Paul calls the church to unity around ‘one Lord, one faith, one baptism,’ and this two-part study asks what that one baptism means and who it is for. Baptism is presented alongside circumcision as a sign of the covenant, not identical to it but carrying a similar function: pointing beyond itself to the reality of a heart cleansed and renewed, the promise God made through Ezekiel to give his people a new heart and a new spirit, later echoed in Paul’s language of ‘the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit.’
The second part turns to paedobaptism, the practice of baptizing the children of believing parents. Since the New Testament nowhere reverses the pattern by which the children of God’s people were set apart to him from birth, and since those children are treated in the New Testament as members of the community of faith and heirs of the same promise, the sign of the covenant is given to them as circumcision once was.