- Baptism is normative (although not essential for salvation... Salvationists and Friends can still go to heaven). Baptism does not "save" you, nor does it cleanse "original sin."
- Baptism is a means of grace, but the specifics of the grace dispensed varies somewhat depending on the point when a person is being baptized (e.g., infant versus child versus adult, etc).
- The earliest church probably baptized primarily by immersion, but the word baptizo does not necessarily mean "to immerse." It's not a point to fight over, although immersion probably has the strongest symbolism of death to our former self.
- There are advantages both to infant and believer's baptism. The advantage for infant baptism is the strong claim on the child for Christ by the community from the very beginning. It does not "save" the child, who will need to confess faith subsequently and receive the Holy Spirit. But it strongly affirms inclusion in the community of faith and makes faith the assumption of the future.
- The advantage of believer's baptism is the power of conscious, individual choice. It strongly affirms the individual faith decision for Christ, although it suggests the person is in a kind of limbo up to that point (the child is a stranger in the church's midst).
- Rebaptism is not ideal or necessary, but is a pastoral call--would rebaptism significantly invigorate the person spiritually.
Showing posts with label infant baptism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label infant baptism. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
A Practical Theology of Baptism
Today my Romans class reached Romans 6:4 and we ended up spending most of the class discussing the practical theology of baptism. I consider myself very wesleyan when it comes to the topic (in contrast to Wesley-an). Of course I don't expect anyone to agree with me but here were my positions:
Sunday, August 30, 2015
SA3. Christians have varying perspectives on baptism.
This is the third post on sacraments in my ongoing series, theology in bullet points. The first unit in this series had to do with God and Creation (book here), and the second unit was on Christology and Atonement.
We are now in the third and final unit: The Holy Spirit and the Church. The first set of posts in this final unit was on the Holy Spirit. The second set was on the Church. This third set is on sacraments.
_______________________________
Christians have varying perspectives on baptism.
1. Baptism is an area where Christians have disagreed strongly in the days since the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s. But while baptism has arguably been a common feature of Christianity since its beginnings, a person can be saved without being baptized. Accordingly, neither the mode nor the timing of baptism is essential to salvation. This observation puts debates over baptism into the category of "disputable matters" (cf. Rom. 14-15, 1 Cor. 8, 10), and Christians should accordingly be charitable toward each other when it comes to such disagreements.
2. The New Testament records few debates over baptism. The problem in Acts 19:1-7 was that these individuals had only an understanding of John the Baptist. They did not know that Jesus was the Messiah and so had not experienced baptism in the name of Christ. This issue thus does not speak to debates over re-baptism or whether tongues authenticates baptism or over what name/names should be invoked in baptism. [1]
At Corinth, various parties in the community boasted that their baptism was more significant because of who had led them to believe, including who had baptized them (1 Cor. 1:10-17). These verses seem to indicate, first, that baptism was not a central element in Paul's ministry, at least not at this stage of it. They also indicate what would become clear about three hundred years later in the Donatist controversy of the 300s and 400s: baptism gains no significance from the person who baptizes you.
Christians commonly believe this fact of all the ministries of the Church. The validity and power of God's grace do not depend on the righteousness of the minister. Baptism takes its validity and power from the Holy Spirit and the faith of those involved. If it would turn out that the person administrating baptism is not a believer or if that person is wholly unrighteous, the baptism is still valid because the power comes from God.
3. It is commonly assumed that the earliest church baptized by immersion. This is a reasonable position, given the nature of Jewish miqvaot, the cleansing pools that one finds archaeologically in Jerusalem and its environs. Paul's imagery in Romans 6:4 seems to suggest as much. We are "buried" with Christ in baptism.
However, it is surely significant that the New Testament never makes a point of the method of baptism. Indeed, while baptism is a common feature of the New Testament, the manner by which a person is baptized is never a matter of contention. It thus goes well beyond Scripture to demand that a person must be baptized in a certain way. There are points where we have to address issues that were not raised in the Bible. There are points where biblical teaching is only in a seminal form that can be fleshed out. But the issue of baptism does not seem to be one that we should fight over.
Around the year AD100, someone put together the Didache, a collection of teachings reported to summarize the teaching of the apostles. Although we cannot at all be sure of that claim, it is surely significant that this text is very practical when it comes to baptism. Ideal is a baptism involving immersion in cold, running water (7.2-5). But if it is not possible, then pouring even with warm water is a valid alternative. [2] Baptisands are also asked to fast for a day or two before undergoing baptism.
Immersion captures the imagery of dying with Christ and complete coverage of one's sins. Sprinkling captures the Old Testament imagery of the altar being sprinkled with blood (e.g., Lev. 16:18-20). But while the Bible may describe various practices, it never prescribes one in relation to baptism. [3] It is thus not only foolish but unbiblical and counter-Christ to engage in divisive conflict over the mode of baptism.
4. Throughout the vast majority of Christian history, Christians baptized their children as infants. Infant baptism is not explicitly mentioned in the New Testament, although it may very well be inferred in a few passages. In Acts 16:15, Lydia's household is baptized when she believes. Similarly, the whole family of the Philippian jailer is baptized in Acts 16:33. No qualification is given about the age of those baptized. Indeed, no qualification is made about the faith of each individual in the house.
Here we must reckon with the fact that the ancient world consisted of collectivist cultures. That is to say, identity was group-embedded rather than individualistic. This is arguably the default human societal pattern. Homo sapiens is a herd animal. As such, it would be understandable if the decision of a head of household was assumed to be binding on the rest of the household, which would include family members beyond what we call the "nuclear" family, extending even to any slaves in the house.
None of the primary reformers questioned infant baptism. [4] Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin (not to mention Wesley) all supported infant baptism. Yet it was inevitable that a movement that emphasized justification by individual faith would eventually have some who would argue that baptism should thus take place when a person is old enough to make an individual confession. [5] This was not a problem for the high Reformers because individuals still expressed their personal faith in confirmation.
Confirmation is the practice of undergoing teaching that leads to an individual confession of faith that "confirms" the faith the Church had for you in baptism. It is a reminder that, even in those traditions which practice infant baptism, that baptism is not sufficient to "save" a person. There must also be a personal confession and owning of faith.
This is the most historic and, perhaps, the preferred approach to Christian baptism. A child is baptized soon after birth, claiming the child for Christ, invoking the faith of the community that surrounds him or her. The child is "in" the Church, and belonging is his or hers to lose. Then when the child is of age, he or she undergoes discipleship in Christian faith and practice, leading to a formal and personal confession of faith before the Church, which can then also be a means of God's grace.
5. However, it is understandable that individualistic cultures would tend to prefer "believer's baptism." Since individualistic cultures emphasize that each individual determines his or her own identity and destiny, it is predictable that they would emphasize a form of baptism that focuses on an individual's confession of faith. Since the New Testament records the first generation of believers, it is understandable that the overwhelming majority of baptisms in the New Testament are adult baptisms. These adult baptisms in Acts easily became the model for baptism in the Americas.
Christians should not de-Christianize each other over such things. It is clear that believer's baptism fit the context of a democratic culture astoundingly well, which is why forms of Baptist Christianity have prevailed in the United States. They did not do so well at first, when in Zurich in the 1500s, some individuals came to Huldrych Zwingli arguing that he had not gone far enough in his reformation. He "baptized" them by drowning in a river. Such de-Christianization of those who practice credobaptism, "believer's baptism" is to be condemned.
Yet, the words of Paul echo toward those who would de-Christianize groups that practice infant baptism as well. "I thank God that I baptized none of you... For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel" (1 Cor. 1:14, 17). Baptism is thus a disputable matter, one in which the most important thing is charity toward each other, not the timing or mode of the act.
6. Some groups, reacting against the ritualism of the Roman Catholic Church, went so far as to stop the practice of baptism altogether. The chief examples of this, arguably over-reaction are the Quakers and the Salvation Army, which is a branch of Methodism.
On the one hand, we must agree with them that a person can be saved without being baptized. The essential element in crossing from death to life is the working of the Holy Spirit, not baptism. While the thief on the cross was technically still before Christian baptism or the age of the Spirit, Jesus' promise that the thief would join him in Paradise exemplifies well the hope of those who place their faith in Jesus even if they are not baptized.
Yet we argued in the previous article that God uses baptism as a means of grace and that it is the primary act that signifies the inclusion of a person into the community of faith. Why then would we deprive anyone of such blessings? The ritual of non-baptism has itself thus become a "vain ritual" that continues only because of a tradition. It has been five hundred years. There is no more need to protest! Why deprive a part of the body of Christ of a blessing?
Hopefully it is clear that rituals are a key element of human existence. Symbolic acts that we repeat on key occasions are far from empty. They are usually the richest and most powerful memories that we have. Movements that have them will always be exponentially more powerful than those that do not, and we deprive ourselves of such power to our own loss.
Nevertheless, we should not in any way de-Christianize those who do not practice baptism at all.
7. Most importantly, we should receive into our fellowship those who have been baptized in other groups. There is New Testament precedent for baptism in Jesus' name (e.g., Acts 19:5) and in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (e.g., Matt. 28:19). Both should be accepted.
Whether a person has been immersed, sprinkled, or poured, we should respect their own conscience and, in a perfect world, we would accept them into our fellowship on the basis of their individual confession of faith, not the particulars of their baptism. To be sure, it is acceptable for individual Christian traditions to baptize in a preferred way. There are enough choices, at least in the West, that we as individuals can worship in a community that baptizes in our preferred way.
The question of re-baptism is a sensitive one. There is no need for a person who was baptized as an infant to be re-baptized. However, Paul would urge us to have our own convictions before God (Rom. 14:22). If it would help a person's faith to be re-baptized, it is in the spirit of Paul to indulge them. We do not want to be a cause of stumbling to anyone, so why would we refuse anyone an opportunity for more grace and an easing of conscience?
What would be far worse is if we sowed seeds of doubt about a person's past baptism. In this case, we are the potential source of the stumbling block. In this case, it is not the individual Christian that needs assurance but it is we who are sowing the seeds of doubt! This is much to be opposed. While the New Testament never fights over the timing or mode of baptism, it strongly opposes any believer who de-Christianizes another over disputable (and in this case even unbiblical) matters such as these.
Ideally, we should think of baptism as a one time act of inclusion. Re-baptism should thus be the exception rather than the rule. And we should not think that a person needs to be re-included into the body of Christ over and over again. True, a person can walk away from Christ. If the break was strong enough, perhaps it could be meaningful to be re-baptized.
What we should not encourage is a sense that a person will move in and out of the family of God repeatedly in their Christian life. Belonging to Christ is not a "one sin you're out" type of situation. Leaving the family of God is possible, but it is not something that happens by chance or casually. We may wrong others in our family and still remain in the family. In the same way, if we practice re-baptism at all, it should be reserved for the most striking of re-entrances.
8. Baptism is a means of grace. It is a sacrament of inclusion, of filling with the Spirit. Christians have practiced baptism since its very beginnings, and it remains a foundational practice today. While we believe it is not necessary for salvation and respect those few traditions that do not practice it, it is a core Christian practice. Let's do it!
However, it is not a practice over which we should de-Christianize others. Its particulars fall, ultimately, into the category of disputable matters. Immersion was perhaps the default New Testament practice, but it was not an absolute. Infant baptism has been the dominant mode throughout Christian history, but credobaptism has obviously been most meaningful to the majority in the individualist West.
Baptism is a sacrament of inclusion into the community of faith, but Christians have varying perspective on its particulars. "Let all be fully convinced in their own minds" (Rom. 14:6). Do not let how you baptize "cause the ruin of one for whom Christ died" (14:15).
Next week: SA4: Communion is a sacrament of re-empowerment.
[1] Oneness Pentecostals see tongues as a sign of receiving the Holy Spirit and thus question whether someone who has never spoken in tongues is truly saved. Suffice it to say that tongues are not mentioned in every instance of conversion in Acts (e.g., Paul's in Acts 8). How much less, then, is tongues a necessary validation of baptism!
[2] In the Didache, such pouring is done three times in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
[3] The lexical fallacy is sometimes committed in arguments over baptism. This fallacy presumes that words have root meanings that are in play in every instance of a word's use. So, someone might argue, that the root bapt- has a connotation of dipping. This may be true in the dark origins of the word group centuries before Christ.
However, words change meanings and develop in their meanings over time. It is fallacious to assume that some root meaning to a word (or original meaning to a word--the etymological fallacy) will always be part of a word's meaning no matter its context. Words just do not work like that.
So in Mark 7:3, it is not clear that the word baptizo has any connotation of how the Pharisees washed their hands. It would seem in this context that the word simply means that they "washed" their hands. A valid translation of baptizo, it would then seem, is "to wash," with no clear connotation of the manner of washing. In the end, since the Didache could speak of a baptisma that involved pouring, it is clear that the word baptism did not include the manner of baptism in its definition at a very early point in Christian history indeed.
[4] The rise of individualism is indeed part of the rise of Protestantism, and Protestantism fostered the rise of individualism. The two naturally fed off of each other.
[5] Or, as it is sometimes called, pedobaptism, from the Greek word for child. This contrasts with credobaptism, or "believer's baptism."
We are now in the third and final unit: The Holy Spirit and the Church. The first set of posts in this final unit was on the Holy Spirit. The second set was on the Church. This third set is on sacraments.
_______________________________
Christians have varying perspectives on baptism.
1. Baptism is an area where Christians have disagreed strongly in the days since the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s. But while baptism has arguably been a common feature of Christianity since its beginnings, a person can be saved without being baptized. Accordingly, neither the mode nor the timing of baptism is essential to salvation. This observation puts debates over baptism into the category of "disputable matters" (cf. Rom. 14-15, 1 Cor. 8, 10), and Christians should accordingly be charitable toward each other when it comes to such disagreements.
2. The New Testament records few debates over baptism. The problem in Acts 19:1-7 was that these individuals had only an understanding of John the Baptist. They did not know that Jesus was the Messiah and so had not experienced baptism in the name of Christ. This issue thus does not speak to debates over re-baptism or whether tongues authenticates baptism or over what name/names should be invoked in baptism. [1]
At Corinth, various parties in the community boasted that their baptism was more significant because of who had led them to believe, including who had baptized them (1 Cor. 1:10-17). These verses seem to indicate, first, that baptism was not a central element in Paul's ministry, at least not at this stage of it. They also indicate what would become clear about three hundred years later in the Donatist controversy of the 300s and 400s: baptism gains no significance from the person who baptizes you.
Christians commonly believe this fact of all the ministries of the Church. The validity and power of God's grace do not depend on the righteousness of the minister. Baptism takes its validity and power from the Holy Spirit and the faith of those involved. If it would turn out that the person administrating baptism is not a believer or if that person is wholly unrighteous, the baptism is still valid because the power comes from God.
3. It is commonly assumed that the earliest church baptized by immersion. This is a reasonable position, given the nature of Jewish miqvaot, the cleansing pools that one finds archaeologically in Jerusalem and its environs. Paul's imagery in Romans 6:4 seems to suggest as much. We are "buried" with Christ in baptism.
However, it is surely significant that the New Testament never makes a point of the method of baptism. Indeed, while baptism is a common feature of the New Testament, the manner by which a person is baptized is never a matter of contention. It thus goes well beyond Scripture to demand that a person must be baptized in a certain way. There are points where we have to address issues that were not raised in the Bible. There are points where biblical teaching is only in a seminal form that can be fleshed out. But the issue of baptism does not seem to be one that we should fight over.
Around the year AD100, someone put together the Didache, a collection of teachings reported to summarize the teaching of the apostles. Although we cannot at all be sure of that claim, it is surely significant that this text is very practical when it comes to baptism. Ideal is a baptism involving immersion in cold, running water (7.2-5). But if it is not possible, then pouring even with warm water is a valid alternative. [2] Baptisands are also asked to fast for a day or two before undergoing baptism.
Immersion captures the imagery of dying with Christ and complete coverage of one's sins. Sprinkling captures the Old Testament imagery of the altar being sprinkled with blood (e.g., Lev. 16:18-20). But while the Bible may describe various practices, it never prescribes one in relation to baptism. [3] It is thus not only foolish but unbiblical and counter-Christ to engage in divisive conflict over the mode of baptism.
4. Throughout the vast majority of Christian history, Christians baptized their children as infants. Infant baptism is not explicitly mentioned in the New Testament, although it may very well be inferred in a few passages. In Acts 16:15, Lydia's household is baptized when she believes. Similarly, the whole family of the Philippian jailer is baptized in Acts 16:33. No qualification is given about the age of those baptized. Indeed, no qualification is made about the faith of each individual in the house.
Here we must reckon with the fact that the ancient world consisted of collectivist cultures. That is to say, identity was group-embedded rather than individualistic. This is arguably the default human societal pattern. Homo sapiens is a herd animal. As such, it would be understandable if the decision of a head of household was assumed to be binding on the rest of the household, which would include family members beyond what we call the "nuclear" family, extending even to any slaves in the house.
None of the primary reformers questioned infant baptism. [4] Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin (not to mention Wesley) all supported infant baptism. Yet it was inevitable that a movement that emphasized justification by individual faith would eventually have some who would argue that baptism should thus take place when a person is old enough to make an individual confession. [5] This was not a problem for the high Reformers because individuals still expressed their personal faith in confirmation.
Confirmation is the practice of undergoing teaching that leads to an individual confession of faith that "confirms" the faith the Church had for you in baptism. It is a reminder that, even in those traditions which practice infant baptism, that baptism is not sufficient to "save" a person. There must also be a personal confession and owning of faith.
This is the most historic and, perhaps, the preferred approach to Christian baptism. A child is baptized soon after birth, claiming the child for Christ, invoking the faith of the community that surrounds him or her. The child is "in" the Church, and belonging is his or hers to lose. Then when the child is of age, he or she undergoes discipleship in Christian faith and practice, leading to a formal and personal confession of faith before the Church, which can then also be a means of God's grace.
5. However, it is understandable that individualistic cultures would tend to prefer "believer's baptism." Since individualistic cultures emphasize that each individual determines his or her own identity and destiny, it is predictable that they would emphasize a form of baptism that focuses on an individual's confession of faith. Since the New Testament records the first generation of believers, it is understandable that the overwhelming majority of baptisms in the New Testament are adult baptisms. These adult baptisms in Acts easily became the model for baptism in the Americas.
Christians should not de-Christianize each other over such things. It is clear that believer's baptism fit the context of a democratic culture astoundingly well, which is why forms of Baptist Christianity have prevailed in the United States. They did not do so well at first, when in Zurich in the 1500s, some individuals came to Huldrych Zwingli arguing that he had not gone far enough in his reformation. He "baptized" them by drowning in a river. Such de-Christianization of those who practice credobaptism, "believer's baptism" is to be condemned.
Yet, the words of Paul echo toward those who would de-Christianize groups that practice infant baptism as well. "I thank God that I baptized none of you... For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel" (1 Cor. 1:14, 17). Baptism is thus a disputable matter, one in which the most important thing is charity toward each other, not the timing or mode of the act.
6. Some groups, reacting against the ritualism of the Roman Catholic Church, went so far as to stop the practice of baptism altogether. The chief examples of this, arguably over-reaction are the Quakers and the Salvation Army, which is a branch of Methodism.
On the one hand, we must agree with them that a person can be saved without being baptized. The essential element in crossing from death to life is the working of the Holy Spirit, not baptism. While the thief on the cross was technically still before Christian baptism or the age of the Spirit, Jesus' promise that the thief would join him in Paradise exemplifies well the hope of those who place their faith in Jesus even if they are not baptized.
Yet we argued in the previous article that God uses baptism as a means of grace and that it is the primary act that signifies the inclusion of a person into the community of faith. Why then would we deprive anyone of such blessings? The ritual of non-baptism has itself thus become a "vain ritual" that continues only because of a tradition. It has been five hundred years. There is no more need to protest! Why deprive a part of the body of Christ of a blessing?
Hopefully it is clear that rituals are a key element of human existence. Symbolic acts that we repeat on key occasions are far from empty. They are usually the richest and most powerful memories that we have. Movements that have them will always be exponentially more powerful than those that do not, and we deprive ourselves of such power to our own loss.
Nevertheless, we should not in any way de-Christianize those who do not practice baptism at all.
7. Most importantly, we should receive into our fellowship those who have been baptized in other groups. There is New Testament precedent for baptism in Jesus' name (e.g., Acts 19:5) and in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (e.g., Matt. 28:19). Both should be accepted.
Whether a person has been immersed, sprinkled, or poured, we should respect their own conscience and, in a perfect world, we would accept them into our fellowship on the basis of their individual confession of faith, not the particulars of their baptism. To be sure, it is acceptable for individual Christian traditions to baptize in a preferred way. There are enough choices, at least in the West, that we as individuals can worship in a community that baptizes in our preferred way.
The question of re-baptism is a sensitive one. There is no need for a person who was baptized as an infant to be re-baptized. However, Paul would urge us to have our own convictions before God (Rom. 14:22). If it would help a person's faith to be re-baptized, it is in the spirit of Paul to indulge them. We do not want to be a cause of stumbling to anyone, so why would we refuse anyone an opportunity for more grace and an easing of conscience?
What would be far worse is if we sowed seeds of doubt about a person's past baptism. In this case, we are the potential source of the stumbling block. In this case, it is not the individual Christian that needs assurance but it is we who are sowing the seeds of doubt! This is much to be opposed. While the New Testament never fights over the timing or mode of baptism, it strongly opposes any believer who de-Christianizes another over disputable (and in this case even unbiblical) matters such as these.
Ideally, we should think of baptism as a one time act of inclusion. Re-baptism should thus be the exception rather than the rule. And we should not think that a person needs to be re-included into the body of Christ over and over again. True, a person can walk away from Christ. If the break was strong enough, perhaps it could be meaningful to be re-baptized.
What we should not encourage is a sense that a person will move in and out of the family of God repeatedly in their Christian life. Belonging to Christ is not a "one sin you're out" type of situation. Leaving the family of God is possible, but it is not something that happens by chance or casually. We may wrong others in our family and still remain in the family. In the same way, if we practice re-baptism at all, it should be reserved for the most striking of re-entrances.
8. Baptism is a means of grace. It is a sacrament of inclusion, of filling with the Spirit. Christians have practiced baptism since its very beginnings, and it remains a foundational practice today. While we believe it is not necessary for salvation and respect those few traditions that do not practice it, it is a core Christian practice. Let's do it!
However, it is not a practice over which we should de-Christianize others. Its particulars fall, ultimately, into the category of disputable matters. Immersion was perhaps the default New Testament practice, but it was not an absolute. Infant baptism has been the dominant mode throughout Christian history, but credobaptism has obviously been most meaningful to the majority in the individualist West.
Baptism is a sacrament of inclusion into the community of faith, but Christians have varying perspective on its particulars. "Let all be fully convinced in their own minds" (Rom. 14:6). Do not let how you baptize "cause the ruin of one for whom Christ died" (14:15).
Next week: SA4: Communion is a sacrament of re-empowerment.
[1] Oneness Pentecostals see tongues as a sign of receiving the Holy Spirit and thus question whether someone who has never spoken in tongues is truly saved. Suffice it to say that tongues are not mentioned in every instance of conversion in Acts (e.g., Paul's in Acts 8). How much less, then, is tongues a necessary validation of baptism!
[2] In the Didache, such pouring is done three times in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
[3] The lexical fallacy is sometimes committed in arguments over baptism. This fallacy presumes that words have root meanings that are in play in every instance of a word's use. So, someone might argue, that the root bapt- has a connotation of dipping. This may be true in the dark origins of the word group centuries before Christ.
However, words change meanings and develop in their meanings over time. It is fallacious to assume that some root meaning to a word (or original meaning to a word--the etymological fallacy) will always be part of a word's meaning no matter its context. Words just do not work like that.
So in Mark 7:3, it is not clear that the word baptizo has any connotation of how the Pharisees washed their hands. It would seem in this context that the word simply means that they "washed" their hands. A valid translation of baptizo, it would then seem, is "to wash," with no clear connotation of the manner of washing. In the end, since the Didache could speak of a baptisma that involved pouring, it is clear that the word baptism did not include the manner of baptism in its definition at a very early point in Christian history indeed.
[4] The rise of individualism is indeed part of the rise of Protestantism, and Protestantism fostered the rise of individualism. The two naturally fed off of each other.
[5] Or, as it is sometimes called, pedobaptism, from the Greek word for child. This contrasts with credobaptism, or "believer's baptism."
Sunday, August 23, 2015
SA2. Baptism is a sacrament of inclusion into the people of God.
This is the second post on sacraments in my ongoing series, theology in bullet points. The first unit in this series had to do with God and Creation (book here), and the second unit was on Christology and Atonement.
We are now in the third and final unit: The Holy Spirit and the Church. The first set of posts in this final unit was on the Holy Spirit. The second set was on the Church. This third set is on sacraments.
_______________________________
Baptism is a sacrament of inclusion into the people of God.
1. Baptism has been part of Christian practice since its earliest days. The medium of this ritual is of course water. Its symbolism is, in the first place, that of cleansing.
However, the hearts of those who come to baptism as an adult are often cleansed on the basis of faith before they reach the waters of baptism. And those who are baptized as infants have not yet exercised individual faith and, indeed, they do not yet have sins in the proper sense to be cleansed. [1] The power of cleansing for sins, done by the Holy Spirit, thus does not coincide exactly with the act of baptism such that we might say that baptism is a sacrament of cleansing in most cases.
2. On the one hand, baptism is associated with the cleansing of our sins. In the book of Acts, the absolutely essential element of that cleansing is receiving the Holy Spirit. [2] It is the moment of the reception of the Holy Spirit when our sins are cleansed. It is this "baptism" in the Holy Spirit that is the moment of our justification and initial sanctification as belonging to God. This is the true moment of adoption as God's children, of regeneration, of redemption.
But baptism, on the one hand, acts out this cleansing symbolically in the most powerful of ways. Baptism enacts ritually our death to sin and our rising to new life. In the book of Acts, baptism and being filled with the Holy Spirit go hand in hand. In Acts, they are associated events.
But we are not literally saved through baptism. This wording in 1 Peter 3:21 is figurative. Baptism in water is an outward sign of the inward grace of the cleansing of sins. But because the "inward grace" in this case is typically a different event in time than the "outward sign," we cannot say that baptism is the catalyst for this more important spiritual cleansing (although it can be).
In Acts, baptism sometimes precedes being filled with the Spirit, and sometimes it takes place after receiving the Spirit. In each case, it is the reception of the Spirit that is the moment of cleansing. In Samaria, they are baptized and believe, but it is days before they receive the Holy Spirit (Acts 8:14-17). In the case of Cornelius, he and his company receive the Holy Spirit before they have been baptized (Acts 10:44-48), as is usually the case with adult baptism in the world today. Paul presumably was baptized by the Holy Spirit in that order as well (Acts 9:17-18).
3. Yet baptism is not simply a memorial of an event that has already taken place. It is more than a powerful symbol. Baptism has been considered a sacrament throughout Christian history. That is to say, there is a power of the Holy Spirit associated with the event that is much more than a memorial. What is this power? What is the inward grace that coincides with the event of baptism itself?
It certainly can be the grace of cleansing. That is to say, in those few cases where one's baptism coincides exactly to being filled with the Holy Spirit, what a powerful sacramental moment that is!
True baptism always involves the grace of re-filling with the Spirit. In the book of Acts, being filled with the Holy Spirit is not a one time event. It is something that can occur over and over again, especially as we face challenges that require a special "anointing" and empowerment from God (cf. Acts 4:31). We can surely say that: Authentic baptism coincides with a moment of power from the Holy Spirit, no matter what the age of the person being baptized.
4. So baptism is memorial of the cleansing of our sins. It is also a sacrament whereby we are filled with the Holy Spirit afresh. But being filled with the Holy Spirit in the early church had another "outward sign" more directly associated with it, namely, the laying on of hands. In Samaria, when baptism in water does not lead to a baptism in the Holy Spirit, Peter and John lay hands on the Samaritans so that they will receive the Holy Spirit (Acts 10:17).
We find other places in the New Testament where laying hands on a person is sacramental in this way. 1 Timothy 4:14 perhaps refers to Timothy's anointing for ministry (and no doubt an associated filling with the Holy Spirit), enacted by laying on hands. Herein is thus a precedent for ordination as a sacrament, with the laying on of hands as the outward sign.
Might we not find some divine grace that is almost always associated with the event of baptism itself, though? Might we not find some inward grace that usually coincides with the act of the outward sign itself?
There does indeed seem to be a more precise grace that God does in the moment of baptism, one that we should say involves a filling with the Holy Spirit. This is the divine grace of inclusion within the people of God. Baptism in water is the outward sign, whereby God brings an individual from outside the people of God to within his people.
5. Like circumcision for males in God's covenant with Israel, baptism ritually enacts the joining of God's people. It is the threshold of inclusion. Would we say that an uncircumcised male 6 days old was an Israelite? Well, yes, in a sense. But the act of circumcision was the outward sign that confirmed it.
In the same way, a person who has exercised faith in God is already justified, is already "saved." But the act of baptism is the outward sign that confirms it and enacts the crossing from outside to inside the people of God. In this way, an infant who is baptized is seen as part of the people of God until they remove themselves. His or her inclusion is something to be lost. [3]
The act of baptism thus enacts coming from the wilderness into the camp. It enacts the transition from "not my people" to "my people." It is a sacrament of inclusion within the people of God.
This is not merely a memorial of this transition. There is a change that takes place, and the person baptized experiences this change when the baptism is authentic. It is a change that involves the Holy Spirit. Any sin is cleansed. There is an empowerment for righteousness and service.
5. Faith is always involved in sacramental baptism, although in the case of an infant it is the faith of the community that baptizes. In adult baptism, the faith of the "baptisand," the person being baptized, is essential for the baptism to be sacramental, for there to be actual change and transformation in the act. In the case of infants, the faith of the community invokes the power of the Holy Spirit over the child to insulate it from the power of Sin as he or she reaches maturity. It is a faith that commits to protect the child from the world, to which the Holy Spirit responds with power.
Baptism is thus a sacrament of inclusion into the people of God. It remembers the faith and cleansing of the Holy Spirit that has usually already taken place (or looks forward to it). But it is a moment in which the Holy Spirit fills the person being baptized. Any sin is cleansed on the basis of faith. Power is received for righteousness and service. Most of all, in baptism God leads us across the threshold into the company of God's people.
Next Sunday: SA3: Christians have varying perspectives on baptism.
[1] In its proper sense, in the sense of what brings condemnation, sin involves intentional wrongdoing. An infant does not yet have a mature enough will to do wrong intentionally. While it is common, especially among older Christian traditions, to think of a baby's original sin being cleansed in baptism, it is ultimately problematic to think that any guilt can attach to us on the basis of Adam's sin or anyone else's sin. We sin like Adam. The power of Sin has control over the world as a consequence of Adam. But we did not sin in Adam, an Augustinian misinterpretation of Romans 5:12.
[2] Prior to Christian baptism, both the ritual washings of Judaism and the baptism of John the Baptist were sacraments of cleansing. For Jews before Christ, the ritual washings enabled a person to participate in the temple worship. These were often a matter of external purity, although no doubt God met many a Jew with his grace in those moments.
The baptism of John the Baptist was not yet Christian baptism, as the event in Acts 19:1-6 makes clear. John's baptism was a baptism for Israel to repent of its sins and be washed in preparation for the arrival of the messianic kingdom. No doubt the Holy Spirit met many of those who were baptized under John with cleansing. Indeed, the Holy Spirit anointed Jesus for ministry when he participated in John's baptism (although no cleansing was necessary; Matt. 3:13-17).
[3] Rather than the unpleasant limbo we often leave such children. By denying an infant baptism, we say they are outside the camp in the wilderness for years. We take the first seven days of an uncircumcised male Israelite and stretch them out to a decade or more. They are strangers in our midst in church, present but not belonging.
We are now in the third and final unit: The Holy Spirit and the Church. The first set of posts in this final unit was on the Holy Spirit. The second set was on the Church. This third set is on sacraments.
_______________________________
Baptism is a sacrament of inclusion into the people of God.
1. Baptism has been part of Christian practice since its earliest days. The medium of this ritual is of course water. Its symbolism is, in the first place, that of cleansing.
However, the hearts of those who come to baptism as an adult are often cleansed on the basis of faith before they reach the waters of baptism. And those who are baptized as infants have not yet exercised individual faith and, indeed, they do not yet have sins in the proper sense to be cleansed. [1] The power of cleansing for sins, done by the Holy Spirit, thus does not coincide exactly with the act of baptism such that we might say that baptism is a sacrament of cleansing in most cases.
2. On the one hand, baptism is associated with the cleansing of our sins. In the book of Acts, the absolutely essential element of that cleansing is receiving the Holy Spirit. [2] It is the moment of the reception of the Holy Spirit when our sins are cleansed. It is this "baptism" in the Holy Spirit that is the moment of our justification and initial sanctification as belonging to God. This is the true moment of adoption as God's children, of regeneration, of redemption.
But baptism, on the one hand, acts out this cleansing symbolically in the most powerful of ways. Baptism enacts ritually our death to sin and our rising to new life. In the book of Acts, baptism and being filled with the Holy Spirit go hand in hand. In Acts, they are associated events.
But we are not literally saved through baptism. This wording in 1 Peter 3:21 is figurative. Baptism in water is an outward sign of the inward grace of the cleansing of sins. But because the "inward grace" in this case is typically a different event in time than the "outward sign," we cannot say that baptism is the catalyst for this more important spiritual cleansing (although it can be).
In Acts, baptism sometimes precedes being filled with the Spirit, and sometimes it takes place after receiving the Spirit. In each case, it is the reception of the Spirit that is the moment of cleansing. In Samaria, they are baptized and believe, but it is days before they receive the Holy Spirit (Acts 8:14-17). In the case of Cornelius, he and his company receive the Holy Spirit before they have been baptized (Acts 10:44-48), as is usually the case with adult baptism in the world today. Paul presumably was baptized by the Holy Spirit in that order as well (Acts 9:17-18).
3. Yet baptism is not simply a memorial of an event that has already taken place. It is more than a powerful symbol. Baptism has been considered a sacrament throughout Christian history. That is to say, there is a power of the Holy Spirit associated with the event that is much more than a memorial. What is this power? What is the inward grace that coincides with the event of baptism itself?
It certainly can be the grace of cleansing. That is to say, in those few cases where one's baptism coincides exactly to being filled with the Holy Spirit, what a powerful sacramental moment that is!
True baptism always involves the grace of re-filling with the Spirit. In the book of Acts, being filled with the Holy Spirit is not a one time event. It is something that can occur over and over again, especially as we face challenges that require a special "anointing" and empowerment from God (cf. Acts 4:31). We can surely say that: Authentic baptism coincides with a moment of power from the Holy Spirit, no matter what the age of the person being baptized.
4. So baptism is memorial of the cleansing of our sins. It is also a sacrament whereby we are filled with the Holy Spirit afresh. But being filled with the Holy Spirit in the early church had another "outward sign" more directly associated with it, namely, the laying on of hands. In Samaria, when baptism in water does not lead to a baptism in the Holy Spirit, Peter and John lay hands on the Samaritans so that they will receive the Holy Spirit (Acts 10:17).
We find other places in the New Testament where laying hands on a person is sacramental in this way. 1 Timothy 4:14 perhaps refers to Timothy's anointing for ministry (and no doubt an associated filling with the Holy Spirit), enacted by laying on hands. Herein is thus a precedent for ordination as a sacrament, with the laying on of hands as the outward sign.
Might we not find some divine grace that is almost always associated with the event of baptism itself, though? Might we not find some inward grace that usually coincides with the act of the outward sign itself?
There does indeed seem to be a more precise grace that God does in the moment of baptism, one that we should say involves a filling with the Holy Spirit. This is the divine grace of inclusion within the people of God. Baptism in water is the outward sign, whereby God brings an individual from outside the people of God to within his people.
5. Like circumcision for males in God's covenant with Israel, baptism ritually enacts the joining of God's people. It is the threshold of inclusion. Would we say that an uncircumcised male 6 days old was an Israelite? Well, yes, in a sense. But the act of circumcision was the outward sign that confirmed it.
In the same way, a person who has exercised faith in God is already justified, is already "saved." But the act of baptism is the outward sign that confirms it and enacts the crossing from outside to inside the people of God. In this way, an infant who is baptized is seen as part of the people of God until they remove themselves. His or her inclusion is something to be lost. [3]
The act of baptism thus enacts coming from the wilderness into the camp. It enacts the transition from "not my people" to "my people." It is a sacrament of inclusion within the people of God.
This is not merely a memorial of this transition. There is a change that takes place, and the person baptized experiences this change when the baptism is authentic. It is a change that involves the Holy Spirit. Any sin is cleansed. There is an empowerment for righteousness and service.
5. Faith is always involved in sacramental baptism, although in the case of an infant it is the faith of the community that baptizes. In adult baptism, the faith of the "baptisand," the person being baptized, is essential for the baptism to be sacramental, for there to be actual change and transformation in the act. In the case of infants, the faith of the community invokes the power of the Holy Spirit over the child to insulate it from the power of Sin as he or she reaches maturity. It is a faith that commits to protect the child from the world, to which the Holy Spirit responds with power.
Baptism is thus a sacrament of inclusion into the people of God. It remembers the faith and cleansing of the Holy Spirit that has usually already taken place (or looks forward to it). But it is a moment in which the Holy Spirit fills the person being baptized. Any sin is cleansed on the basis of faith. Power is received for righteousness and service. Most of all, in baptism God leads us across the threshold into the company of God's people.
Next Sunday: SA3: Christians have varying perspectives on baptism.
[1] In its proper sense, in the sense of what brings condemnation, sin involves intentional wrongdoing. An infant does not yet have a mature enough will to do wrong intentionally. While it is common, especially among older Christian traditions, to think of a baby's original sin being cleansed in baptism, it is ultimately problematic to think that any guilt can attach to us on the basis of Adam's sin or anyone else's sin. We sin like Adam. The power of Sin has control over the world as a consequence of Adam. But we did not sin in Adam, an Augustinian misinterpretation of Romans 5:12.
[2] Prior to Christian baptism, both the ritual washings of Judaism and the baptism of John the Baptist were sacraments of cleansing. For Jews before Christ, the ritual washings enabled a person to participate in the temple worship. These were often a matter of external purity, although no doubt God met many a Jew with his grace in those moments.
The baptism of John the Baptist was not yet Christian baptism, as the event in Acts 19:1-6 makes clear. John's baptism was a baptism for Israel to repent of its sins and be washed in preparation for the arrival of the messianic kingdom. No doubt the Holy Spirit met many of those who were baptized under John with cleansing. Indeed, the Holy Spirit anointed Jesus for ministry when he participated in John's baptism (although no cleansing was necessary; Matt. 3:13-17).
[3] Rather than the unpleasant limbo we often leave such children. By denying an infant baptism, we say they are outside the camp in the wilderness for years. We take the first seven days of an uncircumcised male Israelite and stretch them out to a decade or more. They are strangers in our midst in church, present but not belonging.
Saturday, June 25, 2011
The Skinny on Wesleyans and Baptism
Interestingly, The Wesleyan Church can be attractive to Baptists and Pentecostals for a number of reasons. To Baptists, it offers a very familiar low church feel with a more robust connecting network. All they have to do is deny eternal security or not bring it up. ;-) For Pentecostals, it's very similar except tongues aren't generally allowed in worship. But then again, a lot of charismatic churches don't speak much tongues in worship either.
So what do Wesleyans believe about baptism? Here's the official statement:
"We believe that water baptism and the Lord's Supper are the sacraments of the church commanded by Christ and ordained as a means of grace when received through faith. They are tokens of our profession of Christian faith and signs of God's gracious ministry toward us. By them, He works within us to quicken, strengthen and confirm our faith.
"We believe that water baptism is a sacrament of the church, commanded by our Lord and administered to believers. It is a symbol of the new covenant of grace and signifies acceptance of the benefits of the atonement of Jesus Christ. By means of this sacrament, believers declare their faith in Jesus Christ as Savior."
But official statements often don't really tell the whole story. Here's the skinny:
"Until recently, baptism has not been much of an emphasis of the Wesleyan Church. Most churches practice believer's baptism and have done it maybe once a year. You may find traces of individuals who have never been baptized or who were baptized as infants, but these are rare. Few if any would have any theology of baptismal regeneration and in practice, our sense of baptism as a sacrament has generally been somewhat weak."
Now the background:
1. One of the main predecessor churches of the Wesleyan Church (Pilgrims) had significant Quaker elements. So many of the early Pilgrims were like the Quakers or Salvation Army. They not only did not emphasize baptism. Many of them were not baptized at all. My grandfather only got baptized because he was asked to perform a baptism. He didn't think he should perform a baptism if he wasn't baptized himself.
By far the majority of Wesleyans would now say that, even though baptism does not actually save you, it is a central practice of the historic church with sacramental power. Nevertheless, we still would not believe that a person has to be baptized in order to be saved.
2. The other main predecessor church (Wesleyan Methodist) withdrew directly from the Methodist church over abolition. Accordingly, it retained the possibility of infant baptism. Again, the idea is not that such a baptism saves the child or ensures that the child will eventually be saved.
By far the majority of Wesleyans now practice believer's baptism, so much so that many would be surprised to know that it is still allowed to practice infant baptism in the Wesleyan Church. Nevertheless, my wife and I preferred for our children to be reckoned "in" the church and to have to leave it rather than to reckon them "out" until we could persuade them to come in. Dr. Bud Bence accordingly baptized our children in a Wesleyan Church.
So basically, in practice we have moved toward the Baptists, although in our theology, we neither specify the method (immersion, sprinkling, or pouring) nor the timing (believer's or infant). For Wesleyans, baptism is a sacrament in which every believer should participate, but it is neither essential for salvation nor something whose particulars we should fight about.
Were you baptized as an infant? You do not need to be re-baptized. If it would be significant for your spiritual pilgrimage, though, we will not stop you. Were you never baptized? You should very, very seriously consider it, although we will still call you a brother or sister if you choose not to.
So what do Wesleyans believe about baptism? Here's the official statement:
"We believe that water baptism and the Lord's Supper are the sacraments of the church commanded by Christ and ordained as a means of grace when received through faith. They are tokens of our profession of Christian faith and signs of God's gracious ministry toward us. By them, He works within us to quicken, strengthen and confirm our faith.
"We believe that water baptism is a sacrament of the church, commanded by our Lord and administered to believers. It is a symbol of the new covenant of grace and signifies acceptance of the benefits of the atonement of Jesus Christ. By means of this sacrament, believers declare their faith in Jesus Christ as Savior."
But official statements often don't really tell the whole story. Here's the skinny:
"Until recently, baptism has not been much of an emphasis of the Wesleyan Church. Most churches practice believer's baptism and have done it maybe once a year. You may find traces of individuals who have never been baptized or who were baptized as infants, but these are rare. Few if any would have any theology of baptismal regeneration and in practice, our sense of baptism as a sacrament has generally been somewhat weak."
Now the background:
1. One of the main predecessor churches of the Wesleyan Church (Pilgrims) had significant Quaker elements. So many of the early Pilgrims were like the Quakers or Salvation Army. They not only did not emphasize baptism. Many of them were not baptized at all. My grandfather only got baptized because he was asked to perform a baptism. He didn't think he should perform a baptism if he wasn't baptized himself.
By far the majority of Wesleyans would now say that, even though baptism does not actually save you, it is a central practice of the historic church with sacramental power. Nevertheless, we still would not believe that a person has to be baptized in order to be saved.
2. The other main predecessor church (Wesleyan Methodist) withdrew directly from the Methodist church over abolition. Accordingly, it retained the possibility of infant baptism. Again, the idea is not that such a baptism saves the child or ensures that the child will eventually be saved.
By far the majority of Wesleyans now practice believer's baptism, so much so that many would be surprised to know that it is still allowed to practice infant baptism in the Wesleyan Church. Nevertheless, my wife and I preferred for our children to be reckoned "in" the church and to have to leave it rather than to reckon them "out" until we could persuade them to come in. Dr. Bud Bence accordingly baptized our children in a Wesleyan Church.
So basically, in practice we have moved toward the Baptists, although in our theology, we neither specify the method (immersion, sprinkling, or pouring) nor the timing (believer's or infant). For Wesleyans, baptism is a sacrament in which every believer should participate, but it is neither essential for salvation nor something whose particulars we should fight about.
Were you baptized as an infant? You do not need to be re-baptized. If it would be significant for your spiritual pilgrimage, though, we will not stop you. Were you never baptized? You should very, very seriously consider it, although we will still call you a brother or sister if you choose not to.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Wesleyans and Infant Baptism (W)
Someone asked... here's a position piece edited from a previous post.
____________
Before we say anything else, it is important to point out that Wesleyans do not think baptism saves you. We do not think that baptism keeps anyone from hell or protects them from the consequences of original sin. If a person has faith, we believe it is possible to get into the kingdom of God even if you are never baptized. We believe some Quakers and Salvation Army folk will be in the kingdom of God. Similarly, we do not think that baptism guarantees in any way that a person is right with God.
So the question of infant baptism for Wesleyans is two-fold: what does baptism symbolize and what grace can baptism catalyze. But given the previous paragraph, we simply do not argue over infant baptism. It is not an issue for us as a tradition. We have some who prefer infant baptism because of its symbolism, and we have some who prefer believer's baptism because of its symbolism. But it would be silly for us to get too out of sorts about either because none of us believe that baptism saves you.
As far as grace is concerned, God can meet us most anywhere. In a sense, believer's baptism is grace "after the fact." You have already believed. You have already received the Holy Spirit as God's seal of ownership, presumably. You have already received the Spirit as a down payment guaranteeing eternal life. What grace, then, is given by baptism at that time, since the cleansing of the Spirit has already taken place? Perhaps empowerment or a strengthened assurance?
We thus understand and sympathize with those who think it is significant to be able to remember your baptism. In a Western, individualist culture, we understand the power of individual decision and the strength of being able to look back and hold on to a powerful memory in times of trouble and doubt. We also understand why this position tends to see baptism more in symbolic than sacramental terms--it is after the fact.
The symbolism of infant baptism is also quite significant, but it focuses more on your sense of belonging to a community, a family that passed its faith on to you. It is no wonder that this symbolism has resonated in cultures that are more group-oriented. For Wesleyans who practice infant baptism, it is not an assurance of ultimate salvation. It is laying a claim on the child's life for Christ. It is binding the church and parents to do everything in their power to raise up the child in the way he or she should go. Infant dedication does the same thing but it puts the child on the "outside" of the people of God, while infant baptism places them on the inside of the line (as in ancient Israel) and challenges the child never to leave.
There is some key theology at work here. Wesleyans believe that God wants everyone to be a part of the kingdom of God. We tend to believe that God gives everyone a chance to be saved, even those who have never heard. Wesleyans call it "prevenient grace," the grace that comes to us before we even know it. We do not believe God would condemn someone who was true to the "light they had" even if they did not know the name of Jesus.
So we do not believe that God will condemn young children who are not mature enough to understand. Nor do we believe he will condemn those who are mentally challenged. There are people whom God would never have condemned at any point of their entire life because they responded appropriately from the very first moment God made himself known to them.
It was thus completely in keeping with John Wesley's theology that he preferred infant baptism, and it is for this reason that Wesleyans can still baptize infants today. It is laying a claim on them for God and saying, "You are in and we will do everything we can do to help you to stay in, even though it is ultimately your choice. But we are challenging you to stay in rather than holding you symbolically 'out,' at arm's length, until you make a move."
What is the grace then that might be involved in infant baptism? Perhaps it is a grace to keep you in and a grace on those around you to catalyze it? There is a real sense in which the rise of believer's baptism corresponds to the rise of Western individualism. We are not comfortable with the group dynamics of earlier times and often don't realize that the biblical world itself was similarly group oriented.
A whole host of clarifications to Paul's theology come into play here. For example, justification by faith must be balanced out with the faithfulness of Christ and the far more prevalent sense of us being incorporated into his faith and his death. Predestination and election language in Paul is primarily focused on us as a group rather than on us as individuals. Paul can even say that an unbelieving spouse is sanctified by a believing one, including the children, even apart from the faith either of the spouse or the children themselves (1 Cor. 7).
The fact that the baptisms recorded in the New Testament are all adult baptisms doesn't settle the issue. In point of fact, 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. The NT does mention more than once that whole households were baptized--we just don't know who was in them. On the whole, the group-embedded nature of the ancient world must make us reckon with the strong possibility any children in these families would have been baptized in keeping with the family decision of the parents.
A personal relationship with God and Christ is of course essential. Every individual must confess Christ and appropriate his death if they understand the nature of things at all. But we must strongly suspect that such relationships were always embedded in the community of faith in New Testament times. In that sense they were personal, but not individual relationships with God and his Christ.
And of course infant baptism is not a Roman Catholic thing. Luther, Calvin, and Wesley all believed in and practiced infant baptism. Believer's baptism is really a result of Anabaptist influence on American Christianity in the last few hundred years, a minority voice that has really only flourished in America.
Wesleyans are free to practice baptism in any way other than one that believes the act of baptism itself saves us. We are free to baptize infants, and we are free to baptize individuals when they come to conscious faith. We are even free not to baptize at all, although the vast majority of us would agree that baptism is too powerful an act for us to miss out on.
____________
Before we say anything else, it is important to point out that Wesleyans do not think baptism saves you. We do not think that baptism keeps anyone from hell or protects them from the consequences of original sin. If a person has faith, we believe it is possible to get into the kingdom of God even if you are never baptized. We believe some Quakers and Salvation Army folk will be in the kingdom of God. Similarly, we do not think that baptism guarantees in any way that a person is right with God.
So the question of infant baptism for Wesleyans is two-fold: what does baptism symbolize and what grace can baptism catalyze. But given the previous paragraph, we simply do not argue over infant baptism. It is not an issue for us as a tradition. We have some who prefer infant baptism because of its symbolism, and we have some who prefer believer's baptism because of its symbolism. But it would be silly for us to get too out of sorts about either because none of us believe that baptism saves you.
As far as grace is concerned, God can meet us most anywhere. In a sense, believer's baptism is grace "after the fact." You have already believed. You have already received the Holy Spirit as God's seal of ownership, presumably. You have already received the Spirit as a down payment guaranteeing eternal life. What grace, then, is given by baptism at that time, since the cleansing of the Spirit has already taken place? Perhaps empowerment or a strengthened assurance?
We thus understand and sympathize with those who think it is significant to be able to remember your baptism. In a Western, individualist culture, we understand the power of individual decision and the strength of being able to look back and hold on to a powerful memory in times of trouble and doubt. We also understand why this position tends to see baptism more in symbolic than sacramental terms--it is after the fact.
The symbolism of infant baptism is also quite significant, but it focuses more on your sense of belonging to a community, a family that passed its faith on to you. It is no wonder that this symbolism has resonated in cultures that are more group-oriented. For Wesleyans who practice infant baptism, it is not an assurance of ultimate salvation. It is laying a claim on the child's life for Christ. It is binding the church and parents to do everything in their power to raise up the child in the way he or she should go. Infant dedication does the same thing but it puts the child on the "outside" of the people of God, while infant baptism places them on the inside of the line (as in ancient Israel) and challenges the child never to leave.
There is some key theology at work here. Wesleyans believe that God wants everyone to be a part of the kingdom of God. We tend to believe that God gives everyone a chance to be saved, even those who have never heard. Wesleyans call it "prevenient grace," the grace that comes to us before we even know it. We do not believe God would condemn someone who was true to the "light they had" even if they did not know the name of Jesus.
So we do not believe that God will condemn young children who are not mature enough to understand. Nor do we believe he will condemn those who are mentally challenged. There are people whom God would never have condemned at any point of their entire life because they responded appropriately from the very first moment God made himself known to them.
It was thus completely in keeping with John Wesley's theology that he preferred infant baptism, and it is for this reason that Wesleyans can still baptize infants today. It is laying a claim on them for God and saying, "You are in and we will do everything we can do to help you to stay in, even though it is ultimately your choice. But we are challenging you to stay in rather than holding you symbolically 'out,' at arm's length, until you make a move."
What is the grace then that might be involved in infant baptism? Perhaps it is a grace to keep you in and a grace on those around you to catalyze it? There is a real sense in which the rise of believer's baptism corresponds to the rise of Western individualism. We are not comfortable with the group dynamics of earlier times and often don't realize that the biblical world itself was similarly group oriented.
A whole host of clarifications to Paul's theology come into play here. For example, justification by faith must be balanced out with the faithfulness of Christ and the far more prevalent sense of us being incorporated into his faith and his death. Predestination and election language in Paul is primarily focused on us as a group rather than on us as individuals. Paul can even say that an unbelieving spouse is sanctified by a believing one, including the children, even apart from the faith either of the spouse or the children themselves (1 Cor. 7).
The fact that the baptisms recorded in the New Testament are all adult baptisms doesn't settle the issue. In point of fact, 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. The NT does mention more than once that whole households were baptized--we just don't know who was in them. On the whole, the group-embedded nature of the ancient world must make us reckon with the strong possibility any children in these families would have been baptized in keeping with the family decision of the parents.
A personal relationship with God and Christ is of course essential. Every individual must confess Christ and appropriate his death if they understand the nature of things at all. But we must strongly suspect that such relationships were always embedded in the community of faith in New Testament times. In that sense they were personal, but not individual relationships with God and his Christ.
And of course infant baptism is not a Roman Catholic thing. Luther, Calvin, and Wesley all believed in and practiced infant baptism. Believer's baptism is really a result of Anabaptist influence on American Christianity in the last few hundred years, a minority voice that has really only flourished in America.
Wesleyans are free to practice baptism in any way other than one that believes the act of baptism itself saves us. We are free to baptize infants, and we are free to baptize individuals when they come to conscious faith. We are even free not to baptize at all, although the vast majority of us would agree that baptism is too powerful an act for us to miss out on.
Monday, April 06, 2009
2.2 Getting In: The Holy Spirit
Here is the second section of a sample chapter for a possible proposal I'm thinking of making, Generous Ecclesiology.
________
So baptism in water was the most concrete way of telling whether a person was presumed “in” or “out” of the early church. Certainly attendance at a local assembly of believers pointed in this direction as well, although we can imagine un-baptized individuals being present in a local “church” who would not yet have been considered fully “in.” However, at the same time that baptism played this visible role, the early church soon conceptualized an even more important, underlying element in the entrance equation. What about someone who did not believe Jesus was the messiah but who had been baptized by John the Baptist? Were they “in” or “out”? At some point, at least some Christians came to conclude that such individuals were “out,” even though they were baptized almost exactly like the followers of Jesus. The difference was that these individuals did not have the Holy Spirit, which only could come through Jesus, not John the Baptist.
The portrayal of the Day of Pentecost in Acts 2 gives us an excellent picture of this understanding. The disciples have been told to wait in Jerusalem for the promised coming of the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:4-5). John the Baptist baptized in water, but Jesus will baptize with Holy Spirit (Luke 3:16).[i] So on the Day of Pentecost, those who have believed in Jesus’ resurrection are gathered together and are “filled” with the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:1-4), also called receiving the Spirit (2:38) or being “baptized” with the Holy Spirit (1:5). In Luke-Acts, this event is part of the commencement of the “last days” foretold by the prophet Joel, the age at the end of which God would restore Israel and establish his kingdom once and for all (e.g., Luke 1:68; 21:24).
Throughout the book of Acts, the coming of the Holy Spirit is the essential moment in “conversion,” as we have seen, more crucial even than baptism. If we are to use this word, conversion, we must make it very clear that—at least in the case of Jewish “converts”—we are not speaking of a change from one religion to another. When we speak of “conversion” to the Way or into the body of Jesus followers, we are talking about joining a group that understood itself as nothing other than the truest people of Israel. Ethnic Israel and its basic categories remained the foundation on which the house of God’s “elect,” his “last days” kingdom people, was built. When Paul speaks of the Gentiles coming “in” to God’s people, he thinks of them being grafted into a tree whose natural branches remain ethnic Israel (cf. Rom. 11:17-24).
Nevertheless, as we keep these things in mind, the Holy Spirit is clearly the key element of conversion in Acts, whether one is a Jew or a Gentile. Two incidents we mentioned in the first part of the chapter make the point clear. In Acts 8, some Samaritans have believed and have been baptized, but they have not yet received the Holy Spirit (8:14-17). Peter and John lay hands on them so that they will receive this most crucial element in conversion. In the thought world of Acts, it does not matter that they have been baptized, indeed that they already believe (8:12-13). They are not “in” because they have not received the Spirit. Similarly, in Acts 10, the question of whether Cornelius and the Gentiles with him can be included in God’s people and baptized is made moot by the fact that God has already poured out the Holy Spirit on them. The question of the ritual act is settled by the fact that the reality it signifies has already taken place (cf. Acts 15:8-9).
When we move beyond the presentation of Luke-Acts, we find a very similar theology of the Holy Spirit in relation to becoming a true “child of God” and a true member of God’s people. Paul does not consider anyone—Jew or Gentile—to be one of the elect, a true descendant of Abraham, part of the body of Christ and a member of God’s true Israel, unless they have the Spirit. “If someone does not have the Spirit of Christ, this person does not belong to him” (Rom. 8:9). “As many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God” (8:14). “You have received the Spirit of adoption, by which we cry, ‘Abba, Father’” (8:15).
Similarly, Paul speaks of the Holy Spirit as the arrabōn of what is to come, God’s “seal” on us that shows he is our owner (2 Cor. 1:22; 5:5; cf. Eph. 1:13-14). An arrabōn was like the earnest money someone puts down on a house. It is both a guarantee that makes it clear you are going to buy the house and a deposit toward buying the house. The sense is thus that the Holy Spirit is both a guarantee that believers will receive the inheritance of the kingdom, while providing a spiritual deposit of what that kingdom will be like. When we compare what Paul has to say about the Spirit with what he has to say in his writings about water baptism, there is simply no comparison. The Spirit is the primary element.
The anonymous book of Hebrews similarly presupposes that true membership among the descendants of Abraham (cf. 2:16) entails partaking and tasting of the Holy Spirit (6:4-5). We should not think of such tasting as merely dabbling any more than Jesus “tasting” death was a mere flirtation with death (2:9). As problematic as Hebrews 6:4-8 may be to us, we can be sure that Hebrews understands those who fall away at one time to have been full members of God’s people.
But what did this experience look like, and what would it then look like today? In Acts, the coming of the Spirit is frequently depicted in dramatic terms, with miracles and tongues often accompanying. Paul and Hebrews also imply that wonders often served as ratification of the Spirit’s presence (e.g., Gal. 3:1-5; 2 Cor. 12:12; Heb. 2:4). Are we to think, though, that everyone in the early church who was understood to have the Spirit experienced some dramatic manifestation of the Spirit’s coming? It does not seem likely. While we hear of many dramatic conversions, the New Testament is silent about such manifestations in relation to the vast majority of the early believers. Paul speaks of the Spirit witnessing with our Spirit that we are children of God (Rom. 8:16), which might imply only a calm sense of assurance.
When we ask today, almost two thousand years later, what receiving the Spirit might look like, at first the answer seems straightforward. Regardless of when you were baptized, you receive the Spirit after you repent of your sins and confess faith in Jesus as Lord. Thereafter the Spirit “fills” you—as God sees fit.[ii] Acts 2:38 captures this sense well when Peter tells the crowd on the Day of Pentecost, “Repent and let each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”
Although it is probably fair to say that most Christian traditions do not focus much on the Holy Spirit at all, we still find significant disagreements among different Christian groups on their official positions. For example, perhaps most Christian traditions associate the timing of the Spirit with the timing of baptism more closely than we would argue the New Testament would necessarily warrant. Although in many respects they are on opposite ends of the church spectrum, both the Roman Catholic Church and some forms of the Christian Church would so associate baptism with receiving the Spirit that one’s salvation is in deep trouble without it. The first baptizes infants, the second only adults, but both see baptism as essential to receiving the Spirit to where the soul of an un-baptized person is in serious danger regardless of any confession of faith they might have made.
The United Pentecostal Church is a fascinating example of a group that sees baptism as essential to getting in and links receiving the Spirit closely with baptism. But its real uniqueness comes in that it considers speaking in tongues the sign that a person has received the Spirit and insists that baptism can only take place in the name of Jesus alone, since this group does not believe in the Trinity. Thus a person who does not speak in tongues or who has not been baptized in this way has a dubious claim to be a Christian. Other Pentecostal and holiness groups have considered the Day of Pentecost a model not for conversion but for a second experience as a Christian. But even these groups usually have a place for receiving the Spirit in some sense at conversion as well.
The question of those Christian groups that baptize infants is a tricky one as well. Such groups usually associate receiving the Spirit officially with baptism, even though the child is obviously unable to make a confession of faith or repentance. Although the first impression of many is simply to dismiss this idea out of hand, we remember that in Luke 1:15 John the Baptist is filled with the Spirit even before he is born. Luke-Acts makes no clear distinction between this filling with the Spirit and the baptism with the Spirit in Acts 2. The clear implication is that the author of Luke does not see repentance and confession necessary for an unborn child to be filled with the Spirit. We thus cannot make a clear theological objection to the idea that baptized infants might receive the Spirit at that time, at least not biblically. Certainly it is biblical to expect that such a person will also need to appropriate Christ as Lord and as their means of atonement later in life.
When the smoke clears from the disagreements between different Christian traditions, we are still left with potential common ground. On the one hand, the absolute necessity that a person have the Holy Spirit in order to belong to God’s people remains. We also find the strong common sense of Christendom and the Bible that receiving the Holy Spirit is closely associated with baptism. It is appropriate for us to maintain this association as long as we do not insist that a person must be baptized to receive the Holy Spirit and recognize the need for a person to maintain the presence of the Holy Spirit to the end of one’s life. Whether a person was baptized as an infant or adult, the Spirit must nevertheless be present till death if one is to be "saved."
[i] The Gospel of John preserves this same thinking when Jesus says, “If I go away, I will send him [the Holy Spirit] to you” (John 16:7-11).
[ii] We remember that at Samaria the Spirit filling was not immediate and, theologically, we probably want to give God the final say as to when a person actually receives the Spirit, rather than making conversion a matter of some formula that we as mortals can effect whenever we want.
________
So baptism in water was the most concrete way of telling whether a person was presumed “in” or “out” of the early church. Certainly attendance at a local assembly of believers pointed in this direction as well, although we can imagine un-baptized individuals being present in a local “church” who would not yet have been considered fully “in.” However, at the same time that baptism played this visible role, the early church soon conceptualized an even more important, underlying element in the entrance equation. What about someone who did not believe Jesus was the messiah but who had been baptized by John the Baptist? Were they “in” or “out”? At some point, at least some Christians came to conclude that such individuals were “out,” even though they were baptized almost exactly like the followers of Jesus. The difference was that these individuals did not have the Holy Spirit, which only could come through Jesus, not John the Baptist.
The portrayal of the Day of Pentecost in Acts 2 gives us an excellent picture of this understanding. The disciples have been told to wait in Jerusalem for the promised coming of the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:4-5). John the Baptist baptized in water, but Jesus will baptize with Holy Spirit (Luke 3:16).[i] So on the Day of Pentecost, those who have believed in Jesus’ resurrection are gathered together and are “filled” with the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:1-4), also called receiving the Spirit (2:38) or being “baptized” with the Holy Spirit (1:5). In Luke-Acts, this event is part of the commencement of the “last days” foretold by the prophet Joel, the age at the end of which God would restore Israel and establish his kingdom once and for all (e.g., Luke 1:68; 21:24).
Throughout the book of Acts, the coming of the Holy Spirit is the essential moment in “conversion,” as we have seen, more crucial even than baptism. If we are to use this word, conversion, we must make it very clear that—at least in the case of Jewish “converts”—we are not speaking of a change from one religion to another. When we speak of “conversion” to the Way or into the body of Jesus followers, we are talking about joining a group that understood itself as nothing other than the truest people of Israel. Ethnic Israel and its basic categories remained the foundation on which the house of God’s “elect,” his “last days” kingdom people, was built. When Paul speaks of the Gentiles coming “in” to God’s people, he thinks of them being grafted into a tree whose natural branches remain ethnic Israel (cf. Rom. 11:17-24).
Nevertheless, as we keep these things in mind, the Holy Spirit is clearly the key element of conversion in Acts, whether one is a Jew or a Gentile. Two incidents we mentioned in the first part of the chapter make the point clear. In Acts 8, some Samaritans have believed and have been baptized, but they have not yet received the Holy Spirit (8:14-17). Peter and John lay hands on them so that they will receive this most crucial element in conversion. In the thought world of Acts, it does not matter that they have been baptized, indeed that they already believe (8:12-13). They are not “in” because they have not received the Spirit. Similarly, in Acts 10, the question of whether Cornelius and the Gentiles with him can be included in God’s people and baptized is made moot by the fact that God has already poured out the Holy Spirit on them. The question of the ritual act is settled by the fact that the reality it signifies has already taken place (cf. Acts 15:8-9).
When we move beyond the presentation of Luke-Acts, we find a very similar theology of the Holy Spirit in relation to becoming a true “child of God” and a true member of God’s people. Paul does not consider anyone—Jew or Gentile—to be one of the elect, a true descendant of Abraham, part of the body of Christ and a member of God’s true Israel, unless they have the Spirit. “If someone does not have the Spirit of Christ, this person does not belong to him” (Rom. 8:9). “As many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God” (8:14). “You have received the Spirit of adoption, by which we cry, ‘Abba, Father’” (8:15).
Similarly, Paul speaks of the Holy Spirit as the arrabōn of what is to come, God’s “seal” on us that shows he is our owner (2 Cor. 1:22; 5:5; cf. Eph. 1:13-14). An arrabōn was like the earnest money someone puts down on a house. It is both a guarantee that makes it clear you are going to buy the house and a deposit toward buying the house. The sense is thus that the Holy Spirit is both a guarantee that believers will receive the inheritance of the kingdom, while providing a spiritual deposit of what that kingdom will be like. When we compare what Paul has to say about the Spirit with what he has to say in his writings about water baptism, there is simply no comparison. The Spirit is the primary element.
The anonymous book of Hebrews similarly presupposes that true membership among the descendants of Abraham (cf. 2:16) entails partaking and tasting of the Holy Spirit (6:4-5). We should not think of such tasting as merely dabbling any more than Jesus “tasting” death was a mere flirtation with death (2:9). As problematic as Hebrews 6:4-8 may be to us, we can be sure that Hebrews understands those who fall away at one time to have been full members of God’s people.
But what did this experience look like, and what would it then look like today? In Acts, the coming of the Spirit is frequently depicted in dramatic terms, with miracles and tongues often accompanying. Paul and Hebrews also imply that wonders often served as ratification of the Spirit’s presence (e.g., Gal. 3:1-5; 2 Cor. 12:12; Heb. 2:4). Are we to think, though, that everyone in the early church who was understood to have the Spirit experienced some dramatic manifestation of the Spirit’s coming? It does not seem likely. While we hear of many dramatic conversions, the New Testament is silent about such manifestations in relation to the vast majority of the early believers. Paul speaks of the Spirit witnessing with our Spirit that we are children of God (Rom. 8:16), which might imply only a calm sense of assurance.
When we ask today, almost two thousand years later, what receiving the Spirit might look like, at first the answer seems straightforward. Regardless of when you were baptized, you receive the Spirit after you repent of your sins and confess faith in Jesus as Lord. Thereafter the Spirit “fills” you—as God sees fit.[ii] Acts 2:38 captures this sense well when Peter tells the crowd on the Day of Pentecost, “Repent and let each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”
Although it is probably fair to say that most Christian traditions do not focus much on the Holy Spirit at all, we still find significant disagreements among different Christian groups on their official positions. For example, perhaps most Christian traditions associate the timing of the Spirit with the timing of baptism more closely than we would argue the New Testament would necessarily warrant. Although in many respects they are on opposite ends of the church spectrum, both the Roman Catholic Church and some forms of the Christian Church would so associate baptism with receiving the Spirit that one’s salvation is in deep trouble without it. The first baptizes infants, the second only adults, but both see baptism as essential to receiving the Spirit to where the soul of an un-baptized person is in serious danger regardless of any confession of faith they might have made.
The United Pentecostal Church is a fascinating example of a group that sees baptism as essential to getting in and links receiving the Spirit closely with baptism. But its real uniqueness comes in that it considers speaking in tongues the sign that a person has received the Spirit and insists that baptism can only take place in the name of Jesus alone, since this group does not believe in the Trinity. Thus a person who does not speak in tongues or who has not been baptized in this way has a dubious claim to be a Christian. Other Pentecostal and holiness groups have considered the Day of Pentecost a model not for conversion but for a second experience as a Christian. But even these groups usually have a place for receiving the Spirit in some sense at conversion as well.
The question of those Christian groups that baptize infants is a tricky one as well. Such groups usually associate receiving the Spirit officially with baptism, even though the child is obviously unable to make a confession of faith or repentance. Although the first impression of many is simply to dismiss this idea out of hand, we remember that in Luke 1:15 John the Baptist is filled with the Spirit even before he is born. Luke-Acts makes no clear distinction between this filling with the Spirit and the baptism with the Spirit in Acts 2. The clear implication is that the author of Luke does not see repentance and confession necessary for an unborn child to be filled with the Spirit. We thus cannot make a clear theological objection to the idea that baptized infants might receive the Spirit at that time, at least not biblically. Certainly it is biblical to expect that such a person will also need to appropriate Christ as Lord and as their means of atonement later in life.
When the smoke clears from the disagreements between different Christian traditions, we are still left with potential common ground. On the one hand, the absolute necessity that a person have the Holy Spirit in order to belong to God’s people remains. We also find the strong common sense of Christendom and the Bible that receiving the Holy Spirit is closely associated with baptism. It is appropriate for us to maintain this association as long as we do not insist that a person must be baptized to receive the Holy Spirit and recognize the need for a person to maintain the presence of the Holy Spirit to the end of one’s life. Whether a person was baptized as an infant or adult, the Spirit must nevertheless be present till death if one is to be "saved."
[i] The Gospel of John preserves this same thinking when Jesus says, “If I go away, I will send him [the Holy Spirit] to you” (John 16:7-11).
[ii] We remember that at Samaria the Spirit filling was not immediate and, theologically, we probably want to give God the final say as to when a person actually receives the Spirit, rather than making conversion a matter of some formula that we as mortals can effect whenever we want.
Friday, April 03, 2009
2.1 Getting In: Baptism
If I were to write A Generous Ecclesiology, here is what I picture as the first section of chapter 2, "Getting In: Baptism and Other Things":
We have every reason to believe that baptism in water was the most concrete way among the early Christians to tell whether a person belonged to “the Way” or not. “The Way” was apparently one of the earliest designations for the Jesus movement (e.g., Acts 9:2), although it is at least possible that some Jews considered themselves followers of the Way without specifically believing that Jesus was indeed the Jewish messiah. We at least wonder about this possibility because John the Baptist apparently preached “the way of the Lord” in conjunction with his baptism, and we find hints in the book of Acts and the Gospel of John that there were Way followers of the Baptist’s sort who were not Jesus followers.
It may be worthwhile to flesh out this idea just a little. We hear of an incident at the city of Ephesus in Acts 19 where there were followers of the teaching of John the Baptist who had been baptized accordingly (19:1-7).[i] In the story of Acts, Paul does not consider this baptism sufficient to be “in” the Christian group. He has them baptized again in the name of Jesus and they receive the Holy Spirit. Similarly, the Gospel of John portrays Jesus’ interaction with John the Baptist in such a way as to make it clear that Jesus’ presence immediately made that of John the Baptist obsolete (e.g., 3:30). The Gospel does not even mention that Jesus was baptized by John, and it alone has Jesus ministering at the same time as John the Baptist was still baptizing (3:22-24).[ii]
A very plausible explanation of these things is that, at the very first, baptism of the sort John the Baptist practiced was sufficient to be a part of the Jesus movement. Some followers of “the way of the Lord” came to believe that Jesus was in fact the messiah John the Baptist had foretold. At the same time, others may not have been convinced or may have lived in the Diaspora where they had only heard of the Baptist’s message. For example, we have no evidence that any of the twelve disciples were ever re-baptized in the name of Jesus, while they presumably were baptized as part of John’s movement. In time, however, it may have become more and more necessary to distinguish the baptism of John the Baptist from baptism in the name of Jesus.
If we are to follow the book of Acts, baptism took place as soon as a person believed. The story of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8 is perhaps the best illustration. As soon as the Ethiopian believed, he thinks of baptism and suggests he be baptized in water immediately (8:36). The clear impression we get is that Philip presented water baptism as a very important element in the process of getting “in” the Christian group and that it was the next step in the process, if not the first.
At the same time, we have no clear evidence that the early Christians were obsessed with baptism. For example, the book of Acts focuses far more on receiving the Holy Spirit as the key element of the “entry process” far more than baptism. The baptism of Simon Magus and the Samaritans was insignificant because they had not received the Spirit (Acts 8:9-17). Meanwhile, baptism is a kind of “after the fact” recognition of something the Holy Spirit has already done for Cornelius in Acts 10:47. Paul strangely baptized only two or three households in the church of Corinth (1 Cor. 1:14-17), making us wonder who baptized the others. He almost trivializes the act when he says that "Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the good news" (1 Cor. 1:17). We get the impression that, as central and important as the act of baptism apparently was in some parts of the early church, it represented something else that was more significant than the act itself.
When we move from the early church to the variety of practices among Christians today, we need to keep several things in mind that we mentioned in the first chapter. For example, it is not clear that we have to do everything in exactly the same way that the earliest Christians did. Indeed, there was some variety of practice among the early Christians themselves. Similarly, we do not want to get certain practices out of focus by making various elements in the equation more significant than they were.
Did the earliest Christians baptize by immersion? It is quite possible that they did. The baptismal pools (miqvaot) in Palestine at the time certainly were large enough for immersion. Paul’s comment about being “buried” with Christ in baptism would not have to refer to immersion in water (Rom. 6:4), but it would be particularly meaningful if it did. Yet we are really reading between the lines here.
If baptism by immersion were really as important to God for the later church as some groups make it, we might have expected God to inspire some statement to that effect in Scripture. The early Christian writing called the Didache is very practical about the matter. If cold, running water is available, baptize in it. If not, then in warm water. In a pinch, though, pour water over the head. The key is that a person be baptized—not how a person is baptized. The evidence from the early church gives us no basis to be rigid about how baptism must take place.
Those groups that emphasize baptism as soon as possible after believing in Christ seem to come closest to the original idea of baptism as a concrete embodiment of what God was doing or had done in relation to a person’s sins. However, the New Testament never teaches that it is the act of baptism itself that “saves” a person. It is true that 1 Peter 3:21 speaks of baptism “saving” believers, but this is a figure of speech.[iii] 1 Peter 3 itself indicates that it is not the physical washing but the cleansing of sins that is the operative element in the equation. So while those churches that do not baptize immediately vary somewhat from the practice of the early church, it is not clear that we can condemn their practice for that reason.
More problematic are those groups that do not baptize at all (e.g., Quakers, Salvation Army). These groups represent the working out of the Protestant rejection of "empty ritualism" to its furthest extreme. Of course we find an increasing recognition today that ritual is quite often far from an empty activity, indeed that in many respects it relates to aspects of the human psyche that go much deeper than surface level thoughts or ideas. Nevertheless, what can we say to our Christian brothers and sisters who seem to have abandoned one of the central elements of early Christian conversion?
We can probably say that while they are missing a potentially powerful moment in Christian life with a heritage going back not least to Jesus, they correctly understand that the essence of being “in” is something deeper than the act of baptism. Following through with the character of God as we believe it to be, we believe that God will indeed accept these brothers and sisters because, like the uncircumcised and un-baptized Cornelius of Acts 10, they have received the Holy Spirit.
The question of infant baptism also requires us to go beyond any clear statement in the New Testament either in favor or against. It is true that all the explicit evidence of the New Testament describes the baptism of adults, all of whom presumably repent and confess faith in the Lordship of Jesus as Christ prior to baptism. At the same time, we are never told that the children of households whose fathers or mothers confess faith were not baptized. Individuals in the ancient Mediterranean formulated their identities more in terms of the groups to which they belonged than as a function of their individual decisions. It is at least conceivable that a father or mother would decide for their child (cf. Acts 16:15, 33; 1 Cor. 7:14). We have no evidence that can be decisive either way.
What we find is that while the practices of some Christian groups today are closer or farther from early Christian practice, we have no basis to exclude any group from the church because of how they do or do not baptize. We also may believe ourselves to have a good basis to critique the theology behind certain baptismal practices. But as we suggested in the first chapter, God is much more concerned with our hearts and how they lead to life than with the particulars of what we think.
So some groups baptize one way and other groups another way. From the standpoint of the New Testament, it is not an issue. Some groups baptize soon after confessing faith. Some wait some time. Some baptize infants. Some do not baptize at all. Since it is not the baptism in water that actually saves us, these are not issues that should be central to our faith. Each practice seems to have strengths, and each seems to have weaknesses. Those who do not baptize their children create a climate in which those whom God already accepts are not symbolically “in” the church. Their bodies are in the church, but they are like outsiders in our midst. Those who are baptized as children miss out on the power of remembering their baptismal experience.
Those who do not baptize at all miss out on the power of the act and on communion with the saints all the way back to Jesus. At the same time, they are perhaps more conscious than many of the need for an individual interaction with God in repentance and faith. Those who put too much emphasis on the act of water baptism itself may thereby forget the spiritual reality that is what it is ultimately all about. Those that delay baptism until a person can be fully informed of the faith to which they are assenting have the strength of a baptism that takes place with a fullness of understanding.
We will never convert all the Christians who do it differently to agree with us. But it is not necessary for us to try. Baptism is an issue about which we can be generous in our ecclesiology. We may disagree, but the person who argues to the death over such things is far more likely to miss out on the kingdom for their attitude than the person who perhaps baptizes differently from the early church or from the common practice of the later church.
[i] Apollos also in Acts 18:24-26 is someone who had believed in John the Baptist’s message but was apparently not acquainted with the Jesus movement that grew out of John’s ministry.
[ii] In this respect it is interesting to observe that the Gospel of John is traditionally associated with Ephesus, where Acts mentions followers of John the Baptist. It seems quite possible that the city of Ephesus was home to members of the Baptist’s movement who were not Jesus followers.
[iii] It is a metonymy, when something closely associated with something is substituted for it. If someone is known for a certain hat and I say, “Here comes the hat,” the hat substitutes for the person with which it is closely associated. Baptism is thus so closely associated with the actual cleansing of a person’s sins that it is substituted for the cleansing itself.
We have every reason to believe that baptism in water was the most concrete way among the early Christians to tell whether a person belonged to “the Way” or not. “The Way” was apparently one of the earliest designations for the Jesus movement (e.g., Acts 9:2), although it is at least possible that some Jews considered themselves followers of the Way without specifically believing that Jesus was indeed the Jewish messiah. We at least wonder about this possibility because John the Baptist apparently preached “the way of the Lord” in conjunction with his baptism, and we find hints in the book of Acts and the Gospel of John that there were Way followers of the Baptist’s sort who were not Jesus followers.
It may be worthwhile to flesh out this idea just a little. We hear of an incident at the city of Ephesus in Acts 19 where there were followers of the teaching of John the Baptist who had been baptized accordingly (19:1-7).[i] In the story of Acts, Paul does not consider this baptism sufficient to be “in” the Christian group. He has them baptized again in the name of Jesus and they receive the Holy Spirit. Similarly, the Gospel of John portrays Jesus’ interaction with John the Baptist in such a way as to make it clear that Jesus’ presence immediately made that of John the Baptist obsolete (e.g., 3:30). The Gospel does not even mention that Jesus was baptized by John, and it alone has Jesus ministering at the same time as John the Baptist was still baptizing (3:22-24).[ii]
A very plausible explanation of these things is that, at the very first, baptism of the sort John the Baptist practiced was sufficient to be a part of the Jesus movement. Some followers of “the way of the Lord” came to believe that Jesus was in fact the messiah John the Baptist had foretold. At the same time, others may not have been convinced or may have lived in the Diaspora where they had only heard of the Baptist’s message. For example, we have no evidence that any of the twelve disciples were ever re-baptized in the name of Jesus, while they presumably were baptized as part of John’s movement. In time, however, it may have become more and more necessary to distinguish the baptism of John the Baptist from baptism in the name of Jesus.
If we are to follow the book of Acts, baptism took place as soon as a person believed. The story of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8 is perhaps the best illustration. As soon as the Ethiopian believed, he thinks of baptism and suggests he be baptized in water immediately (8:36). The clear impression we get is that Philip presented water baptism as a very important element in the process of getting “in” the Christian group and that it was the next step in the process, if not the first.
At the same time, we have no clear evidence that the early Christians were obsessed with baptism. For example, the book of Acts focuses far more on receiving the Holy Spirit as the key element of the “entry process” far more than baptism. The baptism of Simon Magus and the Samaritans was insignificant because they had not received the Spirit (Acts 8:9-17). Meanwhile, baptism is a kind of “after the fact” recognition of something the Holy Spirit has already done for Cornelius in Acts 10:47. Paul strangely baptized only two or three households in the church of Corinth (1 Cor. 1:14-17), making us wonder who baptized the others. He almost trivializes the act when he says that "Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the good news" (1 Cor. 1:17). We get the impression that, as central and important as the act of baptism apparently was in some parts of the early church, it represented something else that was more significant than the act itself.
When we move from the early church to the variety of practices among Christians today, we need to keep several things in mind that we mentioned in the first chapter. For example, it is not clear that we have to do everything in exactly the same way that the earliest Christians did. Indeed, there was some variety of practice among the early Christians themselves. Similarly, we do not want to get certain practices out of focus by making various elements in the equation more significant than they were.
Did the earliest Christians baptize by immersion? It is quite possible that they did. The baptismal pools (miqvaot) in Palestine at the time certainly were large enough for immersion. Paul’s comment about being “buried” with Christ in baptism would not have to refer to immersion in water (Rom. 6:4), but it would be particularly meaningful if it did. Yet we are really reading between the lines here.
If baptism by immersion were really as important to God for the later church as some groups make it, we might have expected God to inspire some statement to that effect in Scripture. The early Christian writing called the Didache is very practical about the matter. If cold, running water is available, baptize in it. If not, then in warm water. In a pinch, though, pour water over the head. The key is that a person be baptized—not how a person is baptized. The evidence from the early church gives us no basis to be rigid about how baptism must take place.
Those groups that emphasize baptism as soon as possible after believing in Christ seem to come closest to the original idea of baptism as a concrete embodiment of what God was doing or had done in relation to a person’s sins. However, the New Testament never teaches that it is the act of baptism itself that “saves” a person. It is true that 1 Peter 3:21 speaks of baptism “saving” believers, but this is a figure of speech.[iii] 1 Peter 3 itself indicates that it is not the physical washing but the cleansing of sins that is the operative element in the equation. So while those churches that do not baptize immediately vary somewhat from the practice of the early church, it is not clear that we can condemn their practice for that reason.
More problematic are those groups that do not baptize at all (e.g., Quakers, Salvation Army). These groups represent the working out of the Protestant rejection of "empty ritualism" to its furthest extreme. Of course we find an increasing recognition today that ritual is quite often far from an empty activity, indeed that in many respects it relates to aspects of the human psyche that go much deeper than surface level thoughts or ideas. Nevertheless, what can we say to our Christian brothers and sisters who seem to have abandoned one of the central elements of early Christian conversion?
We can probably say that while they are missing a potentially powerful moment in Christian life with a heritage going back not least to Jesus, they correctly understand that the essence of being “in” is something deeper than the act of baptism. Following through with the character of God as we believe it to be, we believe that God will indeed accept these brothers and sisters because, like the uncircumcised and un-baptized Cornelius of Acts 10, they have received the Holy Spirit.
The question of infant baptism also requires us to go beyond any clear statement in the New Testament either in favor or against. It is true that all the explicit evidence of the New Testament describes the baptism of adults, all of whom presumably repent and confess faith in the Lordship of Jesus as Christ prior to baptism. At the same time, we are never told that the children of households whose fathers or mothers confess faith were not baptized. Individuals in the ancient Mediterranean formulated their identities more in terms of the groups to which they belonged than as a function of their individual decisions. It is at least conceivable that a father or mother would decide for their child (cf. Acts 16:15, 33; 1 Cor. 7:14). We have no evidence that can be decisive either way.
What we find is that while the practices of some Christian groups today are closer or farther from early Christian practice, we have no basis to exclude any group from the church because of how they do or do not baptize. We also may believe ourselves to have a good basis to critique the theology behind certain baptismal practices. But as we suggested in the first chapter, God is much more concerned with our hearts and how they lead to life than with the particulars of what we think.
So some groups baptize one way and other groups another way. From the standpoint of the New Testament, it is not an issue. Some groups baptize soon after confessing faith. Some wait some time. Some baptize infants. Some do not baptize at all. Since it is not the baptism in water that actually saves us, these are not issues that should be central to our faith. Each practice seems to have strengths, and each seems to have weaknesses. Those who do not baptize their children create a climate in which those whom God already accepts are not symbolically “in” the church. Their bodies are in the church, but they are like outsiders in our midst. Those who are baptized as children miss out on the power of remembering their baptismal experience.
Those who do not baptize at all miss out on the power of the act and on communion with the saints all the way back to Jesus. At the same time, they are perhaps more conscious than many of the need for an individual interaction with God in repentance and faith. Those who put too much emphasis on the act of water baptism itself may thereby forget the spiritual reality that is what it is ultimately all about. Those that delay baptism until a person can be fully informed of the faith to which they are assenting have the strength of a baptism that takes place with a fullness of understanding.
We will never convert all the Christians who do it differently to agree with us. But it is not necessary for us to try. Baptism is an issue about which we can be generous in our ecclesiology. We may disagree, but the person who argues to the death over such things is far more likely to miss out on the kingdom for their attitude than the person who perhaps baptizes differently from the early church or from the common practice of the later church.
[i] Apollos also in Acts 18:24-26 is someone who had believed in John the Baptist’s message but was apparently not acquainted with the Jesus movement that grew out of John’s ministry.
[ii] In this respect it is interesting to observe that the Gospel of John is traditionally associated with Ephesus, where Acts mentions followers of John the Baptist. It seems quite possible that the city of Ephesus was home to members of the Baptist’s movement who were not Jesus followers.
[iii] It is a metonymy, when something closely associated with something is substituted for it. If someone is known for a certain hat and I say, “Here comes the hat,” the hat substitutes for the person with which it is closely associated. Baptism is thus so closely associated with the actual cleansing of a person’s sins that it is substituted for the cleansing itself.
Monday, August 11, 2008
5 Infants Baptized Sunday at College Wesleyan...
... well, actually the words Pastor Deneff used were, "I dedicate you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit." But he sprinkled them with water each time and the admonition he gave was practically the same as what you would give to the parents of a child being baptized. The difference between what we did and an infant baptism was one word!
Pastor Judy even hinted that there was something sacramental to the action! Dedication, the eighth sacrament!
So here were some of the thoughts going through my head.
1. Did he give them the option to call it a baptism instead of a dedication, if they preferred? Shame on him if he didn't.
2. Does God view it as a baptism? I have a suspicion he did.
3. Will these children be baptized again? Probably, if they stay Wesleyan.
4. Should they be baptized again? Not sure, especially since he used the word dedicate. I personally don't think God cares much one way or another.
5. Most Wesleyans are Philistines. OK, not nice, but that was one of the thoughts that went through my head. Infant baptism has been the practice of Christianity from about the time we voted in the Trinity to Luther, Calvin, and Wesley--yes, they all baptized infants. Most Wesleyans haven't a clue where they came from or why they think the way they do.
6. Did the New Testament church baptize infants? Not sure. The baptisms in the NT aren't of people who were born into Christian families, so there is hardly any relevant data. We have talk of whole households being baptized in Acts, which I have a hunch at least meant children down to a very young age even before "accountability."
Like it or not, the ancient world was a group culture and the father's decision would more often than not have been the decision for the whole family. We are individualists; they weren't.
1 Corinthians 7 says that the children of an intact marriage in which one spouse is a believer are holy. That means they were "in" whether they were baptized or not.
7. Did Paul think unholy children would be destroyed on the Day of the Lord? Strangely, I found myself thinking that he might very well think that, even though we as Christians today rightly do not. He doesn't mention hell in any of his writings (there are only a couple allusions to the judgment of the dead, one in 2 Timothy 2), so I'm not suggesting he thought they would go to hell.
This led my mind off on a hermeneutical tangent. Paul's writings--Scripture per se--have nothing to say about hell. What, then, if Paul himself didn't have any understanding of hell? It is not Paul himself who is inspired, as if every thought he ever had was Scripture. It is presumably what made it to the biblical page that was inspired, and nothing on this subject made it to the page from him.
Yet does some of the rationale behind what Paul wrote--that didn't make it to the biblical page--have to be inspired as well? In other words, what if Paul writes something that is inspired on the page but he writes it because of uninspired reasoning in his head? Is that possible?
In fact, the point of commonality between the Christian understanding of texts and Paul's original understanding of his texts is the text itself. Is it the Christian understanding of those texts that is ultimately most inspired for us more than Paul's surrounding thoughts?
8. How necessary would Paul have seen baptism of infants for their salvation?
Not sure. I wonder if it wouldn't have been as essential to him as it is to us.
Augustine had a highly developed sense of original sin and infant baptism for him took care of the sin of Adam. I highly doubt Paul would have thought anything of the sort. It is not without reason that Augustine is sometimes called the "first modern man" for his rather individualistic focus.
I suspect sin for Paul was much more general and corporate in focus and much less individualistic. We note that words like forgiveness and repentance barely even appear in Paul's writings. Baptism for him, I think, was not about some mathematical obligation regarding atonement but primarily about incorporation into Christ and death to the power of Sin written large.
I personally prefer infant baptism because it is the strongest way of saying "This child is holy. This child belongs to the people of God." And it does. I personally would go against church tradition and let all the children of the congregation take communion, if it were up to me (and it isn't). On this one I do feel confident that I know what the New Testament church did.
There are people out there who would have gone to be with the Lord at every moment of their existence. They would have as children, and they confessed faith the very first moment they realized they needed to. They could have died at any moment of their life and been "saved."
So why symbolically locate them outside the church for their first years. They are in!
Pastor Judy even hinted that there was something sacramental to the action! Dedication, the eighth sacrament!
So here were some of the thoughts going through my head.
1. Did he give them the option to call it a baptism instead of a dedication, if they preferred? Shame on him if he didn't.
2. Does God view it as a baptism? I have a suspicion he did.
3. Will these children be baptized again? Probably, if they stay Wesleyan.
4. Should they be baptized again? Not sure, especially since he used the word dedicate. I personally don't think God cares much one way or another.
5. Most Wesleyans are Philistines. OK, not nice, but that was one of the thoughts that went through my head. Infant baptism has been the practice of Christianity from about the time we voted in the Trinity to Luther, Calvin, and Wesley--yes, they all baptized infants. Most Wesleyans haven't a clue where they came from or why they think the way they do.
6. Did the New Testament church baptize infants? Not sure. The baptisms in the NT aren't of people who were born into Christian families, so there is hardly any relevant data. We have talk of whole households being baptized in Acts, which I have a hunch at least meant children down to a very young age even before "accountability."
Like it or not, the ancient world was a group culture and the father's decision would more often than not have been the decision for the whole family. We are individualists; they weren't.
1 Corinthians 7 says that the children of an intact marriage in which one spouse is a believer are holy. That means they were "in" whether they were baptized or not.
7. Did Paul think unholy children would be destroyed on the Day of the Lord? Strangely, I found myself thinking that he might very well think that, even though we as Christians today rightly do not. He doesn't mention hell in any of his writings (there are only a couple allusions to the judgment of the dead, one in 2 Timothy 2), so I'm not suggesting he thought they would go to hell.
This led my mind off on a hermeneutical tangent. Paul's writings--Scripture per se--have nothing to say about hell. What, then, if Paul himself didn't have any understanding of hell? It is not Paul himself who is inspired, as if every thought he ever had was Scripture. It is presumably what made it to the biblical page that was inspired, and nothing on this subject made it to the page from him.
Yet does some of the rationale behind what Paul wrote--that didn't make it to the biblical page--have to be inspired as well? In other words, what if Paul writes something that is inspired on the page but he writes it because of uninspired reasoning in his head? Is that possible?
In fact, the point of commonality between the Christian understanding of texts and Paul's original understanding of his texts is the text itself. Is it the Christian understanding of those texts that is ultimately most inspired for us more than Paul's surrounding thoughts?
8. How necessary would Paul have seen baptism of infants for their salvation?
Not sure. I wonder if it wouldn't have been as essential to him as it is to us.
Augustine had a highly developed sense of original sin and infant baptism for him took care of the sin of Adam. I highly doubt Paul would have thought anything of the sort. It is not without reason that Augustine is sometimes called the "first modern man" for his rather individualistic focus.
I suspect sin for Paul was much more general and corporate in focus and much less individualistic. We note that words like forgiveness and repentance barely even appear in Paul's writings. Baptism for him, I think, was not about some mathematical obligation regarding atonement but primarily about incorporation into Christ and death to the power of Sin written large.
I personally prefer infant baptism because it is the strongest way of saying "This child is holy. This child belongs to the people of God." And it does. I personally would go against church tradition and let all the children of the congregation take communion, if it were up to me (and it isn't). On this one I do feel confident that I know what the New Testament church did.
There are people out there who would have gone to be with the Lord at every moment of their existence. They would have as children, and they confessed faith the very first moment they realized they needed to. They could have died at any moment of their life and been "saved."
So why symbolically locate them outside the church for their first years. They are in!
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
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.
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.
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