Wellum declares that paedo-baptists do not see the newness of the New Covenant. This is a fair criticism of some, but undoubtedly not of those who see New Covenant and New Creation as identical. Wellum criticizes well the pietists in the Reformed world, but he does not come near to addressing those of us who see the New Covenant as God’s New World for a New people. Wellum does not see–because of his baptistic presuppositions–how the new world affects everything.The truth is it affects everything. Everything is transformed. For credo-baptists-only like Wellum, it’s about what applies and what no longer applies when the better way to phrase the distinction between before and after Christ is that everything before Christ is transformed after Christ, not annihilated or set aside. Thus, children have a newly transformed status as citizens of a new world, yet the sign is not absent in this new world, it is rather transformed. What once signified death–Old Creation through circumcision, which is bloody–now signifies life–New Creation through the cleansing waters of baptism.
