Glad to see this dialogue. I came out of a Roman Catholic and later Pentacostal background. When I “backslid” into the Reformed Faith 30 some years ago, covenant baptism was exactly the point I had to resolve to make it in without violating my conscience. I, too, was certain that believer’s baptism was the biblical teaching. In fact, I eventually wrote my independent study project on the issue.

I was greatly helped by Neal Plantiga’s extension of Lew Smedes study on Union With Christ and its application to baptism. I highly recommend this study. Over the years the case for baptizing the infant children of believers has become more focused and, for me, is settled around two issues both of which are overwhelmingly established biblically:

1. Expose dispensationalism for the deficient approach to scriptures that it is. In more conversations than I can remember with strong proponents of believer’s baptism, they will reject every appeal to the Old Testament scriptures arguing they have no application to the New Testament church. Therefore they reject cirumcision = baptism out of hand. They reject the discussion of “baptism into Moses through the sea and the cloud” cited in I or 2 Cor. 10:1ff. or Paul’s discussion in Romans 4:11ff. of Abraham’s having in circumcision received a “seal of righteousness by faith” in what God promised. Dispensationalism is the road block to clearly seeing the Bible’s teaching on this. More simply I often put it this way:

If our God, who changes not (and therefore isn’t constantly changing the principles
by which he operates) was so gracious in the Old Covenant to include the children,
by what stretch of imagination do we conclude that in the New Covenant, which is
the “dispensation” of superabundant grace, would strangely become less gracious by
excluding the children?

None I’ve ever spoken to can answer that.

Another: if we can at least agree that the Old Testament rituals and ceremonies were types and shadows of Christ and his workings, then certainly children are included. The “shadows” embraced children; therefore, the reality in the New Covenant is what cast that shadow back across time. If the children are in the shadows, they must certainly be in the reality of which they point to.

I’ve more, but this is just a blog. I hope this adds to the discussion. Thanks for raising the topic.

Blessings, Neil

I can connect with your feelings. I managed to get through 4 years of Reformed Bible College without being convinced of infant baptism. And part of it was that I had wanted my baptism to be a personal experience where I personally obeyed Christ’s command to be baptized as a sign to the world that I believe in him. But that was denied me, and instead I was allowed only a profession of faith.

While it was my aunt (and I think my parents too, but the photos only show my aunt) that took me to be baptized, not “a room full of nuns” at an adoption agency as in your case, I don’t consider my experience as any more “personal” than yours, nor would I consider it so even if I had been baptized in the CRC. I don’t have a single memory of the event. I just know it happened.

What I do know is that you and I were baptized in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit by followers of Jesus, however imperfect those nuns and my aunt and parents were, and however imperfect the Roman Catholic was and is. For all their faults – and I say this as someone whose job it is to call Roman Catholics and others to the true faith here in Mexico – for all their faults, they at the very least obeyed the command to baptize us as Christ commanded. Don’t think of your first baptism as a “Catholic” baptism – think of it as the baptism that the Lord commanded, and that it just happened to be “a room full of nuns” that administered it. In the end that’s Augustine’s argument. The importance of baptism isn’t in the merits of the one being baptized or the merits of the one performing the baptism. The importance of baptism is that Jesus is reclaiming this world and its people as his own, and sends his church to make that known through preaching and the sacraments.

And so we, as adults who believe in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, can count ourselves among the disciples that the church was called to make via baptizing and teaching (Mt. 28.18-20). Various parts of the church, with all their imperfections, baptized us and taught us about Jesus.

I don’t fault you for wanting to be re-baptized. I think it’s a natural human feeling. I know I felt that feeling myself for years. But I’m not convinced anything more than a verbal profession of faith was necessary. You could have just said thank you personally to Jesus for marking you since birth as his own, and then said, Yes and Amen to him through a public profession of your faith in him. By re-baptism you in effect say that baptism in itself isn’t that important so much as the personal experience and faith of the person. I would respond that baptism is not so much a sign of our faith as it is a sign of God’s gracious claim of authority over a person and his inclusion of the person into the covenant community, so faith is a response to it, not a condition for it. (I’ll have more to say about that later so I won’t try to explain that here.)

Wow, that was supposed to be a reply but it turned into practically a blog post in itself! Hope that helps. I really do intend to get to that final post or two soon, but I need to attend to pressing matters such as preparing for the 5 hours I need to teach tomorrow, and taking my wife out for lunch. Blessings to you. Dave

I was baptized as an infant in the Roman Catholic church, then experienced believer’s baptism at the age of 20 in the Baptist church I attended at the time. My solid education at Calvin notwithstanding, sometimes I feel like I am really only CRC because of my home church, Madison Square, and that I would not likely be in this denomination otherwise. But perhaps I shouldn’t say that too loud here at 2850, now that my livelihood depends upon the existence of said denomination!

But let me give you my anecdotal explanation of why I believe so strongly in “believer’s baptism”, which is formed more by my personal experiences than by theological convictions (although I’m not sure you could ever convince me that Roman Catholic baptism is biblical, but I’ll wait to see if you prove me wrong!)

I was relinquished for adoption at birth, and within six days of my birth, I was baptized among strangers–”in a room full of nuns”, as I like to say–I’m going to include the link to my previous blog post on the topic, and hopefully this won’t cause me to be dumped into the spam folder–

http://www.xanga.com/item.aspx?tab=weblogs&user=laterain&uid=531667083

so you see, for me it’s really personal. Nobody who loved me was present at my original baptism–and when you talk about covenant, being baptized “in a room full of nuns” is to me antithetical to that.

But I will be eager to read more of your thoughts! Thanks for continuing the conversation . . .

Lorraine