our trespasses. Oh, the forgiveness of sins. By canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands.

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This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. So there we have the cross, you know, and Christ's atoning work and everything he's accomplished for us is a piece of this.

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And he disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame by triumphing over them in him.

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So even the triumph of Christ over the principalities and powers in the cosmic darkness that reigns now, even that is wrapped up in all of this.

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So you have significant spiritual realities of the circumcision of the heart, which we would contend,

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I'll just briefly say this now. Baptism is not the fulfillment of circumcision.

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The fulfillment of circumcision is the circumcision of the heart, which is regeneration and the indwelling of the

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Holy Spirit, which is what's talked about in Colossians 2. And then it's wild that in three or four verses, you have all of these principles of circumcision of Christ.

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You have being buried with him in baptism, raised with him through faith, and then also being made alive together with Jesus, having our sins forgiven through the work of Christ on the cross.

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Like all of that is right there in the language about baptism. And this is all couched in being alive in Christ in Colossians 2, and then talking later, as Paul will, about the old way of life, the old man, and then the new way, the new man, putting off, putting on, right?

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So we have to take all of that into consideration in terms of how the apostle was reasoning in his letter to the

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Colossians. Significant, significant stuff, yeah. It is, well, not only that, is that Christ then becomes,

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I mean, the great high priest who's interceding on our behalf. So does the great high priest fail?

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And it says he never fails, right? So is he interceding on our behalf? Because this is the question that often the

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Baptist and Presbyterians, so do you let your children pray to God? And just how dare you?

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And I'm like, well, if he's, anyways, I'm not gonna get into that. Well, I wanna grab a little bit of the priest language here.

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There's an amazing book by a friend of mine by the name of Doug Van Doren wrote called Waters of Creation. I'll put it in the notes.

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Highly recommend you reading this because he helps make a wonderful connection between the benefits of baptism.

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So when John is in the waters of baptism and he's baptizing for the baptism repentance,

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John the Baptist, they've been following false gods. He's saying, you need to return to Yahweh for the

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Messiah is coming. And Jesus comes and he says, behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. And he steps into the water and Jesus says to him,

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John, baptize me. And John's like, no, no, no, no. You need to baptize me, right?

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And listen to how Jesus responds to him. This is Matthew 3 .15. And Jesus answered him, let it be so. Now for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill, for us, the two of us, to fulfill all righteousness.

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I love how Matthew writes this about John. Then he consented, right? He's like, well, he stopped arguing.

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Why? Because at that moment, John understood something that was about to happen. And the argument that's being made here is that Jesus is being baptized according to Levitical tradition, that he is gonna be baptized to fulfill all righteousness.

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He has to be baptized by an ordained priest who John is.

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And when he does, he becomes the great high priest. He has to be of the age of 30. He has to be called, which we already know that.

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He said, I'm sitting here by the Father. He has to be 30 years old. And immediately after receiving the sign of baptism by an ordained priest, he starts the role of priesthood.

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And later on, Jesus turns the tables over, goes in and cleans up the temple as a high priest is supposed to do.

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The priests come to him and they're sitting on the steps. And they said, but what authority are you doing this?

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Like who says you could claim to be the priest here? And he asked them one question, by what authority does

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John baptize? So he's saying, I am a priest and I'm ordained and I have the right to do this because I have fulfilled righteousness.

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I've done everything that's required of me to be the priest. And John can attest to that. The reason why we're making this connection is that this concept of priesthood is brought over into the

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New Testament. Peter talks about this. We are part of the royal priesthood. And we are priest, a kingdom of priests, which was promised in the old, we would become a kingdom of priests.

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So we are going to be enacting, we're gonna be representing Christ, our great high priest, to the world as a kingdom of priests.

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What he used to say, we're living stones, right? We're temples, we're, this is important language.

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Those who are a part of the covenant community are housing the spirit of God. This is why he says you're living temples.

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But what I think is interesting is how Paul ends up using this language.

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And he says that in Galatians 3 .27, he says, for as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.

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That's priestly language. Christ had the authority to bring and give you, to make you priests, because he is the great high priest.

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Therefore, and then he says, you've put on Christ. We've put on his robes. We've put on his righteousness. He says, fulfill all righteousness, right?

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And so my argument - And that paradigm there is Zechariah 3. That's absolutely right. Joshua the high priest - So the argument we're making is that -

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Being clothed in pure dustments. Yeah, exactly. So the argument we're making is that the role of being a priest, of the royal priesthood, being a temple that's indwelled by the spirit is all connected -

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Romans 12, Ephesians 2. To baptism, that's right. So I have a hard time giving the sign of baptism to anyone who would not first meet the requirements of it.

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Just like Jesus didn't receive the sign of entering into the priesthood until all requirements were met, all righteousness was met, that baptism is not, the baptism is not connected to circumcision.

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The baptism is connected to the reflection of our priesthood and the union that we have in Christ.

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And so all of these pictures, union with Christ, buried in the likeness of his death, raised with his resurrection, and priesthood are all the symbols.

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They're all connected to it. Not half of them, not some of them, but all of them are connected to baptism. Hey guys, real quick, some of you are listening to this and it's encouraging to you, but you have questions.

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So where do you go? How do you interact with other people who have the same questions and share resources? We have started something called the

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Theocast Community, and we're excited because not only is it a place for you to connect with other like -minded believers, all of our resources there, past podcasts, education materials, articles, all of it's there, and you can share it and ask questions.

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You can go check it out. The link is in the description below. So what does baptism signify?

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It signifies our union with Christ by faith, our being grafted into him, the remission of our sins, being brought into, like you said, this people of Christ who are a royal priesthood, and it means that everything that is

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Christ is now ours, to be united to him and grafted into him in all the benefits of his death and resurrection.

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I mean, this is the language our confession uses in chapter 29, paragraph one on baptism, and we affirm it and we think it's biblical.

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Big deal that everything that's Christ is now ours and baptism signifies that.

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And so what does that mean? It means that we've been forgiven of our sins. It means that we've been absolved of our guilt. It means that we have been declared righteous as he is righteous.

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It means that we have been united to him in resurrection life and our bodily resurrection, therefore, is now certain.

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Like all of these things are massive in their significance and how we are a part of his people.

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We are now living stones. We're being built into a dwelling place for God by the spirit, right? All of that is signified in the waters of baptism.

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And so it only makes sense then, John, that given our understanding of covenant theology and then even given our understanding of what baptism signifies in the words of the

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New Testament, that we would administer baptism then to people who have experienced that new covenant reality of regeneration in dwelling of the spirit, faith in Jesus, repentance toward God in faith, right?

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Those are the people that would receive the sign and we would not be administering it the way that our paid -off friends do, obviously.

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Right, and that's why we would say both sacraments is one symbolizing us being brought into the family in union with Christ.

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And then the second is us sustained in Christ, right? Through the meal. The initiatory one, baptism, about our union with him being grafted in.

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And then, yeah, the ongoing nourishment and sustenance that is demonstrated to us in the supper.

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And we would agree very, I mean, we would agree pretty much wholeheartedly, holistically with our

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Presbyterian and Reformed friends on the supper. Baptism is where we differ. Yeah, that's right. So, John, do you wanna talk a little bit about some of the problem passages, so to speak?

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Do we wanna get into any of those and just at least acknowledge them? Yeah, I would say this is what we,

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Justin and I just gave you is our biggest arguments of like, this is why these are the biggest holes.

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And if you're gonna ask me to give the sign over to a child, I would have to say that child is now degenerate.

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That's the only way I can come to a conclusion is that if I'm giving them the sign and the benefits of the sign, that the moment

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I give that child baptism, that they have Christ and all the benefits of Christ, including his union, his resurrection, the spirit that lives within him, they're now a great high priest.

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I can't in good conscience do that. That's right, I can't do that. The only way we can do that is by what we see in the

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New Testament is that that sign was offered to those who by faith put their faith in Christ, demonstrating the spiritual baptism they had received, followed by the physical baptism of the spiritual nature.

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So that being said, go ahead. We do, just briefly, I think we should acknowledge

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Ezekiel 36, Jeremiah 31, just super quick before we move into other texts. So our understanding of Ezekiel 36, where the

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Lord says he's gonna remove our heart of stone and give us a heart of flesh and put his spirit within us, we understand that's a new covenant promise.

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So there's that indwelling peace, that's significant. But then in Jeremiah 31, where the

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Lord says that all of the members of this new covenant that he's making, it's not like the old one, it's a new covenant, and everybody who's a part of it will know him and will have his law written on their hearts.

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So we understand, and then the forgiveness of sins is entailed. We understand that's about the new covenant also.

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So again, every person who's a part of the new covenant, i .e. the covenant of grace established, knows the Lord, has the law of God written on his or her heart, has his or her sins forgiven, and has been given the spirit of God to indwell him or her.

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So again, this has implications for who we would baptize. That's right.

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There we go. So that being said, one of the things that, when we have these conversations or we've seen these debates in the past, you would say, well, what about all of the examples in the

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New Testament of infant baptism? So we thought we would go ahead and say, well, we think our greatest argument is the one that we just made, that you have to create a duality.

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There's either those who have half covenant membership and those who have full, and then I guess you get into full membership once you become of faith.

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We just don't see the language in the New Testament. You don't see where it says, well, some of you have been baptized and some of you have those benefits.

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It's not there. And I know that's an argument from silence. Well, and what does it mean for a person to have

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Christ as his or her mediator apart from faith in him? And then what does that mean for an individual who is baptized but may never profess faith?

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That's right. Those are significant questions that have to be answered. We have hard questions to answer as well. I think we should acknowledge that.

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In our own. In that we're not God. And it's not like we're saying we infallibly only baptize true professors.

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That obviously can't be done because we can't see the hearts of men. We're taking people at their word. That's right.

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But this is why we practice church discipline. If someone professes Christ and then proves to have a false profession, then we have to church discipline them.

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That's why it's there. And so, yes, there are times where even John says they went out from us because they were not of us.

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Well, that's because there's gonna be false teachers, false professors, and deceivers. All right, so what about household baptisms in the book of Acts?

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Let's start there. So they're saying, see, these are examples of where an entire households were baptized.

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Because of the faith of one person. Yeah, there's a couple of, there's an article I'll put in here by Tom Nettles. I think it's fascinating.

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He goes through all of them and it kind of works through each one exegetically to explain them. Not gonna go through those, but I think,

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Justin, we need to acknowledge them. In whole, there's a couple of problems when we have household baptisms, okay?

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I'll bring up one and I know you have one you could bring up. One of the issues that you're having is that when we execute that, we're allowing children to be receiving the sign and including them in the household.

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But when it says that the household provided a meal, the household rejoiced, the household then went out and did this.

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We're not assuming that the infant wasn't part of the meal preparation, a part of the rejoicing, or part of going out of the house as is indicated in these passages.

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Because, well, that would be weird. I think the author is giving a general idea of this is what's happening.

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But when it comes to the receiving of baptism, we include them in these households. And so I think Tom does a really good job explaining this in that section, kind of exposing the error that's in there.

30:31

It's just an interesting observation how when we're trying to include something, we will say, yes, they were included in the baptism, but they weren't included in the rejoicing.

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Or are we saying they were included in the rejoicing? Let's examine two of the most well -known, just to discuss them.

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One observation that could be made in general is there is a kind of argument from silence that's often made by our pedobaptistic friends that the assumption is nobody else came to faith other than the individual who is preeminent in the account.

31:10

That's an argument from silence, and that's just an observation. That's right. Yeah, so Acts chapter 10,

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Cornelius is a famous one. So Peter obviously has received a sign from the

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Lord that nothing is unclean, right? And most fundamentally, that means the gospel needs to go to the

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Gentiles, most fundamentally. And so Peter goes into a Gentile household, Cornelius' household, and preaches the gospel.

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And then what's interesting about that account is that verse 44 and following, while Peter was still saying these things, the

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Holy Spirit fell on all who heard the word. So the Spirit falls on everybody. And the believers from among the circumcised who had come with Peter were amazed because the gift of the

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Holy Spirit was poured out even on the Gentiles, for they were hearing them speaking in tongues and extolling God. Then Peter declared, can anyone, this is significant here, can anyone withhold water for baptizing these people who have received the

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Holy Spirit just as we have? So there's the falling of the

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Spirit and the receiving of the Spirit for everybody who heard the word is actually what's stated there.

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And he commanded them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. And then they asked him to remain for some days.

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The other one, do you want to comment on that one at all, John? Or are we good? No, I just think that it's interesting how he did connect the

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Holy Spirit in dwelling with baptism. Agree, agree.

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And how the Spirit fell on everyone who heard the word and how they had received the Spirit just as the apostles had.

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Pretty significant there. Now, if you want to be consistent and say that the infants believed, I mean,

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I guess that's how you can be consistent there. All right, so then the Philippian jailer, okay, is another one,

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Acts 16. This is a very famous one as well. People know the story how Paul and Silas are miraculously freed from jail.

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The jailer wakes up and is terrified and Paul says, you don't need to be afraid. And so Paul says, believe in the

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Lord Jesus and you'll be saved, you and your household. All right, so does that mean that by your faith your household is saved or does that mean that you and your household will believe in Jesus?

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That's a legit question to ask. Then verse 32, they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house.

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So they preached the word to everybody. That's right. And then it says, and he took them the same hour of the night and washed their wounds and he was baptized at once, he and all his family, everybody who had heard the word.

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I mean, so again, it's interesting that everybody hears the word and then everybody is baptized. Then he brought them up into his house and set food before them and he rejoiced along with his entire household that he had believed in God.

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Now, everybody's rejoicing. Like, let's not build our understanding of this passage on that one phrase that he had believed.

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It's like, okay, he's rejoicing but everybody else is too. Why are they celebrating unless they too have seen that this is good?

34:09

So those are just our observations on a couple of passages that are often levied against us in terms of, hey guys, household baptism is a pattern in the

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New Testament, meaning the baptism of infants who obviously are incapable of faith.

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And that's our response to a couple of those passages there. Let's talk about 1 Corinthians 7, just really quick.

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Well, before then, one of the probably the most famous passages that are used is Acts 2 39, right?

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Would you say that's probably the one that we start with? We can talk about this. All right, I'm gonna turn to it.

34:43

So let me start, I'll read it. We'll make some comments here, yeah, Acts 2 39. You started going through Acts, I was like, fine, we'll do it.

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We didn't talk about it beforehand, but we'll do it now. Yeah, this is not the, yeah, we're not trying to. For the promise, yeah. For the promises for you and your children.

34:55

Well, what promise though? Let's back up. What promise is he talking about? Yeah, and Peter said to them, repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of the

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Lord Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. So the gift of the

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Holy Spirit, right? Brother, forgiveness of sins, gifts of the Spirit. Those are, that's significant.

35:15

So that's what we're talking about. Verse 39, I'll go ahead and jump in. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, for the promises for you and your children and for all who are far off, everyone who the

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Lord, our God, calls to himself. And with many other words, he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, save yourselves from the crooked generation.

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So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added to that day these 3 ,000 souls.

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So that's the whole pericope. That's the whole section, right? Yeah. So I find it interesting that the promise of salvation and the receiving of forgiveness of sins and of the receiving of the

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Holy Spirit is what is offered. But the baptism that was given was given to those who had received the word.

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And had received the Spirit and forgiveness. That's right. That's significant. Even grammatically, though,

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I mean, amen to everything you just said. Receiving the Spirit and the forgiveness of sins is tethered to, is the promise in Jesus' name, and baptism is what you receive in light of it.

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Now, having said that, grammatically, verse 39, for the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, comma, everyone whom the

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Lord our God calls to himself. So that last phrase is significant. It's for you, it's for your children, it's for all those who are far off.

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Here, modifying all of that, it's for everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.

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That's right. That's the extent of the promise. Everyone whom the Lord would save.

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That's who the promise is for. And that's how we understand that verse in that. And I have to step in here and say,

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Justin, that I love my brothers, but it feels like they start in verse 39, but they forget verse 38.

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And I'm like, listen, are you telling me that when you baptize your children that they're receiving the Holy Spirit? Is that what you're telling me? But then there's also not the acknowledgement of that modifying clause either.

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All those whom the Lord our God calls to himself being the descriptor of all three groups of people, you, your children, and all those who are far off.

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So I've heard this verse used a lot, and those are the two caveats that Justin and I both have. It's like, first of all, that would mean the baptism now saved them.

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Like the water baptism, the sign of it saved them. And then secondly, it's saying that this promise is not locked to the

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Jews. It's locked far beyond that. It's far beyond. Because this is the day of Pentecost. He's preaching a sermon, right?

37:40

All right, Corinthians. Everyone whom the Lord would save. 1 Corinthians 7. So this is the passage where Paul is dealing with various issues pertaining to marriage and even issues pertaining to intimacy within marriage and all these kinds of things.

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But then he gets into what about if you're married to an unbeliever?

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What if you become a Christian and your spouse is not a Christian? What then? So he says in verse 13 and following, if any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him.

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So your marriage, sister, again, this is significant.

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Sister, your marriage is not unclean. If your unbelieving husband desires to be married to you and desires to live with you, you don't need to divorce him.

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Why does this matter? Because we are gonna be told other places in the scriptures that we should not be unequally yoked.

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We ought not marry an unbeliever. So that's true. But Paul is saying if you become a

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Christian and your spouse is not, you don't need to divorce them if they still wanna be married to you, your marriage is not illegitimate, neither are your kids.

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That's where he goes next. That's right. For the unbelieving husband is made holy because of his wife.

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We're gonna come back to that. And the unbelieving wife is made holy because of her husband. Okay, that's significant in terms of how the word holy is being used.

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Otherwise, your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy. So you have all three parties involved, the believing wife, the unbelieving husband, and the children are all said to be holy.

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And the reason we bring this up is that that last clause, otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy, is sometimes raised by our

39:27

Peta -Baptistic friends to say the children of believers are holy and therefore should be baptized.

39:34

That's right. Not meaning they're holy as in they are righteous before God, but as in they are set apart, they are set apart and thereby should receive the sign of baptism.

39:44

Now, brief and then you jump on it, John. It's interesting that we would say that about the children, but we're not prepared to say that about the unbelieving husband in the passage.

39:56

Because he also is described as being holy, but nobody is ever contending that we should baptize him on account of his wife's faith.

40:04

And so I think we just need to be consistent in how we reason from the text. That's right. Yeah, and it was typically, it was a circumcision based upon the men in the

40:13

Old Testament. So we're gonna carry that over. I know, it's so true. So that's complicated. That's a whole other thing.

40:18

And this whole entire section. Household administration, yeah. Right, let's talk about context. In this entire section, he's talking about marriage.

40:24

The whole thing is about marriage. It's all about marriage. It's not about baptism. So let's just be clear. This is not about the institution of baptism.

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He's talking about what's going on in marriage within this new context of a new covenant people, like the new faith that we have.

40:37

Some are coming to faith that have Christ and then they're like, oh, my spouse isn't. And now in the old covenant, they were to leave their spouse, right?

40:47

Divorce them. And he's like, okay, this is different. Right, go ahead. Yeah, like if a person became, let's just say a sojourner, came into the community of Israel, a proselyte, and became a convert.

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I mean, they became effectively a Jew in spirit. And then their spouse was an unbelieving person.

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It would have been a very different situation. Very different situation. Right, and that's where he has to bring clarification saying, right, look, this is different, okay?

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Because we're no longer a nation. We're not keeping the purity of the line for the sake of the

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Messiah that's coming. This is different because of the spirit that now dwells within you.

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He sanctifies, he sets apart that union as long as, because Peter talks about this in 1

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Peter. He says, as long as they are willing to stay married to you, the way in which you love them and treat them can be what converts them, right?

41:41

He says, so he tells the wife, he says, stay married to him if you can, because it converts them. But this section is not about baptism.

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It's not about church membership. It's about the union between believers and their children and their unbelieving children. And so I think it's just important when we're looking at argumentations for baptism and the covenant community that we use passages of scripture that actually deal with that.

42:04

This is not one of those. Yes. No, I agree. I agree with my thought on that. So let's, before we conclude, let's at least acknowledge our

42:13

Lutheran friends because we've been having this intramural reformed community debate.

42:20

So our Lutheran friends also baptize babies, but for a different reason. Their framework is not covenantal.

42:26

They would understand based upon passages like 1 Peter and others that baptism, the baptismal font is salvific and that people are regenerated and are united to Christ in the baptismal waters.

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And that's because the Lord has attached his promise to the waters. Just like the Lord has attached promises to the bread and the cup and the supper, this is how our

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Lutheran friends understand it. And so they would hold to a position called baptismal regeneration. And we're not gonna go in on that today.

42:58

That's not what we hold to in terms of when we baptize believers. It is not that the baptismal waters impart faith or that the baptismal waters regenerate or unite a person to Christ, but the baptismal waters are a sign of that union that has occurred by faith.

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It's a seal in that regard. We would use that language. So then with our

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Lutheran friends, the questions that we would ask kindly are, all right, if baptismal regeneration is your perspective and people are regenerated and dwelt by the

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Spirit and united to Christ in the baptismal waters, what does that then mean for those who fall away?

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And what does that then mean for our eternal security as we stand before the Lord? And how could we ever have peace in our souls if one can be born again, if one can be indwelt by the

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Spirit, if one can be united to Jesus and then be lost? That's a difficult, difficult thing to wrestle with.

43:58

Right, which Romans 8 would then, and these are conversations that I've had and you've had, and they're wonderful, and this is how we grow, and Luther had them, but I've had them with my 15, 17 brothers, and I love them.

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But like Romans 8, it means there is something that can separate you from the love of God. You, you can separate you from the love of God.

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And that's just where our confession and our faith would say that those who have been adopted by Christ cannot cancel,

44:24

I mean, our name is written on the adoption paper by the blood of Christ, that's the way it's kind of described, is that there's nothing that can remove that so, yeah.

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And we can, you know, we can, like our Lutheran brothers and sisters will often say, remember your baptism, because that's where you've apprehended

44:40

Christ. John, you and I have done an episode by that very title, because we as, as Credo Baptist guys, under the, using the language of our own confession, can tell our people to remember their baptism, and we can say that to each other as a source of great encouragement and strength, because it's like, no, remember that you've been united to Christ as signified in your baptism, and everything that's his is now yours, and that changes everything, yeah.

45:07

Right, well, that would be the coffee conversation, right there, that's the coffee conversation, or a cigar, or whiskey, whatever you wanna have with us.

45:15

Maybe one day we will, soon. Maybe. This is an overview, there is much we could say on a kind of more of an academic level.

45:25

Historically, this has been a debate, obviously, that's been going on for a long time. Justin and I did not wanna have this conversation, because we thought we could persuade everybody to our position.

45:33

You asked the question, we provided the answer. For those of you that are trying to figure out this conversation, we will provide some more resources below.

45:41

Some of the stuff that we have on covenant theology we provided last week, I would say, the book by Doug Van Doorn, Waters of Creation, is very helpful,

45:48

I think, in here, as well. Another one, Paul Jewett. Paul Jewett's book, Baptism and the

45:54

Covenant of Grace is really good. It's an excellent book. It's been a while. It's an old one. It's been published for a long time.

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Decades. So, anyways, hopefully, you heard our tone.

46:06

We're not here to fight, put down, belittle. Obviously, we love our Reformed, greater

46:12

Protestant brothers, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Presbyterian. We love those who get the gospel right, who proclaim the gospel, and keep

46:20

Christ at the forefront, and trust in his sovereign will. And we're indebted to so many of you for our own growth, and learning, and edification.

46:29

I wanna just reiterate, John, the reason we're talking about these things is largely because of a lot of the questions that we get about what we believe, not only about covenant theology, but help us understand why you don't baptize infants.

46:41

You claim to be Reformed, but you don't baptize babies, and that's, we just don't understand.

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And so, would you talk about it? And so, that's why we've done these. We're not trying to be polemical, or jerkish, or condescending, or try to bring everybody over to our view.

46:56

We're just trying to articulate it plainly for people to hear it in conversation form. So, thanks for listening.

47:03

That's right. Yeah, this view has been a part of the discussion for hundreds of years, and we're just kind of throwing our voice out there, saying this is a legitimate argument from Scripture that we see.

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This is a perspective that we hold. We're convinced of it, and that's why we preach, teach, and hold it in our churches.

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And we hope that's helpful, but that doesn't mean we're gonna only partner with people who agree with us on theocast. There is first, second, and third.

47:25

Maybe we'll do a theological triage one day, Justin, but. Primary, secondary, tertiary, yeah. And so, we would consider this to be not a primary issue where we would break a fellowship with a believer, so.

47:36

All right, well, thank you for listening. If you want more work on this, I guess, comment.

47:42

Send us a message. I don't know. We'll see what we can do. Thank you for listening, and I believe,

47:47

I don't know for sure, but I believe we might have kind of an overview of Baptist Distinctives next week.

47:53

We might be a guest on another podcast. We'll wait to see if we hear back from them. Or in the next couple of weeks, anyway, yeah.

47:59

Yeah, we hope. All right. If not, I'll announce this now. We got a cool podcast about law gospel coming up with a couple of podcasts.

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It'll be three podcasts in one. It'll be a little bit of a mashup collaboration effort, so look forward to that. Collaboration about law gospel distinction in John Calhoun's book, so.

48:15

Stay tuned for that. See you guys, bye. Hey, everyone, before you go, Justin and I first wanted to say thank you, and if this has been encouraging to you in any way, please feel free to share it.

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But we also need your support, and it's when you give that it really helps us financially reach more people.

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So the next time you consider giving to a ministry, we hope that you would pray about Theocast and partner with us as we share the gospel around the world.