Just a brief comment here, building off the discussion of my Frank Turk post. Frank said this: “But Dr. Clark baptizes babies for the sake of adding them to the church. Just because he doesn’t add them to the church in practice doesn’t mean he’s not doing it in theory, does it?”
There is a lot behind this. Scott Clark is in the URC. In that tradition, when do children who were baptized in infancy generally come to the Table? They generally come when they have been catechized, which is when they are done or mostly done with high school. Then, when they are on the threshold of going away from home, they are fully brought into their home church. But this means that if we understand covenant community as being a full participation in koinonia, this is a tradition that does not really have any experience with covenant children. They are technically on the roster (having been baptized), but they have no experience of body life while they are children at all.