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Dennis, see my post on the covenant faithfulness thread. Even though I am there arguing against a completely objective understanding of the covenant of grace, the issues of covenant and ecclesiology are at the forefront. I do think you are on the right track with the discussion of ecclesiology and the covenant. It is where those two intersect that the nub of the issue lies. One could put it this way: what is the status of the children of believers with regard to the covenant? Are they part of the church? And here is where the visible/invisible distinction is so incredibly crucial. The issues of continuity and discontinuity between the NT and the OT factor in crucially here as well. If there is any sense in which we can say that the church is continuous with Israel, then there seems to me to be a strong case for viewing children the same way the OT church viewed children: part of the visible church, and possibly part of the invisible church (we cannot always discern fruit, but then we can't always with adults either). Galatians 3 needs to be one of the texts that you dive into with excruciating detail on this, particularly what the text means when it says that those of faith are the sons of Abraham. It seems to me that the Baptist position will usually interpret this in a somewhat truncated sense that only those who actually believe are the sons of Abraham. The Presbyterian position will usually say that the covenant underlies the whole discussion. It is not merely that believers are the true heirs of Abraham, but that Christ is the fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant (read fulfillment not as an ending of the covenant, but as the full flowering of the covenant). In other words the new covenant is the full flowering in Christ of the Abrahamic covenant. If that is so, then the privileges of children are probably not less than the Abrahamic covenant but more.
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