6. The enlarging rather than narrowing of the scope of New Covenant membership

In Acts 2:38-39 Peter responds to the cries of the sin convicted crowd at Pentecost in language redolent of the covenant promise made to Abraham but tying baptism to it as the new sign of covenant membership,

“Repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is to you and to your children and to all who afar off, as many as the Lord our God shall call.”

Peter here connects the fullness of the Spirit’s blessing with the fullness inaugurated with the coming of the New Covenant and explains the terms upon which the crowds might come to participate in that covenant blessing. They must repent and believe, signified in baptism. The warrant for his offer to them of covenant membership is the covenant promise itself, “the promise is to you and to your children” just as it was in the Old Covenant. But now the covenant has been enlarged to take in not only the people of Israel but “all who afar off, as many as the Lord our God shall call”, that is, the promise is now offered to believing Jews and their children, and to Gentiles too.

So Peter’s statements here make clear that the covenant is enlarged both in terms of the spiritual inheritance given to God’s people (the gift of the Holy Spirit) and in terms of covenant membership (you and your children and those who are afar off). Children are explicitly included, not excluded, and the scope widened to embrace non Jews as well as Jews.

Children were included in the Old Covenant. Why we might ask our Baptist brothers, are they excluded in the wider, fuller, deeper, richer, New Covenant?  

7. Household baptisms imply that corporate solidarity rather than individualism is operative in the New Covenant as in the Old

We agree that household baptisms alone offer inconclusive evidence that infant were in fact baptized in the New Covenant. But we do assert that the principle of household solidarity found in the Old Covenant is perpetuated in the New so that the administration of the covenant sign of baptism to infants along with newly converted parents is entirely natural and fitting.