Baptists have to argue children stopped being members of the covenant sometime in the first century with no controversy, no discussion, no explicit statement from Jesus or an apostle, and no church council. If Baptists were right, the Jerusalem Council should have been about the exclusion of infants, not (merely) the inclusion of Gentiles. Children had been included in God’s people for millennia; it’s impossible for their sudden exclusion to happen and go relatively unnoticed. No one debates whether or not children born to Israelites under the old covenant were regarded as covenant members; the only question is whether or not children continued to be in the covenant after the new covenant was inaugurated. Did the doctrine of covenant children, so firmly established in the OT, vanish without a trace? This is the proverbial dog that didn’t bark. A controversy that should have been there simply isn’t — it’s the case of the missing controversy. And this missing controversy is definitive proof that the church never stopped including children in the covenant. The reason the NT does not argue explicitly for infant baptism is because there were no Baptists to argue against. You don’t bother arguing against a position no one holds — and in the context of the apostolic church in the first century, no one held to exclusion of the children of God’s people from the covenant. Such a novelty was unheard of. Everyone in the church knew the promise continued to be “to you and to your children.”
The NT does not need to argue for something that was not a matter of controversy. Instead, as we read the NT looking for clues to the baptismal debate, we find exactly what we’d expect to find if the inclusion of covenant children continued to be the pattern among God’s people. To really understand the paedobaptism/credobaptism discussion, it is important to widen the scope of what we look at or we will miss the most important clues — we must not look only at passages that refer explicitly to baptism, but also passages that talk about children, the covenant, God’s promises, and so on. Everything the NT says about the children of believers is consistent with paedobaptism – they are addressed as saints/church members (Eph 6), they are to be brought up in the Lord (Eph 6), the kingdom of God belongs to them (Matt. 19), they are holy (1 Cor. 7), God still deals with households as such (the book of Acts), promises are still made to and about children (Acts 2), there is still a covenant tree with growing branches (Romans 11), etc. Of course, the old covenant Scriptures are full of promises and prophecies about the new covenant that include children, and even single them out for blessing (e.g., Isaiah 59:21). Nothing suggests these promises can be spiritualized away; the NT affirms they refer to actual offspring. Follow the trail of clues in the Scriptures, and you will end up with deep paedobaptismal convictions.
A key text is 1 Corinthians 10:1ff. Paul is drawing a parallel (not a contrast) between old covenant Israel and the new covenant church. They had their sacraments, we have ours. They had baptism, we do too. They had spiritual food and drink, we do too. But who was baptized under the old covenant? All of Israel. The baptism in view is the Red Sea crossing, when water from the glory cloud poured out on them. Obviously, the Israelites brought their children with them out of Egypt and through the sea. (When Pharaoh offered to let all of Israel go free except for the children, Moses turned him down. Children must be included.) For Paul’s analogy in 1 Corinthaisn 10 to work, baptism must still include children. If the church is in some way the continuation of Israel (which it is!), then the “all Israel” that is baptized in the new covenant must include our children. If the new covenant means Christians have to leave their children behind in Egypt, the new covenant is worse, not better, than the old. ! Corinthians 10:1ff is an explicit case of paedobaptism in the NT. It’s not just a clue; it’s a solid and irrefutable prooftext for paedobaptism.
The fact that baptism is linked to faith (and regeneration) does not in any way mitigate against infant baptism. God can give infants faith (Psalm 22, Matthew 18). God can regenerate infants (e.g., John the Baptist). Just as it was supposed to be normative in the old covenant for children to grow up believers (e.g. Psalm 22; see my book Paedofaith), so it should be in the new covenant. There is no need for a covenant child to have a dramatic conversion experience, with a sharply defined before and after. Covenant children can grow up Christian, never knowing a time when God was not their Father and when Jesus was not their Savior. We need to be clear: Covenant infants are sinners in need of forgiveness and new life, but this is precisely why they should be baptized. The consistent testimony of Scripture is that God gives these blessings to the children of his people covenantally in the sacrament of baptism. The biggest reason for the proliferation of the credobaptist position is the failure of paedobaptists to be consistent with their own position, theologically and practically. Too many paedobaptists concede far too much ground to the credobaptists when they essentially say, yes, we should baptize our children but, no, we should not treat them as believers. This schizophrenic position, held by so many paedobaptists today, undermines their own position and creates confusing inconsistencies.
What about church history after the completion of the NT and the death of the apostles? What clues can we find in the early church? Did the early Christians continue with the covenantal practices we see in the NT or did they deviate? It should be kept in mind that the early church represents a missionary situation, where the main source of church growth is from new converts, not covenant children. It should also be noted that not long after the apostolic era ended, a variety of extra-biblical (and frankly, mostly unhelpful) liturgical practices grew up around the rite of baptism, e.g., the Didache calls for fasting one or two days before baptism, something the NT knows nothing about and even contradicts. (As Gary North put it, in the NT every convert has the right to a speedy baptism.)
As soon as we begin to have a decent amount of extrabiblical data to analyze from church history, in the form of writings from the church fathers, infant baptism is the established norm, recognized even by those who question or disagree with it (e.g., Tertullian in the second century – but Tertullian cannot really be claimed by modern Baptists anyway because his reasons for delaying baptism were altogether different).
Irenaeus (born around 140 AD) is an early voice testifying to the practice of paedobaptism. Irenaus believed regeneration takes place in baptism and Jesus became an infant in order that infants might be regenerated. He wrote, ““He [Jesus] came to save all through himself; all, I say, who through him are reborn in God: infants, and children, and youths, and old men. Therefore he passed through every age, becoming an infant for infants, sanctifying infants; a child for children, sanctifying those who are of that age . . . [so that] he might be the perfect teacher in all things, perfect not only in respect to the setting forth of truth, perfect also in respect to relative age.” (Against Heresies 2:22:4 [A.D. 189])
It’s likely that Irenaeus was baptized by Polycarp and from Polycarp’s martyrdom speech (“86 years I have served him”) we know he was almost certainly baptized as an infant as well.
Hippolytus’ Apostolic Traditions is explicit about infant baptism in the early third century; Hippolytus even references parents answering baptismal questions for their children: “Baptize first the children, and if they can speak for themselves let them do so. Otherwise, let their parents or other relatives speak for them.” (The Apostolic Tradition 21:4 [A.D. 215])
Other writers, like Justin (100-165 AD), seem to focus on adult baptism as the norm, but they do not explicitly exclude infants, which would be an odd omission if they were actually opposed to infant baptism because we know infants were being baptized at that time. Both Justin and Hippolytus were in Rome in subsequent generations, with Hippolytus ministering shortly after Justin. Hippolytus assumes the practice of baptizing children and describes how it should be done. But he does not argue for it as if it had been a matter of controversy or novelty. It’s hard to imagine the practice of baptizing infants somehow arose between Justin’s time and Hippolytus’ time with no trace of a debate, development, or opposition. Remember, in this debate, the absence of evidence can be as compelling a clue as its presence; practices like this in the church do not radically shift without leaving some kind of mark on church history.
Further, we have evidence that infants were included in communion very early on (from Cyprian in the 200s AD) and that indicates they were baptized as well. Cyprian and over 60 bishops affirmed that paedobaptism did not have to wait until the 8th day of the child’s life; the issue was not baptizing infants, but how early in infancy it should happen.
Origen was a bit of a mess theologically, but he claims paedobaptism is of apostolic origin and he was as in as good of a position to know as anyone else of his time. Gregory of Nanzianzus told parents to sanctify their children from infancy by having them baptized. John Chrysostom argued Christian parents should baptize their babies because of the benefits conferred in the sacrament.
Augustine speaks definitively to the issue, making a comprehensive theological case for it and also grounding it in tradition tracing back to the apostles. His primary theological opponent, Pelagius, also agreed that infant baptism was the universal practice of the church, stretching back to the apostles. While Baptists might want to contest church history from the apostles to Augustine, by the 4th century it is well established the most of the church is practicing paedobaptism (and paedocommunion) and it’s impossible for the practice to have arisen from nothing such a short amount of time. It’s actually much easier to explain how the credobaptist position developed later on than it is to explain how the paeodbaptist position developed early on. Paedobaptism was the practice of the apostles and those who followed them; some did eventually deviate but for sub-biblical reasons, like Tertullian’s weird view of post-baptismal sin (which led to penance). There is really no case to be made for the Baptist position from church history, just as there is no case to be made for it from the NT. All the clues point in the other direction.
When it comes to church history and paedobaptism, the problem is not the evidence for paedobaptism its lacking. The clues are all over the place. The problem is that credobaptist detectives don’t know how to look for it — just like they don’t know how to read the evidence for infant baptism in the NT.
Baptists sometimes ask how a practice like paeodbaptim could have developed. They will usually point to things that went wrong in the early church, such as theological confusion (e.g., baptism guarantees salvation so there was pressure to baptize children) or pragmatic concerns (e.g., infant baptism arose as an emergency measure for sick children and spread from there until it got normalized). But the practice of infant baptism did not develop at all. It was already present in the old covenant and simply continued into the new. It was there immediately in the book of Acts, starting in chapter 2, after the Holy Spirit was poured out. Paedobaptism was simply inherited as part of the package of covenant blessings that got transformed and passed along from the old Israel to the new. As the old covenant gave way to the new covenant, the covenant status of the children of beleivers was not altered, only intensified. New covenant baptism (including the baptism of covenant children) is simply a fulfillment of a variety of threads and themes from the old covenant. Washings with water (including newborns) were already a Jewish practice, tracing back to Leviticus. New covenant baptism was obviously not only a fulfillment of all those old covenant washings, but also various baptismal events (the flood and Red Sea crossing) and circumcision. If we follow the clues they lead straight to this conclusion: The doctrine of covenant children, so firmly established in the old covenant, continues to be a reality under the new covenant. We are never told to stop including our children in the assembly of God’s people. Therefore, we conclude covenant children are still a thing in the new covenant, and that means baptizing our children is both a privilege and an obligation.
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Here’s a way to summarize the historical issues the Baptists faces if he wants to argue the apostolic and early church practiced professor’s baptism only:
- He has to explain why discontinuity in the NT did not create a controversy. Children had always been included in God’s covenants, they are suddenly excluded, and there is not a trace of discussion or controversy about it in the NT. Is that plausible? Not a single apostle thought to make a defense of this change? Jewish Christians never questioned it?
- If the apostles were Baptists, the Baptist has to explain how paedobaptism became the universal (or very near universal) practice of the church very early on (by Cyprian and the Council of Carthage in 256, or certainly by the time of Augustine) without a trace of discussion or controversy about it in the writings of the early church. We are supposed to believe the whole church was Baptist, changed over to paedobaptist, and there is not any evidence of argument or controversy breaking out over this change? That Baptists stood by silently while paeodbaptists took over? We are supposed to believe that the church was Baptist early on, but Origen and Augustine had never heard of such? Is that plausible?
These historical discontinuities — the change from paedo-inclusion to paedo-exclusion in the apostolic era and then the reverse change in the early church era — are simply not supported by the historical record.
[Note: Tertullian’s arguments for delaying baptism are not relevant. In fact, his arguments really only make sense if the practice of infant baptism was widespread in his time. Tertullian did not argue babies should not be baptized because it was wrong to do so; he argued it was safer for everyone, children and adult converts alike, to delay baptism as long as possible so there would be less post-baptismal sin to deal with. His flawed understanding of baptism led to a flawed practice.]
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