The Elephant in the Room on Baptismal Regeneration

The Meaning of “Regeneration” [Commentary on Browne: Article XXVII (1)]

I’ve been thinking about posting on this topic, but, in their inimitable way, North American Anglican has posted this. Like many things in Christianity (vernacular liturgy being an important example,) Anglicanism has wrestled with many things it inherited from Roman Catholicism long before the Catholics did, and this is one of them. The core of the article linked to above is that the idea of baptismal regeneration is, in the Anglican tradition, equivocal, to use a good Thomistic term. And unfortunately that’s not unusual.

Let’s start with the starting point, i.e., what they inherited from Roman Catholicism. I’ll pick a couple of catechisms that I just happen to have on hand. Let’s start with the catechism of Joseph Deharbe, S.J. This is from the Sixth Edition (1908,) although earlier editions date back to at least 1876. His definition of baptism is as follows:

What is Baptism? Baptism is a Sacrament in which, by water and the word of God, we are cleansed from all sin, and re-born and sanctified in Christ to life everlasting.

He is quick to sharpen his definitions as follows:

Why do you say that ‘in Baptism we are cleansed from all sin?’ Because in Baptism original sin. and all the sins committed before Baptism, are forgiven.

Is also the punishment due to sin remitted? Yes; the temporal as well as the eternal punishment is remitted in Baptism.

Let’s jump ahead a century to Walter Farrell’s, with which I was received into the RCC. This is from the 1955 edition:

What is Baptism? Baptism is the Sacrament which cleanses you from Original Sin and personal sin, too, if you are sorry for these latter, and gives you the life of grace, making you a child of God, a brother of Christ, a member of His Church.

He doubles down on those who neglect to baptise their infants:

Is it a serious sin to neglect to baptize a baby? If you neglect the Baptism of your infant you commit mortal sin. A baby who dies without Baptism cannot enter heaven and will never see God.

Unbaptized babies will be free from suffering and will probably enjoy a certain peace and happiness in the next world, but will not have the vision of God.

Farrell’s cathechism was revised in 1970, after Vatican II, and the second quotation was modified as follows:

Is it a serious sin to neglect to baptize a baby? If you neglect the Baptism of your infant you commit mortal sin. It is extremely doubtful that unbaptized infants will go to heaven.

Here we see a shift in Baptismal theology, one which evidently Farrell’s catechism is drug “kicking and screaming.” The “elephant in the room” of this whole debate is that, as anyone who has read Dante’s Inferno knows, the Catholic Church taught through the Middle Ages and down to Vatican II that unbaptised infants would end up in Limbo because the principal purpose of baptism was to wash away the effects of Original Sin, a concept set forth by Augustine and which has become standard theology in the West. This explains the urgency regarding the baptism of infants in traditional Catholic practice.

Ending the teaching that Limbo exists only shifted Limbo from the afterlife to this one. If there is no eternal penalty for being unbaptised, what’s the point? It was here that Roman Catholicism has shifted the emphasis from the eternal benefit to the temporal one, by elevating baptism as the initiation into the church and the graces that come from being baptised. This has led to a great deal of the swelling rhetoric that we hear now on the subject, not only from the RCC but from Anglo-Catholics and Affirming Catholics alike.

Anglicanism wrestled with this problem from the start, since it wisely realised that Limbo had no Biblical warrant. The result, as the North American Anglican article notes, is that there was at least a bifurcation in thought on the extent of baptismal benefit and the real meaning of the term “baptismal regeneration.”

I think that the major loss in this whole debate–which has been going on for half a millennium now–is putting the eternal consequences of baptism front and centre rather than diverting the discussion to the temporal ones. Roman Catholicism’s answer was wrong but it was an answer, and that’s more than we see from those both in the RCC and Anglican/Episcopal worlds who have tried to pick up the pieces since.