Danny Hyde has offered an outstanding service to Reformed churches and I heartily recommend his book. Since it has a special interest in addressing the concerns of Christians from baptistic backgrounds who are wrestling with the claims of Reformed Christianity, this book should be particularly useful for people from such backgrounds visiting Reformed churches or in membership classes. Many new parents already comfortable with infant baptism, yet perhaps not having a deep understanding of its significance or biblical basis, should also find this work stimulating.

This book can boast of many strengths. One of them is the pastoral sensitivity with which Hyde writes. As one who himself was raised in baptistic churches and who has shepherded many people from such backgrounds into Reformed Christianity, he constructs this book with a sympathetic eye to some of the issues that often prove to be most nettlesome. For example, Hyde is attentive to objections that infant baptism is a Protestant holdover from Roman Catholicism, that there is no explicit biblical text teaching infant baptism, and that the practice of dedicating infants has a better biblical basis than that of baptizing them. Without being demeaning to Baptist readers in the least, Hyde addresses such questions directly and provides many helpful biblical responses to them.

Another strength of this book is Hyde’s theological adeptness. Though he has written a book aimed at ordinary Christians rather than trained theologians, Hyde himself has done his homework. He has obviously read widely on the issue of infant baptism and has digested a variety of biblical arguments that he musters throughout the book. In my judgment, the two most crucial chapters in this book are also two of the best, for precisely this reason. In chapters three and four, Hyde beautifully displays the unity of God’s saving purposes through biblical history and his gift of circumcision and now baptism as sacraments of initiation into the covenant relationship. He also points to a wide range of biblical testimony about the redemptive blessings that circumcision and baptism signify and seal: regeneration, justification, union with Christ. Furthermore, he also utilizes some recent scholarship on the symbolism of circumcision and baptism as a curse (fulfilled, for believers, in the curse endured by Christ for us). By doing so, Hyde is able to give a fuller account of the riches of biblical teaching on baptism than some previous Reformed studies have provided, though without in any way compromising that primary biblical message that baptism is a blessing and a means of grace.

--Dr. David VanDrunen, Robert B. Strimple Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics at Westminster Seminary California