(Genesis 17:1-14, Psalm 103:15-18; Colossians 2:8-15)
In our time, baptism is one of those things Christians have been fighting over for ages; which is sad. It wasn’t always that way. The New Testament commands us to baptize, but really doesn’t address the practical stuff we get hung up on. We see people come to faith, and immediately they’re baptized—and with them, their whole household; but that’s never unpacked. In the post-biblical records, it’s clear that infant baptism was standard practice; the earliest references we have describe it as “an unquestioned rule” that was “received from the apostles.” There were those who didn’t practice it, but they didn’t argue against it, nor did anyone try to argue with them, as far as we can tell. The first sustained argument against infant baptism dates to the Reformation, to the Swiss Reformer Zwingli; unfortunately, the argument quickly got caught up in the religious wars that were wracking Europe, and things got nasty.
As such, there’s a legacy of distrust and hostility tied up with baptism; we don’t put people to death as heretics anymore, but all too often baptism still divides us instead of uniting us. Those who don’t baptize infants regard those who do with great suspicion—do we believe baptism somehow magically saves us? Are we really secretly papists in disguise? Meanwhile, those who baptize infants are prone to see those who don’t as neglecting God’s consistent concern for his people’s children because of a failure to understand the meaning of his covenant. It doesn’t take long before the tone gets angry.
As such, I feel the need to clear the decks a bit, just briefly, and I hope in a way that moves forward to my broader point; and especially because in this case, I stand not only as the teacher of the church, but as the parent, and so this is my personal affirmation of my belief. No, we don’t baptize infants because we think that baptism saves them, or that they’ll be excluded from Heaven if they die unbaptized. Rather, we baptize infants because we understand that baptism is not about what we have done but about what God has done and is doing. We understand baptism as an act of his covenant, which he has made not just with us as individuals, but with us as a people, a family of families; it is the sign which marks and celebrates our entrance into the covenant people of God.
This is why Paul links baptism to circumcision, because for the Jews, circumcision was the mark of God’s covenant with Israel; only men were circumcised, of course, but it was the mark of their identity, the sign of their belonging to the people of God. The fact that every baby boy was circumcised at eight days old was the symbol of God’s promise to his covenant people for their children; it was a sign of his assurance that his hesed—his steadfast love and covenant faithfulness—for those who fear him extended even to their children’s children, as long as they continued to be faithful themselves, to keep covenant with him and obey his commandments. Circumcision was a visible reminder of God’s covenant promises, and his covenant faithfulness, to his people.
The problem with circumcision, and with the whole Law, is that it was only an external reality; this is why the Old Testament speaks in several places about the “circumcision of the heart” which God desires—faithful love and humble obedience—and why it promises a new covenant, which will be written not on tablets of stone but on the human heart, where it can produce real change. In Christ, that new reality has come, and physical circumcision has been replaced by a spiritual circumcision, a circumcision made without hands. This, Paul says, is “the circumcision of Christ,” the removal not merely of a strip of flesh, but of the whole “body of the flesh,” which is to say, of our sinful human nature. Baptism is the sign and seal of this reality, for in baptism, we are symbolically buried with Christ and then raised again with him to new life. We lie down in the water and our old lives and all our sin are washed away, and then we are raised up again, reborn, made new, belonging to Christ forever.
Now, some might say, that makes sense for an adult who has become a Christian, but how can that possibly apply to an infant? The key here is that when we baptize children of believers, it’s a sign of God’s promise not only to them, but to us, for what he will do in their lives; it’s a reminder that the promise is not just to us as individuals, but to us as a family. Just as the Jews circumcised their newborns, and still do, so we baptize our infants, trusting in the promise that “the hesed of Yahweh is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him, and his acts of vindication extend even to our children’s children, to those who keep his covenant and remember to obey his commandments.”
Obviously, baptizing an infant looks different than baptizing an adult convert to Christ; baptizing a new believer is a sign of what God has already done in their lives—it’s like a wedding ring—while baptizing infants is a sign of what he intends to do, more like an engagement ring. But just as a wedding is the logical conclusion of an engagement, so when our baptized children come to profess their faith and join the church, that’s the logical working-out of their baptism, the promise of God come to fruition.
It looks different, but the difference here is not as great as we tend to think, in two ways. First, we don’t have any more of a guarantee in adult baptism than we do in the baptism of infants; we think we do, because we can see more of the person’s life, but people fool us all the time. If it’s about the faithfulness of the person being baptized, we should really wait much, much later than we do; which points us to the second thing, that baptism isn’t about our faith, or our faithfulness, whether we’re baptized as adults or as newborns—it’s about the initiative and the faithfulness of God. We see this in Genesis 17: God initiates the covenant, he declares the covenant, he sets the terms, and he determines the sign of his covenant as a sign of his faithfulness to keep his promises.
Did circumcision guarantee salvation? No, as we noted earlier; there were many who were circumcised who turned away from God, and there have been many baptized, both as children and as adults, who have done the same. And yet God keeps making his promises to us, for ourselves and for our children, even though sometimes his promises are rejected. He has put the family at the center of his plan for us—he created us to live in families, and he created believing families to be the principal setting in which we learn of his love and goodness and are raised in faith in him—and so he makes it clear to us that he loves our children even more than we do, and that they are even more important to him than they are to us.
The key thing in all of this is that it’s all about the promise of God. I think we would do well to take to heart the example of the New Testament, which focuses our attention not on the details of baptism but on its meaning and purpose; I hope we can get past regarding this primarily as a test of doctrinal purity, and instead let baptism focus our minds and hearts on the goodness and faithfulness of our Lord and Savior, who has called us in his love and created us as a people for his name; and whether we agree on baptizing our babies or not, I trust we can all take to heart the truth Peter declared in Acts 2:39: “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.” However we understand the details, we are all here at God’s invitation, by his initiative, because he loves us; and whatever may come, he will never let us go.