The Protestant Limbo

I don't enjoy Christian baby dedications. To me they're a little sad and a little irritating all mixed together.

It's sad to me because to me it's like making your kids live in a tent in the back yard until they know how to unlock the back door. You let them stay on the property but they don't really belong. So you make sure they don't come in the house. It's irritating to me because I don't really agree with the reasons usually given against infant baptism.

I should say right off the bat that I don't think baptism saves you. I don't think that baptism keeps a child from hell or protects them from the consequences of original sin. In that sense, I believe it is possible for a person to go to heaven even if they are never baptized. So in terms of the symbolic aspect of baptism, deciding when a person is baptized is partially a question of what you are trying to symbolize. Do you want them symbolically in from the beginning of their lives or only when they have made the personal commitment?

But are they really out when they are 2? I believe they're really in when they're 1, 2, 3, maybe even 4, 5, 6. Indeed, I believe it's possible that a person might be "in" at every moment of their life--if they accept Christ from the moment they understand their need for him. I bet Russ Gunsalus and Keith Drury have been on their way to heaven every single moment of their lives! Accordingly, it makes me really sad when we make it a point of saying that our children are "out." Frankly, I think our children should take communion too. I guarantee you the children at Corinth ate the communion meal of 1 Corinthians 11.

But of course I believe baptism is also a sacrament, a means of grace. In that sense, I believe it "helps" our fellowship with God in some mystical way. I actually believe that a child who has been baptized has a better chance of accepting Christ personally later, not too dissimilar from the passage in 1 Corinthians 7 that says our children are sanctified by our faith apart from any act of will on their part.

If baptism is truly a means of grace in this way, then to forbid our children from baptism is actually to refuse them an avenue of God's grace. In other words, it sets down a "harder" path into the kingdom for them than it could be. If we knew this to be true for certain, refusing our children baptism would be rather infuriating to us, something we would actually fight against (P.S. I write these words with some restraint).

I suppose the main objection to infant baptism is the idea that you cannot be saved without a personal confession of faith. But of course nothing I've said thus far contradicts this idea. That's part of what's irritating to me. Salvation is not the same thing as baptism. And there's often a subtle individualistic assumption that goes along with this position--as if for an experience to be meaningful I have to be conscious of it (note to self: examine possibly self-oriented assumptions I may not have examined).

And of course the fact that the baptisms recorded in the New Testament are all or at least nearly all adult baptisms doesn't settle the issue. The Bible never tells us an incident where someone is baptized as an adult who was in the church as a child. All the adult NT baptisms are people entering the church for the first time as an adult. And of course the NT does mention more than once that whole households were baptized--we just don't know who all was in them. On the whole, my sense of how group dynamics worked in the Bible makes me suspect it more likely than not that child baptism was a part of early Christian practice.

A personal relationship with God and Christ is of course essential, meaning that every individual must confess Christ and appropriate his death if they are at all intellectually able (Frankly I would still baptize a severely mentally challenged person, even if they will never really understand). But I suspect that such relationships were always imbedded in the community of faith in New Testament times. In a sense they were personal, but not individual, relationships with God and his Christ.

And of course infant baptism isn't just some Catholic thing. Luther, Calvin, and Wesley would all give an intense scolding to anyone using their name and not baptizing their children. In recent times, adult baptism is really an Anabaptist thing that resurfaced these last few hundred years, a backwater trickle that has really only flourished in America.

Many will disagree with me, but I find baby dedications lamentable, missed opportunities. To me they impoverish the church by placing our children in a limbo that they are not really in. While we could use baptism to emphasize that we are communities and families of faith, instead we accentuate ourselves as isolated individuals of faith. Rather than making our children have to work to leave, we make them work to get in when they are really in already. Rather than avail them of God's means of grace and give them any sacramental benefit to baptism, we make them come in cold turkey.

So maybe I'll go become a Methodist. Oh wait, the Wesleyan Church actually allows for infant baptism. I wonder why nobody does it? Maybe it's because we've been hanging out with the Baptists for so long.