The canard of credo-baptism necessitating 'another' covenant theology

It is to be remembered that there were two covenants made with Abraham. By the one, his natural descendants through Isaac were constituted a commonwealth, an external, visible community. By the other, his spiritual descendants were constituted a church. The parties to the former covenant were God and the nation; to the other, God and His true people. The promises of the national covenant were national blessings; the promises of the spiritual covenant (i.e., the covenant of grace), were spiritual blessings, reconciliation, holiness, and eternal life. The conditions of the one covenant were circumcision and obedience to the law; the condition of the latter was, is, and ever has been, faith in the Messiah as the Seed of the woman, the Son of God, the Savior of the world. There cannot be a greater mistake than to confound the national covenant with the covenant of grace, and the commonwealth founded on the one with the church founded on the other.

When Christ came “the commonwealth” was abolished, and there was nothing put in its place. The Church remained. There was no external covenant, nor promises of external blessings, on condition of external rites and subjection. There was a spiritual society with spiritual promises, on the condition of faith in Christ. In no part of the New Testament is any other condition of membership in the Church prescribed than that contained in the answer of Philip to the eunuch who desired baptism: “If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest. And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.” (Acts viii. 37)
Charles Hodge, Church Polity (New York: Scribner, 1878), 66-67.

The angry sacramentalists and practical deists (like the now eminently asinine R. Scott Clark) that self-identify as Reformed Christians have now gone shamelessly to the extreme of stating, dishonestly, that credo-baptism is against, or somehow not commensurate with, classical Covenant - Federal - Theology.

Read the extract from Charles Hodge above again. This is the area of doctrine that the angry infant baptizers are now resting on to put forward this canard. They are saying, well, it's not *Moses* that we are drawing our connection between circumcision and infant baptism and our overall doctrine of ritual regeneration from, it is *Abraham*!

Yet clearly, as Hodge points out, circumcision is connected *not* with the Covenant of Grace but with the covenant associated with Abraham's natural descendants that were to become the nation of Israel.

Regeneration - i.e. being born again - by the Word and the Spirit, and the faith that follows, is the entrance into the Covenant of Grace. Not ritual. Fallen man demands to control what only God has control of. Fallen man *demands* to exalt man and ritual above the Word and the Spirit. It angers fallen man to no end that God has control of regeneration -- to the point that, as John Owen said so well, any talk of regeneration engenders the very same anger in the ritualists Cain had for Abel.