Yesterday on my drive home I was listening to an internet radio show where the host (who is a reformed baptist) was just taking caller questions and comments and discussing them. One caller started talking about baptism. It appeared that he had recently studied through the issue of paedobaptism, and had come out credobaptist. He went through a few of the arguments he had encountered that gave him some trouble, and how he worked his way through (or around, we might say) them.

One of the arguments that had been presented to him in favor of paedobaptism was based on 1 Corinthians 10, and went something like this…

All of Israel was baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. When we look at the Old Testament, we see that Moses asked Pharoah to let Israel go out to celebrate a festival and make sacrifices, and Pharaoh said they could go, but had to leave the women and children. And so Israel did not go without them. From what I gathered, the argument here went something like, since the Israelites demanded that the children come also, they were also baptized. And that, in turn, is reason that we should baptize our children in the Church.

Whether or not that is a good argument to use isn’t important right now, I just want to get to his response to it.

He said the problem with this argument is that the Egyptians were torturing the Israelites and beating them and killing their children. He then said, “It’s not the nature of God to let infants hang out in a murderous situation like that. In other words, God wouldn’t have said, ‘Okay, the men and women can go on the festival, but, you know, the infants we’re just going to lay them there in the sand and leave them for a few days.’ God’s not the God of major irresponsibility.”

And my only response to that is… yeah…?, with a ‘what’s the problem with that’ sort of tone.

He recongnizes that leaving a baby in the sand is cruel and irresponsible, but doesn’t seem to think that cutting them off from the blessing and promises of God is much of a problem.