When Dr. John Yeo was presented to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary as a newly elected assistant professor of Old Testament, he signed the seminary’s book of confessional heritage in August, agreeing to teach in accordance with the Baptist Faith and Message 2000.

Seminary professor John Yeo wants his students to stand confidently under the authority of Scripture, a stand he made by abandoning the practice of infant baptism.

When Yeo was presented to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary as a newly elected assistant professor of Old Testament, he signed the seminary’s book of confessional heritage in August, agreeing to teach in accordance with the Baptist Faith and Message 2000.

But in 2007 Yeo was an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America when he took a faculty position at Reformed Theological Seminary in Atlanta. Although baptized as a boy after his profession of faith in Christ, Yeo taught infant baptism as part of the covenant theology he had embraced within the Reformed tradition.

But he began to doubt this doctrinal system when he was teaching his students about the new covenant mentioned in Jeremiah 31: “But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more” (Jeremiah 31:33-34).

While discussing the passage in class, Yeo taught that “believers in the new covenant were to receive the sign of the covenant, meaning that only true believers were in the new covenant.” As Jeremiah 31 teaches, all those in the new covenant will know the Lord. One student, a Baptist who sat in the front row of Yeo’s class, immediately noticed the implications of this interpretation.

[Editor’s note: This article is incomplete. The source for this document was originally published on Baptist Press—however, the link (URL) to the original article is unavailable and has been removed.]