Link and Chain

The father of one of the children being baptized here today was one of the first infants that I ever had the privilege of baptizing. The fact that he was my grandson was not doctrinally part of it, but it did put an exclamation point on the doctrine. This underscores one of the emphases that we have wanted to recover in our day and age. We do live in individualistic times, and this means that many of the churches that still practice infant baptism are doing so more in conformity to Newton’s first law than they are through understanding the import of what all of this means. We are not just baptizing an individual—are interested in baptizing generational lines. To be sure, we baptize the link, but we never forget the chain.