Those Pesky Pedobaptists

I decided to have the good taste to wait until after Holy Week to respond to the North American Anglican’s two posts on this subject: Lee Nelson’s Credobaptism and Anglicanism and Alexander Wilgus’ The Baptist Sacrament. Both of these were in response to Matthew Joss’ The Case for Baptist Anglicans. Evidently this eminent site could not wait until Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ rose from the dead (liturgically) to torpedo Joss’ thesis. Additionally it’s worth noting that, back in the Roman Empire church, Holy Saturday was the time to baptise and chrismate the adult catechumens that had completed their final catechism in the preceding Lent. (I have an entire series of Cyril of Jerusalem’s lectures on the subject if you’re interested.)

My position on this subject is in my post Why I Support the Idea of Believers’ Baptism and I’ll leave it to those of you who wish to take the time to respond to it. My objective here is to say some of the things that neither Nelson or Wilgus explicitly spelled out but which are necessary to get a complete picture.

Let’s start with Wilgus’ piece. He makes the following statement regarding the Baptists’ substitution of sacramental baptism with the public profession of faith:

Unlike a confession of belief (such as in Romans 10:9‒10), once universally understood to be the prerequisite in order to participate in the main event of baptism, the Public Profession is something else altogether: a super-sacrament that purports to contain within itself all of the graces that the Church once promised were dispensed by the sacraments of the gospel. Moreover, it even results in a revision of the meaning of grace in order to turn entirely on the internal disposition of the believer, rather than the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

Even with his Baptistic erudition on display, Wilgus leaves out one important fact: historically Baptists in this country have believed in unconditional eternal security (“once saved always saved”) even when they preach a more Arminian view of election. With the profession of faith you’re on your way to heaven and that’s it. To put it mildly the concept blows the doors off of any sacramental benefit that the pedobaptists usually come up with, and if it were true (which it isn’t) it would put everyone else on the backfoot. Even with the infiltration of TULIP Calvinists into the Anglican world, it is doubtful that many of these would associate election and perseverance simply with baptism.

Rather than dickering with this topic, the Anglican world would do far better to root out “once saved always saved” from its Baptistic converts than to make a big stink out of baptism. I discuss this problem in my post I Wonder…How Many of these ACNA Exvangelicals Still Believe in Eternal Security? But you hardly ever see any Anglican divines deal with this.

Turning to Nelson’s piece, I think the best way to deal with his argument is to point out the basic weakness of the Anglican position regarding baptism. The best way to do this is to look at the traditional Roman Catholic position on the subject, the one that the English Reformation had to deal with one way or another.

Roman Catholic theology traditionally posited the primary purpose of baptism was to wash away original sin, which everyone is born with. Failure to do so resulted in an infant ending up in Limbo, not Paradise, which is why Roman Catholics were so solicitous in baptising people as soon as they were born (so they would end up in Paradise.) The concept of Limbo wasn’t the most scriptural idea they ever came up with, but it made logical sense and was internally consistent. The Church had a follow-up with First Communion, Confirmation, initiating their children in the Sacraments, and the Catholic education, which traditionally made dislodging people from Roman Catholicism a difficult business.

Once the Protestant Church of England decided to dispense with Limbo but not Original Sin, they were left with questions. Where do unbaptised babies go? Do they end up in Hell? Or are they not held accountable for their original sin until they are baptised? Article XXVII, which Nelson quotes, dodges these questions with its swelling rhetoric:

Baptism is not only a sign of profession, and mark of difference, whereby Christian men are discerned from others that be not christened, but it is also a sign of Regeneration or New-Birth, whereby, as by an instrument, they that receive Baptism rightly are grafted into the Church; the promises of the forgiveness of sin, and of our adoption to be the sons of God by the Holy Ghost, are visibly signed and sealed, Faith is confirmed, and Grace increased by virtue of prayer unto God.

When Roman Catholicism itself decided to dispense with Limbo after Vatican II, it too adopted swelling rhetoric about baptism, the baptised and the community of faith it’s supposed to create. The Episcopal Church, not to be outdone, used baptism as an excuse to dispense with Confirmation as a prerequisite to the Holy Communion, and of course came up with the infamous Baptismal Covenant: The Contract on the Episcopalians. All of this, however, dodges the key point: at the core of the whole concept of Baptismal Regeneration is the washing away of original sin. (Neither of the NAA articles even mention that topic.) What’s replaced that is part of a trend that evidently antedates our own time–the shift of emphasis from the eternal benefit to the temporal benefit. With a rite such as baptism, which is supposed to be done but once, it’s fair to focus on the eternal benefit rather than the temporal one.

And there’s something else worth noting. In his book The Social Sources of Denominationalism, Richard Niebuhr makes a distinction between churches (such as the RCC, Episcopal, Lutheran, Presbyterian, etc.) and the sects (Baptists, Holiness, etc.) Almost without exception the former practice pedobaptism and the latter credobaptism. (The Methodists, with their composite origins, complicate everything.) The former are generally the descendants of the state religions of old Europe, and the state mentality applies: you’re born into a country, you’re born into a religion, you’re born into a church, the initiation should be early. (Remember that we had baptismal records before birth certificates, a practice which presumes pedobaptism.) This mentality on the state side is parodied by Gilbert and Sullivan, doubtless mindful that many former inhabitants of the British Isles had filled two continents with those who wanted or had to leave:

The problem with this idea is that it breeds complacency. People are simply assumed to be “sealed” into their church, which makes churches vulnerable to being buffeted the way they have during the last half century and more. Many get to the point where they no longer remain Episcopalians or Presbyterians or whatever. The Anglican world has suffered much with this, and unless they figure out how to break the cycle (which I describe in Squaring the Circle of Anglican/Episcopal Ministry) decline with happen sooner or later.

In fairness it’s not always that way with pedobaptist churches. A glaring exception are Middle Eastern churches, as I noted in The Evangelical Comeuppance in the Middle East. But American churches are going to have to deal with a hostile environment more effectively than they’ve heretofore shown evidence.

It’s probably fair to say that, in spite of the inroads credobaptists have made into the ACNA, that institution will remain predominantly pedobaptistic. Matthew Joss, whose article detonated this controversy, tells us that “I’m not aware of anyone being disciplined or removed for lack of baptizing their infant.” But there’s a first time for everything. I have conservative Episcopalian friends whose foray into the ACNA was ended by what the husband (a retired judge) called a “snot-nosed” rector who objected to something they were doing. I’m sure there’s a Diotrephes or two out there who will exercise their authority on this issue and many more.

In the meanwhile, I think we would do well to dig into the base issues rather than simply bandy authority about.