Ruh roh!

There are a couple of very interesting articles on Church Matters, the 9 Marks Blog (Mark Dever’s ministry) that caught my eye. Normally the blog posts are pretty innocuous but when the titles of the posts read: “"The Sin of Infant Baptism", written by a sinning Baptist”and “The unintentional yet damaging institutional sin of infant baptism.”, you know that is going to cause a stink. When I go off about baptism, it can be dismissed as the rantings of a loony. When Mark Dever, of Together for the Gospel and 9 Marks Ministry does, ruh roh!

From the first post by Mark Dever…

Nevertheless, as I understand the words of Christ in Matt. 28:18-20 Christians are commanded to baptize and to be baptized, and the practice of infant baptism inhibits the obedience of what I take to be a quite straightforward command. I understand explanations that have been given about the practice of infant baptism (Orthodox/Roman, Lutheran and Reformed) but am sincerely persuaded that none of them line up with God's own Word. This does not cause me to doubt the sincerity of my reformed paedobaptist brethren, nor even their judgment in general. It is simply that on this point they've got it wrong, and their error, involving as it does a requiring of something Scripture does not require (infant baptism), and the consequence of a denying of an action Scripture does require (believers baptism) is sinful (though unintentionally so).

I have made it no secret that I consider paedobaotism to be a serious error and I agree with Mark that Scripture does not command or imply the baptism of infants. But is it a sin, even an unintentional one? Those who baptize infants, by and large, are sincerely doing what they believe the Bible teaches. But being sincere and believing in what you are doing is never the measure for truth, otherwise an awful lot of errant teaching would be considered orthodox. Infant baptism is applying a command to something the Bible does not command, and so does that qualify as a sin? I think it does (ducking my head).

The second blog post by Mike Gilbart-Smith links infant baptism with a lack of church discipline, using the example of the Church of England.

The problems are multiple:

1) baptism is seen as having nothing to do with church membership. And when there is no church membership, church discipline becomes impossible.

2) infant baptism itself tends to separate baptism from church membership and discipline. One doesn't want to publicly disicpline a 2 year old for poking his sister in the eye and showing no signs of repentance. All paedobaptists I know rightly recognise that such matters are better dealt with within the family.

The problem there of course is that a) there is no command for formal church membership in the Bible and b) credobaptist churches have many of the same problems when it comes to discipline that paedobaptist churches endure. I am not sure that poking your sister in the eye as a baby would be grounds for church discipline in any church setting anyway. You kind of have to read both posts in their entirety to get a flavor for the full argument.

I am certain that this is going to reignite the firestorm over baptism on the blogosphere. The comments on the posts themselves are already getting snippy. Baptism is kind of the elephant in the Reformed room, and whenever it comes up people get wound up. I may have to wear a disguise next weekend at the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology in Grand Rapids so as not to be attacked by angry mobs of Presbyterians and Dutch Reformed types.

So what say you: whichever side of the baptism debate you come down on, is the giving of the sign of baptism to an infant or the denying of that sign to an infant on the level of a sinful act?