An Important Book for Baptist Pastors

Allow me to take a cue from Justin Childers' Blog and recommend a book: "Believer's Baptism: Sign of the New Covenant in Christ". This book is edited by Tom Schreiner and Shawn Wright, and includes valuable contributions by men like Andreas Kostenberger, Duane Garrett, and Mark Dever.

The fourth chapter, entitled "Baptism and the Relationship Between the Covenants", is written by Stephen Wellum and is worth the price of the whole book. In recent months I have come to see how our view of the connection between the Mosaic Covenant and the New Covenant (knowingly or unknowingly) affects a whole array of issues, such as divorce, the Sabbath, the teaching of Jesus, and paedobaptism. This chapter helps show the definciencies of Covenant Theology and how it often misses important elements of discontinuity between the covenants. This chapter is excellent - and I would urge any pastors who read this blog to consider reading it (along with Frank Thielman's books on the law). This will be extremely helpful to your exegesis of books like Romans, Galatians, Matthew, and Hebrews, among others.

Since we've talked about the Federal Vision quite a bit on this blog, I thought I would point out that Schreiner and Wright say something similar to what I think we've been saying, namely, that paedocommunion and other errors logically flow from Presbyterian covenant theology. Though most Presbies balk at this, its hard to avoid. Here's how S&W say it:

"Moreover, paedobaptist face a problem with the Lord's Supper that Baptists do not encounter. The Lord's Supper is reserved for believers who have been baptized, but many paedobaptists do not allow children to partake of the Lord's table until the children have expressed personal faith. But such a divide between baptism and the Lord's Supper cannot be sustained from the NT, for it is clear that those baptized participated in communion. Baptism has been waived as the initiation right for believers by paedobaptists, and hence some kind of initiation (like confirmation) is substituted before people take of the Lord's Supper. Now a new ritual (confirmation), which is not located in the NT witness, is introduced so that the Lord's Supper is reserved for believers. Baptists insist that such an expedient is unnecessary if the biblical requirement of believer's baptism is maintained. Some paedobaptists have recently responded to this inconsistency and claimed that infants and young children who are baptized may eat of the Lord's table. Such inconsistency is to be saluted, but an even greater problem exists on this scheme. For now unbelievers are taking of the Lord's Supper, and clearly they are not discerning the body, and hence are eating and drinking in an unworthy manner (1 Cor. 11:27-34)."

I want to interact with this book more over the coming days, so you can look for that over the next week.

However, just so you know what the purpose of the book is, here is the most important passage in the introduction:

"Our desire...is to respond to evangelical paedobaptists, primarily in the Reformed tradition, who baptize infants not because they believe that baptism regenerates the child but because they believe that baptism brings the child into the covenant community where he or she will have the blessing of hearing the gospel preached as they grow up as members of the church. Certainly there are variations among our paedobaptist brethren, and we shall note some of them in the following pages. The view of paedobaptism affirmed by the Reformed tradition is fraught with inconsistency: as evangelicals they believe salvation is by faith alone in Christ alone, but as paedobaptists they give the sign of that faith (baptism) to those who have not exercised faith (infants). It is primarily this theology we are trying to correct in this book."

JN