The Age of Admission to the Lord’s Supper -- By: Roger T. Beckwith

Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 38:2 (Winter 1976)
Article: The Age of Admission to the Lord’s Supper
Author: Roger T. Beckwith


The Age of Admission to the Lord’s Supper

Roger T. Beckwith

The fascinating article by Christian L. Keidel in the Spring 1975 issue of the Westminster Theological Journal lends its weight to a proposal which is being widely canvassed in the Christian Church at the present time, namely, that baptized infants or children should be admitted to the Lord’s supper. The proposal is being discussed all over the Anglican Communion and in many of the churches linked to the World Council of Churches, whose Faith and Order Commission supported it at their 1971 Louvain conference.1 The proposal assumes the rightness of infant baptism, and so is not entertained by Baptists, but Baptists have played a large part in popularising the proposal by their claim that those who baptize infants ought in consistency to admit them to the Lord’s Supper as well. Mr. Keidel tells us (p. 305) that his own conversion to belief in infant communion was prompted by Baptist polemic, and his hope is that by adopting this practice the Reformed Churches will strengthen the case for infant baptism and lead Baptists to consider it more sympathetically.

Whether Baptists would really react in this way may be doubted: they might rather be shocked and repelled to see candidates being admitted to all the ordinances of Christianity without having made any profession of repentance and faith, or indeed being capable of doing so. Mr. Keidel thinks that the remedy is “require” them “when they reach an age of discernment…to have a credible confession of faith” (p. 341). But supposing they have not: are they then to be excommunicated? This would be a very damaging procedure, much worse than not to have admitted them in the first place. For the New Testament reserves excommunication for flagrant offences against doctrine and morality, not for the absence of a credible profession of faith.

It is not, however, to be taken for granted that the consistency of the pedobaptist case really depends upon the acceptance of infant communion. The Baptist claim that infant baptism and infant communion stand or fall together must first be scrutinized. Baptists have made no great effort to prove their claim: it is usually brought forward more in the way of a debating point. And my own conviction is that the more closely it is examined, the more vulnerable it is found to be. It rests upon six assumptions: (i) that, if infant baptism is early attested in the history of the church, infant communion is attested equally early; (ii) that, if baptism is a ceremony suitable to infants, the Lord’s supper is a ceremony equally suitable; (iii) that, if the solidarity of the household entitles the child of ...

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