01.004. The Argument from Circumcision

The Argument from Circumcision.

"He that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every male throughout your generations, he that is born in the house or bought with money of any stranger, which is not of thy seed."-- Genesis 17:12.

"Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah; not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers . .. In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old."-- Hebrews 8:8-9; Hebrews 8:13.

"When they believed Philip preaching good tidings concerning the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women."-- Acts 8:12.

Advocates of infant baptism ever claim that the apostles had to interpret the command to baptize in the light of their previous knowledge of Jewish practice. Hence the appeal to the Old Testament. Now, it might reasonably be urged that the apostles had a nearer and more direct example than anything found in the Old Testament Scriptures. Mr. Tait, Presbyterian minister, in his booklet on Christian Baptism, says: "The disciples would understand Christ’s command in the light of what they knew of John’s baptism." If this were so, they would know that the people baptized by John confessed their sin (Matthew 2:1-6), and that repentance was so much the condition of John’s baptism that it was called "the baptism of repentance unto remission of sins" (Mark 1:4). We get a striking parallel with this in the very first occasion on which the apostles acted on the instructions of the commission; Peter told heart-pierced enquirers: "Repent and be baptized" (Acts 2:38). Our friends, however, invariably get to the Old Testament, and find the strongest support of their position in infant circumcision. Herein is a marvelous thing. Baptism "was instituted by Christ," as Mr. Tait says. It is, according to the Westminster Confession, "a sacrament of the New Testament." Yet Pedobaptists go to the Old Testament to learn the subjects of what is a New Testament rite. They cannot get infants in connection with baptism in the New; nor can they get baptism in conjunction with infants in the Old: but they do get infants in the Old and baptism in the New, and then try desperately hard to show that the Bible "identifies circumcision with baptism" (as Mr. Madsen says), or, as the more common statement is, that baptism came in the room of circumcision. He who wants authority for circumcision of male infants naturally goes to the account of the institution of circumcision, and there he gets it (Genesis 17:12). He who wishes authority for the baptism of infants cannot get that anywhere in the Bible. There is a significant difference here. Mr. Madsen tries to forestall such a criticism as the foregoing by saying:

"Any objection raised by Baptists against our appeal to Old Testament usage for light upon the meaning of Christian baptism re-acts upon their own method of argument, inasmuch as they appeal to the Old Testament, and the classics, for light and authority to justify their mode of baptism by immersion" (pp. 84, 85). When we quote the Old Testament on the action of baptism, it is because the very word "baptize" whose meaning we seek to know, and cognate words, are found there (in the Septuagint version). When a man goes to the Old Testament for infant baptism, he does not find any infant baptism there: the words and the idea are alike absent. He gets in the Old Testament minute instructions regarding a different rite, and then wrests such in order to support a practice which has not a tittle of Scriptural authority either in Old Testament or New. Should a twentieth century Disraeli arise to write another book on Curiosities of Literature, he may find some instances in Pedobaptists apologies for their practice. I have some gems, two of which on our present theme I would like others to enjoy with me. In Infant Baptism in the Bible, James Pollock, M.A., writes:

"Jesus plainly shows us that we must search the Old Testament Scriptures about infant baptism. ’When the chief priests and scribes saw the children crying in the Temple, and were ’sore displeased,’ Jesus said, ’Yea, have ye never read, Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast Thou perfected praise?’ Matthew 21:15-16. Compare with this our Lord’s words to Nicodemus, ’Art thou a master of Israel, and knowest not these things?’ John 3:10. In the former place our Blessed Lord speaks of children, in the latter of the new birth ’of water and of the Spirit:’ in the former He applies to the children that followed Him an Old Testament saying about ’babes and sucklings;’ in the latter, He takes it for granted that a ’master of Israel’ ought to be able to see the meaning of the doctrine of Christian Baptism: Do you see the need of Infant Baptism? Have you ’never read’ your Bible?" In reply, suffice it to say that no one denies that you can get "babes and sucklings" in one place and baptism in another; but the infant texts are not the baptism texts, or vice versa. Mr. Pollock’s contribution to the exegesis of John 3 merits notoriety, if only as a means of adding to the gaiety of nations. In the Methodist tract, Should Only Believers be Baptized? appears the following sentence, which lets us know of the haste which must have been manifested in preparing literature to stay the exodus from the Pedobaptists ranks:

"Ask any reasonable Jew why his child should not be baptized under the New Testament as well as circumcised under the Old, and what could he answer but, ’Yes’?"

We have always thought that this is the situation, but we hardly expected a Victorian Methodist Publishing Co. to so candidly confess it. If it really be so, it only shows that that Jew is as deficient in Scriptural reasons as are our Methodist friends. If one ask us why a believer in Christ should be baptized, we point him to the command (Acts 2:38; Acts 22:16) and to the example (Acts 8:12; Acts 18:8). If believers in infant baptism when asked "Why?" can only answer "Yes," they really must forgive us for suggesting that their reason is not very cogent.

THE PEDOBAPTIST ARGUMENT STATED. The argument is that in "the Jewish Church," or "Old Testament Church," infants were found. There is church continuity or identity. Baptism has taken the place of circumcision. Seeing that there is no express command to exclude infants, the apostles must have understood that such are to be included in the church, and that consequently they are fit subjects of baptism. We give three statements from Pedobaptists controversialists:

Mr. Madsen, in The Question of Baptism, writes:

"God had a Church in the Old Testament, and gave directions as to the persons who should be admitted to its membership, and the method of admitting them" (p. 22). "It would appear to the mind of St. Paul that the circumcision of the Old Testament passes into the baptism of the New, just as, similarly, the Passover passes into the Lord’s Supper," etc. (p. 23). "Old Testament circumcision" "was the Sacrament of admission into the membership of the Church of God before the coming of Christ" (p. 23). "One of our arguments for the practice is that God, having granted privileges to infants in the Old Testament, such as Church membership on receiving the sign and seal of it, is not likely to withdraw similar privileges from infants in the New Testament. If there has been a reversal of the Divine complacence, where is the evidence of it? We baptize infants on the basis that God has not changed His mind regarding their admission into His Church" (p. 84).

Bannerman, in Difficulties About Baptism, writes:

"The Church of God has been essentially one from the beginning" (p. 63). "The infant children of believers were members of the Church, it is admitted, from the days of Abraham to the days, of Christ. When were they put out of their privileges as such, and why?" (p. 65). "The only change is that Baptism has taken the place of circumcision--being, as the Apostle of the Gentiles calls it, ’the circumcision of Christ;’ just as the Lord’s Supper has taken the place of the Passover," etc. (p. 65).

T. Withrow, in Scriptural Baptism, uses similar language:

"The Church, into whose membership infants were introduced by an express appointment of God, is the same in all essential particulars with the Church that now exists" (p. 42). "To produce from the New Testament any express statute re-affirming the membership of infants in the Church, is what we are not bound to do. Except the Old Testament is a dead letter-- a bundle of waste paper--there is no need for it" (p. 45).

REPLY.

Before examining in detail the argument stated above, we may mention that Pedobaptists do not agree among themselves on this question. just as we find some who seek to justify infant baptism on the ground that infants are in the church, while others (as Mr. Madsen) say that infants are brought into the church by baptism, so in the case of infant circumcision: some declare it to be an initiatory rite, while others declare it was received by those who were in "the Jewish Church" and covenant. They cannot all be right.

We have before referred to the case with which Pedobaptists arguments can be answered by Pedobaptists. We find a good illustration of this in the circumcision argument. After reading what Messrs. Madsen, Bannerman and Withrow say, consider the following from the pen of an able and learned believer in infant baptism. The quotation is long, but interesting:

"Very frequently we hear an argument like the following, in support of the view that infant baptism was the regular practice from the earliest days of the Church. The members of the Jewish Church, it is said, had been accustomed to circumcise their children; and so the baptism of children would be regarded by the first Christians as a matter of course and a matter of right. Any seeming exclusion of infants from the blessings of the covenant, in which they had fully shared under the former economy, would inevitably have created such a disturbance as would have left some traces upon the early history of the Church. It might just as well be argued that because at the Jewish Passover young children were present as partakers of the feast, therefore the first Christians, as a matter of course and a matter of right, would bring their little children to the Lord’s table. Moreover, it must be borne in mind that circumcision was a rite which applied not to all children, but only to male children. The circumcision of a male child, therefore, could not immediately and as matter of course become the ground of a claim that children of both sexes should be baptized. And if it was the case under the Jewish dispensation that a girl or a woman enjoyed the privileges of the covenant by her very birth as a Jewess, coupled with her relation to the head of the family, is there any reason to doubt that Jewish Christians would have no great difficulty in accepting the baptism of parents as carrying with it a present share for their young children in the privileges of the Christian community? Besides, it must always be remembered that the Christianity which meets us in the New Testament is not in the main a Jewish Christianity at all, but a Gentile Christianity. The analogy of Jewish circumcision would not naturally suggest itself to Paul’s Gentile converts as a reason for seeking baptism on behalf of their children. And Paul himself, who first worked out the relation between the two dispensations, and pointed to a certain correspondence between baptism and circumcision, does not give any evidence of having pressed upon his Gentile converts the duty of having their infant children baptized."--J. C. Lambert, B.D. in Kerr Lectures, The Sacraments in the New Testament, 1903, pp. 202-204.

We could afford to wait until our opponents answer their Pedobaptists brother; but, since the circumcision argument is the strongest one that can be presented in favor of infant baptism, we shall risk the charge of doing a superfluous thing and give an independent reply to the views now being disseminated. The validity of the argument drawn from infant circumcision as stated by Mr. Madsen depends upon three things, not one of which is true:

CHURCH CONTINUITY.

Mr. Bannerman expressly says: "The Church of God has been essentially one from the beginning." Such a belief is necessary to Mr. Madsen’s argument also, for it obviously would avail nothing to prove that infants were members of another "church" and proceed to argue that therefore they were in the church which is "the body of Christ." If "the church" be not identical, there is no point in Mr. Madsen’s talk about God not having changed His mind regarding admission into His church.

In the light of the definite Scriptural statements that the church of Christ was not established till after the words of Matthew 16:18 were spoken, and that there is a change of law in the New Covenant, what becomes of Mr. Madsen’s statement that "there is no argument which Baptists urge against infant baptism, which cannot also be urged against infant circumcision"? When God desired that Abraham be circumcised, he commanded it. When God wanted Abraham’s male children to be circumcised, what did He do? He gave once more the definite command: "He that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every male throughout your generations, he that is born in the house, or bought with money of any foreigner that is not of thy seed" (Genesis 17:12). As a doctrine, infant circumcision is "actually asserted--as a practice, actually commanded; and clear and undeniable instances, with divine sanction, are recorded." Does this hold good of infant baptism? No Pedobaptists dare say so. And the change in covenants and law forbids us taking it as a necessary inference that infants are now in the Church of God because they formerly were in "the Jewish Church."

DID CIRCUMCISION ADMIT INFANTS INTO THE

CHURCH? Our Methodist friends are arguing that since circumcision "was the sacrament of admission into the membership of the Church of God before the coming of Christ," and since the apostles insisted on "baptism as the initiatory sacrament of admission to the membership of the Church," therefore baptism, as circumcision, should be administered to infants. This argument is already shattered, as we have proved that the requisite church identity or continuity does not exist. The body of Christ into which baptism is initiatory (1 Corinthians 12:13) was not in existence in the days of Abraham.

Now, we shall prove that the second assumption of Mr. Madsen and his confreres is also groundless. We deny that it can he proved that Jewish children were ever initiated into "the Jewish Church" by circumcision. They were circumcised because they were in, not in because they were circumcised. If this be so, then the fact that baptism is an initiatory ordinance, while circumcision was not, will strongly militate against the Pedobaptists position.

It may be noted that we may improve upon our usual custom of beginning our refutation of Mr. Madsen’s argument by quoting other Pedobaptists against him. On this occasion we prefer to quote the author of The Question of Baptism against himself, since he is more likely to acknowledge the worth of this authority. After earnestly contending for circumcision as "the Sacrament of admission," Mr. Madsen writes:

"The covenant promise was so jealously guarded that a dreadful threat rested upon the uncircumcised--’he shall be cut off from his people.’ Here was excommunication pronounced upon such as neglected circumcision" (p. 25).

We beg to point out that you cannot "cut off" anything from that to which it was not previously attached. You cannot put one out of a place which he never was in. It is impossible to excommunicate or expel from a church one who never was a member of it. For instance, it would be beyond the power of anybody on earth to excommunicate me from the Methodist Church. Methodists do not "excommunicate" unbaptized infants from their church; such are simply not in; to get in, according to Mr. Madsen, they must be baptized. Accordingly, it is evident that if the uncircumcised were excommunicated, as Mr. Madsen says they were, circumcision was not initiatory.

We could stop here; but somebody might say that after all this was only one of the numerous cases of Pedobaptists inconsistency, and that Mr. Madsen’s first position was right, even if his second was inconsistent with it. We therefore remark that circumcision did not initiate the children to "the Jewish Church," for:

HAS BAPTISM TAKEN THE PLACE OF CIRCUMCISION?

Mr. Madsen gives himself an unnecessarily severe task, for he declares that Paul "identifies circumcision with baptism." Mr. Madsen ought to know that this is an absurd way of talking, for no two things can be identical: a thing is only identical with itself. If baptism be identical with circumcision, then everyone baptized was circumcised, and all who were circumcised were baptized. Abraham’s male children were not recipients of baptism, but of circumcision. The one act was a cutting of flesh; the other, Mr. Madsen would say, is an application of water. Remarkable identity! To save Mr. Madsen’s credit, we shall charitably suppose he meant what his Pedobaptists brethren generally say, viz., that "baptism has taken the place of circumcision." This is Bannerman’s statement. This is vital for the theory. True, the Bible never says that baptism came in the room of anything; but, Bible or no Bible, the Pedobaptists cause demands that the one ordinance has taken the place of the other. If this cannot be proved, then our friends are in a sad case.

Argument from resemblance or analogy is proverbially weak. It does not follow that because two things are alike in several particulars, therefore they will be found to be alike in other particulars. In the case of circumcision and baptism, the dissimilarities outnumber and outweigh the resemblances. We have the following reasons, among others, for not believing that baptism has come in the place of circumcision (to say nothing of the ludicrous view that baptism is identical with circumcision):

Infant baptism does not in this particular exactly fill the place of circumcision. New Testament practice also disproves the assertion that baptism took the place of circumcision.

Mr. Madsen refers to the decision of Acts 15,. and says the apostles "formally discredited circumcision, and officially cancelled it as a rite of the Christian Church."

Again, he writes:

"Circumcision being thus officially cancelled as a Christian Sacrament, and Christ having ordained baptism as the sign of admission into His Church, the conclusion is obvious and unavoidable, that Baptism thereafter held the field, and circumcision died out. This Council gave the Old Testament rite its death-blow in all Christian thought, and obliterated it from all Christian practice" (p. 29).

Now, as circumcision never was a "rite of the Christian Church," it needed no cancellation in this regard. If Mr. Madsen means to say that circumcision ceased to be practiced by Christians, after the decision of Acts 15, then he ought to read his New Testament more carefully. The very next chapter says Paul "took and circumcised" Timothy. The rite surely had not "received its death-blow" if Paul could do this. Years after, as we have seen, Paul agreed with James that there was no truth in the report that the apostle to the Gentiles had told Jews not to circumcise their children. Circumcision never was "a Christian Sacrament"; while, on the other hand, it was not interfered with by the apostles as a practice which believing Jews could continue to observe in the case of their own children. What Acts 15 settled by apostolic authority, and what Paul afterwards contended for, was that the Gentile Christians should not be required to submit to circumcision. But Paul never once gave a suggestion that either Gentiles or Jews were exempt on the ground that baptism had taken the place of circumcision.

Colossians 2:11-12.

It is this passage which Mr. Madsen declares makes it evident that "St. Paul identifies Circumcision with Baptism." It will be well, therefore, to notice the text. Paul says: "In whom [i.e., Christ] ye were also circumcised with a circumcision not made with hands, in the putting off of the body of the flesh, in the circumcision of Christ; having been buried with him in baptism, wherein ye were also raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead." Later, in The Question of Baptism, Justin Martyr is quoted as declaring: "We have received not carnal, but spiritual circumcision, and we have received it through baptism." Dr. Carson is referred to as saying that "the circumcision of Christ came in the room of the circumcision of Moses" and that "circumcision and baptism correspond in meaning." Thereupon Mr. Madsen adds a remark which has a naivete which is in some respects charming, but which should hardly deceive a Methodist baby, that "the matter of correspondence being admitted on both sides, we may pass on," etc. Is it necessary to point out that there is a vast difference between saying that we receive Christ’s spiritual circumcision in baptism and saying that that circumcision is baptism? Many who believe the former deny the latter. Mr. Madsen has in great part reproduced John Wesley’s argument, except that Wesley evidently did not believe that baptism was identical with circumcision, but rather that "baptism came in the room of circumcision," "our Lord appointing one positive institution to succeed another." Wesley, in his Notes on the New Testament, writes: "With a circumcision not performed with hands--By an inward, spiritual operation. In putting off, not a little skin, but the whole body of the sins of the flesh--All the sins of your evil nature. By the circumcision of Christ--By that spiritual circumcision which Christ works in your heart. "Colossians 2:12. Which he wrought in you, when ye were as it were buried with him in baptism." We may accept every word of that, and be far from suggesting that the "circumcision" of Colossians 2:11 is the "baptism" of Colossians 2:12.

Meyer says on the passage:

"It is not, however, baptism itself. .. that is meant by the circumcision of Christ." While he does not think "not made with hands" proves this, yet he considers that what is meant is "the spiritual transformation, that consecration of a holy state of life, which takes place in baptism." In Dummelow’s Commentary, which is cited in other connections by Mr. Madsen, and which is thought so highly of by the Methodist Church of Victoria that it is prescribed as a text-book in each of the four years of the Probationers’ Course of Study,--there is the following paraphrase of Colossians 2:11 :—"You need no physical circumcision, for in your conversion you received a spiritual circumcision, not the mere cutting away of a fragment of the body, but the removal of the whole carnal nature. Really, this went back to the death of Christ in which He underwent this spiritual circumcision."

Prof. A. S. Peake, in the Expositors’ Greek Testament, has this comment:

"The Apostle does not merely leave them with the statement that they have been made full in Christ, which rendered circumcision unnecessary, but adds that they have already received circumcision, not material, but spiritual, not the removal of a fragment of the body, but the complete putting off of the body of flesh. .. A definite historical fact is referred to, as is shown by the aorist. This was their conversion, the inward circumcision of the heart, by which they entered on the blessings of the New Covenant. The outward sign of this is baptism, with which Paul connects it in the next verse. But it cannot be identified with it, for it is not made with hands."

There are two things in Colossians 2:1-23 which to us seem conclusive against Mr. Madsen’s use of the passage as part of an argument in favor of infant baptism:

1. The circumcision which the Christian has is "not made with hands." Of no baby which I have ever seen "baptized," was it true that the operation was "not made with hands."

2. Paul says the Colossians had "been buried with him in baptism, wherein" they "were also raised with him through faith in the working of God." No babe since the world was, at the time of baptism, had faith in the working of God, though I have seen many manifest considerable displeasure with the work of men. It is this reference to faith in Colossians 2:12, which makes the Methodist Prof. Beet refer to Paul’s statement as one of two "most important assertions about Baptism in the New Testament" which "are altogether inapplicable to the Baptism of infants." The foregoing study of the circumcision argument shows that baptism is not the same ordinance with circumcision; that on the contrary it was an ordinance of a different covenant in which there was a change of law; that baptism was an initiatory rite as infant circumcision was not; that the Church of Jesus Christ into which baptism is initiatory was not established for nineteen centuries after Abraham’s receiving of the covenant of circumcision; and that there is no Pedobaptists body on earth which would claim that the subjects of circumcision (as mentioned in Genesis 17:1-27) are the same with the subjects of baptism. From all of which it follows that there is no need to talk about God’s having or not having changed his mind, and that it is foolish to suggest, as Mr. Madsen does, that the apostles had need of a definite command to exclude infants if they were to understand that "the baptizing commission" did not include infants. The apostles knew that whereas God, when he desired infant circumcision, had specifically commanded it, he had given no such instruction in the case of the baptism of infants. So the apostles did not exclude; they simply refrained from the impiety of including what the Lord had not included, which is precisely what we want our Pedobaptists friends now to do. That the apostles so refrained is obvious from their practice and teaching as recorded in the New Testament, as implied in the acknowledgment of the distinguished Methodist theologian and exegete, Prof. J. A. Beet, when he writes: "The entire teaching of the New Testament about baptism is valid only of those whose baptism is a confession of personal faith."