Jack Miller

Read Colossians 2:11–12 in the Greek and the sentence will not split. It is one sentence. Every verb is passive: περιετμήθητε, you were circumcised; συνταφέντες, buried with Him; συνηγέρθητε, raised with Him. The Colossians perform none of it. They receive all of it, and all of it is located ἐν ᾧ — in Him. Two συν-compound verbs weld their burial and their resurrection to Christ. Regeneration in verse 11 and baptism in verse 12, two events in two subjects, is a reading imposed on the punctuation of English translations. Paul's syntax knows one movement in one place: in Christ. "The circumcision of Christ" is Christ's. Paul calls it ἀχειροποίητος, made without hands — Daniel's word for the stone cut without hands that shatters the kingdoms (Dan 2:34), the Lord's word for the temple made without hands that is His risen body (Mark 14:58). The register is God's own climactic deed, not an inward experience. And Paul defines the event himself, in this same letter: the stripping off is ἐν τῇ ἀπεκδύσει τοῦ σώματος τῆς σαρκός, "in the putting off of the body of the flesh." In 1:22 that phrase is Christ's — reconciliation accomplished "in the body of His flesh through death." The rare root appears once more, at 2:15, where Christ at the cross is the one stripping — ἀπεκδυσάμενος — the rulers and authorities. Body of flesh, stripping, cross: Paul's vocabulary locates the circumcision of Christ where Kline located it, in the covenant cutting executed on the federal Head. Baptism seals to the believer what was cut away on Christ. "Through faith" will not do the work assigned to it either. Grammatically it hangs on the raising: συνηγέρθητε διὰ τῆς πίστεως τῆς ἐνεργείας τοῦ θεοῦ — raised through faith in the working of God who raised Him. The baptism clause carries no faith condition; Paul simply addresses baptized people and tells them where their burial and resurrection lie. Faith in this sentence is the hand that receives the benefit, and faith has never been the sign's gate in either administration. Circumcision sealed the righteousness of faith to a household whose infants exercised none (Rom 4:11; Gen 17). The sign follows the promise's address, and the address never changed: "to you and to your offspring" becomes "the promise is for you and for your children" (Gen 17:7; Acts 2:39). Kline assumes nothing here. The administration itself assigns the sign. On 1 Corinthians 7:14: Paul's word for the children is ἅγιος, holy — the covenant's own consecration vocabulary, the status of a people set apart inside the administration. And the mixed administration rests on texts, not appearances. Hebrews 10:29 speaks of a man sanctified by the blood of the covenant who then profanes it. The standing is real, it is covenantal, and the man perishes under eschatological judgment. The new covenant community in its visible administration is wider than the elect because its own apostasy texts say so. Every step of the counter-reading runs on one equation: covenant membership equals election, and the sign therefore waits on regeneration. That equation is the subject of the post. Restating it does not answer it. #Colossians2 #Paedobaptism #Baptism #CovenantTheology #Kline #SecondAdam

I arrived at Westminster Seminary California a convinced Baptist. I left a paedobaptist. Meredith Kline did it, and he did it on three points I could not answer. First, the new covenant is broader than the elect. Its visible administration encompasses more than the finally saved. Men can stand within it, receive its signs, sit under its ministry, enjoy its privileges, and yet never embrace Christ in saving faith. That is not an exception. It is the Bible's own picture from Israel to the warnings of Hebrews. Second, baptism is the sign of the new covenant. The sign belongs to the covenant as God administers it in history. It marks membership in the visible covenant community, not infallible knowledge of election hidden in the decree. Third, the children of believers belong to that covenant community. The promise runs to believers and their children as it always has. Paul calls them holy (1 Cor. 7:14), not because they are presumed regenerate, but because they belong to the holy people God has set apart in history. Then Paul presses the point further in Ephesians 6. Writing to a Gentile church, he addresses the children directly: Honor your father and your mother. And he gives them the covenant promise attached to the command: that it may go well with you. This is remarkable. Paul does not treat the children of the church as outsiders awaiting admission. He takes a covenant command from the Decalogue and administers it directly to them as their command. Nor does he discard the promise attached to it. Under the Mosaic economy, the promise was expressed in terms of life in the land, a typological inheritance pointing beyond itself. Writing to a predominantly Gentile congregation outside that land, Paul does not abandon the promise. He carries it forward into its eschatological fulfillment. The land type has yielded to the greater inheritance, but the promise still belongs to the covenant children to whom he writes. A covenant stipulation given through Moses is administered by an apostle to the children of the new covenant church, complete with its promise transformed from type to antitype. Canon to covenant, command to promise, and the line never breaks. Put those three points together and the Baptist fence cannot stand. I had built it on a single equation: covenant membership equals election. Kline broke the equation. Once covenant membership was distinguished from election, the rest followed. The sign belongs to the covenant. The children belong to the covenant. Therefore the sign belongs to the children. I did not change tribes. I learned to see the covenant whole. #Paedobaptism #Baptism #CovenantTheology #Kline #Ephesians6 #SecondAdam

Saved Outside the Covenant 1689 federalism dates the formal existence of the covenant of grace from the death of Christ. The Abrahamic covenant is assigned to another category: earthly promises, a mixed seed, a covenant in its own right. The Mosaic covenant likewise stands outside the covenant of grace as a legal administration superimposed on it. The dating generates a population problem. Ask under what covenant Adam was saved. The Adamic covenant supplies his condemnation: broken by the head, its curse administered on the race in real time, death reigning from Adam to Moses (Rom 5:14). For his salvation the scheme offers the covenant of grace "as revealed in the promise." A covenant revealed in promise is a covenant announced. It has not been cut. It constitutes no community, administers no benefits, gathers no one. Adam believes, and stands under no salvation covenant at all. Multiply Adam by forty centuries. Every believer before the new covenant lives under covenants the scheme itself defines as non-saving, awaiting a saving covenant the scheme dates after their deaths. The fathers are saved on the security of the Pactum Salutis, Christ's obedience credited proleptically, the former sins passed over in divine forbearance (Rom 3:25). The Pactum is an eternal ground. Administration requires a covenant in history. Between the eternal ground and the historical man, the scheme interposes a promise and a memorandum of forbearance. The result is an old world with a covenant basis for condemnation and no covenant basis for grace: the curse administered through a covenant in force, mercy administered around a covenant in waiting. Romans 5 forbids the asymmetry. Paul runs the two federal administrations in parallel grammar and parallel history: judgment through one trespass, free gift through one act of righteousness, death reigning, grace reigning. The gift in Paul is as covenantal, as located, as administered as the trespass. Kline resolved the difficulty at the level of covenant dating and covenant form. The covenant of grace commences at the protevangelium: Genesis 3:15 initiates the redemptive covenant in the aftermath of the broken covenant of works. Genesis 6:18 records its establishment — the verb is hēqîm, the upholding of a covenant already in existence, deployed at the crisis when the promise had reduced to one worshiping family. Genesis 15 cuts and constitutes the covenant community: marked with circumcision, carrying land and a seed as stars and sand. Abraham is the constitution of a community already under grace, never the founder of a parallel arrangement outside it. The covenant is one; its administrations are successive. Under that dating, the Pactum acquires its historical instrument from the first day of the fall: the eternal covenant's outcome is administered in time through the covenant of grace, Adam gathered in at its initiation, the fathers dying inside it (Heb 11), the new covenant arriving as its eschatological administration under the same federal Head. The fathers were saved inside the covenant because salvation has never been administered anywhere else. #1689Federalism #CovenantOfGrace #CovenantTheology #FederalHeadship #MGKline