What is an appropriate age for a child to be baptized according to the bible? (2 Tim 3:16). Since we believe the scripture is sufficient for all matters of life and godliness, this is the first question we should ask as we approach this matter. Join us with Sam Waldron as we discuss the various views, our experiences over the years, a survey of what the scriptures explicitly teach, and what we learn from Baptist history.

Here's a link to Sam Waldron's series on the baptism of children:
Shall We Baptize Children?

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture. And today we want to talk about baptism, particularly baptizing children, age of baptism. And Jason, we're so delighted to have Sam Walden with us. Hey, Sam.

Hey, it's good to be here, Scott. Good to be with you. Thanks. Yeah, in case you don't know Sam, Sam is the president of Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky and also pastor at Grace Reform Baptist Church in Owensboro, Kentucky. So we're really, really glad to have you in this discussion today.

Just big picture here, there seem to be three positions on the baptism of children, if you're a Baptist, and the first is that baptism ought to be on the profession of faith in any age, And you know this is a common practice in Evangelicalism. I read the other day that in 2014 the Southern Baptist Convention recognized that their baptism rates were falling except in one category. They were rising in age five and below. So these would be people who believe that baptism in any age is appropriate. And then second, the baptism of adults.

And this seems to be the position of most Reformed Baptist churches. And then a third baptism at an age of maturity, A good example of this would be John MacArthur's Grace Community Church where they baptized at age 12. So there's this idea of maturity that enters in. And I think most Baptists really, really embrace the idea that maturity matters. Like most Baptists would not feel comfortable baptizing a four or five year old, but maybe they would in an eight or nine or 10 or 12 year old.

So everybody believes that maturity matters. Everybody believes that maturity matters. That's right. Everybody believes that. It's just that what counts as maturity.

Right, yeah, it's kind of where do you draw the line? Now, the three of us have had different experiences as pastors and as people who've been baptized. And we've all not held the same view over the last 30 years. We've changed in different ways. All of us share that.

We feel like we're learning more as we grow older. But anyway, Sam, tell us just maybe briefly about your experience as a Christian and then as a pastor. Sure. Well, I was baptized in quotes when I was seven, and then I was baptized again when I was 26 because I had continual doubts about my baptism at age seven. And I was actually a pastor when I was baptized at age 26 already.

That's my experience as a pastor. My wife, who grew up in a Christian home as I did, had a similar experience and was baptized, and one of those people was baptized twice. I know that's not accurate theologically, right? But as a pastor, I've been a pastor of three Reformed Baptist churches. In Grand Rapids, where I was a pastor for about 24 years, We actually changed our practice during that period of time.

The reason we changed our practice is that early on we had baptized, as I recall, four eight or nine-year-olds, And we actually had to exercise church discipline over all four of them when they got older. And this made us begin to ask ourselves some serious questions about the baptism of children. And we moved from baptizing children to the notion of maturity. But for us, maturity meant someone who had faced the world at some level on their own. I think after we made that change, the youngest person we ever baptized was age 15.

Usually the young people that were baptized were 16, 17, 18. But we didn't have an age limit per se. It was a matter of the judgment of the elders whether someone had attained a measure of mature adulthood, right? And then when I moved to Kentucky, I actually moved to a church that had the practice of baptizing children. Pastor felt quite strongly about it.

I had conceived some reservations, not so much about our practice of baptizing older teens, but about the way sometimes it was defended and talked about. And therefore, I was comfortable even being in the eldership with the church that baptized children, although they normally weren't very young children at all. I would suspect that I'm not sure if I remember a lot of things, but I think the children would have been 8, 9, 10, 11, and they would have been quizzed pretty thoroughly about whether they had a testimony of Christ and understood the Gospel. And then when I moved to Grace Reformed Baptist Church in Osbrough, Kentucky, We took a while to make up our minds specifically about this, but it was eventually facing the multitudes of children that were coming into our midst, and the addition of a lot of young families that made us say we've got to do some specific teaching on that subject. And we adopted, I guess, in terms of your paradigm, the maturity, but I don't completely separate the maturity paradigm from the adult paradigm because I, well, here's the thing.

I don't think the Bible says anything about teenagehood. In the Bible, people are either children or adults. And so, we began to think through that, and that's what led me to teach my five son is the lessons that people can find online entitled the question of the baptism of children. Yeah. We'll put a link to that, uh, on the, on the notes here.

You know, Sam, I was I was shocked to learn that most Reformed Baptist churches, you know, don't baptize under 18. Apparently that's true in the United Kingdom. Apparently that's true here in the United States. You know, Al Martin's Trinity Baptist Church didn't baptize under 18. You have Capitol Hill Baptist Church where Mark Dever is, they don't baptize under 18.

None of us have felt comfortable putting an exact age on this, but I was just surprised that, that the baptism of older children is pretty much the standard practice of Reformed Baptist churches in the United States and in the UK. Yeah, well, that's interesting. I think probably coming out of Southern Baptist circles I can understand that surprise. I'm not comfortable with putting an age 18 limit on it. I want to say an adult.

But I want to define that fairly broadly and as I understand it, biblically. So, and so, I argue for adult baptism, but adult not defined as age 18, which is completely arbitrary, of course, but defined in some of the ways I think the Bible would support. Let's talk about some of the scriptures that come to mind on this matter of adult baptism, and then after that, let's move into what does it mean to be an adult. But let's talk about the scriptural testimony, because whatever other Reformed Baptists do in history isn't our primary question. It's really what does a sufficient scripture teach the best that we can understand it?

Yeah, well, I think as I taught through the issue, there were four major texts that I think are oftentimes wholly ignored by modern Baptists as opposed to more historically oriented Baptists. And So, let me just share what I think those texts are. And they really compose a kind of biblical theology of minor children. The first one is 1 Corinthians 13.11. When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child.

When I became a man, I did away with childish things. Well, here you have the very clear distinction between children and men and the very clear assertion that children speak, think, and reason like children, whereas men reason, think, speak like adults. And I just don't think we can ignore that kind of distinction in our assessment of children. You know, it's commonly known that agencies, parat in Bible schools and other things, can get 95% conversion rates from children. And there's just a complete naivete about the differences between children and adults, and I just don't think we can allow that kind of naivete to go on and on and on.

The second text I turn to by way of a biblical theology of minor children is Ephesians 4, 13, and 14, which says, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ, and here's the key verse, as a result we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness and deceitful scheming." Now, if that text says anything, it says, I think, pretty clearly that before the maturation process into adulthood, children are easily led and easily deceived. I think that's the plane of teaching of Ephesians 4.14. And this reality points us to the difficulty of attributing stability and permanence to the affirmations of children because they are driven through and fro because of their child likeness. Nothing wrong with it, but the fact of the matter is that children have this natural instability about them that we have to be aware of. The third text I turn people to in my science school classes is John 9, 18-23.

And especially the statement both in verse 21 and verse 23 where the parents of the blind man say to the religious authorities, he is of age, he will speak for himself. And then again in verse 23, he is of age, ask him. Now this is a pretty clear and revealing statement that in Jewish society there was a distinction between being a minor and reaching majority. And while you were a minor, you could not speak for yourself. And that distinction was a common thing in Jewish society, in the Jewish society into which the church was born.

And the last text that I turned people to, and there are more that you might go to, was Acts 8-12. But when they believe Philip preaching the good news about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were being baptized, men and women alike. Now, the words used here for men and women may be used of husbands and wives, but they always connote adult males and adult females. And these are not boys and girls. These are adult males and adult females.

And the book of Acts actually contains no record of the baptism of children. And in a case like this, it leads you to wonder why there weren't any children baptized, because the language here is specific. These were men and women, not boys and girls, and the Greek words bear that meaning. So, these were the major texts, Scott, that I turned people to in my Sunday school class. Yeah, there are many occasions of baptism.

You know, in the New Testament, you have the 3, 000 and the 5, 000. You know, in Acts 5, 14, you have both men and women in the 5, 000 who are baptized. You have unnamed believers in Samaria in Acts 8. You have Simon the sorcerer in Acts 8. You have Saul of Tarsus in Acts 9.

You have Cornelius and the unnamed members of his household, that's where most people wanna go, is for the household baptism matter. You have the unnamed disciples of John in Acts chapter 19, you've got Crispus, the chief ruler of the synagogue, and unnamed members of his household in Acts 18, verse 8. And so you're making the case for adult baptism from the explicit nature of these texts. There's no mention particularly of baptizing children. That's right.

And if you try to appeal to the household baptisms while you're playing into the hands of the infant Baptist, because you're going to be adopting the same exegetical ground that they do, assuming that there were babies present, and the argument from household baptisms, then for children being baptized, would be the same kind of argument. You know, we don't like to make arguments from silence. We don't want to make arguments just because something is not mentioned. But with this, what is mentioned is salient. So how do you deal with that question about, aren't you arguing from silence?

Well, first of all, I think we have to back up and say, we're dealing here with a matter that is got to be governed by what we call the Regulator Principle of the Church. And the Regulator Principle says that we actually need precedent for what we do in worship and what we do in church government as well. And baptizing is certainly covered in this general thing. And so, In a matter like this, you actually do need precedent, and silence is golden, because if there's no precedent for the baptism of children, then you don't have a right, according to the Regulator Principle, to be baptizing them. Now, I think there are a lot of other considerations that go into this.

That's a rather bald and naked assertion right there. But, and there are a lot of other ecclesiastical, ecclesiological principles that go into this and would kind of lead to the same conclusion. Let me just mention one. And that is, anywhere where you have the baptism of children practice, you have the development, whether it's informal or formal, implicit or explicit, of a split-level church membership. You have certain members of the church that can vote, and certain members of the church, the children, who may not vote.

Now the question has to be raised, where does the New Testament ever give us any precedent for that kind of split-level church membership? Well, the answer is it does not give us any precedent for something like that. So, and just to clarify, what you're talking about is if you're going to, if you're bringing children in church membership, you wouldn't want them to vote if they're eight years old. So, in church constitutions, there is a limitation. If a child is a member, they can't have a vote.

So now you're talking about, you called it a split level, you have a two-tiered church membership. That's right. And I think you have to do something like that. The church where I was a pastor, actually, when we wrote the Constitution, I helped to write it, I said, look, you've got to baptize children into a local church. You can't just baptize them into nothing.

And if you're going to do that, then you've got this problem of what are their rights and responsibilities? And the other passes were carried by that, so they wrote into the Constitution itself a distinction between minor membership and adult membership. I'm saying that has to happen, but I challenge now and even more keenly than when I was in that situation rethinking a lot of things. I challenge the propriety of making that distinction where you can't find a precedent for it in the Bible. Scott, I'd like to interject with mechanics at the church where I serve, meaning when you want to be baptized or think you ought to be baptized, what happens?

Because that's changed at our church, and it's really changed as a result of just the issues that we're talking about. In time past, if a child or the parents of a child thought that that child was ready for baptism, they would approach an elder and then we would schedule a baptism interview and we would try to discern from talking to the parents and talking to the child whether they were ready to be baptized or not. Over these issues, we've actually changed the mechanics to now when that happens, We say, let's put a discussion about a baptism interview on hold for now. I want to come over to your house, and I want to talk to you and your parents so that your parents are hearing everything that you're hearing, and then I want you to consider the things that I say when I come. And then after a period of time of you considering it, if you want to have a baptism interview, then we can talk about that then.

What do we do at this sort of pre-interview step. Well, I do the talking, or my co-elder does. During the baptism interview, they'll do most of the talking. And I take them to three places in Scripture. The first is Acts 8 and the baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch.

And when the Ethiopian eunuch believes and says, here is water, why can't it be baptized, Philip says this, if you believe with all your heart you may. So that's really what we're trying to discern as church leaders. Is this a person who believes with all their heart, or is this just a transitory thing that is going to go as quickly as it's come? To sort of continue down that track, we then go to Luke chapter 14, which is the text about the radical claims of discipleship. Unless you hate your father or mother, spouse, brother and sisters, your friends, even your own life, you cannot be my disciple." So at that point, either my co-elder or I is saying, this is what it means to believe with all your heart, that if you are faced with the choice of holding onto your most precious relationships or having Jesus, you would turn your back on your most precious relationships in order to have Jesus.

That's really what we're trying to discern here. And we talk about what baptisms are like in our church. What are they like? We baptize, they come up out of the water, we clap and sing. And I'm glad we're in an environment where we clap and sing, but we want a person considering being baptized that that historically is unusual and even in many places in the world would be unheard of.

Why would it be unheard of? Because when you get baptized in those times in history or in those places in the world, you're probably kissing your professional prospects goodbye, kissing your friendships goodbye, kissing your family relationships goodbye. So it's a lot more sober-minded of an event than it would be at our church. And we want them to think, if you had to be baptized in one of those times or one of those places, would you still want to be baptized? Do not come back and ask for an interview until your answer to that question is yes.

If I lived in a place where when I was baptized, there wouldn't be clapping and singing, but instead I would be forfeiting my professional prospects and all my relationships, but I still want to because I don't have anything if I don't have Christ. That's really the point where you're ready to be baptized. The last place we take them is to Luke chapter 18 with the Pharisee and the tax collector, the Pharisee thanking God that he's not like other men, but the tax collector can't even look to heaven, but he beats his breast and says, God, have mercy on me, a sinner. We say, if you're that guy, we want to baptize you, you know. And if, but until you're that person and a person who's willing to walk away from the most precious things in their life in order to have Jesus, then we're just not ready for that.

And you're talking about the seriousness of baptism. You're entering into a covenant, and as Sam would say, you're entering into a covenant with the local church. And Sam, one of the questions that you've dealt with is, is a child able to keep a covenant as serious as that? So maybe you could talk a little bit about that problem. Yeah, let me just interact a little bit here and say two things about that, really.

My view is, and this is what I was struggling with when I moved from the Church of Michigan to here, I would hear some of my fellow elders say something like, oh, we don't question whether you're a Christian or not. It's just you shouldn't be baptized until you're age 18 or until you're older. And that bothered me a lot because it seems to me that if someone can make a credible profession of faith, it's my duty to baptize them. To me, the question is if a minor child actually, given what we know about minor children from the Bible, can make such a credible profession of faith. But the other thing that you were just talking about is that we have really clear evidence from Jewish writings and from Jewish society, and they are confirmed by hints and things in the New Testament, that in Jewish society, a boy was not able to make any kind of oath or vow until he was at least 13.

And maybe it was slightly different for a girl. Maybe it was a little bit younger, age 12. But that's what was so impressive to me. Now, I'm not saying that every young person at age 12 or 13 is mature enough to be baptized. But I am saying there does seem to be a kind of cut off point there that before that time children are more, young people are more and more childish, and after that time They're maturing into adulthood.

The whole situation with Jesus, apparently not going with his parents to the feast until he was 12. And the text of Luke makes it very clear that he was 12 and makes a point out of it. Seems interesting to me. And then the other thing that seems to confirm this to me is that, and pardon the reference to infant Baptist churches, but even Reformed fetal Baptist churches, you know, communicative membership was not normally allowed to young people until they were 12 or 13. You know, so that's, and when I said earlier, you know, the Bible doesn't know about teenagers.

It just knows about children and adults. I think that there's a good argument for a cutoff line generally, and I'm not being dogmatic, at around age 12 and 13, so that below that age, things get really questionable about a credible profession of faith. After that age, we could have increasing confidence that someone knows what they're doing and can make adult commitments. You talk about marriage laws. Yes.

The entry into a serious, you know, marriage covenant. And there are age limits in US law. Of course, our paradigm is not US law, but you do have this recognition of a reality that a 12-year-old is not allowed to enter into a marriage covenant. They're not old enough to do that. Any thoughts, any more thoughts about that?

Yeah, I think it's a matter of kind of natural law or natural revelation. And there's a couple of things about that, I'd like to say. One is, again, at age 12 and 13, we're starting to talk about puberty, aren't we? That's what makes a boy into a man and a girl into a woman. And so, there's something about normal maturation processes which tend to point to that period of time.

And then The other thing is that this is kind of a response to the people who say, well, we're denying our children this privilege, and we shouldn't be denying children this. Well, are we denying young people a legitimate privilege, an advantage, and something that they should have by not allowing them to marry when they're 12, or 11, or 10? I don't think so. Everybody recognizes that some things are a blessing, but they're only a blessing when you're ready to have them, you're old enough to have them knowledgeably. And I think the marriage laws that I think reflect a kind of natural revelation that God has given us are an illustration of that and point us in the direction.

If we aren't going to allow a person in Kentucky, it's under age 17, without the permission of their parents, we're not going to allow them to swear a marriage covenant, then recognizing that baptism is a spiritual covenant of even more importance, we have to ask the question, what are we doing allowing four, five, and six years old to swear a baptismal covenant that they probably don't completely understand and won't understand the implications of for many more years. I was reading someone who illustrated what you're saying a little bit differently, and it was, why would you bring such a young child into such a serious covenant who can't even decide what to wear or what to eat. You're, you're going to tell them what to wear and what to eat. And you are going to withhold certain things from them because you're their parents. But I just thought that was interesting point.

There's, and that's just the recognition of this matter of maturity. Everybody, I think most people recognize there is a continuum of maturity. And the question that we're asking is, well, where do you draw the line? The three of us aren't comfortable drawing a specific age line. Right.

Also, we're delighted that God saves children, little children. God can save the littlest child. So we're not making any statement about the age of salvation at all, because we know that God is powerful. He moves on people when he wants to. So we're not casting shadows on the salvation of children by any means.

No, absolutely not. The children can be saved, may be saved, are saved. The question is whether we can know that well enough when they're children and whether they can make a credible profession of faith when they're minor children. That's the real question, because baptism is a two-way street. It's not only that someone wants to be baptized, the church has the responsibility to make sure that person should be baptized and has a right to be baptized.

And that requires a credible profession of faith. Let's just hit one last matter, and that is Baptist history. What's your understanding of how Baptists in history have handled this? Yeah, I think Baptists in history would regard even my lowering the age to 12 or 13 as incredibly naive. One of the best Baptist historians I know, Pastor Ron Miller, in Clarksville, Tennessee, Covenant Baptist Church.

He's the one that does on our seminary podcast the Particular Pilgrim Podcast. And people love that program because he's a lot of stuff about the history of Particular Baptists and people's lives. He, I wrote him and asked him this question, and he was kindly dogmatic and said, look, 15 or 16, that was the age for a particular Baptist forefathers, and that was what happened. And the idea that they would baptize young children would have been unknown in the 17th, 18th centuries. And I think everything I've read from other sources confirms that judgment.

So, yes, I think that Reformed Baptist history would confirm that there must be maturity and a measure of adulthood if a person is going to make a credible profession of faith and be baptized and be received by one of the historically Reformed Baptist churches in England and so forth, even in our country. Okay, so there you have it. There you have it. Controversial subject. We've come down in different places over the years, and church leaders will do that.

Elders have to decide these things. Elders of churches have to determine how they'll lead their church in this matter. Thankfully, in our churches, we have lots of little kids that are coming to know the Lord. That's really a blessing, I'm so thankful. We pray for it all the time.

And so it's a really critical matter, and we want to treat them well. We want to bless them in their professions of faith. We wanna encourage them. My greatest delight on Sunday morning is when kids come and talk to me about their faith or about something that was said in the sermon. And sometimes they're telling me they love the Lord and they want to be baptized.

I'm so thankful. I want to encourage them And be a blessing to them and not be a hindrance to their faith. Jason, last comment, we'll give it to you. No, I just think it's interesting in thinking through the progression for all of us is that there's been movement, meaning there often we come out of church backgrounds personally where we just haven't thought all the way through it yet and there's more thinking to do. Yeah.

Yeah, that's God's design for us. He's the one that brought us through these iterations of the church and He's governing it. So I don't think we wanna wage war against people who have different views. But at least I think we've thrown this out to say, well, let's just keep thinking about it and pray about how you can be a blessing to the children in your church. Amen.

Amen. Thank you so much, Sam. Appreciate it. You're welcome, brother. Good talking with you.

Good talking with you. You too, Jason. Good to see you. All right, and thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. We'll see you next time.

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