Refutation of household baptism
The biggest obstacle that paedobaptists run into is the utter lack of explicit Biblical example or command to baptize infant children of believers. Because of that fact, paedobaptists are left with two streams of argument. The first is to emphasize (I would say over emphasize) the ties between circumcision and baptism. The second is to try to find some Biblical passages that at least imply infant baptism, which invariably leads to the household baptism passages in Acts. I have never found those passages to be all that persuasive, and they seem more relevant for what they don't say rather than what they do say. Pulpit Magazine recently ran a series of short blurbs from a new book, A Biblical Critique of Infant Baptism, and even these brief blog entries lay to rest the idea that the households mentioned in the book of Acts.
The biggest obstacle that paedobaptists run into is the utter lack of explicit Biblical example or command to baptize infant children of believers. Because of that fact, paedobaptists are left with two streams of argument. The first is to emphasize (I would say over emphasize) the ties between circumcision and baptism. The second is to try to find some Biblical passages that at least imply infant baptism, which invariably leads to the household baptism passages in Acts. I have never found those passages to be all that persuasive, and they seem more relevant for what they don't say rather than what they do say. Pulpit Magazine recently ran a series of short blurbs from a new book, A Biblical Critique of Infant Baptism, and even these brief blog entries lay to rest the idea that the households mentioned in the book of Acts.
Good stuff!
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