Those who recognize children of believers belong to the covenant sometimes make the error of also admitting them to partake of the bread and the wine as infants, or at least babies. Even among paedocommunion advocates, there is a surprising amount of variety, some admitting to the table from birth, others waiting until anywhere between 1-3 years old, for various reasons, usually tied to physically being able to digest the bread/wine or being weaned from the mother's milk.
But the Lord's Supper is a spiritual meal, requiring spiritual teeth, faith, to truly feed on Christ and be nourished at the table meal. So here is a brief reply I gave to some paedocommunion guys who charge paedobaptists like myself of being inconsistent and "excomunnicating" our covenant children from the Lord's Table:
Infants and babies are always part of the family, and usually literally join at the dinner table/high chair around the table for family meals. They are not "unwelcome" at the family table. The table is for them. They are brought around it. But until they have the physical constitution to eat the meat, they don't. They drink their mother's milk, as they get older they also drink water, then soft foods, etc., are added. But there are a couple years usually before the child is expected and able to eat the full family meal (and often a year or two after where they have the food chopped up in tiny pieces), but all the while they are admitted to the family table.
Well, you can make the obvious application to the Lord's Table/Supper. Covenant children aren't excommunicated or "unwelcome" at the Table. If our congregation had a communion table where each covenant family would come to it/sit at it, we would not tell the parents to abandon their infants and babies in the pew, but rather bring them to the table. As soon as they can eat of this spiritual meal at the Lord's Table, that is, desire to and profess faith in Christ, so as to feed on Him by faith, they may do so. You can take physical/carnal feeding on Christ back to Rome. This is a spiritual meal, which requires a spiritual chewing that is symbolized in the physical chewing. It only takes child-like faith, but it does take faith to truly partake of Christ in the sacramental meal.
Just as the babies are encouraged to grow into maturity and eat the full meal at the family table that their older brothers and sisters are enjoying, so is the Lord's Supper a call to grow into spiritual maturity/faith. But that spiritual feeding comes by the moms and dads, along with the pastors/elders, feeding the milk of the Word to the children, nurturing them in the covenant so that God works by His Spirit with the word on their hearts to bring them to saving faith, and praise God, to not just sit at the Table of the Lord but to now feed on the same spiritual meal as their covenant family, the meal that they have been seated around as a member of, and now are able to devour with their spiritual teeth of faith that have come in by God's kindness. The meal, of course, is Christ Himself, and His efficacious death. His body broken and blood shed for that child. His body was given for our covenant children from their mother's womb, and now with the teeth of faith they come to the table to partake of His saving blessings.
You do have the ditch in some Reformed churches where, to borrow from my analogy above, they don't merely wait for a child-like faith/spiritual teeth to come in, but mature faith/spiritual molars. So children who truly have faith to partake worthily and remember/proclaim the Lord's death for them are forbidden. This would be like barring your older children from eating steak because they don't yet have their molars, making them wait until they are teenagers or even college aged to eat a nice steak dinner.
That would be frustrating, and so when a child is ready to profess faith in Christ and wants to come to the table, to refuse to do so because they don't have a mature faith with spiritual "wisdom teeth" is absurd, and can frustrate the faith of that child. So my position, and the elders position at our church, is "young credo-communion." At the time of writing this, 6 of our covenant children, ages 6-8, will make profession of faith this Lord's Day, and then in June will partake by faith, with their spiritual "baby/child" teeth as it were, of Christ in the bread and wine, and so be spiritually nourished, remembering and proclaiming the Lord's death for them and the whole Church body/family to which they belong, and have always belonged.
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