Calvin, just like the Westminster Confession, insists that salvation is pictured, even offered, in baptism, but only received by those who embrace the promise of baptism in faith. God can implant the seed of faith in that infant at the moment of baptism if he so chooses, but there is no inseparable connection between baptism and even the inception of salvation. Furthermore, infants are to baptized not on the grounds of known faith and repentance, but rather, it “will be sufficient . . . if, after infants have grown up, they exhibit the power of their baptism.” The promise of salvation held out in baptism, in other words, must be received and personally appropriated by personal faith.

Jonathan Mckenzie’s recent piece at American Reformer highlights a real issue in some PCA churches: there is an insecurity among some PCA pastors when it comes to infant baptism. They’re nervous, on the one hand, because a large number of their members likely have come out of credobaptist churches fairly recently and still find infant baptism perplexing at best, and deeply troubling at worst. On the other hand, they are anxious to assure their congregants that they are not baptizing infants for the same reason that Romans Catholics do, not sharing with them a view of baptismal regeneration.

Mckenzie, however, does not provide a single statement about “the Reformed doctrine of infant baptism and its efficacy.” He does imply that the majority of PCA ministers do not know what that doctrine teaches and therefore do not adhere to it. Specifically, Mckenzie states that the Westminster Standards “quite clearly condemn those who would reduce baptism from an effectual means of salvation to a mere symbol.”

McKenzie needs to be more careful with the language he uses to describe the teaching of the Westminster Standards. Nowhere does the Confession state that baptism is an effectual means of salvation. Now, I suppose I can’t say exactly what Mckenzie means when he says that baptism is “an effectual means of salvation” because he doesn’t explain this claim even once, nor quote any Scripture, Reformed confessions, or Reformed theologians to substantiate it. Nonetheless, I think most people would read such a phrase to imply that baptism effects, or causes, salvation. The Westminster Confession certainly does not argue for this.

What does the WCF say that baptism accomplishes? First, it brings about “the solemn admission of the party baptized into the visible church” (WCF 28.1). Mckenzie is correct that the Confession does not teach that baptism is merely a sign. It certainly is a sign, but also a “seal of the covenant of grace, of his engrafting into Christ, of regeneration, of remission of sins, and of his giving up unto God, through Jesus Christ, to walk in newness of life (WCF 28.1). Sacramental signs and seals, as John Calvin puts it so well in his Genevan Catechism, are necessary because God:

consults our weakness. If we were wholly spiritual, we might, like the angels, spiritually behold both him and his grace; but as we are surrounded with this body of clay, we need figures or mirrors to exhibit a view of spiritual and heavenly things in a kind of earthly manner; for we could not otherwise attain to them. At the same time, it is our interest to have all our senses exercised in the promises of God, that they may be the better confirmed to us.

As a seal, baptism “better confirms” the promises of God to us. It does not, however, bring about conversion or regeneration invariably.

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