For starters, once-and-done vs. weekly? One baptism vs. hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of communings. Then too, orthodox reformed liturgies of baptism on top of pastors meeting with parents prior to the baptism warning the parents that the baptism of our covenant children doesn’t assure their salvation. No such warnings are given by paedocommunionists.
I could go on to open up the credo-baptist’s sacramental approach to the baptism of all the church’s children on the same Sunday after they complete the pastor’s class… Credos should note how similar their practice of baptism is to sacramentalist paedos, and how similar the ratio of fruit is between their subjects in coming years.
Main point, though, is not that parents shouldn’t take comfort from this or that practice as they pray for the salvation of the souls of their precious children. The mother or father who didn’t do so would be almost inhuman. God Himself gives us these promises because they’re true.
Main point is that paedocommunion is a violation of Scripture and we know this not because mothers or fathers take comfort from the weekly communing of their child. That’s merely the explanation of why paedocommunionists are so intense in continuing a practice universally condemned by the historic Reformed church and contrary to the explicit command for the subjects of this sacrament to examine themselves prior to communing.
What is critical for me, though, is the pastoral issue of children not coming to the table through the elders, but through their mother and father. I’ve talked to paedocommunionists about this and they always deny it, saying something like “our elders are the ones who exercise authority over the Lord’s table, not the parents,” but the actual practice speaks louder than the words. In the paedocommunionist church, there is nothing remotely approaching the proper interview of a covenant child by the pastors and elders of an orthodox reformed church prior to first communion, and their regular saying of “no” to such children, and not just “yes,” when they request welcome to the Lord’s table.
Like the gap between reformed who are credo and paedobaptist, this gap between non-paedo and paedocommunionist is bridged by love, but that love ought never to cause us to go wobbly in our convictions about why the historic and orthodox reformed church has baptized converts and their infants, together, and why we have communed only those able to examine themselves. Love,