In working through infant baptism and children in the covenant (not, mind you, whether adult converts should be baptized; yes they should), trying to find proof texts (“go ye forth and baptize thy children, or… not”) is the wrong way to go about sifting through the data. MacArthur’s arguments against Sproul, for instance, are unhelpful to me in defending against it. He says, “I don’t see it, it’s just not there,” or “show me a specific text” and then proof texts’ the New Testament, wrongly conflating the Abrahamic Covenant (Genesis 17) with “Old Covenant” (Mosaic Covenant). So much of that has to do with presuppositions underlying “not seeing it” though. In other words, it’s reductionist to just say “it’s just not there” which ignores volumes of theology related to the larger story of scripture, starting way back in Genesis going forward, and the necessary outworking of that story, carrying over into the NT. (MacArthur may be a bad example though given that he’s a staunch classic dispensationalist which sees division in the unfolding of redemption that I don’t hold to, but I hope you see the point.)
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