On 22nd February, Lord willing, our son Noah is going to be baptised. From a personal perspective, this marks the last step in a process started some seven years ago when I first encountered a biblical argument for the baptism of believer’s children. Although after about three years I was pretty convinced of the case, I’d never had to put my convictions into action, until Noah arrived.
As a result, this seems to me as good a time as any to do what I’ve thought about doing for a long time now – spend a series of blog posts outlining a case for infant baptism. My desire in all this is not to be controversial, or to aggravate those with confirmed baptist convictions, or to stir up trouble amongst sincere Christians from differing camps. That’s why my first post proper in the series will be an assessment of how ‘big’ the issue really is or isn’t, to put all that follows in some sort of perspective. Overall these posts are for those who are intrigued as to the biblical case for infant baptism, whether that stems from a position of openness (‘I’ve just never really thought about it myself’) or brotherly incredulity (‘how can he believe that?’), especially those within our immediate church family and other networks of Christian brothers and sisters.
Below is an outline of how the series pans out, with links to the various posts to make it easier to navigate. If nothing else, the structure below will give you a fairly strong indication of where I think the issue really rests.
1. Reflections on the bigness of the issue
2. The Covenant Status of Believers’ Children
c. OT evidence – Abrahamic Covenant
d. OT evidence – Mosaic Covenant
e. OT evidence – Psalms and Wisdom
f. OT evidence – New Covenant Prophecies
g. NT evidence – various texts
h. NT evidence – Jesus’ blessing
3. On Circumcision and Baptism
4. History’s biggest excommunication
5. Texts that hint and suggest
6. Infant Baptism and Nominalism
