Peter Leithart recently wrote about the power of baptism for young men.
While this is all true, Leithart’s actual theory and practice of baptism guts the rite of its power for young men. It is depersonalised, feminised, and Judaised.
A depersonalised baptism
Paedobaptism puts baptism at the wrong end of child-rearing. Being under godly parental discipline, raised in “the training and instruction of the Lord,” is not the same thing as discipleship. The dictionary definition of a disciple is somebody who voluntarily binds him- or herself to a teacher or teachings. As Douglas Wilson has said, we are to raise our children to not only obey the standard, but also to love the standard. Jesus made it clear that following Him is a personal choice (Matthew 16:4). But paedobaptism scuttles that element of the rite. Paedobaptists rightly condemn the individualism of modern Western culture. But the cure for individualism is not nominalism. We follow Jesus in baptism as a death that is as voluntary as His death.
For this reason, baptism cannot be a rite that establishes a spiritual role for parents and guardians. Rather, it is the rite that removes the mediation of parents and guardians. Leithart himself has noted that Paul describes the New Covenant as a coming of age. In a sense, a child is a “slave” bound involuntarily to a moral code, like Israel under the Law. But an adult chooses to submit to Christ. The Mosaic law for slaves even included a rite whereby a slave who was freed could choose to remain under the rule of his master. We are not taken captive. We are called to be bond slaves to Christ.
A paedobaptist pastor recently made a big deal of having a “rite of passage” event for his son. This sort of ritual is common to a majority of cultures across the world. Once a boy is considered to be a man, he suddenly has a gravitas that he did not have before, and the power of having other men of all ages as peers makes honour a motivating factor in self-discipline. But what this pastor missed is that the reason there was a ritual void was his son’s paedobaptism. For the same reason, the Jews invented bar-mitzvah and Christians invented confirmation.
One might argue that Paul also commanded Christian children to obey their parents “in the Lord.” Rather than indicating a role for the baptism of children, it actually highlights the fact that baptism is for those who legally represent Christ. It was only the parents who were baptized, “both men and women.” They had submitted in baptism to the authority of Christ in heaven and His Church on earth, so to submit to one’s baptised parents is to submit to Christ and the Church. Baptism removes this mediating discipline and makes one personally accountable to church discipline.
The personal aspect of submission is crucial for any sort of “band of brothers,” which is why I use the analogy of knighthood. Paedobaptists emphasise the objective aspect of the rite at the expense of the subjective. Something can be done to a baby even though the baby has no choice in the matter. But this tension is a false dichotomy. Like a knighthood, the rite is both subjective and objective, in that order. The believer submits, and the baptiser baptises. If there were no choice in the matter, the rite loses its relevance as an “investiture” for spiritual adulthood. A vow by proxy is not a vow, and an oath of submission is important for young Christian men.
A feminised baptism
Leithart’s focus on baptism is a focus on plugging men into the church. However, the masculine aspect is not the baptism at all, but the men in the church, and the community of the saints in general. Why mention baptism at all? Certainly, baptism is mandatory, but stating that “young men need baptism” when you rarely baptise them as young men reveals another significant disconnect in Leithart’s thinking. The connection is there, but it’s estranged. If a man was baptised as an infant, he is simply to be reminded of the claim made upon him. So he does not actually need baptism at all, since it made no difference to him at all. What he needs is the “living out” of the baptism. The problem is that defining Leithart’s “baptism” is attempting to nail jelly to a wall. It is everything and so it is nothing. It means entirely different things in different contexts. He wants a rite that inspires young men, but is also a rite for infants. Why not just talk about the Gospel instead of baptism? Because baptismal regeneration is salvation that supposedly bypasses repentance and faith. There is a clear “cause and effect” in the Gospel and baptism, but in terms of logic, Leithart’s doctrine of baptism is a bit of a shambles. Its meaning changes depending on the age and faculties of the recipient. There is an attempt to remedy this inconsistency. His desire to take what the New Testament says about baptism seriously is admirable, but the subsequent attempt to apply that to infants leads to some fantastic claims.
If a man was not baptised as an infant, then at least he is to be baptised as an adult, and there is a rite for the response to the call of Christ. But a break with the past life really needs to be a ritual death, and that is the rite that God gave us.
One of the indicators that both paedobaptism and the mode of sprinkling or pouring are man-made is the fact that there is no ordeal. As Doug Van Dorn notes in his book Waters of Creation, although baptizo was sometimes used for bathing or washing, it was more generally used for perishing or drowning. Circumcision was most certainly an ordeal of the flesh, regardless of the age of the male being circumcised. And baptism, too, is to some degree an ordeal of the flesh. Immersion pictures a death, burial, and resurrection. It is a humiliation of the flesh. Sprinkling, especially sprinkling a baby, is a celebration of the life of the flesh. And there is nothing wrong with celebrating a new life. But baptism is an extinguishing of the entire old world, “all flesh,” that the one baptised might be a new creation in a spiritual sense (2 Corinthians 5:17). Similarly, there were various rites employed for a knighthood, but the one that is most familiar was a stylised beheading. In actions rather than words, the king’s “I am your head” was followed by “and you are my right arm.” Leithart is also a paedocommunionist, which makes him more consistent, but also more consistently wrong. At least the understanding of communion as a moral ordeal, one which might result in judgment, is understood by most paedobaptists. So baptism is a “spiritual knighthood” and communion is the king’s round table. Both rites are an ordeal. Fellowship with God in His court requires that we pass through death. There is an appeal for young men in voluntary rites that entail risk, commit to effort, and bring accountability. Baptism is no initiation into a “brotherhood” if your peers are babies.
It probably sounds strange to say that paedobaptism and sprinkling feminise the Church, since the Church is the bride of Christ. But the focus of the rites of the Church is not the sons of men, but the Sons of God. She is “awesome as an army with banners.” She is not a nursery but a barracks. Or, if she is a nursery, it is only metaphorically.
However, baptism is a rite for “both men and women.” While its function as an “oath” of allegiance and service is consistent, the offices of the “member of Christ” differ based on sex. As a rite of investiture, or a coming of age, it is an induction into spiritual adulthood, a delegation of office as a living sacrifice that does not obscure the different roles of the sexes within the function of the assembly. The ordeal of faith is the same, but baptism calls men and women to different offices within the Church. Adam and Eve were both clothed by God, but God only called for Adam. Its precise typological equivalent, though only a shadow, was the Israelite tasselled robe as an extension of the ministry of the clergy among the common people.
A Judaised baptism
When it comes to the sacraments, we tend to debate over particulars. While this can be enlightening, the real issue is always the underlying paradigm. How we practice the sacraments is an expression of our ecclesiology. The real issue is our definition of the Church.
If a man or woman was baptised as a child, and there is a renewed call to “live out” their baptism, the call of Christ is intact, and that is a good thing. The problem is that there is an ethnic component in that call, when there is no ethnic component in the New Covenant. That is not to say that “blood and soil” no longer matter. They most certainly do, as we are discovering under the barrage of attacks on the family and the sovereign nation by the globalists. And Christian parents are still called to raise their children in the faith. The difference now is that family and nation are no longer “sacralised.” That is because the Church is a spiritual people. A helpful way to think of the difference is that ancient Israel was a cell, but the Church is a virus. Israel had an ethnic boundary to protect the ministry of mediation from the corruption-via-intermarriage that resulted in the Great Flood. Now that Christ has come, there is no need for a boundary of flesh. In fact, it was Jesus’ death in the flesh that removed the dividing wall.
Any “call” of Christ that has a hereditary aspect contains the seeds of its own destruction. Christendom 1.0 is testimony to that. Nations with statistics of 99% baptism and 1% church attendance are the reason why even paedobaptists are now mostly baptistic in their thinking. This is not to say that families and nations do not matter. But paedobaptism puts the cart before the horse, the effect before the cause. Christian families and Christian nations are downstream from the obedience of Jesus’ voluntary, accountable legal representatives.
Our sacraments are not ethnic rites, but ethical rites. For the same reason, the Man and the Woman were called to obey God in the Garden before He would bless them with fertility in the Land (family) and the World (nation). It is right that Christians call out the placement of a national flag in a church sanctuary. But paedobaptism muddies the pure water of obedience with our soil, and paedocommunion mingles the blood of Christ with our blood. While the globalists attempt to bring unity by homogenising the nations, the Gospel of Christ brings unity by harmonising them. If we include any hint of ethnicity, tribe, or heredity in these purely ethical rites, that work is hampered. It is claimed that paedobaptism places a child into God’s family, but since it is based on family or other earthly guardianship, what it actually does is put a Judaistic demarcation around promises that have been given to all nations. The only divide now is between the blessed and the cursed.
Just as our practice of the sacraments is the outworking of our ecclesiology, so also our ecclesiology is the outworking of our covenant theology. The entire debate over baptism in the Reformed world is due to the errant notion that the New Covenant is not global in nature. This fundamental misunderstanding causes a problem that has to be dealt with, but the baptists and paedobaptists deal with it in different ways. They are two hemispheres of the same schizoid brain, and uniting them requires the removal of the Judaistic element in Reformed covenant theology.
Baptism is neither the boundary of the Church nor the boundary of the New Covenant. The New Covenant has no boundary, and the Church itself has no hard and fast wall around it. It is a sphere of degrees of influence, with stepped offices and levels of accountability from top to bottom. So baptism is the “staff uniform” for accountable worshipers, an office that is right there under our noses in the Old Testament. While the New Covenant is “Noahic” in its universal obligation, all the seeds of this new order were planted in the microcosm of the nation of Israel. The Church is still a “model society,” but not in the way that Israel was. It is a model society in a liturgical sense, in the way that the Sanctuary was.
Conclusion
What young men, and young women, need is not an “objective” baptism. They need the public rite of allegiance to Christ that we see in the New Testament. It is the rite by which our earthly fathers are finally outgrown, and the Heavenly Father is revealed. In Israel’s national baptism, the people of God outgrew Abraham. In Jesus’ baptism, the people of God outgrew both Abraham and Moses.
Further reading: Union with Christ – Federal, Vital, and Ritual
