I’ve really appreciated this thread. But I have to admit, this comment regularly makes me laugh. I read Bannerman on the sacraments as a Reformed Baptist a number of years ago, having heard @tbbayly recommend him and when I was seriously contemplating jumping ship, and I must admit, Bannerman may be singularly responsible for me remaining a Reformed Baptist. His explanation of believer’s baptism is better than most Baptists’ that I know, and his apology of infant baptism, well, comes very near to an apology (especially at the beginning).
I can appreciate a paedobaotism’s claim that a credobaptist is reading the Bible differently, but I would argue, only with respect to certain particulars of baptism (and maybe, by extension, how we think of aspects of the church, though I’m not persuaded this is necessarily the case). Remember, Reformed/Particular/Calvinistic Baptists grew out of an explicitly reformed soil. They were never anabaptists in theology and they consistently sought to distance themselves from the anabaptists. We agree with all the same principles of hermeneutics…except when it comes to the specifics of the when and how to baptism. I’ve made this point before, but there are baptists and then there are baptists. Matt Bingham made this case pretty persuasively in ‘Orthodox Radicals’ Orthodox Radicals: Baptist Identity in the English Revolution (Oxford Studies in Historical Theology) Amazon.com. The distinctions between a reformed credobaptist and a paedobaptist are much much finer than hermeneutics.
It may be that some of the confusion stems from many of the paedocommunionists having jumped from being Baptist to being paedobaptist without ever considering the Baptist perspective as consistently Reformed Baptists - in other words, they’re still more Baptist than reformed paedobaptist.
That said, I love Bannerman. Especially on baptism!
(We need a metaphor for Baptists becoming paedobaptists, like crossing the Tiber. Swimming the Thames?)
No, I think he is making an observation anyone at a table with infants and toddlers would make about their being participants in that meal, which is the reason I keep trying to get to the issue of participation. It’s impossible to discuss participants until one defines participation. So concerning Calvin adding the matter of inquiring into the meal’s meaning, it is obvious to me his focus is on the necessary concrete observations about the nature of that child’s participation in the actual meal itself. Which is to say, eating. He nurses. He doesn’t eat.
Think about this very carefully: in traditional societies, children are weaned somewhere between 18 months and five years. Samuel is likely to have been weaned between two and four years before being dropped off with Eli. Now then, what do we make of Moscow’s paedocommunion but that they are ridiculous to talk about infants and toddlers eating lamb and the necessary meaning that infants and toddlers (that can’t speak, for pity’s sake!) must be force-fed the bread and wine.
It’s my conviction these things are obvious outside our present nurse-for-a-few-months cultural mandate, and thus our inability to recognize why Calvin here laughs about anyone not agreeing with him.
Meanwhile, thank you for your graciousness in all this, and let’s persevere. With love,
Yup. As I’ve said to Doug many times, men who start out Baptists and become Reformed are so ashamed of their background and want so very much to prove they’ve left it behind that they have to cross the Tiber before they feel secure. But men who didn’t grow up Baptists don’t need to. They’re content to be reformed.
If one can’t go the whole way across the Tiber, collars, robes, stoles, Anglican chant, weekly Mass, and sacramentalism will almost do. Adding in paedocommunion is a neat exotic addition that seals the sale. Seriously.
It’s my judgment that the CREC should just enter some tiny Anglican sect and be done with trying to sell themselves as Presbyterians.
On the matter of Bannerman, some years back, a friend of mine told me he was going to Westminster to serve on the faculty for a while. I knew he rejected the sacraments—not sacramentalism, but the sacraments themselves—so I suggested he read Bannerman since The Church of Christ is the closest statement of anything close to Reformed sacramentology that he might be able to bear and use in his lectures. I think it’s noteworthy that, if my assumptions are correct, Westminster isn’t concerned to know their profs’ views on the sacraments.
EDIT: I also want to say that after reading this explanation, and then going back and reading your prior posts, I can see that you were saying this all along. I see it more clearly now.
If Calvin’s statement is merely alluding to the fact that babes didn’t take the Passover, then I agree that this point is enough – even from a defense of the reformed framework of continuity – to reject paedocommunion. It is clear to me (as I think it already was) that one does not need to quibble over the ages of who is allowed to take the Passover to make that point. All one needs to do is appeal to the nature of table food and the nursing babe to make a typological point.
I am still left to conclude – from an exegetical standpoint – that Calvin is overstating his point when he says “duly eaten only by those who were old enough to be able to inquire into its meaning.” Had he said “duly eaten only by those who were old enough to eat table food,” this would have made the same typological point to dispel Servetus, while not overselling it beyond what the Scripture (and nature) make plain.
I think it’s an overstatement to say that nature makes it plain that eating table food equates to being old enough to inquire as to meaning. Our children can and do eat table food before they can inquire of the meaning of spiritual things. I do understand your point about the nurse-for-a-few-months nature of our culture versus how nursing is something done longer in times past, and how the “gap” between being weaned and being able to inquire about the meaning of things was more narrow, so as to reinforce the general point and contribute to Calvin’s dismissive attitude, but it still falls short of getting me to the pronunciation of “old enough to be able to inquire into its meaning.”
Speaking anecdotally as the father of ten breastfed children (and I don’t mean nurse-for-a-few-months), there is at the very least a lot of grey area between the time nursing is wrapping up and when a child’s strength of reason and inquiry takes flight. And I suppose this grey area is precisely where Wilson is making his claim – at least as he would interact with Calvin’s meaning. Which I suppose is what you cover in the article.
At the end of the day, I guess I’m left to conclude that Calvin’s appeal to continuity makes sense, but is overstated. I see and am helped by his consistency as to continuity from a reformed framework, and how the error of actual paeodocommunion is clearly refuted. At the same time, I see that arguing from continuity alone falls short of preventing the somewhat ambiguous child communion of Wilson.
For this very reason, however, I find myself no more convinced of the reformed paradigm of continuity in general. If we have to appeal to the New Testament commands concerning the Lord’s Supper in order to stop Wilson – that is, if appealing to the Old Testament model of the Passover isn’t sufficient to do so clearly – then what we’re tacitly acknowledging is the discontinuity between the Passover and the Lord’s Supper. Scripture still makes something explicit about the nature of the Lord’s Supper that is not explicit in the Passover.
A reformed/particular/calvinistic baptist right? (grin)
Reformed credobaptists and Reformed paedobaptists alike agree that there are continuities and discontinuities between the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament outward sign of the covenant was only for boys, paedobaptists baptise both boys and girls (as credobaptists baptise both men and women). Reformed credobaptists argue as well as reformed paedobaptists that baptism is a new circumcision. The question isn’t the broad hermeneutical relationship between the testaments, it’s the specifics of how those differences (that both credobaptists and paedobaptists agree exist) are applied in the New Covenant.
To that very point, I might take issue with the particular language of speaking of baptism as being a “new circumcision” but only because of what that term sounds like it means to me as a reformed baptist, but I don’t deny there is a relationship between the two. Circumcision was the sign of entry into the Old Covenant, as baptism is a sign of entry into the New. To that extent, yes, I affirm continuity.
