Why I Wish I Could Be a Presbyterian... but Can't

So I wish I could be a Presbyterian and just say I subscribe to the Westminster Confession of Faith. Finding a home church would be so easy. Ministry and support raising would be so easy. Plus, I'd have the backing of an entire denomination in missions, not to speak of the tremendous history of the Westminster tradition.

Except I disagree with one question in the Westminster. Just one. Just a teeney one.

No way I can baptize infants.

What follows is a skeleton outline of why baptizing the infants of believers is wrong. It's just a skeleton; if you need warrants for these statements, that's the meat they're missing, and we can dialog through them.

And not one of these arguments is necessarily a 'magic bullet' that seals the argument. But I think the cumulative force of them all together is a debilitating blow to Reformed Paedobaptism. So without further ado, the reasons...

1) In Scripture, faith and baptism aren't just linked in terms of objective meaning, but in terms of subjective experience.

2) Infant baptism is never commanded. My Reformed Paedobaptist friends would do well to remember their own regulative principle, Deuteronomy 12:32, and need to show that not only would paedobaptism have to be assumed, but properly assumed by the earliest Christians.

3) People in the New Covenant are all regenerate. See Hebrews 8 and Jeremiah 31.

4) The Abrahamic Covenant was not just spiritual. It had both spiritual/eternal and physical/ethnic aspects.

5) Circumcision in the Old Testament is fulfilled in (and prophesied) regeneration, not baptism.

6) Circumcision and baptism are never talked about as if they were identical signs.

7) Baptism is never talked about as the simple solution to the problems of the Judaizers - which would've been the case had it been the replacement for circumcision.

8) New Covenant people are spiritual and defined by spiritual birth.

9) No where is there a promise that children of believers are elect - only set apart because they'll hear the word of God.

10) The covenantal paedobaptism position is nowhere in history until Zwingli. Baptism and faith were always linked in experience in theological writings until then (even if sometimes mistakenly so).

11) Nowhere is baptism ever talked about as the sign of entry into the visible church. It's always in terms of one's regeneration - being in the invisible church.

12) Paedobaptists assume that the Abrahamic covenant IS the covenant of grace - not merely a dispensation of it. They look at the fulfillment of the covenant of grace (the new covenant) in terms of the Abrahamic covenant, as opposed to the Abrahamic covenant as a downpayment for and in terms of how the New Covenant fulfills it. (That is to say, they look at the relationship between the two covenants as essentially merely repeats of each other as opposed to looking at them in terms of promise-fulfillment.)

That's what I got off the top of my head. I'll add more as I think of them, God willing!