Access Denied, Pt. 3

"And it shall be, when your children say to you, What do you mean by this service? that you shall say, It is the Passover sacrifice of the LORD, who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt when He struck the Egyptians and delivered our households”

—Exodus 12:26–27

In traditional Reformed churches, the Lord’s Supper is withheld from a covenant child until he can sustain a satisfactory examination by the elders regarding the genuineness of his faith. In some churches, even before that child has access to such an exam, he is required to fulfill a prerequisite condition: he must memorize and recite all 129 questions and answers of the Heidelberg Catechism. Of course, that usually means that the child is no longer a child by the time he makes it to the Lord’s Table.

To be clear, I am not arguing against the practice of catechetical training. In fact, I believe that one of the great tragedies of our day is that the regular, didactic use of the Reformed confessions and catechisms has been neglected by churches and families alike, and the results have been devastating, to say the least.

The question here is not about using catechisms. The question is about exactly how a catechism should and should not be used. To state it clearly:

Do we have the authority to exclude a covenant child from the covenant meal until he has completed the catechetical program of our churches?

For many, the basis for this practice arises from how participation in the Passover was understood within the Reformed tradition, reaching back as far as John Calvin himself.

For example, when Calvin concluded from Exodus 12:26 that the Passover was eaten “only by those who were of a sufficient age to inquire into its meaning” (Institutes, 4.16.30), a certain application naturally followed. If what Calvin said is true, then it stands to reason that those who participate in the Lord’s Supper should have to meet the same requirement. To be sure, Calvin was not the only theologian who understood the Passover in this way. Nevertheless, his influence on those who came after him should not be underestimated, and for many, his interpretation gives weight and confidence to their position.

What, then, is the actual line of reasoning that flows from Calvin’s statement? When the argument is drawn out, it typically proceeds along fairly straightforward lines.

• First, the dialogue mentioned in Exodus 12:26–27 is presented in a question-and-answer format.

That matters, because answering questions is a form of catechetical instruction.

• Second, it is emphasized that the dialogue itself was commanded by the LORD.

That too is significant. If this exchange was one of the prescribed features of the Passover meal, then we are already looking at a strong case against the notion that young children were full participants in the feast.

Why is that? Because this kind of exercise requires a certain level of maturity and spiritual discernment. And generally speaking, young children do not yet have the intellectual capacity to perform such a task.

Thus, if we begin with a desire to align ourselves with Calvin’s interpretation, we are placed on a clear and definite trajectory. Not only do we deny that children partook of the Passover, we also justify the imposition of a catechetical requirement to regulate admission to the Lord’s Supper. And never mind that, in practice, this has been expanded from a single question to 129 questions and answers. That is not the point. The point is that, in Calvin, we believe we have a trustworthy historical and theological rationale that gives weight and confidence to our practice.

Now, as we turn to consider this line of reasoning more closely, it is worth noting that answering this objection is not as difficult as it may first appear. To address it in its most developed form, it is best to begin with one of its most thorough recent treatments within the Reformed tradition, namely Dr. Cornelis P. Venema’s Children at the Lord’s Table? Assessing the Case for Paedocommunion.

Throughout his book, Dr. Venema addresses the question of child participation in the Passover, and when several of his statements are considered together, the basic structure of the argument becomes clear.

On page 70, he writes:

“The Passover Feast included, as one of its prescribed features, a kind of catechetical exercise. At a certain point in the Passover rite, the children of the household were to ask, What mean ye by this service? (Ex. 12:26). In reply to this question, the head of the household was to declare, It is the sacrifice of the LORD’s Passover, who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt, when he smote the Egyptians, and delivered our houses (v. 27a).”

To his credit, Dr. Venema acknowledges that the presence of this exercise does not argue conclusively against the participation of young children. And yet, he goes on to argue that it does suggest that they were excluded.

On page 57, he writes:

“Each of these elements seems to have required a measure of maturity and spiritual discernment that would have excluded full participation in the Passover meal by infants and younger children.”

Taken together, these statements reflect the same line of reasoning outlined above. Here, however, we are dealing with a careful and representative formulation of the argument as it is actually made.

At the same time, there are at least two interpretive missteps in this argument. They are easy to make, but they materially affect the meaning of the text, and for that reason, they must be addressed.

First, it is an error to describe the question in Exodus 12:26 in imperative terms. Dr. Venema refers to it as a “prescribed feature,” suggesting that it was something the children of the household were to ask. But the text does not say that. It does not command the question. It simply anticipates it. “When your children ask about the meaning of the Passover, here is how you are to answer.”

In other words, the answer is prescribed, but the question is simply expected:

“And it shall come to pass, when your children say to you, What do you mean by this service? that you shall say, It is the Passover sacrifice of the LORD.”

That distinction matters. Once the question is treated as required rather than simply anticipated, the argument is already moving beyond what the text says.

Second, it is also an error to treat the question in Exodus 12:26 as tied to a specific moment in the Passover rite. Dr. Venema suggests that this exchange took place at a particular point in the celebration, but the text imposes no such restriction. The wording is open-ended, allowing the child’s question to arise at any time, not only within the setting of the meal itself.

As James B. Jordan observes in his essay, Children and the Religious Meals of the Old Creation:

“Exactly the same kind of question and prescribed answer is found in Deuteronomy 6:20–21 with reference to the law, and in Joshua 4:6–7 about the memorial stones at the Jordan River. These are not ritual events, but examples of a child’s curiosity being satisfied in a perfectly normal manner.” 1

With all due respect to Dr. Venema, his treatment presses the text in a more formal and restrictive direction than the wording seems to support. Granted, it may simply be an overstatement, but either way, the result is the same: the meaning of the text is changed. Our reading, by contrast, follows the natural sense of the passage and leaves the text as it stands.

Thus, the question in Exodus 12:26 is neither a prescribed requirement nor a ritual feature tied to the Passover rite.

As we continue to consider Exodus 12:26, it is worth noting that another argument is often drawn from the form of the question itself. Though Dr. Venema does not raise this particular argument, others within the Reformed tradition have appealed to it in a similar way.

For example, Brian Schwertley, in his article Paedocommunion: A Biblical Examination, writes:

“Interpreters who believe that females and young boys did not eat the bitter herbs and roasted lamb often appeal to the question, What do you mean by this service? (Ex. 12:26) as evidence that small children were observers rather than direct recipients.”

One of the interpreters he has in mind is Morton Smith, who, in his Systematic Theology, writes:

“The question would seem to indicate that the child was not one of the partakers.” 2

Here the argument rests on the form of the question. The claim is that the wording places the child outside of the action itself. If he were participating in the meal with his father, he would have asked what this meal means “for us,” rather than what it means “to you.”

But that assumption does not hold up when we consider how this kind of language functions elsewhere in Scripture.

In Exodus 12, the Passover is instituted with the expectation that children will later ask about its meaning. When that happens, a child may ask in the second person singular, what does this mean “to you” but his father is commanded to answer in the first person plural: “We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, and the LORD brought us out…”

Again, that detail matters because, theologically, the father’s answer necessarily includes his son.

Whether or not his son was born at the time of the deliverance, he is a member of the people who were delivered. Not only in a physical sense, as Levi paid tithes to Melchizedek while still in the loins of Abraham, the child was delivered from Egypt in the loins of his father (Heb. 7:9–10), but more importantly in a covenantal sense, a reality that extends even to Gentiles who would be grafted into Israel’s history.

And what is true of the deliverance is also true of the obligations that flowed from it, which is why Jordan appealed to Deuteronomy 6:20–21, where we have a situation very similar to Exodus 12. A son asks his father about the meaning of God’s commandments, and the wording is the same: “which the LORD our God has commanded you.”

Taken on its own, that wording could be read as placing the child outside the obligation. But Moses has already made it clear that this is not how the covenant works. Just a chapter earlier, when he speaks to “all Israel” (Deut. 5:1), he says, “The LORD our God made a covenant with us in Horeb” (v. 2), and then adds, “The LORD did not make this covenant with our fathers [only], but with us: those who are here today, all of us who are alive” (v. 3). In this statement, he is speaking to those who were not yet born when the covenant was first made, and yet he deliberately includes them in it.

This is how God’s covenants are designed to function. What is given to the fathers includes and binds the children after them, even to their children as well (cf. Deut. 4:9–10; 6:6–7; 11:18–19; Exod. 10:2; Ps. 78:5–7). A child in Israel, then, was not brought into this later. He was born into it, “born under the law” (Gal. 4:4).

This means that in Deuteronomy 6:20–21, when a child asks about the commandments given to his father, he is asking about commandments that were given to him as well.

And in the same way, in Exodus 12:26, when a child asks what the feast means to his father, he is necessarily speaking of a feast in which he himself is included.