Geoffrey W. Bromiley: Children of the Promise: The Case for Baptizing Infants (1979)

1. The Practice of the New Testament

  • no direct evidence for or against infant baptism → silence can be taken two ways
  • If silence means no:
    1. It doesn’t mean no in other cases (eg women’s participation in Lord’s supper)
    2. External evidence
    3. Children of Christians in NT ~ children of God’s people in OT:
      • Jesus has concern for children
      • 1 Cor 7: “In relation to the unbelieving spouse the apostle’s meaning seems to be that in virtue of the other’s faith he or she is separated to God, enjoys a status within the covenant, and comes into the sphere of evangelical action and promise with a hope of future conversion. But the same is true of the children. (How much more so, one might suppose, when both the parents are confessing Christians.)”
      • No precedent in NT for infant dedication

2. The Witness of the Old Testament

  • Christ did not come in a vacuum
  • For people in NT the word of God was the OT
  • Beware of rationalistic / evangelical dissection of Bible

Those who resist these critical extremes, however, may easily fall victim to the dispensationalists, or to certain advocates of progressive revelation who see in the Old Testament, and often enough in parts of the New Testament, words of God which have no direct relevance to the church age, or to the final period of revelation, and consequently to believers today. In this connection it is not without interest that the Anabaptists, the sixteenth-century precursors of the Baptists, had a marked tendency to disparage the Old Testament and to destroy the proper unity of scripture except along the lines of a wholesale spiritualizing.

  • Basic distinction between OT and NT: not opposites or lower / higher dispensations but promise & redemption and type & reality
  • NT types for baptism (not accidental but inspired by Holy Spirit):
    • Ark (Peter)
    • Cloud and Red Sea (Paul)
  • NT Baptism ~ OT circumcision (similarly: NT Lord’s supper ~ OT Passover)
    • Main difference: NT signs without blood
    • Col 2:11-12 (circumcision)
    • 1 Cor 5:7 (Passover)
  • God does not deal with individuals in isolation but individuals in family or people
  • Why did circumcision only apply for males but baptism applies to both males and females?
    • Circumcision points to salvation through Christ → male seed
    • In Christ all are one → sign extended
  • Covenant has been fulfilled in Christ → anticipatory sign no longer needed
  • Yet, there is no reason to assume God changes course and begins to deal with individuals in isolation
  • Crux of debate: can we interpret NT baptism as sign of fulfilled covenant?

3. The Meaning of Baptism

  • Fact of baptism obvious but meaning and purpose not so clear
  • Extremes:
    • Baptism = salvation
    • Baptism = attestation of repentance and faith
  • Association of faith and baptism is widely recognized (faith of parents important in infant baptism too)
  • “Faith must be included in baptism” is not the same as “faith is the meaning and purpose of baptism”
  • Focus of baptism: not on what we do but what is done for us

    “Baptism finds its basic and central meaning as a sign and proclamation of the work of God whereby the righteousness of faith is sealed to us. It has only secondary and derivative meaning as the confession of our own faith and conversion… If this is so, then it is no less perverse to treat baptism as the sign of personal faith than to treat circumcision as the sign of the faith of Abraham. Indeed, if this is possible, it is even more perverse. It is false to the New Testament and destroys the whole balance of the Christian gospel and the Christian life. It substitutes an anthropocentric meaning for the theocentric meaning. It puts the “I” and its decision in the place of God and his decision. It gives the primacy and honor to man and his work and not as it should to God and his work. It gives this work of man an apparent importance of its own in independence of Jesus Christ and the atonement and the Holy Spirit and regeneration. It finds the critical point in our turning to God rather than his turning to us and his turning us to himself. In other words, it turns the gospel upside down. In so doing it misses the real meaning and purpose of the gospel ordinance or sacrament. (p. 33,36-37)

4. The Election of the Father

Baptism into the name of God the father declares to us the supreme fact that God has a purpose of love for us. (p. 38)

  • Initiative rests exclusively with God
  • Examples:
    • Abraham: “If Abraham also elected God, he did so because God first elected him.” (p. 40)
    • Israel
    • NT: disciples (Jn 15:16)
  • Covenant is not mutual arrangement → human decision is secondary
  • Can we be sure that election of Father extends to children of believers?
    • God doesn’t deal with individuals in isolation but in families (Gen 17:7-8)
    • Scripture doesn’t tell us of any change in God’s covenant dealings

      God does not give with one hand, extending the covenant in space, only to take away with the other, restricting the covenant in time. (p. 45)

  • Why is it then that not all the children of confessing Christians repent and believe?
    • OT Israel: there was always a remnant
    • Unfaithfulness of one part of a generation didn’t defeat God’s election
    • Baptism doesn’t guarantee a genuine conversion even in the case of adult baptism (e.g. Simon Magus)
    • No matter how baptism is understood, it only means an external calling, and cannot be equated with divine election
    • Warning for those opposing infant baptism: only God knows the heart → don’t assume you can separate true believers from hypocrites

      When [God] chooses that his name should be set in a family, society, or church, it is not for any person, let alone his disciples, to attempt to hold back this testimony on the ground that external confession is unsupported by internal faith. Only when a family, society, or church deliberately and finally rejects God’s divine purpose of grace should the testimony cease, but then there will no longer be any desire for or possibility of it, so that it will tend to die away of itself, as infant baptism has diminished in many secularized communities today. (p. 49)

5. The Reconciliation of the Son

Baptism into the name of God the Son declares to us the supreme fact that God has indeed fulfilled his purpose of grace for us and implemented the election, the covenant, and the promises. (p. 52)

  • OT circumcision points to shedding blood of the promised son
  • God chose the sign on purpose so it portrays reality
  • Why did Jesus insist on getting baptized despite having so no sin? → To identify with us sinners

    Now in our baptism it is quite true that we declare our own dying and rising again with Christ. Baptism speaks to us of a responsive identification with Christ, of a personal entry into his vicarious death and resurrection. It is necessary that there be this dying and rising again in repentence as the renunciation of the old life and in faith as the turning to the new. Nevertheless, this personal death and resurrection through identification with Christ is not in itself of primary importance. The first thing, and that to which baptism directs us initially, is the dying and rising again of Christ in identification with us and on our behalf. It is an unfortunate reversal of the gospel message, or at least of the gospel emphasis, if in baptism we allow our own dying and rising again to occupy center stage and push the dying and rising again of Christ out into the wings. We are not to think that ours is the real baptism, and then apply the term in a transferred or figurative sense to the reconciling work of the Son. The truth is that the reconciling work of the Son is the original baptism and our own dying and rising again with Christ is the copy and reflection. (p. 58)

  • Primary reference of baptism: not a present event in us but a past event for us
  • Danger of indifference: does it matter whether we believe or not?

    If we still think that, notwithstanding Christ’s work, our salvation lies in the self-identification of us with him, we run a dreadful risk of delusion and distortion. If, on the other hand, we treat the fact with indifference or reject it altogether, we cannot alter its truth but, trying to live apart from it, we can exclude ourselves from its truth and therewith from its redemptive benefits. These two points cannot be separated. Self-identification with Christ is demanded… Yet self-identification with Christ is the appeal of the gospel and not the saving act constituting the message. (p. 63) The very helplessness of infants underscores the truth that God’s salvation is accomplished vicariously for us … If the temptation in adult baptism is to lay too much stress on the human movement, the temptation in infant baptism is to lay too little stress on it and thereby to destroy the evangelistic bearing of the news of God’s saving action. (p. 64)

6. The Regeneration of the Spirit

BAPTISM into the name of the Holy Spirit declares to us the supreme fact that the fulfillment of the divine purpose in Jesus Christ is appropriated to us individually by the ministry and in the power of the Spirit. (p. 65)

  • Signifies “subjective” side of baptism
  • What’s the point of infant baptism since they cannot express and sign of repentance and faith?
    • Formalism, false security is a valid danger → it is good to accompany infant baptism with baptism of evangelized adults
    • NT example: Cornelius: Holy Spirit descended with no mention of repentance or faith → we do not control or fully understand underlying operations of repentance (Jn 3:8)
    • Scripture warns of purely human belief which is not the work of the Holy Spirit but hard to distinguish
    • HS may have begun regenerative work much earlier than confession of faith (even long before we were aware of it)
    • Illustration: conception by the Spirit happens before birth of the Spirit
    • Conception can very well go back to infant baptism
    • Regeneration can begin even though birth itself (coming to personal faith) happens decades later
    • Faith is the supra human operation of the Spirit, it can be given even without normal consciousness

      A favorite debating point of the sixteenth-century Anabaptists, still heard in many circles today, was that infants ought not to be baptized because they cannot have faith. Faith, it was argued, demands the self-conscious operation of rational, volitional, and emotional capacities, which is totally outside the sphere of infant possibilities… Indeed, as Luther also pointed out, it is no more a miracle for the Holy Spirit to work in the less resistant hearts of infants than it is for him to work in the self-opinionated and sin-hardened hearts of adults… Only a rationalistic mind, even though it be the rationalistic mind of a believer, can foolishly suppose that adults enjoy some native possibility of faith whereas infants are such impossible subjects that even the Holy Spirit cannot begin his work in them if he so chooses, … Surely the Holy Spirit laughs at this so-called possibility and impossibility, just as he laughs at all man’s pretentious possibilities and all his solemn judgments on such impossibilities as the virgin birth or the resurrection of Christ from the dead. Who are we to tell the Holy Spirit what he can and cannot do? Regeneration and faith are never a human possibility—they are always in all people a miracle of sovereign grace and power, so that if we think in rationalistic terms we shall always be forced to cry out with Mary (Lk 1:34) or Nicodemus (Jn 3:4,9) “How can these things be?” The answer is still the same. No explanation of the mode of operation is given, but “with God all things are possible.” He does what he chooses to do and therefore these things are. (p. 72-74)

  • But are they? Do we know for a fact that the Holy Spirit works in infants?
    • Yes, for example:
      • Jeremiah (Jer 1:5)
      • John the Baptist (Lk 1:15)
      • Paul (Gal 1:15)
  • Conclusion:

    in a covenant context it is unnecessary and even foolish to insist on a temporal link between conscious faith on the one hand and the regenerative operation of the Spirit, and therefore the sign of that operation, on the other.” (p. 76)

7. The Scope of Baptism

  • Baptism: dying and rising again with Christ
  • Single act with three successive stages:
    1. Conversion:
      • Backward look to vicarious death and resurrection of Christ

        Baptism has now an evangelistic office as an adjunct of the word. It tells those who are baptized as children that it will find actualization in them only as the first stage of the Spirit’s work is reached and they come to repentance and faith. When they do so it again serves as a necessary reminder and reassurance that this is not just a human decision but a deep work of God… But if they do ignore and forget it, it will witness against them on the day of judgment. (p. 78)

    2. Sanctification:
      • Present reference to our identification with Christ
      • Continual dying to soon and rising again to righteousness (Rom 6:1-11)

        Again, however, baptism must not be construed as the sign of a purely human decision and work. It was here, perhaps, that the Anabaptists lost their way… they deduced from this that no one ought to be baptized without a steadfast determination and commitment to take up this course of life and to pursue it to the end. Their emphasis tended to fall on the human aspect… Nevertheless, this work of mortification and renewal is not a possibility or achievement of our own. (p. 84)

    3. Resurrection
      • Looking forward to second coming of Christ

        The fact that baptism has this forward-looking aspect means, of course, that whether we be baptized as infants or as adults, the personal application cannot be fulfilled nor the work of the Spirit completed prior to the administration of the sacrament… Baptism is a sign whose significance can never be exhausted in this life. (p. 88)

  • Conclusions

    1. baptism must not be self-centeredly treated as primarily the witness to some decision or activity of our own (p. 88)

    2. not one of us can say: I have a right to baptism because the work of which it speaks has already been fulfilled in me and I am thus declaring that here and now I am identified in this way with Jesus Christ… Only when the end has been attained can we say that by the work of the Spirit we have fully entered into the baptism of Christ. (p. 89-90)

8. The Salvation of Infants

infant baptism and infant salvation are clearly interrelated. If there can be no salvation of infants in default of a conscious decision and confession, the administration of infant baptism will obviously make very little sense for anyone. If, on the other hand, infants can enjoy the work of God as the thing signified by the baptismal sign, it is difficult to see what good or proper reason there is for denying them the sign. (p. 91-92)

  • Christ didn’t exclude little children from salvation
  • Christ had fellowship with Father and Spirit even as an infant
  • Christ went through all stages of human life in order that there might be salvation at every stage
  • Same basis for infant and adult salvation: divine election, reconciliation and regeneration
  • Infants are not exempt from sinful human nature; they do not become sinners by sinning, they sin because they are sinners
  • Infant righteousness doesn’t exist apart from the righteousness of Christ, there are no exceptions

    Infants, like all others, are either saved by Christ alone, and therefore by faith in him, or it is hard to see how, in view of the inclusiveness of sin and the exclusiveness of the way of salvation, they can really be saved at all. If, however, infants are saved by Christ and by faith in him, it is also hard to find any intrinsic reason why they should be refused the sacrament of salvation and faith if they are born in the covenant sphere of the word and Spirit. (p. 97-98) The faith by which Christ’s righteousness becomes ours is not primarily or independently a human decision. It is the gift and work of the Holy Spirit. Certainly this gift and work of the Holy Spirit is a miracle in infants. But it is equally a miracle in adults. Faith in Christ cannot be regarded as a human possibility. Hence infant faith in Christ cannot be regarded as a divine impossibility. (p. 99)

  • Does infant salvation applies to all infants and not just to those who die in infancy?
    • “The Lord knoweth them that are his” (2 Tim 2:19)
    • Adult baptism has the same problem
    • Not knowing this final secret is no reason for withholding the sacrament in proper cases
  • Should baptism be extended to all infants instead of limited to the children of professing Christians?
    • Bible gives no authority to administer covenant signs to children of unbelieving parents
    • In the absence of covenant context they should be given no sign of covenant
  • Indiscriminate baptism: is more a problem of circuit discipline than baptism
    • Professing Christians living in sin & refusing repentance should be excommunicated

Conclusion

  • No command to baptize infants
  • No reason to stop adult baptism
  • Children of confessing Christians are in different position as pagan children → they should not be excluded from baptism either
  • Baptism is not about what the baptized person does
  • Profession of faith is required but it is not what the sign is about
  • Infant baptism in covenant setting is consistent with GodI’m dealings with his people in both OT and NT
  • Yet, infant baptism is not mandatory; parents who are withholding baptism from their children are not disobeying any clearcut command
  • Even our response is the work of God
  • Children cannot be denied from the work of salvation
  • Practical guidelines:
    1. Infant baptism should not be imposed
    2. Churches should not give, members should not request/expect repetition of baptism (← baptism is one)
    3. Christian parents should commit to the spiritual upbringing of the children they bring to baptism
    4. Church and minister have a responsibility as well as parents
    5. Church and minister also have responsibility in Christan nurturing
    6. Infant baptism (ordinary pastoral situation) and adult baptism (extraordinary missionary situation) should be both emphasized