Hodge’s 8 Propositions on Infant Baptism
In blogging through By Oath Consigned I’ve covered Kline’s argument for infant baptism. It’s interesting to see the parallels with the argument of Charles Hodge. Both Kline and Hodge avoid presumptive regeneration as the basis for infant baptism and instead appeal to the concept of membership in the covenant of grace or visible church. The point is useful in countering the Federal Vision argument that relies on baptismal regeneration.
Hodge’s argument goes like this:
In the present discussion, by the Church is meant what is called the visible Church; that is, the whole body of those who profess the true religion … With regard to infant baptism the following propositions may be maintained.
1. The visible Church is a divine institution …
2. The visible Church does not consist exclusively of the regenerate …
3. The commonwealth of Israel was the Church …
4. The [visible] Church under the new dispensation is identical with that under the old. It is not a new Church, but one and the same. It is the same olive-tree (Rom. 11:16-17). It is founded on the same covenant, the covenant made with Abraham …
5. The terms of admission into the [visible] Church before the advent were the same that are required into the Christian Church …
6. Infants were members of the [visible] Church under the Old Testament economy … This is really the turning point in the controversy concerning infant church-membership. If the Church is one under both dispensations; if infants were members of the Church under the theocracy, then they are members of the Church now, unless the contrary can be proved.
7. There is nothing in the New Testament which justifies the exclusion of the children of believers from membership in the Church …
8. Children need, and are capable of receiving the benefits of redemption …
[Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. III, pp. 546-58.]
I think this is a pretty sound argument for infant baptism. I like Hodge’s approach because it starts out with the concept of the visible church:
In order to justify the baptism of infants, we must attain and authenticate such an idea of the Church as that it shall include the children of believing parents.
Indeed, ecclesiology is the key to the whole debate — as any baptist who has struggled with this issue and ultimately switched over to the paedobaptist position knows.
However, Hodge’s argument does need a bit of Klinean tweaking. Kline would not agree that “the Church under the new dispensation is identical with that under the old” (proposition 4). The word “identical” obscures the legitimate differences between Israel and the Christian church that even Hodge would acknowledge – chief among them the fact that Israel was a national church. Or, to use Kline’s language, Israel was theocracy in which cult and culture were institutionally integrated as an intrusionary prototype of the eschatological kingdom. The church is not a theocracy, and its relationship to culture follows the patriarchal pilgrim model, which is very different from Israel’s conquest model (a difference that was painfully clear to the inhabitants of Canaan!).
But I don’t think Hodge’s argument rests on the word “identical” in proposition 4. Actually, you could delete proposition 4 and move straight to proposition 5 — “the terms of admission were the same” — and the argument still works.