Why I am a Convictional Baptist

(And Why I Reject Infant Baptism)

Heath Lambert

Debates about Baptism

We live in fascinating times when many are evaluating or reevaluating the religious traditions they will join. The people involved in this great reevaluation have not always had a very favorable disposition to the Baptist tradition. Many have looked beyond the Baptists to more High-Church traditions and we have seen important examples of people leaving Baptist denominations to become Presbyterians. For me, this issue is very important because of my personal journey of rejecting infant baptism to become a convictional Baptist.

On the one hand, I was saved in a Baptist church and have only ever been a member of Baptist churches.

On the other hand, the Baptist church where I got saved was not spiritually healthy back then, and it forced me to turn to other sources for discipleship. For years, those other sources were almost exclusively Presbyterian. One of the most significant was R.C. Sproul. I never had the honor of meeting him, but to this day, I have heard more of his sermons than any other preacher.

More personally, both of my ministry mentors were influential and deeply respected Presbyterians: Bill Barcley and David Powlison, with Powlison, like Sproul, now in heaven. Whether through a long-distance preaching ministry or through years of personal teaching and close relationship, I have been exposed to the best and most theologically consistent arguments for infant baptism. I spent years wanting desperately to believe the arguments I heard from the men I respected more than anyone in the world. With all my heart, I wanted to believe what they believed. And there were times when I got really close.

But, as I write/speak to you from the campus of the First Baptist Church of Jacksonville, Florida, it is clear that years of listening to the best arguments never persuaded me that my respected mentors were correct in their practice of baptizing babies. I love them, deeply honor them, learned from them, and have supported them in every way possible. But over time, I moved in the direction of credobaptism—the conviction that baptism requires the immersion in water of only believers in Jesus Christ. Ultimately, I find no support in Scripture for pedobaptism—the “baptism” of children who have not professed faith. My reasons are many, but here, I will discuss three of the most important.

The Word for Baptism

To begin, it is important to understand that our English word, baptism, is not a translation of, but rather a transliteration from Greek. When we translate a word in the New Testament, we take a Greek term, determine its meaning, and then use the corresponding word in English to communicate to English readers and listeners. For example, the Greek word metanoia means to turn or to change one’s mind. We translate this word, most often, with the English word repentance.

The work of transliteration is a little different. A word is transliterated when we take the Greek letters that make up a word and replace those Greek letters with corresponding English letters in order to create a new English word. An example of this is the Greek word Christos. When that Greek word shows up in the New Testament instead of always translating the word Christos as anointed, we often use the transliterated term, Christ.

Our word baptism is a transliteration of the Greek term, baptizo. The definition of baptizo is to dip or immerse. Instead of translating the term every time it shows up in the New Testament as immerse, we mostly just use the transliterated term.

Scholars often debate the theological significance of the word baptism, but from the standpoint of linguistics, there is no debate about the meaning of the term. When Jesus and his apostles wanted to refer to the rite that initiates Christians into the church, they used the Greek word that means immerse or dip.

This specific Greek term makes the mode of baptism clear. Some theological traditions may baptize by aspersion, or sprinkling. Some traditions may baptize by affusion or pouring. I am a Baptist because it is only our practice of immersion, or dipping that does justice to the clear meaning of the New Testament term.

The Picture of Baptism

When Christians engage in biblical baptism and immerse believers under water, we are not merely clinging to the definition of an ancient Greek term. We are living out a picture visible to everyone who observes the practice. Baptism paints a portrait of the work of Jesus for believers. That picture is described in Colossians 2:11-14

In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.

In the New Testament, water baptism paints a dramatic picture to the watching world of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Just as Jesus was crucified on the cross, buried, in a tomb, and raised on the third day, so the baptizand (that’s what we call the person being baptized), is buried under the waters of baptism and raised up out of them. This portrait of baptism only works with baptism by immersion. So-called baptism by affusion or aspersion fails to portray the biblical picture.

This portrait of baptism also only works when the baptizand possesses personal faith in Jesus. The apostle is clear that it is the baptizand who has receives the work of Christ (Colossians 2:11). It is the baptizand who was dead in trespasses but has been made alive together with Christ (Colossians 2:13). It is the baptizand whose trespasses have been forgiven (Colossians 2:13). It is the baptizand whose record of debt has been set aside through the work of Christ on the cross (Colossians 2:14). It is the baptizand—not his parents and not his church—who has faith in the work of Jesus to save (Colossians 2:12).

This is only one of multiple places in the New Testament teaching the portrait painted by baptism only makes sense for believers. No faithful Christian believes baptism saves, because salvation comes through Christ alone. I am a Baptist because the Bible makes clear that the realities that baptism portrays can only be true of those who possess personal trust in Jesus Christ as Savior.

The Progression of Biblical Covenants

Faithful Christians who insist on the baptism of infants do so anchoring their position in a view of biblical covenants. Pedobaptists often refer to this as covenant theology. It is absolutely true that it is impossible to understand God’s revelation without acknowledging the significance of covenant language in Scripture. But it is easy to misunderstand the way these covenants work, as I believe my pedobaptist friends do.

Pedobaptists look to the covenant sign of circumcision and acknowledge that it was given to children of the covenant who neither possessed faith in or knowledge of the covenant. From this biblical observation, they argue that just as the covenant sign of circumcision was administered before the presence of faith, so baptism should be given to the children of believers before they profess personal faith.

This pedobaptist argument is an interesting one but is unfortunately imposed upon Scripture and not found within it. The only place in the Bible where baptism and circumcision are mentioned together is Colossians 2:11, quoted earlier. In that passage, the ones baptized are those who have received the kind of heart circumcision toward which physical circumcision was always meant to point (Deuteronomy 10:16; Jeremiah 4:4). Colossians 2 absolutely does not teach that because babies were circumcised in the Abrahamic Covenant, they should be baptized in the New Covenant.

The pedobaptist argument also does not work because it fails to understand a crucial distinction between the Abrahamic Covenant and the New Covenant, which fulfills it. The Abrahamic Covenant is a relationship between God and the descendants of Abraham, where God is building his people biologically through one ethnicity. In that covenant, everyone has Abraham’s genes, but not everyone has Abraham’s faith. The authors of the New Testament see this as a limitation of that covenant. The Apostle Paul says in Romans 9:7-8, “Not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring, but ‘Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.’ This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring.” One of the saddest realities about the Abrahamic Covenant is that the covenant includes people who are Abraham’s biological descendants without being one of his spiritual descendants.

We do not have to wait for the New Testament to discover this limitation of the Abrahamic Covenant. The Old Testament itself sees this limitation and looks forward to a covenant that is only composed of those who know God. After the physical descendants of Abraham enter a national covenant with God and receive his law at Sinai, it becomes clear that physical descendancy will never be enough to create faithfulness. In Jeremiah 31:34, the prophet looks forward to a future covenant when, “No longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” These words point to the New Covenant in Jesus.

That New Covenant is one where God is no longer building his people biologically through birth into a family but spiritually through faith. The only people included in this covenant are people who actually know God, and the only way to enter it is through faith. Galatians 3:14 says, “In Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith.”

This is where the covenant sign is important. Covenantal signs always point to covenantal realities. For example, the sign of the Noahic covenant is the rainbow because God has promised never to destroy the entire earth with water ever again. One sign of the New Covenant is the Lord’s Supper because it is the body and blood of Jesus that make it possible for sinners to be forgiven. Covenantal signs always point to crucial covenantal realities.

Members of the Abrahamic Covenant receive circumcision as a sign of the biological nature of the covenant. Circumcision creates a permanent alteration to the male reproductive organ so that, in every act of procreation, a man and his wife see the mark and remember that children are the gift of God, keeping his promise of a physical family to Abraham.

Members of the New Covenant receive baptism as a sign of the spiritual nature of the covenant. Every ethnicity and nation of the world is included in this spiritual kingdom when they have faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Unlike the Abrahamic Covenant, the New Covenant is not a mixed bag. It only includes those who have faith in Jesus. That is why the covenant sign of baptism is required to be given only to those who have the faith the sign portrays.

It is a misunderstanding of the biblical covenants and the way covenantal signs work to assume baptism functions in the New Covenant the way circumcision functions in the Abrahamic Covenant. I am Baptist because I believe Jesus has come in fulfillment of the covenant with Abraham. I believe this is a truth that thrilled Abraham (John 8:56). And it is impossible to be a member of the New Covenant without faith.

Believing the Bible

I am thankful for a generation of people who are carefully evaluating what they believe and the communities in which they will pursue their relationship with Christ. Unfortunately, it is possible for such evaluations to lead in the wrong direction. There is a temptation to make crucial decisions based on influences outside Scripture. I know this because I experienced it myself. It was often a challenge to weigh the words of the men I greatly respected against the words of Scripture. There were times when it was painful to follow influences and traditions which had not impacted me as personally, but which I believed were more faithful to Scripture.

At the end of the day that journey was one of the most important ones of my life that taught me a lesson I pray Christians today will also learn. That lesson is that faithful Christians must always base their decisions on the teaching of Scripture. We should love and honor the good elements of other traditions, and we must value and respect teachers who influence us for the good. But Scripture alone is the authority in the life of the Christian. We must follow the Bible above every other influence. When we do that on the issue of baptism, I am convinced we will discover that the ancient teaching of Jesus and his apostles points us to the Baptist tradition.