Wednesday, February 25, 2004 AD
Baptism, Law and Gospel
I'm grateful for the new pastor at our current (independent evangelical) church having such decided baptistic views. No, really I am. Being repeatedly told that Baptism is an "act of obedience" - Law - forced me to consider more seriously what it meant for Baptism to be "Gospel", and that in turn led to my embracing the Lutheran (biblical) position on the subject; as well as becoming more joyfully aware of what it means personally to be able to say, "I am baptised" (see previous post, below).
The baptist position - that baptism is a work of righteousness, of Law - leads to some unfortunate confusions of Law and Gospel, particularly where infants are concerned. The baptist position is that you can't be baptised unless you [can convince the elders in your church that you] believe. Infants can't believe, we're told (of course, the Bible tells us something different, but that doesn't make much sense to us, and human reason has to take precedence here), so they can't be baptised. QED.
But then this leads to the next problem: how then can children be saved? Now, the issue of what happens to unbaptised children who die in infancy is an abyss too deep for me to begin to fathom: IMO, God's approach on this is clear - he doesn't want us speculating over things we've not been told, he wants us to use the means by which he has promised children can be saved, i.e. baptism.
But of all the answers given to this question, the least satisfactory has to be the one to which baptists are almost inevitably drawn: the "age of accountability". Children below a certain age are too young to have moral guilt for their actions. So they don't need saving, so it doesn't matter that they can't believe and hence can't be baptised.
This is what I meant by confusing Law and Gospel. Ultimately the baptist position boils down to this: the Gospel ain't no help in saving children, because "children can't believe". So instead, we have to water down the Law, find some loopholes in it. So children aren't saved by faith in the the Gospel promises, they're saved by an exclusion, a get-out clause, in the Law: namely, the wholly-invented, unbiblical concept of an "age of accountability".
This is really about children who live unbaptised rather than children who die unbaptised - ISTM there are promises in the Bible to which Christian parents can look for comfort where a child dies unbaptised, though nothing like so many, so clear and so rich as the promises attaching to baptism. But whether my youngest son lives or dies, I don't want him to rely for his current standing before God on some loophole in the Law - I want him to receive and share in the promises of the Gospel, like his brother and his parents. In other words, I want him to be baptised.
The baptist position - that baptism is a work of righteousness, of Law - leads to some unfortunate confusions of Law and Gospel, particularly where infants are concerned. The baptist position is that you can't be baptised unless you [can convince the elders in your church that you] believe. Infants can't believe, we're told (of course, the Bible tells us something different, but that doesn't make much sense to us, and human reason has to take precedence here), so they can't be baptised. QED.
But then this leads to the next problem: how then can children be saved? Now, the issue of what happens to unbaptised children who die in infancy is an abyss too deep for me to begin to fathom: IMO, God's approach on this is clear - he doesn't want us speculating over things we've not been told, he wants us to use the means by which he has promised children can be saved, i.e. baptism.
But of all the answers given to this question, the least satisfactory has to be the one to which baptists are almost inevitably drawn: the "age of accountability". Children below a certain age are too young to have moral guilt for their actions. So they don't need saving, so it doesn't matter that they can't believe and hence can't be baptised.
This is what I meant by confusing Law and Gospel. Ultimately the baptist position boils down to this: the Gospel ain't no help in saving children, because "children can't believe". So instead, we have to water down the Law, find some loopholes in it. So children aren't saved by faith in the the Gospel promises, they're saved by an exclusion, a get-out clause, in the Law: namely, the wholly-invented, unbiblical concept of an "age of accountability".
This is really about children who live unbaptised rather than children who die unbaptised - ISTM there are promises in the Bible to which Christian parents can look for comfort where a child dies unbaptised, though nothing like so many, so clear and so rich as the promises attaching to baptism. But whether my youngest son lives or dies, I don't want him to rely for his current standing before God on some loophole in the Law - I want him to receive and share in the promises of the Gospel, like his brother and his parents. In other words, I want him to be baptised.
