Thread on paedocommunion.
Thesis: American evangelicalism is essentially Baptistic. From a Reformed POV, Baptists conflate (identify, confuse) the sign of outward initiation into the covenant people with the sign of renewal. In their system baptism does both.
Thesis: American evangelicalism is essentially Baptistic. From a Reformed POV, Baptists conflate (identify, confuse) the sign of outward initiation into the covenant people with the sign of renewal. In their system baptism does both.
When American evangelicals come into Reformed Churches they bring their Baptistic assumptions with them. They are so pervasive, so widely assumed, that many don’t even realize that they making assumptions. For them what they assume is what everyone around them assumes.
They may not even be aware that there are other assumptions, other ways of looking at things.
One of the effects of evangelical migration into P&R churches is that P&R congregations are so eager for new members (most of our churches are small and some are positively beleaguered and borderline) that we are afraid to challenge these assumptions.
Sometimes this is true of ministers too, who come into P&R congregations from evangelicalism. It’s true of teachers of theology who adopt (some) Reformed doctrines. They never question the underlying assumptions involved.
Thus, in such a setting, when people adopt infant baptism (paedobaptism) they assume/infer that we should also commune infants because they have ported with them Baptistic assumptions about the sacraments.
They now want to do to the Lord’s Supper what they used to with Baptism: make it perform *both* functions, initiation AND confirmation. This is perhaps the fundamental error of paedocommunion.
In historic Christian understanding and practice, even before the Reformation, and certainly in Reformed theology, piety, and practice, baptism is the sign of initiation and communion the sign of confirmation/renewal. They are two distinct signs, with two distinct functions.
Paedocommunion is attractive to evangelicals in transition for other reasons. 1) It’s a little transgressive of their former way of practicing the faith; 2) It‘s sometimes presented to evangelicals, who have little experience of Christianity prior to the 19th century
as “the” ancient way of practicing communion; 3) It’s antithetical to evangelical individualism and it fits the “family-centered” (as distinct from a church-centered) model of the Christian life promoted in some groups.
4) Theonomy and the Federal Vision theology are among the more popular and frequent toll booths through which evangelicals in transit pass on their way into the P&R world. Paedocommunion is standard among them.
Evangelicals in transit don’t usually have a basis on which to evaluate the (theonomic/FV) claims that paedocommunion is *the* biblical, ancient, Reformed practice of communion.
We can appreciate why it would be plausible. If the Baptist account of the faith is wrong, maybe they’re wrong about communion too? When a paradigm gets upended, it’s like 52-pick up, all the cards get spilled and they get put together again randomly.
Another source of paedocommunionism in the P&R world is, of course, the Federal Vision theology. The FVist system of “in by baptism, stay in by cooperation with grace” (works). In that sacerdotal (to use the word that James White used in ‘04) scheme paedocommunion makes sense.
Infants need all the help they can get in order to be able to cooperate successfully and sufficiently, to retain all the benefits they’ve been given in baptism (election, regeneration, union, justification, adoption), acc to the FVists.
Of course, anyone who knows even a little about the Medieval church recognizes the FV theology as essentially pre-Reformation and the thing rejected by the Reformation.
