The Reformers’ Dissent and the Evangelical Discrepancy

The battle cry of the Reformation, heralding the efficacy of “faith alone” for salvation, inverted the fathers' emphasis on the efficacy of the sacraments themselves.[1] As a result, the doctrine of baptism would be profoundly reshaped, even where the practice of baptizing infants continued.[2] But where this practice was retained, the tension of the fathers remained.[3]

Where else can we start but with the extraordinary Catholic priest turned Protestant pastor, Martin Luther? In light of his new understanding of justification by faith alone in Christ alone, he would come to reject[4] the popular Roman theory that the faith of the church validates the infant’s baptism:
The sophists in the universities and the papal gang have fabricated the story that young children are baptized without personal faith, namely on the faith of the church which sponsors confess at his baptism; … but if one asked them as to the ground of such an answer and where it stands in Scripture, then one finds them in a dark smoke-hole; or they point to their clerical cap and say: ‘We are the most learned doctors and say it is so; therefore it is right and you are not permitted to inquire further …’[5] [But] baptism helps no one, is also to be given to no one, except he believe for himself, and without personal faith no one is to be baptized. As St. Augustine himself says: ‘the sacrament does not justify, but the faith of the sacrament ’… Were we not able to prove that the young children themselves believe and have personal faith, it is my sincere counsel and judgment that one straightway desist and the sooner the better, and never more baptized any child so that we no more mock and blaspheme the most blessed majesty of God with such baseless tomfoolery and jugglery.[6]
Luther’s demand that faith precede baptism without exception is admirable for its consistency.[7] His positing “infant faith,” however, seems rather dubious.[8] Though some Lutheran and Reformed theologians have embraced this view, “few have found the courage to rest the weight of their case on so tenuous a foundation.”[9] Rather, most would affirm, in the words of the Anglican Catechism, that, “by reason of their tender age [infants] cannot perform repentance and faith.”[10]
Nevertheless, for Luther, and his successor, Philip Melancthon, the waters of baptism retained the power to regenerate.[11] They taught baptism as necessary to salvation, being the instrument of regeneration. Accordingly, the Augsburg Confession (1530 AD), penned by Melancthon, states of the churches represented: “They condemn the Anabaptists, who reject the baptism of children, and say that children are saved without Baptism.”[12] The Saxon Visitation Articles (1592 AD) likewise condemn the Calvinists for rejecting baptismal regeneration and baptism’s consequent necessity.[13] Similarly, Martin Bucer, who influenced not only the Lutheran and Calvinist movements, but also the English Reformation,[14] would eventually profess regeneration through the baptismal rite.[15] This position is reflected in the standards of Anglicanism. According to article 27 of the Thirty-Nine Articles, baptism is “an instrument” whereby the infant is “rightly grafted into the Church.” In the Book of Common Prayer, the waters of baptism are said to effect the “mystical washing away of sin,” in which a child is “regenerated and grafted into the body of Christ’s church,” and “made a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of God.” In light of this, Jewett opines, 
When the ancient fathers began seriously to frame a reason for baptizing infants, they wrote the prologue to this medieval sacramentalism by saying that baptism is the divinely appointed instrument for mediating the grace of cleansing from original sin and renewal in the image of Christ. The position of the Lutheran and Anglican confessions is but the epilogue to this same position. Though in the latter communions, as in the early Fathers, the ties between the outward sign and inward grace are looser than in the Roman Church, yet cleansing from sin and inward renewal are still tied to the waters of baptism.
For those evangelical segments of these traditions, the tension remains most acute.
But with the Swiss Reformer, Huldrych Zwingli, a new path would be cut, and an “evangelical” defense for infant baptism pioneered.[16] Whereas Luther thanked God that the baptismal rite had been preserved unimpaired throughout the centuries, Zwingli wrote,
In this matter of baptism — if I may be pardoned for saying it — I can only conclude that all the doctors have been in error from the time of the apostles. …All the doctors have ascribed to the water a power which it does not have and the holy apostles did not teach … at many points we shall have to tread a different path from that taken by either ancient or modern writers or by our own contemporaries.[17]
Though Zwingli retained the venerable tradition of baptizing infants, his rationale for the practice marked a radical break with the past. With the Anabaptists – and against Rome, Lutheranism and Anglicanism – Zwingli rejects the necessity of baptism for salvation.[18] Baptism does not mystically operate to wash away sin, original or otherwise. It is a symbol and sign – a sign of the covenant.[19] In Alister McGrath’s distinction of the two historic conceptions of the sacraments, baptism is declarative of spiritual realities, rather than causative of them.[20] Zwingli writes,
Water–baptism is a ceremonial sign with which salvation is not indissolubly connected ... The inward baptism of the Spirit is the work of teaching which God does in our hearts and the calling with which he comforts and assures our hearts in Christ. And this baptism none can give save God alone. Without it, none can be saved – though it is quite possible to be saved without the baptism of external [immersion]. … Hence water–baptism is nothing but an external ceremony, that is, an outward sign that we are incorporated and engrafted into the Lord Jesus Christ and pledged to live to him and to follow him. And in Jesus Christ neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails anything, but a new creature, the living of a new life, so it is not baptism that saves us but a new life.[21]
In a word, baptism is a sign declaring the realities of the new covenant, just as circumcision did in the old covenant. McMaken summarizes Zwingli’s argument:
In this way, Zwingli provided Christian theology with the second of its two great arguments[22] in support of infant baptism, namely the covenantal argument. God has established a covenant with God’s people and children born to Christian parents are included in this covenant just as were children born to the Israelites. Such infants ought to receive baptism as a sign of the covenant in the same way that infant sons received circumcision as the sign of the covenant.
The covenant argument would provide a framework for infant baptism with which most evangelicals could live, even if it didn’t resolve all the tensions.[23] 

Two Baptisms?

In particular, given the broad evangelical consensus on baptism’s basic meaning[24] - namely, our vital union with Christ in His death and resurrection[25] - it is far from clear how such import can be coherently applied to all infant children of believers without significant qualifications.[26]  Yet, as most paedobaptists would concur, “if it is proper to administer baptism to infants, then the import of baptism must be the same for infants as for adults.”[27]

Argument from Precedent: Israel and the Church

In defense that infants justifiably receive a sign signifying union with Christ, and all the spiritual blessings that entails - even though, by all accounts, they lack these - many point to the fact that circumcision in the old covenant, anticipating the same realities (e.g., regeneration and renewal of the heart; cf. Dt 30:6; Rom 2:28-29) were applied to male infants in Israel without discretion. And though it is doubtful that the practice of circumcising infants in ancient Israel typically involved explicit admonitions to “circumcise your hearts,” it could be argued on the basis of Moses’ warnings in Deuteronomy (e.g., 10:16) and Jeremiah’s later chastisements (e.g., 4:4) that such should have been the case.
Yet, the veiled nature of the “old dispensation” (cf. 2 Cor 3:7-16) indicates an important distinction between the two covenants in this regard. In particular, unlike baptism, the full import of circumcision was unclear to the members of its respective covenant(s). While it is no doubt true that “the old covenant Scriptures anticipate Christ, bear witness to him, prophesy of his coming and of his death and resurrection, and all that flows from it,” it is also the case that “several elements in the gospel, and even the gospel itself, were hidden in the past, and have only been revealed with the coming of Christ.”[28] What D.A. Carson says of the gospel and “some of its chief elements” with respect to the Old Testament revelation applies particularly to the import of circumcision as a type of regeneration: “[It is both] something that has been (typologically) predicted and now fulfilled, and something that has been hidden and has now been revealed.”[29] Or again, if “the sign of circumcision” that sealed Abraham’s faith was part and parcel of the exemplar of “the righteousness by faith” for Abraham’s physical offspring, then (as for the uncircumcised Gentiles who would later come to believe) it didn’t constitute an effectual model of this righteousness until the unveiling of the gospel in Christ (Rom 4:11-12). 
Moreover, prior to the “summing up of all things in Christ” (ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι τὰ πάντα ἐν τῷ Χριστῷ), and the integrated revelation of “the mystery of the gospel,” the various “types” and symbols that pointed forward to Christ were diffused throughout the matrix of Israel’s corporate life and worship. There were signs everywhere: on pots and pans, in tents and tunics, and in the blood of sheep and bulls, the meaning of which would not be fully disclosed until the illumination of Christ. It is no more remarkable that such signs, whose meaning would prove so profound, would be applied to an oil lamp than to an infant. This is to be sharply contrasted with the use of baptism and the Lord's Supper in the New Testament. Nevertheless, in the Reformed tradition this asymmetry between the two covenants, and their respective signs, tends to be suppressed in the fashioning of a procrustean covenant theology. R.B. Kuiper is representative when he writes:
In the old dispensation God instituted two sacraments, circumcision and the Passover. In the new dispensation the Lord Jesus Christ substituted baptism for circumcision and holy communion for the Passover … the meaning of the sacraments in the two dispensations is essentially the same, and their number is identical.[30]
With all the variegated ceremonies of the old covenant, is it not odd (and convenient) that we should identify only two “sacraments” within it? Rather, it seems to us that, with the “cutting” of the new covenant, the manifold symbolic and ceremonial shadows of the old dispensation, having been illuminated in Christ’s advent, are largely dispelled. Augustine’s assessment seems more accurate:
In these times, since there has been revealed to us a clear sign of our liberty in the Resurrection of the Lord, we are not heavily burdened with the use of certain signs whose meaning we understand; rather we have a few in place of many [i.e., in the old dispensation][31] which the teaching of the Lord and the Apostles has transmitted to us, and these are very easy to perform, very sublime in implication, and most upright in observance. Such are the sacraments of Baptism and the celebration of the Body and Blood of the Lord.[32]
If there is continuity between the signs of these covenants, there is also significant discontinuity. And this reflects the substantial difference of the covenantal dispensations to which the signs belong. The new covenant, though organically emerging from the old, is radically different in nature (Jer 31:31-34). Unlike the law-covenant of Moses, the new covenant of Christ is immediate - rather than hierarchical - and effective for all its members (Rom 8:1-4). The Spirit seals all Christ’s members, individually (“all who believe”), guaranteeing their status and future inheritance in Him. As Carson summarizes it:
This does not foresee a time of no teachers;[33] in the context, it foresees a time of no mediators [see Jer 31:30], because the entire covenant community under this new covenant will have a personal knowledge of God, a knowledge characterized by the forgiveness of sin (31:34) and by the law of God written on the heart (31:33) … [The nature of the new covenant entails] the abrogation of an essentially tribalistic covenantal structure in favor of one that focuses on the immediate knowledge of God by all people under the new covenant, a knowledge of God that turns on the forgiveness of sin and the transformation of the heart and mind.[34]
Regarding the implications for baptism, he concludes:
Under the Mosaic covenant there is necessarily a distinction between the locus of the covenant community and the locus of the elect/redeemed/remnant, with circumcision being the sign of the former, under the new covenant the distinction is obliterated… i.e., the locus of the covenant community and the locus of the elect/redeemed/remnant become one. That suggests that baptism, for instance, cannot properly be a sign of the former but not of the latter.[35]
If there is an “already/not yet” aspect to the present economy of the new covenant - and there surely is - such that the empirical church is “not yet” a pure fellowship, but a “mixed society” in which a brother must at times, “teach his neighbor and ... his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’” nevertheless we mustn’t forget the present realities in Christ, established “already” for all who are in him by faith. In Christ, the church is pure. In Christ, all the members are regenerate. What, after all, are we calling ignorant and false brothers to but a sincere faith, and so to a true participation “in Christ”? For this reason, we rightly strive to discern a “living faith” among those we admit into and maintain in the covenant community. And for this reason, church membership and discipline presuppose the reality and norm of the “already” in Christ when confronting the “not yet” of the present age. As we’ll explore in the next post, all of this is entirely consistent with the apostolic pattern: those who repent and believe were baptized “into Jesus Christ,” having thereby entered into the glorious realities our Lord brought to light and inaugurated in his life, death and resurrection.
And though there is little doubt that baptism has a definite correspondence with circumcision in the Abrahamic covenant, it is far from evident that it was a one-to-one correspondence, such that baptism essentially replaced or was “substituted” for circumcision in the New Covenant. If this were the case, it must have been a massive oversight of the Jerusalem Council to not appeal to the baptism of the Gentiles as constituting their “new circumcision,” against those who were insisting that they be circumcised in addition to their baptism (Acts 15). Similarly, for all of his argumentation with the Galatians regarding circumcision, why did Paul fail to mention the fact that their baptism served in the place of circumcision, and so end the debate once and for all?  And why did the primitive Jewish church continue to both circumcise their children and celebrate baptism as the supposed sign of the “new dispensation”? Rather, the relationship between these two rites appears to be far more nuanced than Reformed theologians have typically admitted. 
Others insist on baptizing infants, not as an exact replacement of circumcision under the old administration, but as embodying the principle of familial solidarity in God’s covenant dealings with his people – which, it is argued, was enshrined in the practice of circumcising the male children. However, it is plain that baptism’s function according to the New Testament is not to mark family solidarity. It is an eschatological mark of “who’s in” and “who’s out” with respect to the kingdom of God. Consider John and Jesus’ respective words regarding the radical nature of God’s dealings with us in the new age:
[John] said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham. Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. “I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
 “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”
God still honors the family structure, of course, and still employs it in the work of redemption,[36] but the new covenant in Christ is of an apocalyptic character. That is, the blessings are both universal and individual, cutting across the ties of family, tribe and nation. Family solidarity is relativized in the baptism and Spirit of the new age. God does bless the family structure – indeed, it is through Abraham’s elect (and mixed) line that the Messiah came to us – but it, in itself, guarantees nothing in salvation. Apart from faith, our physical lineage can only condemn us. Along these lines, Acts 2:39[37] and 1 Cor 7:14[38] appear immaterial in the discussion. Also irrelevant are Mt 19:14, Mk 10:15, etc., as many paedobaptists frankly admit.[39] 
Sidestepping these hermeneutical and exegetical questions, some argue that in the place of Scripture’s silence the ancient tradition of the historic church clearly speaks: baptism is properly applied to the children of believers.[40] As many have observed, this is a somewhat ironic argument for a Protestant. Jewett notes, “early Baptists used to remind their Paedobaptist brethren that subjects of the triple crown are fond of tradition, and that it ill becomes a Protestant to cry, ‘The Fathers, the Fathers.’”[41] More seriously, evangelical paedobaptism boasts no greater antiquity than the credobaptism of the continental Anabaptists and English Baptists. As we’ve seen, prior to Zwingli (and his Swiss Anabaptist contemporaries), baptism was framed in a radically different conception than either evangelical credobaptists or paedobaptists could brook. Zwingli’s covenant arguments, though utilizing an ancient correlation between circumcision and baptism,[42] were an innovation of the 16th century. Moreover, if evangelical paedobaptists, though rejecting the ancient rationale, point to the ancient practice of infant baptism as indicating the apostolicity of the institution, then they must also admit the equally ancient practice of paedocommunion. Within fifty years of Tertullian’s reference to infant baptism in North Africa, Cyprian of Carthage mentions the (then) catholic practice of infant communion.[43] Though some evangelical scholars and leaders embrace giving the eucharistic elements to infants, the overwhelming majority of evangelicalism has historically rejected paedocommunion as undermining the significance of the meal. This is particularly significant when we consider that “early Christian sources from the Didache onward reflect the unity of the sacraments; they were always celebrated together.”[44] Hence, as Jewett argues, “to repudiate [infant communion] as a post-apostolic superstition, as most Paedobaptists do, is to threaten [infant baptism] with the same odious pedigree.”[45] Finally, it is far from clear that the evidence of history is on the side of infant baptism.[46] Paedobaptist theologian, T.W. Manson writes,
As a matter of history, of what went on in the Early Church, the antipaedobaptist case is a very strong one. The argument from silence on the matter of infant baptism is almost complete; and even Oscar Cullmann’s powerful argumentation does not seem to me to do more than establish that there may have been infant baptisms in the New Testament times.[47]

Theory and Practice

Theologically, there remains the question of the functional import of infant baptism. Despite protests to the contrary, there is no escaping the fact that the baptism of a baby is fundamentally different in practical significance than that of a believing adult. The careful evangelical paedobaptist will sprinkle qualifiers with the baptismal water: “this does not mean the child is saved,” “he still needs to hear and believe the gospel,” “she is a daughter of the covenant, and our prayer is that she will one day become the daughter of God,” etc. Is this, then, the “sealing” of our union with Christ? The remarkable exception that infant baptism constitutes in evangelical paedobaptistic reflections on baptism continually betrays this difference.[48] Consider, for instance, Calvin’s reflections on baptism:
Christ enjoins that those who have submitted to the gospel, and professed to be his disciples, shall be baptized; partly that it may be an outward sign of faith before men, … Christ enjoins them to teach before baptizing, and desires that none but believers shall be admitted to baptism, it would appear that baptism is not properly administered unless when it is preceded by faith (Harmony of the Evangelists, vol.3, p.385-6).
Baptism is, as it were, an appurtenance of faith, and therefore it is later in order; secondly, if it be given without faith whose seal it is, it is both wicked and also a too gross a profanation, (Commentary on Acts, vol.1, p.362).
And yet this norm apparently does not apply to the bulk of Christendom:
In a heathen nation, first teach them, and then baptize them; but in a Christian church, first baptize them, and then teach them (Thomas Watson, The Ten Commandments, p.160).
It is abundantly obvious that this language [Mark 16:15-16] applies primarily to the ordinary case of adults and not to the exceptional case of infants, and while the order – first belief, and then Baptism – refers to adults, it cannot apply to infants (James Bannerman, The Church of Christ, vol.2, p.104f.).
Unfortunately, this “exceptional case” would become the rule in the Church. 
Moreover, this discrepancy in the evangelical theology of baptism invites new meanings and interpretations to be invested in the rite. “As long as you give baptism to an unregenerated child, people will imagine that it must do the child good. They will ask, ‘If it does not do the child any good, why is it baptized?’”[49] More careful evangelical paedobaptists typically deny any definite blessings conveyed simply by virtue of the rite itself. At the very least, the question appears to be moot.[50] Rather, as perhaps 1 Cor 7:14 suggests, the benefits children enjoy as members of a family of faith are by virtue of their birth, not the rite of baptism. In particular, they have, at least, the privileges of a Christian home and a church community. Yet the question remains. Unless infant baptism is merely “a wet baby dedication,”[51] what does the rite do? For most in the congregation watching the precious newborn sprinkled under the invocation of the Triune Name, Spurgeon’s conclusion seems undeniable: “The statement that it puts children into the covenant, or renders them members of the visible church, is only a veiled form of the fundamental error of Baptismal Regeneration.” Commenting on the “deplorable” confusions surrounding infant baptism in many Protestant churches, Kuiper writes,
Infant baptism having become shrouded in superstition, many Protestant parents have a vague notion that in some magical way this sacrament guarantees the salvation of their little ones if they should happen to die in infancy, or at least improves their chances of being saved. Often infant baptism is regard as a mere dedicatory rite.  It is thought that in this ceremony the parents dedicate their children to God – and such they do, but the promises and obligations of the covenant of grace are forgotten. And comparatively few Protestant churches today take the membership of baptized children seriously.[52]
This is no doubt true. Yet even if these churches did take seriously the supposed membership of believer’s children in the “visible church,” what of the other aspects of baptism’s meaning? What of their being forgiven, washed, sanctified, regenerated, and baptized in the Holy Spirit? The tension between the import of baptism, on the one hand, and its application to infants on the other clearly remains. There are three solutions that have emerged in attempting to resolve it: (1) water-down baptism’s meaning, as most evangelical paedobaptists have done by effectively reducing the rite to a marker of “membership in the visible church,” (2) ramp-up baptism’s intrinsic efficacy, resulting in a de facto doctrine of “baptismal regeneration,” as the fathers did explicitly, or (3) eschew infant baptism altogether, as Tertullian encouraged. 

[1] This is reflected in the various reformed creedal statements on baptism: “We therefore by being baptized do confess our faith,” First Helvetic Confession; “Baptism is a sign of profession [of faith],” Thirty-Nine Articles, “Q. What is required of a person who is baptized?  A. Repentance, where they forsake sin, and faith, whereby they steadfastly believe the promises of God made to them in the sacrament,” Anglican Catechism, the French Confession calls it a “sacrament of faith and penance,” and the Westminster Confession declares baptism is “a sign and seal” to the party baptized “of his giving up to God through Jesus Christ to walk in newness of life.”  
[2] “The sacramental argument for infant baptism [i.e., removal of sin] reigned supreme in theology for a thousand years, until the Protestant Reformation,” The Sign of the Gospel: Toward an Evangelical Doctrine of Infant Baptism after Barth, W. Travis McMaken (Fortress Press, 2013), p.21.
[3] Paul K. Jewett labels it a “rudimentary asymmetry,” defining it this way: “On the one hand, as evangelicals they so defined baptism as to recognize faith as essential to the meaning and efficacy of the sacrament; on the other, they insisted that infants, though admittedly incapable of faith, should be baptized,” Infant Baptism and the Covenant of Grace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), p.162.  Similarly, McMaken explains, “[There is] an inherent tension within all reformational doctrines of infant baptism. For both Luther and Calvin, and the mainline of the Reformation as it proceeded from them, baptism is only as effective to accomplish what it is said to accomplish insofar as it is joined with faith. …for all the bluster in support of infant baptism against the Reformation’s radical wing, the affirmation of infant baptism – at least in the form it then assumed – is not a self-evident conclusion for Protestant theology,” p.24. 
[4] Yet this view is still found in Lutheran circles, e.g., Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, (Muchen: Kaiser-Verlag, 1960), p.180.
[5] This is somewhat ironic, as this response isn’t altogether unlike his own defense of infant baptism in his Larger Catechism.
[6] Luther’s “Sermon for the Third Sunday after Epiphany (Matt.8:1ff.),” cited in Jewett, Infant Baptism, p.167-68. 
[7] “[The reformational demand of faith] pushed both Luther and Calvin to make assertions about the possibility of faith in infants, as well as to argue that those baptized must fulfill their baptism with faith,” McMaken, p.24. Cf. Institutes, IV, 16.20.
[8] Luther’s position is made to stand only by leaning on scholastic speculation and church tradition. Jaroslav Pelikan writes, “the appropriate arguments from Augustine in defense of the thesis that children could believe had been assembled in the Corpus of the Canon Law. On the basis of these arguments, the biblical evidence had been exploited with increasing care and profundity by early scholasticism and had been carried as far as it could be, until the speculative doctrine of the infusion of faith provided theologians with a method for gaining additional proof texts. Despite his hostility both to the canon law and to speculation, Luther seems in fact to have been drawing on this material [in his defense of infant baptism],” Spirit Verses Structure: Luther and the Institutions of the Church (Harper & Row: New York, 1968), p.80.
[9] Jewett, Infant Baptism, p.168.
[10] Italics mine. In this regard, Jewett cites Kierkegaard: “The truth is, one cannot become a Christian as a child … Becoming a Christian presupposes (according to the New Testament) a personal consciousness of sin and of oneself as a sinner. So one readily sees that this whole thing about becoming a Christian as a child, yea, about childhood being above all other ages the season for becoming a Christian, is neither more nor less than puerility…,” Infant Baptism, p.170.
[11] Pelikan goes on to state, “though Luther was a theologian of faith, he was also, perhaps even more, a theologian of the structured means of grace,” Spirit Versus Structure, p.83.
[12] It earlier asserts, "children are to be baptized who, by Baptism, being offered to God, are received into God's favor."
[13] Under Article IV, Calvinists are condemned for holding: “[i] That Baptism is an external washing of water, by which a certain internal ablution from sin is merely signified. [ii] That Baptism does not work nor confer regeneration, faith, the grace of God, and salvation, but only signifies and seals them. [iii] That not all who are baptized in water, but the elect only, obtain by it the grace of Christ and the gifts of faith. [iv] That regeneration doth not take place in and with Baptism, but afterwards, at a more advanced age-yea, with many not before old age. [v] That salvation doth not depend on Baptism…,” De Sacro Baptismo.
[14] Under Thomas Cranmer’s leadership, Bucer influenced the second edition of The Book of Common Prayer.
[15] “We confess and teach that holy baptism, when given and received according to the Lord's command, is in the case of adults and little children truly a baptism of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit, whereby those who are baptized have all their sins washed away, are buried into the death of our Lord Jesus Christ, are incorporated into him and put him on for the death of their sins, for a new and godly life and the blessed resurrection, and through him become children and heirs of God,” Martin Bucer, in his 1548 Brief Summary of the Christian Doctrine and Religion Taught at Strasbourg.
[16] Hughes Oliphant Old writes, “[Though his arguments are incomplete] Zwingli’s exegesis has broken loose the stones that Bullinger, Oedolampadius, Bucer, and finally Calvin would make into a very solid argument,” The Shaping of the Reformed Baptismal Rite in the Sixteenth Century, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992), p.112. Luther earlier argued from the covenant by analogy with circumcision, but in light of his understanding of the covenant as universal, his argument was profoundly different: “the command and the promise were universal, excluding no nation and no individual from the divine covenant. How then could any individual or any nation be excluded from the sign of the covenant, which was baptism? Only those who excluded themselves by refusing to accept the sign and the covenant could be denied baptism. Otherwise, ‘if we follow his command and baptize everyone, we leave it to him to be concerned about the faith of those baptized.’ The gospel was the same for all nations, and therefore for all individuals, in accordance with the covenant of God, signed in his command to baptize and sealed in his promise,” Pelikan, Ibid., p.95, 96. 
[17] Zwingli and Bullinger, G. W. Bromiley, p. 130.
[18]  “[Zwingli] decided to walk with the Fathers and contrary to the Anabaptists in retaining the usage of infant baptism, but at the same time to walk with the Anabaptists and contrary to the Fathers by denying the necessity of infant baptism,” Jewett, p.80. 
[19] Though “Zwingli failed to work out any fully developed or coherent theology of baptism…with his definition of baptism as a covenant sign he did indicate the lines along which much profitable work was to be done by the later Reformed theologians,” Bromiley, Zwingli and Bullinger, p.270.
[20] McGrath, Christian Theology, (John Wiley & Sons, 2011), p.423.
[21] Huldrych Zwingli, Of Baptism. Found in The Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953), Volume XXIV, pp. 136–137, 156.
[22] The first being what McMaken terms “Augustine’s synthesis” (see previous post).
[23] McMaken outlines “the Protestant crisis of infant baptism” that emerges after the Reformation (see Sign of the Gospel, pp.26f.).
[24] John Murray is representative of the historic, evangelical position when he writes, “baptism signifies union with Christ in the virtue of his death and the power of his resurrection, [resulting in] purification from the defilement of sin by the renewing grace of the Holy Spirit, and purification from the guilt of sin by the sprinkling of the blood of Christ,” Christian Baptism (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1980), p.5.
[25] “Baptism signifies union with Christ in his death, burial and resurrection. It is because believers are united to Christ in the efficacy of his death, in the power of his resurrection, and in the fellowship of his grace that they are one body. They are united to Christ and therefore to one another,” Murray, Ibid., p.3
[26] Whereas such can be made with respect to those who make a credible profession, even if their profession ultimately proves false. This is the problem with Murray’s argument on pp.51-58, which amounts to question-begging.
[27] Ibid., p.45 (emphasis mine).
[28] D.A. Carson, “Mystery and Fulfillment,” in ed., Carson, O’Brien and Seifrid Justification and Variegated Nomism, Vol.II (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), p.397.
[29] Ibid., p.427.
[30] Kuiper, The Glorious Body of Christ (Banner of Truth Trust, 1967), p.201.
[31] On Christian Doctrine, Book III, VI, 10. Augustine is of course referencing Galatians 3:24.
[32] Ibid., Book III, IX, 13.
[33] We’re reminded of John’s comment in 1John 2:27. They don’t “need anyone to teach” them, and yet John is teaching them. 
[34] “Evangelicals, Ecumenism and the Church,” in Evangelical Affirmations, ed. Kenneth S. Kantzer and Carl F. H. Henry (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990), p.360-61.
[35] Ibid., p.362, fn.18.
[36] This is against such oversimplifications and straw-men as erected by opponents of credobaptism to the effect that believer baptism implies a modern hyper-individualism, as, for instance, when Bromiley argues “there is no reason whatever to suppose that God changes course and begins to deal only with individuals in isolation,” Children of Promise (T&T Clark, 1979), p.24. First, no one supposes that God deals “only with individuals in isolation,” and secondly, though there is something new to the “new covenant,” such that God no longer relates to his people in the “tribalistic” structure of the old, it was always the case that “not all Israel is Israel.” The difference between Israel and “the Israel of God” is the difference between the old and new administration under Christ.  
[37] As Arndt, Gingrich, and Danker suggest, teknois here denotes “descendants,” rather than children specifically.
[38] On this verse, Beasley-Murray concludes: “it yields no positive evidence concerning the Apostolic doctrine of baptism and it would best be omitted from the discussion concerning that doctrine,” Baptism, p.199.
[39] It is universally acknowledged among paedobaptists that Jesus blessed but did not baptize the children. Matthew Poole, for instance, writes: “We must take heed we do not found infant baptism upon the example of Christ in this text; for it is certain that he did not baptize these children.” Cited in T.E. Watson, Should Babies Be Baptized, (Grace Publications, 1995), p.26.
[40] E.g., A.A. Hodge writes, “The early church, in unbroken continuity from the days of the apostles, testify to their custom on this subject,” Confession of Faith, (Banner of Truth Trust, 2004), p.348.
[41] Infant Baptism, p.15.
[42] As Jewett puts the matter, “the opinion that infants should be baptized because they were circumcised is of ancient pedigree, having been mentioned by Cyprian in his letter to Fidus. Prior to Zwingli, however, it had enjoyed only an ancillary place in giving propriety to infant baptism.” Other fathers echoed this correspondence between baptism and circumcision as reflected in Colossians 2:11-12.
[43] “From the third century until the twelfth and thirteenth century there is overwhelming evidence that the Western Church regularly brought her infants and young children to participate in the Lord's Supper. This is evidenced by several primary sources and substantiated by numerous secondary sources. Before this time, we have no unambiguous evidence about the practice" of paedocommunion,” Tommy Lee, The History of Paedocommunion: From the Early Church Until 1500, http://www.reformed.org/social/index.html?mainframe=http://www.reformed.org/sacramentology/tl_paedo.html. For an instance of this very logic, from a Catholic perspective, see http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/04/why-cant-my-son-receive-the-eucharist.
[44] Jewett, p.41-42.
[45] Ibid., p.42.
[46] Adolf von Harnack famously asserted that there is no evidence for the practice of infant baptism before the end of the 2nd century, and many scholars since have affirmed this. See Beasley-Murray, Baptism, pp.305-312.
[47] “Baptism in the Church,” Scottish Journal of Theology, vol.2, 1949, p.403. The author is referring to Cullman’s booklet, Baptism in the New Testament, penned in response to Karl Barth’s devastating critique of infant baptism.
[48] Church historian, William Cunningham, writes of the Westminster Catechism: “The general definitions of sacraments and the corresponding general definition given of the objects and effects of baptism, do not apply fully and without some modification to the form in which we usually see baptism administered, [i.e., infant baptism],” Historical Theology, vol.II, p.145. He continues, “…the statement in the Confession plainly assumes, that each individual baptized not only should have the necessary preliminary qualifications, but should be himself exercised and satisfied upon this point, and should thus be prepared to take part, intelligently and consciously, in the personal assumption of the practical obligations [of baptism.],” Ibid., p.262f. This and the following quotes are cited in T.E. Watson, Should Babies Be Baptized, p.123, and p.30-33, respectively.
[49] Charles H. Spurgeon, Spurgeon at His Best, comp. Tom Carter (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1988), p.21
[50] “We are unable to put any such clear and explicit alternative in the case of the baptism of infants, or give any very definite account of the way and manner in which it bears upon or affects them individually. Men have often striven hard in their speculations to lay down something precise and definite, in the way of a general principle or standard, as to the bearing and effect of baptism in relation to the great blessings of justification and regeneration in the cases of infants individually. But the Scripture really affords no adequate materials for doing this,” Cunningham, Historical Theology, vol.II, p.150.
[51] “The Constitution of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., 1960-62, affirms that “children born within the pale of the visible church are dedicated to God in baptism,” Jewett, p.63, fn.61. But, Jewett asks, “is dedication the meaning of baptism? Neither in the New Testament nor in the classic Paedobaptist confessions is this unique theology of the sacrament to be found.”
[52] Op cit., p.210.