Why I care about agency
This meant a lot me, because, while I myself was dedicated to God by my parents as a newborn, and later I willingly asked my parents for baptism at the age of seven, I have some hard memories of overly harsh discipline and pressure from my parents around ages 5-7, even to the extent of being given Jack Chick's tract "This Was Your Life" and another tract by Joni Eareckson Tada called "Joni's Story" by my mom, and being urged to pray the sinner's prayer by my dad during a discipline session when I had already done so on my own. I know that they had my best interests at heart and wanted desperately for me to know God. It just felt like a lot at such a young age.
This meant that I reacted strongly against Calvinist teaching when I was first exposed to it as a teenager, and I still feel that there is something misordered about infant baptism. In both cases, the agency of the individual is ignored.
An olive branch for those who disagree
In all charity, I suspect that Calvinism may be part of the truth, since we are contingent creatures in a universe ruled by a benevolent God, and I imagine that if I had been baptized as an infant I might have tried to defend it as something helpful for me to be automatically included in the external form of God's family. By calling infant baptism misordered I mean it in the literal sense of the word as the elements of conversion being out of their proper order, but I still recognize that it may play a helpful role in certain individuals' lives, and that the important thing is, no matter how we begin, that we continue in daily faith and repentance, living in Jesus and he in us.
Excursus into family lore
Unfortunately, in my great-grandfather Harry Straub's life infant baptism played a crippling role as a barrier to repentance -- he was baptized as an infant in the Volga German Lutheran church in Russia, moved to the US in his early twenties, and had his son Henry, my grandfather, baptized on the eighth day. But by all accounts he was an angry man, prone to drunkenness and violence. He went to church only on special occasions like Christmas and Easter. His son Henry, after getting married, later was converted and rebaptized and joined the Church of Christ. Henry introduced his new way of thinking to his mother Katrina, who was Harry's sweet and peaceful stabilizing influence. She started attending evangelistic meetings at the Minnehaha Church of Christ (her husband drove her), and decided she wanted to get rebaptized. Harry told her to wait and they would do it together, but she saw it was just a delay tactic and he wasn't really going to go through with it. So she invited the ministers over to the Straub dairy farm one day when her husband was gone, and they rebaptized her in the Camas Slough. When Harry found out, he said that if those preachers ever came back to his farm he would shoot them with his shotgun. Years later, after Katrina died, he had a temporary softening, but even on his deathbed he refused to repent and believe the gospel when his son Henry presented it to him. Harry believed that his baptism as an infant was his passport to heaven, and so he apparently did nothing to appropriate to himself its true meaning. So now you see how faulty understandings of baptism can tear a family apart and keep someone from salvation.
John Chrysostom's story, and part of his second catechetical lecture
Chrysostom himself grew up in a Christian home, and was baptized around age 20, and yet also spoke approvingly of infant baptism. He's a complicated figure, and practice wasn't exactly consistent, nor was the rationale uniform in the early church.
But his words here are a comfort to me:
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Say therefore constantly, I renounce you, Satan. Nothing is more safe than this word if we shall prove it by our deeds.
This I think it right that you who are about to be initiated should learn. For this word is a covenant with the Master. And just as we, when we buy slaves, first ask those who are being sold if they are willing to be our servants: So also does Christ. When He is about to receive you into service, He first asks if you wish to leave that cruel and relentless tyrant, and He receives covenants from you. For his service is not forced upon you. And see the lovingkindness of God. For we, before we put down the price, ask those who are being sold, and when we have learned that they are willing, then we put down the price. But Christ not so, but He even put down the price for us all; his precious blood. For, He says, you were bought with a price. (1 Corinthians 7:25) Notwithstanding, not even then does He compel those who are unwilling, to serve him; but unless you have grace, He says, and of your own accord and will determinest to enroll yourself under my rule, I do not compel, nor force you. And we should not have chosen to buy wicked slaves. But if we should at any time have so chosen, we buy them with a perverted choice, and put down a corresponding price for them. But Christ, buying ungrateful and lawless slaves, put down the price of a servant of first quality, nay rather much more, and so much greater that neither speech nor thought can set forth its greatness. For neither giving heaven, nor earth, nor sea, but giving up that which is more valuable than all these, his own blood, thus He bought us. And after all these things, he does not require of us witnesses, or registration, but is content with the single word, if you say it from your heart. "I renounce you, Satan, and your pomp," has included all. Let us then say this, "I renounce you, Satan," as men who are about in that world at that day to have that word demanded of them, and let us keep it in order that we may then return this deposit safe.
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On this account, then, I beseech you to cleanse yourselves from this error [of theaters, omens, and incantations], and to keep hold of this word as a staff; and just as without sandals, and cloak, no one of you would choose to go down to the market-place, so without this word never enter the market-place, but when you are about to pass over the threshold of the gateway, say this word first: I leave your ranks, Satan, and your pomp, and your service, and I join the ranks of Christ. And never go forth without this word. This shall be a staff to you, this your armor, this an impregnable fortress, and accompany this word with the sign of the cross on your forehead. For thus not only a man who meets you, but even the devil himself, will be unable to hurt you at all, when he sees you everywhere appearing with these weapons; and discipline yourself by these means henceforth, in order that when you receive the seal you may be a well-equipped soldier, and planting your trophy against the devil, may receive the crown of righteousness, which may it be the lot of us all to obtain, through the grace and lovingkindness of our Lord Jesus Christ, with whom be glory to the Father and to the Holy Spirit for ever and ever — Amen.
Source: Translated by T.P. Brandram. From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 9. Edited by Philip Schaff. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1889.) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. <http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1908.htm>.
