Here's a research update on my baptism study.
1. I agree very much with the Sacramental Baptists -- Stanley K. Fowler, Anthony R. Cross, Robert H. Stein, and (although I haven't read much of him yet) George R. Beasley-Murray. Stein especially seems to strike the balance just about right in saying that all the strongly realist language about baptism's effects in the New Testament -- the experience of union with Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection, cleansing from sins, and salvation through the appeal to God for a good conscience -- makes the most sense when we assume that the one being baptized knows what they are doing, because the water-baptism and the Spirit-baptism and the full experience of conversion happen at the same time. (See Stein's lecture on conversion or his article "Baptism and becoming a Christian in the New Testament".)
2. William G. Witt (retired Anglican professor from Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, PA) is just brilliant. In a 2009 blog post called "The Modern Debate About Normative Infant Baptism: A Discussion and Bibliography", he divides up six different views of the theology of baptism and makes them each answer the same four questions, and then evaluates them. Like John MG Barclay's analysis of perfections of grace in Paul and the Gift, he describes how four of these views stretch (perfect) various aspects of the truth into opposing extremes. It's all very geometric, like stretching a rubber star this way and that. But he comes down in favor of either the normative Sacramental Baptist point of view (with possible allowance for infant baptism), or the view which says infant baptism is incomplete as initiation until the child has come to make their own profession of faith later in life, at confirmation.
3. Witt put me on to Geoffrey Wainwright. He is not only brilliant, but also warm, friendly, and honest. In a 1981 conference paper called "Christian Initiation: Development, Dismemberment, Reintegration", he walks you through the history of baptism, up to the 16th century Reformation, and says that confirmation was a historical accident in the West which became useful as a way to teach kids the faith and allow them a chance to express their own belief. (The delay of first communion was also a historical accident which later was rationalized by an appeal to an age of accountability, and because the wine was now thought be dangerous to the baby because of transubstantiation.) He comes down at the end with three ways to reintegrate the initiation process: 1) be like the Eastern Orthodox and do baptism, anointing/confirmation, and communion for babies all on the same day (although this doesn't bode well for an understanding of justification by faith); 2) be like the Baptists (and maybe the early church) and delay baptism until the child has been catechized and can profess the faith for their own -- and maybe enroll the kid as a catechumen from birth, like many early Christians did (see David F. Wright's article "Infant dedication in the early church", in Infant Baptism in Historical Perspective); or 3) be like the evangelical Anglicans and the Roman Catholic liturgical renewal movement and really make confirmation meaningful as the end of a really-long-stretched-out initiation that began with baptism. He says all three options can help preserve parts of the truth, and we should respect all of them and view them as equally valid.
4. I quite appreciate Anthony NS Lane's point of view -- which is much the same as that of Richard H. Stein -- that the elements of conversion-initiation (faith-repentance, confession, baptism, and receiving the Holy Spirit/regeneration) all happened usually on the same day in the book of Acts, but now both in paedobaptist churches and in credobaptist churches the process is stretched out in different ways, whether by infant baptism followed evidence of personal faith years later, or by delay of a child's baptism until months or years after their first evidence of faith, just to be sure it was credible. So we're all inconsistent in different ways, so deal with it -- but let's make sure that we call for all of the elements of conversion-initiation at some point, and also that we keep conversion-initiation as one unitary complex thing, theologically speaking, even if it does get stretched out in practice. (See his article in Themelios, "Conversion: a comparison of Calvin and Spener".)
5. The view of baptism as synecdoche for conversion-initiation as a whole is brilliant. I've seen it in Doug Moo's commentary on Romans, who cites James DG Dunn ("baptism is a concertina word"), and I've also seen the synecdoche angle pressed hard, in a good way, in Anthony R. Cross's Recovering the Evangelical Sacrament. As a linguist, I appreciate this move, and it makes everything make more sense -- that I finally understand the code (some) people were talking in before, like when Wendy gives Peter Pan a thimble and calls it a kiss, and he in return gives her an acorn -- and later she says she'd like to give him a thimble and gives him a real kiss.
I felt the same way a couple years ago when I read Augustine (On Marriage and Concupiscence) saying that concupiscence is called "sin" because it comes from sin and leads to sin, even though it literally is not sin:
Inasmuch, however, as by a certain manner of speech it is called sin, since it arose from sin, and, when it has the upper hand, produces sin, the guilt of it prevails in the natural man; but this guilt, by Christ's grace through the remission of all sins, is not suffered to prevail in the regenerate man, if he does not yield obedience to it whenever it urges him to the commission of evil. As arising from sin, it is, I say, called sin, although in the regenerate it is not actually sin; and it has this designation applied to it, just as speech which the tongue produces is itself called tongue; and just as the word hand is used in the sense of writing, which the hand produces. In the same way concupiscence is called sin, as producing sin when it conquers the will: so to cold and frost the epithet "sluggish" is given; not as arising from, but as productive of, sluggishness; benumbing us, in fact.
Augustine was a wily thinker (witness his contortions on proxy faith and baptismal regeneration in Letter 98 to Boniface), but a rhetorical-literary master, and sometimes that's just the way he thought (always in service to the church as he understood it), so we can't quite blame him if he uses short-hand later on and forgets to tell us the code.
I felt the same way last year when I read the Westminster Confession of Faith (Article 27.2) cuing us in on their private code: "There is in every sacrament a spiritual relation or sacramental union, between the sign and the thing signified; whence it comes to pass that the names and the effects of the one are attributed to the other."
So... sacramental language is at least full of non-literal referents, whatever else is going on experientially, socially, and spiritually. My only worry is that if we don't explain this well, it can lead to a magical view of the sacraments.
6. Reaching back to Point 1 and the Sacramental Baptist view, I am prepared to make a concession -- if some of the household baptisms in Acts included infants, or if it was reasonable for its original readers to infer this and possibly copy it with a household-including-infants baptism of their own, then that was a risk that the apostles -- or at least Luke, the author -- took. The fact is that infant baptism doesn't fit well with theology of baptism articulated throughout the New Testament, so if some in the early church did include infants in their household baptisms, it was a sort of tag-on to the prototypical case of baptism upon confession of personal faith. Maybe the apostles didn't think it through as much as we do, or maybe they didn't care -- or at least care enough to tell us not to. But in any case, it's not the central prototype.
7. While we're on the topic of household baptisms, I'd like to try an argument on you. The purpose of household baptisms in Acts, as a literary trope, seems to be to highlight not just household solidarity, but the joy as faith is transmitted from the head of household to everyone else in the house, and the miracle of effectual calling as the Holy Spirit opened the hearts of everyone in the house -- spouse, children, and servants -- to believe the gospel (and sometimes speak in tongues) at once. We know that this didn't always happen in every household, even if group conversion following the paterfamilias was a cultural expectation, because Peter wrote to wives with unbelieving husbands (1 Peter 3:1), and Paul wrote to both wives and husbands with unbelieving spouses (1 Cor. 7:12-16) and a believing master who had a slave who only came to faith after running away (Philemon). What this tells us is that the household conversions in Acts were miracles, and it didn't always happen like that in every case. And, since the children and unbelieving spouse of a Christian were both considered "holy" or "sanctified" in a sense through their connection to the believing spouse (1 Cor. 7:14), then baptism would be as unnecessary for the child as for the unbelieving spouse, until both came to profess faith on their own. (As a side note to confirm that paterfamilias solidarity doesn't always work, even in collectivist cultures, I read a story in a missionary friend's newsletter from the 1990s, where a shaman in a hilltribe in Thailand wanted to convert to Christianity after a power encounter, but he waited several years because his son wouldn't agree -- later, after his son went to jail, he finally converted and was baptized.)
8. Now, mind you, I'm still prepared to accept household baptisms that included infants, either by the households mentioned in Luke or by later readers who may have imitated them, but I consider this to be a different logic of baptism. Rather than a person appealing to God for a good conscience, it's more like a family undergoing a ritual cleansing of their house as they convert from paganism, say, in a folk-animist culture like where I lived in Taiwan or Thailand. Remove the idol shelf, dunk everyone, and that will get rid of the evil spirits and set our whole family on the right path. (This seems to be the logic of Jewish proselyte washings, too, from the 2nd century onward.) The logic doesn't work the same if the parents have already been baptized, and later they give birth to a baby, and they want to baptize their baby as an act of dedication. That's a third kind of logic altogether.
9. I now want to close by hitting a note on the piano that I touched on in my last post. Infant baptism, like being baptized while in a coma (see Augustine's friend), can be a powerful means of persuading someone to accept and live into the gospel, which has already been ritually spoken over them. It's like Jean Valjean when the priest gives him the candlesticks and says "I have purchased your soul for God." Even though Jean Valjean feels grateful and morally obligated to go on and be an honest man, he still has the choice to walk away from it if he really wants to. Similarly, when Jesus forgave and healed the paralyzed man on the basis of (mostly) his friends' faith who lowered him through the roof, the man still had the choice of whether to obey, stand up, pick up his mat, and go home. If he had just laid there and never gotten up, he might have been healed, but we would have no evidence of it, and it would have been just as if he hadn't been healed, in his physical functionality. The first solid evidence of personal faith we see in this man is when he stood to his feet. And so, even if someone's had the choice taken from them or made for them, so to speak, by their parents having baptized them when they were a baby or while they were in a coma, they have the choice now, as soon as they are conscious of things that matter, to affirm it and live into it.
10. One of the best examples I have seen of this kind of personal grasping of a faith that started in their parents is Jonathan Edwards. Read what he wrote when he was 19:
Saturday, Jan. 12 [1723], in the morning. I have this day solemnly renewed my baptismal covenant and self-dedication, which I renewed when I was received into communion of the church. I have been before God; and have given myself, all that I am and have to God, so that I am not in any respect my own: I can challenge no right in myself, I can challenge no right in this understanding, this will, these affections that are in me; neither have I any right to this body, or any of its members: no right to this tongue, these hands, nor feet; no right to these senses, these eyes, these ears, this smell or taste. I have given myself clear away, and have not retained anything as my own. I have been to God this morning, and told him that I gave myself wholly to him. I have given every power to him; so that for the future I will challenge no right in myself, in any respect. I have expressly promised him, and do now promise almighty God, that by his grace I will not. I have this morning told him, that I did take him for my whole portion and felicity, looking on nothing else as any part of my happiness, nor acting as if it were; and his law for the constant rule of my obedience; and would fight with all my might against the world, the flesh, and the devil, to the end of my life. And did believe in Jesus Christ, and receive him as a prince and a Savior; and would adhere to the faith and obedience of the gospel, how hazardous and difficult soever the profession and practice of it may be. That I did receive the blessed Spirit as my teacher, sanctifier and only comforter; and cherish all his motions to enlighten, purify, confirm, comfort and assist me. This I have done. And I pray God, for the sake of Christ, to look upon it as a self-dedication; and to receive me now as entirely his own, and deal with me in all respects as such; whether he afflicts me or prospers me, or whatever he pleases to do with me, who am his. Now, henceforth I am not to act in any respect as my own. I shall act as my own, if I ever make use of any of my powers to anything that is not to the glory of God, and don't make the glorifying him my whole and entire business; if I murmur in the least at afflictions; if I grieve at the prosperity of others; if I am anyway uncharitable; if I am angry because of injuries; if I revenge; if I do anything, purely to please myself, or if I avoid anything for the sake of my ease; if I omit anything because it is great self-denial; if I trust to myself: if I take any of the praise of any good that I do, or rather God does by me; or if I am any way proud.
This day made the 42nd and 43rd Resolutions.
42. Resolved, frequently to renew the dedication of myself to God, which was made at my baptism; which I solemnly renewed, when I was received into the communion of the church; and which I have solemnly re-made this 12th day of January, 1722—23.
43. Resolved, never henceforward, till I die, to act as if I were anyway my own, but entirely and altogether God's, agreeable to what is to be found in Saturday, Jan. 12. [[Jan. 12th, 1723.
11. This resolve in Edwards is the sort of thing Paul saw in Timothy, when Paul, who served God like his ancestors did with a clear conscience recognized a sincere faith in Timothy which had earlier lived in his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice -- and for this reason he was to fan the gift of God into flame more and more, which was likely a preaching gift, given when Paul and the council of elders laid his hands on Timothy at ordination to be an elder (1 Tim. 4:13-14; 2 Tim. 1:3-7). Paul also explained how the faith had taken root in Timothy -- it was because from childhood he had been acquainted with the Scriptures, which are able to make one wise unto salvation, and he had learned the truth from people he knew, such as Lois, Eunice, and Paul. (2 Tim. 3:14-15) In Timothy's case, he hadn't been circumcised when he was young, because his father was a Gentile, whereas his mother was Jewish. He likely had been baptized as a convert, which Paul references by reminding him of how he made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses" (1 Tim. 6:12).
In the story of Timothy, we have someone who was raised in the faith, hearing the Scriptures, and (likely) later was baptized. I think it's very powerful to have all those experiences in your memory, and I have those memories, too. But even if baptism was something done to you before you could remember, you still have the choice, like Edwards did, to call upon God in self-dedication and take hold of that faith again and again.
12. Finally, just by way of more book recommendations, do read everything by David F. Wright (Infant Baptism in Historical Perspective and What Has Infant Baptism Done to Baptism?). He was a Scottish Presbyterian, but he's very honest with the evidence, and very much against indiscriminate baptism of babies who aren't likely to be raised in the faith.
Don't bother reading all of Everett Ferguson's book Baptism in the Early Church -- it's just too long and detailed, but do hit the high points and summaries, where he theorizes that infant baptism originated from emergency baptisms of children on their deathbeds.
Don't waste your time with Scot McKnight's book It Takes a Church to Baptize -- it has some nice narrative descriptions of the ACNA Anglican liturgy of baptism and what it means, and he is kind and honest enough to apologize on behalf of all paedobaptists for the drowning murders of the Anabaptists in the 16th century. Actually, the Anabaptists were his heroes before he became Anglican, which was just a few years before he wrote the book. While I liked these parts, he simply lost all my trust when he claimed to show what the Bible says about infant baptism, but only gave us inferences, and when he and the author of the foreword, Gerald McDermott (another baptist-turned-Anglican) cite Tertullian and Gregory Nazianzen without mentioning that both of these church fathers advocated delaying baptism until an age when the child was able to understand (although Gregory recommended age 3, which is still pretty young!).
That's it for the research report. Thanks for journeying with me, if you've read this far! I'm truly grateful for your companionship.
