Does Christian Baptism Parallel Old Testament Circumcision?
This is the second in a four-part series on Christian baptism. Let me tell you a bit about how I am choosing the texts to preach from. I discovered in my seminary and graduate school days that my old ways of defending believer’s baptism were not compelling. I used to spend time pointing out that all the baptisms described in the New Testament are baptisms of believers and that all the commands to be baptized are given to believers. I used to point out that infant baptism is simply not mentioned in the Bible and that it is questionable to build a crucial church practice on a theological inference, without explicit Biblical teaching when all the examples go in the opposite direction. But I discovered that those who baptize infants (“paedobaptists”) were not swayed by these observations, because they pointed out that, of course, we only see believer’s baptism in the New Testament since we are dealing in all these settings with first generation evangelism, not with second generation child-
