Pondering Logical Conclusions -

If you believe that baptism is only rightly administered to individuals who have a "credible" profession of faith, supported by the fruit of their life, then you are asserting that God made a very significant change to the essence of His church when He introduced baptism as the sign of the new covenant community to replace circumcision. You are asserting that God no longer deals covenantally with families but rather began excluding the children of covenant believers with the institution of baptism. You are asserting that God has now given man the responsibility of evaluating wheat versus tares by discerning the status of a person's heart. You are asserting a significant discontinuity between the New Covenant and the Old Covenant.

More often than not, credobaptists challenge paedobaptists by stating that the Scriptures contain no indisputable accounts of baptism being applied to the children of believers. But regardless of the common response to this statement, paedobaptists ought to turn this approach on its ear by requiring credobaptists to defend from God's Word their significant alterations to God's Covenant dealings with His people. The Scriptures contain no indisputable accounts of God's Covenant being stripped from the children of the elect. The Scriptures nowhere establish such a detestable practice as sinful men examining the fruit of a person's life to determine whether or not they are allowed into the Covenant community.

Who among us was ever grafted into the people of God because of our perfection? How can we delay the benefits of being Covenantally united to God because a child's profession is not credible enough? How can we avoid the Scriptures relating to Covenantal headship and the significance of baptism as a sign and seal of the New Covenant?

The usual affinity among believers with a reformed understanding of the Scriptures, whether Baptist or Presbyterian, is good and commendable. But we must not pretend that the significance of our disagreement is mild; it is not possible to only disagree about the recipients of baptism, the implications on other areas are significant.