| From the TeachingtheWord Bible Knowledgebase |
Part 5 of a series. Read part 4.
The position on baptism presented in this series is the author's personal doctrinal position, and is not part of TTW's official doctrinal statement.
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Acts 2:38-41 makes the case not for paedobaptism but for credobaptism, and in fact excludes paedobaptism.
And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise. (Galatians 3:29)
In previous articles, we have set forth the conservative paedobaptist position, and the hermeneutical principles and priorities on which both paedobaptists and credobaptists say they agree. With this background, Let us now examine each of the paedobaptists' three foundational premises in more detail.
A Key Passage
Their first premise is that baptism is to be administered to both believers and their infant children. The Scripture most often cited to support this position is from Peter's sermon on Pentecost in Acts 2:38-41:
Then Peter said to them, "Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is to you and to your children, and to all who are afar off, as many as the Lord our God will call." And with many other words he testified and exhorted them, saying, "Be saved from this perverse generation." Then those who gladly received his word were baptized; and that day about three thousand souls were added to them.
Three Crucial Questions
The focus of paedobaptists' use of this passage to support their position is the phrase "the promise is to you and to your children." Both Dutch Reformed theologians such as Louis Berkhof, and Presbyterians such as John Murray, assert that the Jewish audience listening to Peter's sermon on Pentecost would have assumed from his statement that the covenant sign of baptism was to be administered to them and to their children.[1] The question is: Does the Biblical text support this assertion?
Grammatical-historical hermeneutics require us to take the entire sentence into consideration as it is given: "For the promise is to you, and to your children, and to all who are afar off, as many as the Lord our God will call." Understanding this sentence involves answering three questions: 1.) What is the promise? 2.) To whom is the promise given? 3.) To whom does the promise effectually apply? The answers to these questions are to be found in the immediate context, and they are confirmed in the larger context of Scripture as a whole.
What Is the Promise?
First, what is the promise? The answer is found earlier in Peter's sermon, beginning at Acts 2:16, where he explains to his Jewish hearers what has happened on the Day of Pentecost: It is the long-prophesied pouring out of the Holy Spirit on all believers:
But Peter, standing up with the eleven, raised his voice and said to them, "Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and heed my words. For these are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is only the third hour of the day. But this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel: 'And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God, that I will pour out of My Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions, your old men shall dream dreams... I will show wonders in heaven above and signs in the earth beneath...' " (Acts 2:14-17, 19)
Therefore being exalted to the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, He [the exalted Christ] poured out this which you now see and hear. (Acts 2:33)
These words correspond to those found elsewhere in the Old Testament prophets as well as Jesus' own words in the Gospels and in Acts:
For I will pour water on him who is thirsty, and floods on the dry ground; I will pour My Spirit on your descendants, and My blessing on your offspring... (Isaiah 44:3)
And it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions. And also on My menservants and on My maidservants I will pour out My Spirit in those days. And I will show wonders in the heavens and in the earth: Blood and fire and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the coming of the great and awesome day of the Lord. And it shall come to pass that whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. For in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be deliverance, as the Lord has said, among the remnant whom the Lord calls. (Joel 2:28-32)
Behold, I send the Promise of My Father upon you; but tarry in the city of Jerusalem until you are endued with power from on high. (Luke 24:49)
And being assembled together with them, He commanded them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the Promise of the Father, "which," He said, "you have heard from Me; for John truly baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now." (Acts 1:4-5)
In response, the Israelites asked Peter in Acts 2:37, "What shall we do?" Peter answered,
Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. (Acts 2:38)
Peter was telling his hearers, in effect. "Each of you must repent, and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ because of the remission of your sins, and you also will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit - just as we one hundred and twenty believers who were waiting in the upper room have received the promised Spirit this day in fulfillment of the words of the prophet Joel."
So this is the answer to our first question: The promise of which Peter speaks is Christ's promise of the Holy Spirit to believers under "the New Covenant in My blood, which is shed for you," instituted the night before He died (Luke 22:20).
To Whom Is the Promise Made?
This brings us to the second question: To whom is the promise made? Peter's Israelite hearers, gathered to observe one of the Mosaic Law's commanded feasts, would most certainly call to mind God's promise to Abraham and to his seed (Genesis chapters 12 and 15). But who is the seed? Is it a physical seed consisting of national Israel only, or is it a spiritual seed comprising both believing Jews and Gentiles? Galatians chapter 3 tells us that God fulfills the promise to Abraham in the pouring out of the Spirit on a spiritual seed, both Jew and Gentile:
Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us (for it is written, "Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree"), that the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles in Christ Jesus, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith. (Galatians 3:13-14)
But the Scripture has confined all under sin, that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe. (Galatians 3:22)
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise. (Galatians 3:28-29)
This is confirmed in many other passages. Hebrews 2:13-18 likewise tells us that the believing brethren whom God the Father has given to the Son, those who have been released from the power of death by Christ's death, are the seed of Abraham. Romans 4:13-25 tells us that God's promise to Abraham is made certain to every true spiritual descendant of Abraham - "all the seed," both Jew and Gentile - "of faith that it might be according to grace." Romans 9:6-33 tells us that only the children of the promise, God's elect regenerated by the Holy Spirit, are in the eyes of God Abraham's seed and the true Israel of God.
So then, the sum of the answer to the two questions is this: The promise of Acts 2:39 is the promise that God would send the Holy Spirit to raise up regenerated spiritual descendants of Abraham, both Jew and Gentile, from among all nations - those whom God would call to salvation through repentance from sin and belief in Christ.
To Whom Does the Promise Apply?
This great truth is underscored by the answer to our third question: To whom does Peter declare that the promise of the Holy Spirit applies? The answer once again is in Acts 2:39, where he says,
For the promise is to you, and to your children, and to all who are afar off, as many as the Lord our God will call.
Peter declares that the promise of the Spirit is not an indiscriminate or blanket one. I now ask my readers to bear with a somewhat detailed but very vital analysis of the Greek text of this verse. Here is an interlinear rendering of the Greek and English. It reads, literally:
For to you is the promise
humin gar estin he epaggelia
and to your children
kai tois teknois humin
and to all who are afar off
kai pasin tois eis makran
as many as the Lord our God may summon to Himself.
osous an proskalesetai kurios ho theos humon
The last phrase makes it clear that the decisive condition for the application of the promise is not parental connection, but the effectual calling of God in salvation. Most paedobaptists would agree, up to a point. They would say, in the words of the PCA's standards, that adults who were baptized as infants, but do not subsequently exhibit the evidences of effectual calling, "become covenant breakers, and subject to the discipline of the Church."[2]
But such a formulation, while recognizing that regeneration is the deciding factor, still insists that parental connection is a valid basis for New Covenant membership.[3]
Many paedobaptist commentators support this position by asserting that in Acts 2:39 the words osous an ("as many as") refer only to "all who are afar off" and not to "you and your children." However, the Greek grammar and syntax of Acts 2:39 do not support them.
Here again we must go into some detail, and again I beg my readers' forbearance. Arndt and Gingrich's Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and other language tools tell us that osous an ("as many as") introduces a conditional relative clause denoting action of the connected verb; the verb's action depends upon a circumstance or condition. In the case of Acts 2:39, the condition is the effectual calling of God in salvation, expressed in the words "as many as the Lord our God may call" (osous an proskalesetai kurios ho theos humon).
Osous an is the direct object (masculine accusative plural) of the verb proskalesetai. Therefore osous an identifies whom the Lord may call. All three categories of people - expressed in the datives humin (you), teknois (your children), and pasin tois eis makran (all those who are afar off) - are offered the promise by the uses of the conjunction kai (and). Therefore in the Greek they form a compound, three-part direct object. Because osouos an is masculine and teknois (children) and pasin (all) are also both masculine, the rules of Greek grammar say that osous an modifies both of them as well as humin (you).
Therefore, the Greek text says that all three categories of people - Peter's immediate Jewish adult hearers, their children, and all those afar off, both Jew and Gentile - are equally among the "as many as" to whom the promise is given. But Scripture gives us a further decisive qualifier: God's effectual calling in salvation. In other words, the covenant promise - the promise of the Holy Spirit - is to the saved only from among all three groups, and therefore only believers from all three groups are qualified candidates for baptism.
Acts 2:41 corroborates this: "Then those who gladly received his word (asmenos apodechamenoi ton logon autou, gladly or warmly accepted the word that was offered) were baptized." Repentance and belief in the Gospel, not parental connection, is the deciding factor on the question of who is qualified for baptism.
Old Testament Lens, or New Testament Lens?
Paedobaptists may protest by asking, "Why then are 'your children' mentioned as a separate class of people? Does that not prove, or at least indicate, that they were to be included in baptism?" This question itself bespeaks a hermeneutical problem in the paedobaptist position. The paedobaptist is reading Acts chapter 2 through the lens of the Old Covenant, rather than employing the principle that the New Testament revelation tells us how the Old Testament revelation (in this case, the Abrahamic Covenant) is fulfilled.
B. B. Warfield states, "The warrant for infant baptism is not to be found in the New Testament, but in the Old Testament."[4] Likewise, Louis Berkhof: "It will be observed that all these statements [in support of paedobaptism] are based on the commandment of God to circumcise the children of the covenant, for in the last analysis that command is the ground of infant baptism."[5] These assertions contravene essential hermeneutical principles and priorities.
Sound hermeneutics compel us to view Acts 2:39 through the New Testament lens. That is the view embodied in Peter's own emphasis on repentance, faith, and the effectual calling of God. It is also the view that takes fully into account the sole qualification for New Covenant membership - belief in Christ, not parentage - which is stated, as we have seen, in Galatians chapter 3, Hebrews chapter 2, Romans chapters 4 and 9, and elsewhere.
Is it not far more reasonable to say that Peter was making certain that his Jewish hearers understood that the New Covenant sign of baptism was not for their infant children as was circumcision, but only for their children who could repent and believe under the effectual calling of God? The language of the original Greek supports this.
In summary: Acts 2:38-41, both on its own and in the confirming light of the fuller body of Scripture, makes the case not for paedobaptism but for credobaptism, and in fact it excludes paedobaptism.
References:
1. Berkhof says this in his Systematic Theology, page 663; Murray in his Christian Baptism, pages 70-71.
2. PCA Book of Church Order, 56-4.j.
33. The flawed logic of this formulation also says that these unsaved individuals are (and remain) members of the New Covenant, having "broken" it and therefore become subject to the discipline of the visible church - the central object of which, Presbyterian books of discipline as well as Scripture frequently remind us, is always restoration. But apart from salvation, there is no basis for supposed "restoration" of the baptized unsaved to New Covenant fellowship. There is only the imperative of the individual meeting the true and singular qualification for New Covenant membership - first-time repentance and faith in Christ through the effectual calling of God.
4. Warfield, Studies in Theology, 399.
5. Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 638.
Next: Does Water Baptism Replace Circumcision?
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