Thanks to everyone who has been reading my series on infant baptism. I’ve tried to outline the reasons why my opinion shifted from a creedobaptism to a paedobaptism position.

Below you’ll see a listing of all the posts in this series.

Part 1 - Covenant Kids

What started my journey was the nagging question: Just how does God see my kids? As part of the church? Totally lost? His people? Pagans? I started out completely closed to the idea of paedobaptism. But I wanted to know who my children were in the eyes of God. This opened the door to my exploration.

Part 2 - All in the Family

My first stop along this journey was when I started to embrace a more biblical view of the family. While I didn’t find paedobaptism arguments convincing yet, I found myself more and more drawn to their understanding of God’s covenant community and covenant family.

Part 3 - My Objections

I had some serious objections to infant baptism. This post outlines 4 critical ones.

Part 4 - Circumcision: A Seal of the Promise

If it’s true that infants in the church should be baptized like those in the old covenant were circumcised, this would mean that circumcision held profound spiritual significance. But as someone from a baptistic background, I believed circumcision was merely a mark of Jewish ethnic identity. I needed to have this notion overturned.

Part 5 - God’s Generational Faithfulness

One of the reasons I rejected the idea of paedobaptism was because I believed an advantage of the new covenant was that only professing believers would be considered a part of God’s people. Therefore only believers should be given the mark of membership. The old covenant was too inclusive, I thought, embracing members by virtue of their parentage and not their faith. In order to buy into infant baptism, this assumption needed to be dismantled.

Part 6 - From Circumcision to Baptism

In order to believe in infant baptism, I needed to believe baptism somehow replaced circumcision, but there are no statements in the Bible to this effect. Why do paedobaptists believe baptism is the New Testament counterpart to circumcision?

Part 7 - Baptized Born Again Believers

My biggest objection to paedobaptism was my belief that baptism is always linked to a personal profession of faith and a believer’s personal union with Christ. How could an infant be united to Christ? How could we baptize someone who is unable to profess faith? If paedobaptists couldn’t explain this one, there was no way they would win me to their side.

Part 8 - The Household Connection

With my objections answered, I searched for some sign from the New Testament that baptism was for more than just professing believers. I originally believed the absence of infant baptisms in the Bible was a clear indication that it was wrong: I later came to see this silence as one of the greatest arguments for it.

Part 9 – The Difference It Makes

Since my children have been baptized, how has this new theological position changed the way I think about baptism? About God? About my kids?

In these last 8 posts I’ve been telling the story of my move from the Baptist to the paedobaptist position. While I’ve attempted to give a reasoned defense of this position, my posts are as much biographical as they are theological. I’ve only outlined specific aspects of this debate with which I personally wrestled, certainly not every possible angle or every relevant Bible passage.

For this final post, I want to share what difference this change has made in my life.

How I understand infant baptism

I used to believe baptism was first and foremost saying something about me: I am united with Christ; I am forgiven; I am born again. But now I see baptism as first something about Christ.

Credobaptists and paedobaptists alike agree that the act of baptism symbolizes or demonstrates spiritual realities. But historically there has been a great divergence of opinion over what exactly it symbolized in baptism. [Read more...]