Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 09:1 (Oct 1961)
Article: The Covenant, Baptism And Children
Author: G. S. Harrison

TynBul 9:1 (1961) p. 3

The Covenant, Baptism And Children

G. S. Harrison

THE HISTORIC BAPTIST view of the sacrament is fairly defined for us in the words of the 168g Particular Baptist Confession of Faith:—

‘Baptism is an ordinance of the New Testament, ordained by Jesus Christ, to be unto the party baptized, a sign of his fellowship with him, in his death and resurrection; of his being engrafted into him; of remission of sins; and of his giving up unto God, through Jesus Christ, to live and walk in newness of life.

Those who do actually profess repentance towards God, faith in, and obedience to, our Lord Jesus Christ, are the only proper subjects of this ordinance’ (29:2).

Upholders of this view are opposed on many grounds, but, in my opinion, the argument based on the covenant is the only one with which Baptists have seriously to contend. The covenant argument is a substantial one, indeed a very substantial and formidable one. Once grant its premises and its conclusions would seem to follow fairly logically and inevitably. As the reader will appreciate there is a considerable measure of re-adjustment to be undergone by anyone dealing with this covenant argument from an attitude so markedly different from it as mine is. It may well be that some of my criticisms are misdirected because of this strangeness. Such as they are these criticisms will be centred largely around the implications in the realms of ecclesiology and sacramental administration. It is interesting to note at this point something that Marcel writes: our Baptist brethren will only achieve their task if they succeed in carrying through a theological, that is to say, scientific and biblical, attack not only on the other constitutive elements of the covenant which we shall study, but on the covenant itself. They must attack the very cause itself and not simply—for that

TynBul 9:1 (1961) p. 4

would be an error of method—one or other of its consequences. We shall permit those who oppose infant baptism to take refuge neither in the subjective conclusions of their personal sentiment, nor in the shadow of history and its impositions, nor again in the criticism which is called modern and its self-styled “established” results, when, for reasons that are most disputable, they contradict or neglect data of Holy Scripture which are immediate and consequently of capital importance’. (The Biblical Doctrine of Infant Baptism, James Clarke, 1953, pp.94f.). And again: “It is a fact of the greatest significance that in all the works written in support of the Baptist position inevitably an attack is found, sooner or later, against circumcision taken by itself, or pronouncements which cannot fail to convey a depreciation of it...