I followed Mark’s recommendation suggestion (from comments below) and read Peter Leithart’s chapter in The Case for Covenantal Infant Baptism. As I was reading it, I was definitly taking away good points, and learning, but thinking to myself that Niell’s chapter was far more fun to read.

Then I got to the last page or so. I finished, sat the book down, and said to myself, “Wow.”

It, too, was a really, really good read. In reading it, a recent exhortation posted on Leithart’s blog kept popping into my mind, and feeling so relevant. The way he presents the history of infant baptism, it seems like things kept going wrong when they could have easily gone right. But, in a way much like our God, Leithart fits it all together to deliver a wonderful and poignant exhortation to paedobaptists. He says,

Having conceded the point [that current paedobaptist practice places the 'unconfirmed baptized' in a sort of church limbo and reduces the significance of baptism], however, the answer is not to abandon paedobaptism, but to establish a more fully paedobaptist theology and practice. The most serious threat to paedobaptis is posed, not by Baptists, but by compromised paedobaptists, who shrink from the full implications of their position and fail to embody their theology in practice.

Wahoo, Dr. Leithart! I’m not sure he (or anyone else) could have made such a good and necessary statement. It’s just what we need to hear at this point in history. It reminds me of an equally true statement from Douglas Wilson’s paedobaptism book, To A Thousand Generations:
“Why do baptists not understand the covenant? The answer is not what many paedobaptists want to hear — the baptists do not understand it because paedobaptists do not understand it.”

What do you have to say about it, Mark?