Partisans of infant baptism probe a middle way. Supporters of believers’ baptism worry about youth. Here a Lutheran theologian defends “believers’ baptism of infants” while a Southern Baptist theologian voices anxiety over evangelistic compulsion of the very young.
In recent years the time-honored Protestant controversy over infant baptism has been renewed in much of its Reformation vigor. Karl Barth, who belongs to the Reformed camp, has aligned himself with Baptists. And the late Emil Brunner, though he did not adopt the radical attitude of Barth, wanted no part of the traditional Reformed arguments based on the corporate conception of the family, the doctrine of prevenient grace, and the covenant sign of the Old Testament. Brunner dismissed these arguments as “biblicist” but suggested keeping infant baptism as a sign pointing to Christ. Others ask if Brunner’s views were “biblicist” enough.
The Lutherans are fighting a private battle on baptism among themselves. Here the famous protagonists Joachim Jeremias and Kurt Aland exchange broadsides over the New Testament word oikos (“household”) used in connection with the baptism of families in Acts. Jeremias contends that oikos includes children and that thus they too were baptized. Aland, with as much elaborate evidence and with some of the same documents, attempts to prove the opposite.
For all practical purposes this battle promises to end in a stalemate. Although these inconclusive results do not mean that the New Testament has nothing to say about infant baptism, they do mean that oikos and the words related to it apparently cannot resolve the issue. Even if Jeremias, the champion of infant baptism, should be shown to be correct, the victory would only confirm the Reformed position that the family was included in the faith of the head of the household. And although the result might bring some comfort to the Roman Catholics with their theory of substitutionary faith, it would hardly be of comfort to the Lutherans.
Thus, in spite of the renewal of the controversy in our day, baptismal practices themselves remain in question and the underlying problem is unresolved.
The fundamental issue in the controversy over infant baptism is essentially the same as it has always been since the Reformation. It is the question of how faith relates to baptism. The baptism of New Testament times was obviously administered in faith. And even before Luther asserted that the sacraments were ineffectual for the individual without faith in Christ, the Roman church had at least recognized the importance of faith in baptism and had tried to sidestep the issue by substituting the faith of the church for the faith apparently lacking in the child. The Reformed theologians referred to the faith of the parents or to the child’s future faith in their teaching on baptism.
All these attempts only verify what the Anabaptists contended in the days of the Reformation and what many scholars assert today about the subject. Certainly the New Testament does not explicitly state that everyone baptized had faith. But there is not one shred of evidence of the baptism of a person without faith.
In our day the relation of faith to baptism has become particularly prominent as a result of the influence of existentialism on Christian theology. Faith and membership in the church, at least according to Barth and Brunner, depend largely on a personal “confrontation,” understood as the conscious meeting of the individual with God. With this philosophical orientation, many, like Karl Barth and his son Markus, have rejected infant baptism. And the emphasis itself has accentuated the problem for many pedobaptist Protestants and Roman Catholics. These groups are caught between the apparent evidence of the New Testament, especially the Book of Acts, and their own practice of infant baptism, which is administered, as it is frequently admitted, without the faith of the recipient. Many observers of this problem conclude that infant baptism is perpetuated only for continuity within the institutionalized church.
Is there a way out of this dilemma? Or must we choose between the apparently conflicting poles of “believers’ baptism” and infant baptism? It is axiomatic that any satisfactory solution must do justice to the New Testament evidence, especially as it is incorporated in the sola gratia and sola fide principles of the Reformation.
This dilemma, which bothers all Protestant denominations, including the tradition-minded Episcopalians, is based on the presupposition that it is impossible for children or infants to have faith. But does the New Testament as well as our empirical evidence prove this?
Emil Brunner rightly criticizes the Roman practice of uterine baptism, baptism of foetus. But is he correct in saying that the unborn or newborn child is incapable of the personal act required to receive salvation? Luke 1:44 says that the unborn John the Baptist leaped for joy in Elizabeth’s womb when Mary, the mother of the Lord, spoke to her. Certainly “leaping for joy” was, according to Brunner’s terminology, a “personal act,” and joy is one of the fruits of faith in Christ.
Luke also records the bringing of infants (Greek: brefte̅; not teknon, “child”) to Jesus for his blessing (18:15–17). What kind of blessing was this? It must have been an offering of the grace of God (sola gratia), as Calvin maintained. Yet no blessing or grace is received without faith, and to deny faith absolutely to these children is to fall into the Roman Catholic concept of blessing inanimate objects and persons incapable of faith. That the blessing of the children involved their faith is further reinforced by the remainder of the pericope, in which the infants are held up as examples for those desiring to enter the Kingdom. Certainly faith is the only key to the Kingdom, as even the Baptists, Barth, and Brunner would maintain.
The modern understanding of New Testament baptism has faltered somewhat in interpreting these incidents from the gospel records. But it has faltered even more in developing an adequate theology on child psychology. Is it really proper to say that an infant or young child lacks sufficient consciousness or mental development to make coming to faith possible? Even apart from the Gospels, which speak about children and infants in the Kingdom and of “the little ones who believe” in Jesus, is it really possible on the basis of child psychology to say that even the most limited children cannot receive knowledge from the outside or, more particularly, that saving knowledge which comes “from above”? It is noteworthy at this point that even the Baptist theologian Johannes Schneider has been ready to lower the traditional age of accountability from twelve years to six. Can we really apply an intellectual test at any age? Is God’s grace limited by supposed human limitations?
Apart from the New Testament, which in my opinion offers conclusive evidence for infant faith, many Christian parents recognize evidences of faith in their children even in the first years. Although the stammering of the name “Jesus” is not conclusive, who can positively deny that even here the Holy Spirit may be at work? For St. Paul taught that calling Jesus “Lord” was evidence of the presence of the Spirit (1 Cor. 12:3). No wonder that even those Reformed and Lutheran theologians who are convinced that the baptism of the New Testament was for believers are nevertheless reluctant to deny this sacrament to children.
The middle way in this dilemma—of having to choose between what appears to be the New Testament baptism of believers and the baptism of infants—is suggested in the Lutheran doctrine of infant faith. Since the days of rationalism in the eighteenth century this doctrine has received only occasional “Lutheran” support, but recently it has been backed by Peter Brunner of Heidelberg, Hermann Sasse of Australia, and the late professors Rudolf Hermann of Berlin and Peter Brinkel of Rostock. By maintaining infant faith in connection with infant baptism, we need not choose between “believers’ baptism” and infant baptism. With infant faith, infant baptism is in fact a baptism of believers, and other essential New Testament teachings are upheld as well.
First of all, this teaching recognizes that children are included under the universality of sin, as are adults, and that they also need faith to be saved. An astute analysis of the sin of children is given by Robert L. Short in his Gospel According to Peanuts:
Seeing the infant as a sinner, however, probably never has been nor will be a popular point of view. It may be, therefore, that the modern “cult of the child,” which holds to the child’s “original innocence,” is partly a reaction against the doctrine of Original Sin. “Those who hold that human nature is essentially good (‘unfallen’) and corrupted only by society,” writes H. A. Grunewald, “regard the child as an unspoiled bundle of life which ‘goes wrong’ mostly because of bad things happening in the ‘environment.’ ” Wherever they can, even the youngest Peanuts children are crafty enough to take advantage of this point of view.… As Grunewald points out, the myth of the innocent child strongly resembles the myth of the noble savage—savage perhaps, but not too noble [pp. 52 ff.].
Secondly, the doctrine of infant faith provides all children with a means of the grace of God. To deny children a means of grace would deny their inclusion under the universality of God’s saving grace. As mentioned above, in the case of John the Baptist and the blessing of the children, children can be objects of the grace of God.
Thirdly, infant faith avoids the possibility of having God’s grace offered without any real chance that the child will receive it. Traditionally, there has been no quarrel between Lutherans and Baptists on the application of grace through faith. If baptism is going to be effective in the individual, it must be “believers’ baptism.” This would also correspond to those recent exegetical studies showing that the baptism of the early Church was given in faith.
Fourthly, infant faith is based on what the New Testament writers and Jesus have to say about the relation of children to the Kingdom and their coming to faith.
The recent influence of existentialism on theology has made the idea of infant faith even more unpopular among the pedobaptists than it was in the days of rationalism. But if the pedobaptists are not willing to accept this doctrine, then it must be granted that the practice of the Baptists in baptizing only mature persons is more in keeping with the New Testament practice. Without faith it is impossible to please God—and this applies to children as well as to adults.
But to deny infant baptism, and with it infant faith, would be to limit what God obviously does not limit. The choice before the Christian world is not between infant baptism and “believers’ baptism,” but between believers’ baptism foe both infants and adults and no baptism at all.
Surprisingly, the “people called Baptists” have not been the most outspoken interpreters of the New Testament teaching on baptism. Until very recent years, Baptists were almost silent on the subject, despite the fact that baptism has become an increasingly live issue in Christian debate and has emerged in ecumenical discussions from the pronouncements of Vatican II to the expression of variant viewpoints among Pentecostal groups. There are at least two reasons for the tardy entry of Baptists into this crucial discussion. First, the majority of Baptists throughout the world have not been directly involved in the World Council of Churches or any other forum of Christian discussion where their views of baptism are strongly challenged and clearly heard. And second, for decades Baptists have been preoccupied with serious controversies about baptism among themselves.
The Campbellite Controversy
For more than a century, Baptists in the southern part of the United States have carried on two sharp doctrinal conflicts over baptismal meaning and practice. The first of these is the Campbellite controversy, which from the 1830s onward split Baptist churches by the hundreds and spilled over into other loosely organized “free church” groups. The followers of Alexander Campbell, a sometime Presbyterian who had become a Baptist preacher, arose in churches throughout Kentucky and adjoining states to proclaim that baptism is essential to salvation or that salvation is completed, if not actually conferred, by baptism. It is extremely difficult to document this sacramental concept of baptism in the writings of Campbell himself, but this clearly was the popular understanding of the “Campbellite” doctrine among his followers and his opponents. Most Baptists saw in this view a kind of Roman Catholic sacramentalism and a “works salvation.” Whole churches were captured for the Campbellite movement, however, and many more saved their buildings and the battered remnants of their congregations only after losing many members.
From the viewpoint of world Christendom, this strife could not have mattered less; but it certainly diverted Baptist energies and attention from the wider task of interpreting their view of baptism to the Christian world at large. This world would not take it for granted that the form of immersion was involved in the meaning of baptism or that the act of Christian confession and faith was essential in the baptismal subject.
An ironic footnote to this internal conflict among the immersionists is that almost none of the modem Christian Churches (Disciples of Christ), which trace their descent from Alexander Campbell, will proclaim their view of baptism in the old sacramental terms. Even the Churches of Christ, an ultra-conservative split off the main body of Disciples about the turn of the century, speak with something less than a firm and unified voice on the explicit sacramental character of the baptismal rite. Yet the debate goes on while the basic question has been shifted, and most of the disputants continue to ignore the wider forum of ecumenical discussion.
The Landmark Movement
Another internal controversy began in the middle of the nineteenth century with the writings and activity of J. R. Graves. This influential editor of the Tennessee Baptist developed such a rigid doctrine of the Church and church succession that only those churches that exactly reproduced the New Testament pattern and could trace their institutional succession from biblical days could qualify as true churches. From Graves’s point of view, only Baptist churches could qualify as true churches, and not even all of them could qualify. The result of these views for the doctrine of baptism has been a devastating debate on whether it is proper to receive believers’ baptism by immersion performed by other Christian churches.
Not even Graves maintained that the Baptist name was necessary to make scriptural baptism valid. However, his restriction of the word “church” to Baptist churches only amounted to virtually the same thing. Thousands of Southern Baptist churches have adopted the pattern of receiving only Baptist baptism as the simplest way of guaranteeing that the person “received by letter of recommendation” into the local church fellowship has, in fact, been baptized with the proper form, meaning, and authority.
Even a casual reader of church history realizes that just as the Campbellite movement tended toward the Roman Catholic doctrine of sacramental (or saving) baptism, so the Landmark movement tended toward the Roman Catholic doctrine of institutional succession as the necessary hallmark of the true Church of Jesus Christ. It did not matter that neither Graves nor anyone else has ever demonstrated the unbroken succession of a single Christian institution throughout the 1,900 years of ecclesiastical history. The succession that was so important to Graves was simply affirmed as an article of faith. Jesus said that the gates of hell would not prevail against his church (Matt. 16:18), and these “succession-minded” persons could only interpret that to mean that a Christian congregation was authentic only if it stood in an unbroken line of organic, institutional succession from the first century. They forgot that the Spirit of God might depart from an ecclesiastical institution even though it had an unbroken line of succession, as did the Temple and national Israel. And they forgot that God can call a people into being by his own sovereign act in his own good time, as he did with Israel and as he did with the Christian Church as the New People of God.
Similarly, others of the sacramental persuasion forgot that while God can use any means to reveal himself and to accomplish his holy purpose, he is never trapped within the bounds of ritual, to be dispensed like a holy potion in response to a magical formula. Both distortions of the Christian Gospel attempt to limit God, the one to a particular organic institution and the other to a particular religious ritual. Both philosophies seek to limit God to ecclesiastical control.
The Church As Baptists View It
Preoccupation with these internal controversies has deterred Baptists from wider involvement in current Christian discussions. But where does Baptist thought go from here as these controversies fade into the past? What will be the determinative factors in the years ahead?
What is most distinctive about the Baptist denomination? Contrary to the opinion of many people, it is not their view of baptism. The most distinctive tenet of the Baptists is their belief in the direct and immediate call of God to the individual soul and the direct and immediate response of that soul to God without the official administration of a priest, a ritual, or an institution. It is this doctrine that will ultimately determine the Baptist stand on baptism vis-à-vis the non-Baptist denominations.
If God calls men directly into a saving relationship with himself—upon the basis of the atoning work of Christ, which is made effective in the individual heart by the convicting power of the Holy Spirit—and if this takes place without the necessary mediation of any human priest, ritual, or institution, then it follows that God directly calls into being that fellowship of believers which is Christ’s body, the Church, of which Christ is also directly the Head and Lord. This direct and unmediated Lordship of Christ over his body is the basic understanding of the Church among Baptists and explains the characteristic Baptist rejection of all priests or bishops. Although most Baptist confessions of faith have clearly affirmed the ultimate concept of the Church as the body of Christ, composed of all the redeemed of all ages, they have also maintained that this Church is manifest in the world only in gathered communities of believers. According to this dominant view, the name “church” cannot be applied to any denomination, convention, or association of churches but only to a local congregation, a gathered community of believers.
Realizing this basic view of the nature of the Church, one can predict with reasonable certainty the outcome of current debates about baptism among Baptists and between Baptists and the wider Christian world:
1. On the issue of the authority for baptism, Baptists will eventually come down firmly on the presence of Christ in the local congregation as the only valid locus of authority. Eventually, they will reject all attempts to validate baptism through the denominational name (Baptist) or through affiliation with any particular convention. After all the debate and confusion about institutional succession and alien immersion (immersion by non-Baptist churches), Baptists will eventually receive scriptural baptism by those congregations that they recognize as churches. Either they will do this or they will repudiate their basic understanding of the Church.
Before they recognize a congregation’s practice of baptism as scriptural, most Baptists will continue to insist (1) that the practice be in essential agreement with their own and (2) that the congregation’s understanding of salvation and the Church mark it out as a genuine New Testament church, by whatever name it may be called. It is now a matter of fact that some congregations that do not wear the Baptist name embody this historic Baptist understanding of salvation and of the Church far better than some Baptist churches. In any case, Baptists will be forced to let local congregations decide about receiving other scriptural baptisms. If they transfer this power of decision to an association or convention of churches (actually made up of “messengers” from the local churches), they will be making the convention or association itself into a church and thereby denying their basic understanding of the Church as the local congregation.
2. On the issue of the form of baptism, most Baptists will continue to insist upon immersion—not only because it was certainly the New Testament form, but even more because they believe that the form is bound up with the meaning.
Virtually all biblical scholars acknowledge that the meaning of the Greek word baptizo is “to immerse,” that the context of baptismal passages in the New Testament clearly indicates immersion, and that the historical evidence conclusively demonstrates that immersion was the original form and the prevailing one for centuries. But since many New Testament patterns have changed with the passing of the years, it might have been possible to accept the more convenient form of sprinkling or affusion had it not been for the meaning reflected in the form of immersion. The burial of the believer in the waters of baptism is seen as a visible gospel sign, a vivid declaration of his spiritual identification with the burial of Christ (Rom. 6:4). His resurrection from the waters of baptism is a powerful proclamation of his resurrection with Christ to “walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:4; Eph. 2:5, 6). Because Baptists reject any conception of saving power or sacramental value in the ritual itself, everything depends upon preserving its significance as a Christian sign and confession. If, by changing the form, it loses its power as a witness to the Christian’s death and resurrection with Christ, then it becomes empty and meaningless. Without this meaning it is not New Testament baptism; and without this form it has lost its meaning as a gospel sign.
3. On the matter of the baptismal subject, Baptists will continue to stake everything on the conviction that the person must be a believer in Christ. Baptism is the way a person makes his public declaration of belief in Christ. They read the recurring New Testament formula “baptized into [Greek: eis] the name of Jesus Christ” and understand this to mean that through the act of baptism the early Christians were declaring their identification with their Master. It was their regular way of confessing before the world that Jesus Christ was their Saviour and Lord.
Baptists will continue to reject infant baptism because they believe that it began in church history with the expression of the doctrine of original sin as condemning even the infant and emerged as a sacramental rite to remove this “original sin” as soon as possible after birth. Even when it is construed as a “covenant sign,” replacing the sign of circumcision in the old covenant, Baptists believe this contradicts the plain teaching of the New Testament that baptism comes only after one has “received the word” of the Gospel (Acts 2:41). They also believe that the attempt to connect baptism with circumcision is a frantic effort to preserve a baptismal practice that arose later in church history by reading into it a meaning nowhere found in the New Testament.
Baptists, however, have found themselves confronted by a problem that is intensified by their own strong insistence upon believers’ baptism. The pressure of evangelistic campaigns and the strong emphasis upon child evangelism in younger Sunday school classes has brought younger and younger children to the church altar, “trusting Christ” and requesting baptism and full church membership. Several reports from Southern Baptist churches indicate that children as young as four or five years of age have been received as “candidates for baptism” and full church membership. On every side the charge is heard, “You Baptists have come full circle—right back to infant baptism.”
Many articles and books have sounded a warning cry that “regenerated church membership” is being undermined. More than one church and more than one Sunday school leader have been wrestling with this problem. How old must a child be in order to make a responsible decision to confess Christ as Lord and fulfill the minimum requirements of membership in his church? Drastic suggestions have been made: Hold back children until they have reached puberty, because only then have they reached a point of psychological maturity where they can think abstractly of the Lordship of Christ over life; or withhold baptism until this level of maturity is attained in adolescence, even though the child may have come earlier into a kind of “probationary” church membership.
With the dominant Baptist concepts of salvation, baptism, and the Church, it is not difficult to predict with reasonable confidence where this discussion among Baptists will come out. Baptists will never consent, in any great number, to the postponement of baptism until a pre-determined level of Christian maturity has been reached. They cannot do this because they believe that baptism is the sign of Christian beginning. It would be emptied of its meaning if it did not stand at the threshold of the journey with Christ. On the other hand, there is going to be increasing Baptist concern to remove external pressures that may push a child into a false response to a highpowered evangelist or an over-zealous Sunday school teacher. Because Baptists believe that a person is saved by the genuine response of that soul to the inner working of God’s Spirit, they will try to protect their children from external pressures that might produce a counterfeit response. Nevertheless, they will refuse to set an arbitrary age at which they will “permit” the Holy Spirit to work this miracle in the life of the child, and they will demand more and more evidence that it is a genuine response of each soul to God rather than a coerced “decision.”
4. Finally, all discussion about baptism will turn at last upon the question of meaning. For Baptists, everything is bound up with the conviction that baptism is the believer’s public declaration of his death and resurrection with Jesus Christ. Because it is a testimony given before the world, Baptists will take a dim view of those persons who say, “Well, although my church teaches that baptism saves you, I have always privately believed that it is an act of Christian obedience and confession of Christ, exactly as you Baptists do.” Such a private belief, in the context of a public interpretation that contradicts it, is confusing, to say the least. The vast majority of Baptists will also stoutly maintain that because of what baptism means, the form of baptism must continue to be immersion and the subject must always be a genuine believer.
All Baptists will continue to proclaim that all who have truly believed in Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour are redeemed and are their Christian brethren, no matter how they have been baptized! They cannot deny this because it is their most basic belief. And most Baptists will continue to affirm that the real test of this redemption in our lives is how much Christian love and understanding we demonstrate toward those brethren who sharply disagree with us on such doctrines. Nevertheless, it will forever remain true that all the water in the world cannot help a person who has not been baptized in the heart by the redeeming work of God’s Holy Spirit!
