The following text in the picture is from a "covenant/reformed" Baptist minister named Tanner. I wrote a lengthy response below it. I think this may be helpful in further understanding the true nature of the Lord's Church, church government, the sacraments, and the importance of recognizing our children belong to the Covenant and are to receive baptism while babies. I am thankful for Baptists like Tanner who are in some ways moving toward the biblical/covenantal position, but the differences still remain, and have implications. Perhaps this will also help you when talking with some of your friends and family who believe like Tanner or similarly, or who say "why not just have a baby dedication"?
Below is my response:
So close, sort of.
I am not sure if he is saying his children are Christian because he, the head of the house, professes faith or not.
If so, praise God, but then to call your children Christian, yet say they are outside of the covenant (and somehow that's "better"?!) and therefore are not to be baptized until they personally profess faith, is nonsensical.
That's like saying you are a citizen of the United States, but not really, and not until you declare yourself to want to be, and then you'll get your social security number and actual rights of a citizen. Or something like that.
Nowhere does Scripture acknowledge unbaptized Christians. Even the OT saints were all baptized (I Cor. 10), and of course given the sign of the covenant at that time, circumcision, to all the adult males and male children/future head of households.
How serious was it for one to not have the sign of the covenant? Per Gen. 17:14, God said the infant male children were to be cut off from the people of God if they were uncircumcised, because they had broken the covenant. "And the uncircumcised male child, who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, that person shall be cut off from his people; he has broken My covenant.”
God was ready to kill Moses for not having circumcised his male child, Exodus 4:24-25, "And it came to pass on the way, at the encampment, that the Lord met him and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a sharp stone and cut off the foreskin of her son and cast it at Moses’ feet, and said, “Surely you are a husband of blood to me!”
Christ plainly said to make disciples of all nations by baptizing and teaching them all that He had commanded, Matthew 28. Baptists are inconsistent in discipling their children when they teach them, yet leave them unbaptized for some period of time (sometimes a shorter period thankfully, others much longer, similar sadly to how some Reformed/Presbyterians put off communion until children are basically adults or no longer living with their parents).
This is more than the timing (and mode) of when our children get wet. Holy Baptism is for the holy people of God, and God by His Spirit works through baptism, even as He works through prayers and the Scriptures, to work salvation into the hearts of His people, to bring Christ to His covenant people.
Who is holy in the new covenant/testament? The same as were holy in the old, for the covenant of grace spans both covenants/testaments. It is the household of faith, therefore not only believers, but also their children. I Cor. 7:14, "For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband; otherwise your children would be unclean, but now they are holy."
Note that when there is just one believing parent, the children are holy. That includes when it is the wife who is the believer, and the husband the unbeliever. Strictly speaking, the argument presented by Tanner Cartwright, as it is written, doesn't work in situations where the head of the household, the man, is the unbeliever, but the wife is the believer. She is not the head of the house, the unbelieving husband is, and she still must submit to his headship, I Pet. 3:1ff. And yet in even such a situation, the inclusion of children in the new covenant is GREATER, not OBLITERATED! Now, even when the head of the household is an unbeliever, if the wife/mother is a believer, the children of that union are still holy.
Consider the inferiority of the covenant under its old administration, where even the priests had to put away their pagan wives, and Ezra 10:44 tells us explicitly that "some of them had wives by whom they had children".
But now in the fuller blessings of the new covenant, the household is further restored to God/Christ and His covenant grace, not removed. Now, we read that the unbelieving spouse is even sanctified by the believing spouse, such that the children, who otherwise would be unclean, are now "covenantally" holy. They are fit to approach God in worship, and to be received in Christ, who took the infant children into His arms, prayed for them, and blessed them, saying the kingdom of God belonged to them, in Luke 18 and elsewhere.
Baptism is the sign of covenant entrance/inclusion, and so our holy children should receive holy baptism, the moment they are holy. And they are holy by virtue of being born into a household with at least one believing parent, whether it is the head of household or not. Such is the graciousness of God through Christ in the new covenant.
I think the fundamental hang-up, and I expect this to be reflected in the comments on this post, is that many Baptists/Evangelicals in general have a paltry at best understanding of the covenant, the sacraments, and the Church in general. Church government is something Evangelicals today, Baptists and non-denoms, have largely shredded and neglected, not intentionally of course. Most of them believe they are following Scripture.
But the result is that many can now only think in terms of Christian = regenerate/born of the Spirit. If one is not born of the Spirit, one is not a Christian in any meaningful sense, and therefore, babies cannot be baptized until we have evidence they have been born of the Spirit (faith and some fruit of the Spirit). So the argument, which is completely interjected into the Scriptures and entire covenant working/dealing with God and His covenant/Church people, is that unless one is born again, they cannot be God's covenant people. Therefore, many Baptist and other churches will re-baptize even adults who came by profession, then apostatized/departed from the faith, but have returned at some future point. The first baptism evidently wasn't real.
But baptism is real, on infants and adults, whether we like it or not. It is a sacrament of God given to His ministers, and when it is applied, that person is all the more bound to God and His Church, and that baptism will become a baptism of judgment against the one baptized if they do not persevere in faith. Scripture constantly exhorts the Church in this fashion. Once you see it, you cannot miss it. I Corinthians 10, where all were baptized into Moses, yet many of them perished and their bodies were scattered in the wilderness, the same language used to describe Pharaoh's army drowned in the baptismal waters of judgment, is a good place to start.
I've said enough. I hope this gets a lot of interaction. Recovering the God's church government and its sacraments is critical to spiritual growth and well-being for us and our children, down through the generations, so that the nations are won to Christ. When we begin to see the blessings and promises of God to us and our children, and the duties it calls us and our children to, it is excited, clarifying, convicting, etc. It shows us our priority really is to our wife and children, our church and near neighbors and kin, and our own town, state, and nation, above others.
I hope Tanner is not trying to imply that Presbyterian/Reformed baptize our children based on an external covenant, to the exclusion of teaching our wife and teaching/catechizing our children in the Christian faith thoroughly. It is just the opposite. We baptize precisely because we recognize our children are in the covenant and are disciples. Christ said disciples are made by baptizing and teaching them. Therefore, we do both. Baptists at best teach, but do not baptize at the proper time.
But we understand that because our children are covenantally holy, they are disciples, the kingdom belongs to them, and we raise them as citizens of the kingdom, we are commanded by God to do so, to to teach our children all of Scripture, raise them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord as Eph. 6 says, echoing Deut. 6. etc., and we parent by God's precious covenant promises for our children, that we can have confidence as we raise them for the Lord, the Lord will work in their hearts to save them.
Baptism is like formal enrollment into the church/school of Christ, as a disciple. God/Christ has accepted the children of even one believing parent into His church/school, as His disciples, and baptism signifies and seals that acceptance. To teach and train your children without first enrolling them into the school/church of Christ, is to at best raise your children as church auditors, listening in but not members. That's certainly better than not even bringing them to be auditors, but why reject the blessings of Church membership to our children, and the privileges and duties that brings, to both parent, child, and the Elders/church at large?
Our children aren't taking a citizenship test they must pass before they can be baptized as church members. They are church members, from birth, by virtue of being born into a covenant household. If parents and church raise their children for the Lord, trusting in His promises, doing so by His strength, apostasy should be exceedingly rare, as rare as defectors and traitors from their home country that is prosperous and kind to its people.
If we don't get this right concerning the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, that it includes the next generation of believers, children, from their conception, we really won't understand how the Kingdom is going to grow predominately, our Evangelism will be paltry, and our efforts at Christian Nationalism in the best sense of that term will be diminished.
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