A Baptist Responds to “How or Whom”

I thank Matt Corey for beginning a dialogue on the Baptism question here on Tribute. Matt is a friend, so I’m happy to answer his call for Baptist responses to his essay, “How or Whom.” Perhaps a friendly discussion conducted “on paper” will result in more clarity than our previous, sometimes wandering, verbal discussions on this issue.

Matt’s first essay is preliminary, not yet touching the sensitive heart of the baptism issue, but instead making a more foundational claim about the nature of the “newness” of the New Covenant. Baptists (and I am one of them) articulate that part of the “newness” of the New Covenant has to do with the “who” question of covenant membership: “who” belongs to the covenant people of God has changed from the Old, and this has implications on the administration of Baptism, which is the entrance sacrament into the covenant. Matt’s desire is to refocus and reframe the argument, wanting to focus our attention more on the question of “how” than “whom.” His claim: “The Bible spends most of its discourse about what makes the New Covenant new by determining how the covenant is administered, not who is included.” 

I’m not persuaded. If we confine ourselves to a discussion of Jeremiah 31 as interpreted by the writer of Hebrews, I would be happy to grant that the focus of these passages in Hebrews is more on “how” the Covenant is administrated (through Christ the better mediator) than on “who” is in and out (and how they got there). These passages, as Matt so well expounds them, gloriously unfold the superiority and glory of Christ in his mediation of the New Covenant. 

But Matt has a much more ambitious thesis to prove: “The Bible spends most of its discourse about what makes the New Covenant new by determining how the covenant is administered, not who is included.” (Emphasis mine.) I will let Matt make my point for me through in the small “who” exception which Matt himself grants:

It seems to be the only significant who question the New Covenant is aimed at is an expanded inclusion. The Gentiles can now enter the throne room. As Galatians tell us, equal access to the Father is given to men, women, slaves, freemen, Jews, and Gentiles. 

This is, as Matt acknowledges, a significant “who” question. The expanded inclusion of the New Covenant is no footnote in the New Testament. With the advent of Christ, the Kingdom of God is expanding beyond the Kingdom of Israel and line of Abraham into all the nations of the world.

A Baptist would point out (and I would know) that this “who” question of Gentile inclusion in the people of God is not unrelated to other “who” questions in the New Testament. The covenant “who” from Abraham to Christ was related to a physical line of descendants; a biological family stewarded the promises and mysteries of God, and this family was fenced by the seed-sacrament of circumcision. The Abrahamic promises were sealed by a physical marking off the seed of Abraham. 

After the advent of Christ, we have a new and better way of being born into God’s family: a new birth into the family of God through faith in Jesus Christ. “But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” (John 1:13) Baptism is the new sign and seal of this new kind of incorporation into Abraham through faith in Christ. In Christ:

…you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise. (Galatians 3:26-29. Emphasis mine.)

Wherein does the newness of the New consist? In “how” or in “whom”? This is a false dichotomy. Our new “how,” Jesus Christ, the true “seed” of Abraham, has fulfilled God’s ancient promise to Abraham in these last days to bless all the nations (“whom”) as they put their faith in Jesus Christ and are incorporated into God’s covenant people.

The nub of the issue which divides paedo-baptists from credo-baptists, as I understand it, is the extent to which the “whom” question has changed in the New Covenant with regard to the seed principle. We all agree that in the New Covenant, Jews and Gentiles alike can be members of God’s covenant people by faith in Jesus Christ. We likewise agree that the seed-sacrament, circumcision, counts for nothing in Christ (Galatians 5:6). The dividing question is whether any partial remains of Abraham’s seed-principle continue into the New Covenant era. Are the seed of believers covenant members by virtue of birth? My answer is no. “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love.” (Galatians 5:6) Living faith in Jesus Christ is the principle of inclusion for New Covenant membership, and thus I understand, as an outworking of the “whom” question, that the only proper recipients of the New Covenant seal are those who have professed faith in Jesus Christ.

I thank Matt again for his work to reframe this discussion. I look forward to his feedback to this article as we seek further clarity and unity on this issue. I’m thankful for my fellowship with him and other Gospel-preaching paedo-baptists, and I pray for the unity of the churches in Maine even over issues of Baptism. I look forward to future articles in this series as we seek to work out that unity.