Why I believe in infant baptism — ten thoughts

Infant baptism is one of those issues that won’t go away, but which is a pretty big decision for a lot of people. So here are my thoughts on this question, such as they are. I hope they’re helpful. They are by no means definitive; and in fact writing this has clarified a number of issues for me that I need to think further about, so I’m happy to interact with people on this. This is a fairly long post, which I hope some people will bother to read and think about. Because of this, I will also make it available to download as a pdf on the essays page.

Why I believe in infant baptism — ten thoughts

1. Baptism is not an optional extra for Christians. Despite the exegetical wrigglings of some, this seems to me to be obvious. Jesus commissioned his disciples to “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them…” (Matt 28:20); and the practice of baptism accompanying conversion to Christian faith is taken for granted throughout the New Testament (e.g. Acts 8:37), and used as the basis of theological reflection (e.g. Rom 6:4). The argument that when Paul refers to Christians being buried with Christ in baptism (e.g. Col 2:12) he means Christ’s death—his “baptism” (Mark 10:38)—seems to me inadequate: it doesn’t account for Jesus command, and it ignores straightforward evidence like John 4:1–2, Acts 10:47, and 1 Corinthians 1:13–17. Baptism with water was normal for Christians from day one. It came from Jesus. We should keep doing it.

2. So what is baptism then? Baptism is, very basically, a sign, a symbolic act, a ritual that signifies something, or as theology has typically called it, a sacrament. What does baptism signify? Most fundamentally, baptism signifies what happens when a person’s life is transformed by Jesus. Baptism is a sign of new birth with Christ. There are two aspects to this. First, baptism signifies the washing, or cleansing from sin, that comes through union with Christ (e.g. 1 Cor 6:11). Second, baptism symbolizes burial and resurrection, going down and coming up. This is a bit less obvious; and especially when you don’t have some kind of full immersion in water going on it’s not very clear. But it’s still there, as it should be, as Paul draws heavily on this image: “we were buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life” (Rom 6:4). Baptism symbolically enacts how a person’s life is transformed by Christ: they are cleansed of their sins, they die and rise again, there is a new creation (2 Cor 5:17).

3. There is a sense, therefore, in which baptism is a word. Baptism says something; it proclaims a reality: “this woman’s life has been recreated in Christ”. Sacraments have thus been understood in Christian history as “visible words”. But whose word? Not the minister’s. Nor the candidate’s. God’s. Baptism is a visible word from God, a divinely given announcement of the definitive reality of a particular life.

4. Baptism is a sign, a visible word, of new life in Christ. However, it is not identical with this reality. A sign is not the thing it signifies. It is connected to it; but they are distinct. Emphatically, therefore, baptism does not equal conversion, it signifies it; it proclaims it, but it does not achieve it. People are not saved by being baptized; they are saved, and this is depicted and announced in baptism. How are they saved? Through sharing in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ through faith. How else? Baptism is an expression of this more fundamental reality.

(5. As an aside therefore, if forced to answer the intensely irritating question whether people absolutely need to be baptized in order to be saved, I would say no. However, this whole way of approaching things is misguided. Quite apart from being badly reductionistic — why do we want just the bare minimum? — it assumes we know how exactly salvation happens in someone’s life, how people are brought to new life in Christ. Yet I suspect that this is actually a more obscure reality than we think, and one which is perhaps quite inaccessible to us. We should presume that Jesus knew what he was doing when he gave us baptism. Perhaps part of the reason was to give a clarity to our experiences that he knows we need.)

6. A sign, then, is not the same thing as the reality it signifies. It seems to me that one interesting implication of this is that there is nothing essentially wrong about baptizing someone at a time quite removed from the moment they confess Christian faith. Someone who has been a follower of Jesus for years can still be meaningfully baptized; and a baptism is not rendered meaningless because the child does not responsibly own their faith for some years to come — indeed, does any baptism actually coincide with the event of conversion? Perhaps the Ethiopian eunuch’s? Infant baptism is therefore not ruled out by the argument that it is often distant in time from an individual’s personal decision to follow Christ.

7. But correspondingly, infant baptism is also not ruled in by the argument that people can be Christian their whole lives long! Why not let everyone, then, be baptized as an adult? Yet we shouldn’t confuse what is logically legitimate with what is best practice. It makes sense for the sign of baptism to relate temporally to the reality of coming to faith. That’s why new converts are normally baptized soonish, and it’s why, I think, the New Testament so often speaks of people’s baptism as the moment they were saved (e.g. Galatians 3:27). But it’s for precisely this reason that it makes sense for many people who grow up as Christians to be baptized as infants; or do we want to reject the possibility that someone can grow up as a believer even from their earliest days?

8. But, someone may protest, what good is a sign that I can’t remember! I think three things need to be said here. First, baptism is not just a sign for the candidate; it is also for the congregation, including Christian parents. Why should they be denied the assurance and comfort that comes from baptism? Yes, there are those who grow up to repudiate their infant baptism; but there are also those who don’t, and the former case should not tarnish the later. This is especially relevant for parents of a child who dies early. What are we saying by refusing to baptize such a child. Again, do we not think God can save children? Second: that said, however, the sign is, centrally, for the benefit of the person being baptized. This must, therefore, be taken into account in infant baptism, where the candidate cannot normally remember the event. So the parents have the obligation of assuring the child of her baptism and explaining its significance — baptism certificates are very valuable here. Also, if you are going to baptize infants, you’ve got to have something like confirmation, a moment when the person claims their baptism as his own. Third, we need to be careful before unthinkingly treating memory as a stable factor in this whole equation. Remembering is a tricky thing — on the whole straightforward, but by no means one hundred per cent reliable. There are many other conceivable ways in which someone might not be able to remember their baptism and yet know it had happened to them, or need to be assured of this by others.

9. Infant baptism has a few other significant pluses. First, infant baptism detaches the sign of baptism from any particular response made by the individual (though it emphatically does not detach it from response per se). This can be appropriate and, indeed, helpful for people who grow into faith and along the way make many responses, perhaps of increasing maturity and comprehension, none of which can be identified as “the moment” they became a Christian without some arbitrariness and doubt. Indeed, all types of baptism can play this role, of bringing a clarity and unity to what was a complex and sometimes drawn out process in someone’s life by declaring, “this is what has happened here, in this person’s journey, they have been saved”. Infant baptism does the same thing, just at a different moment. Second, infant baptism makes it plain that salvation is more about God’s work than our response. It is only God’s sovereign, powerful grace that saves anyone; and God can save even helpless, dependent children — indeed only helpless, dependent children (cf. Mark 10:13–16). Third, infant baptism reminds us that God can and does save people who cannot make an intelligent response, whether they be children, or the mentally ill or severely disabled, or perhaps the senile. To say that only those who make an intelligent response can be baptized is to shut God’s mercy off from those we know receive it.

10. Finally, though there are real complexities and problems raised by infant baptism, these need to be carefully considered. The great difficulty for many, of course, is those whose baptism as an infant makes no obvious impact on their lives. In this category are the great bulk of “cultural” baptisms. However, it seems to me that to blame this problem on infant baptism itself is in many cases completely unreasonable. The fault, surely, lies with the parents who promise to bring their children up in the faith and then make no effort to keep their promises, or with the churches and ministers who happily baptize without any real challenge to the parents or any attempt to integrate them into the community. You could argue that the practice will inevitably breed these problems, but that does not seem to me to be self-evident, nor indeed sufficient to turn us against it. But what about those children of diligent Christian parents who do not stay true to their infant baptism. This is indeed a challenge. But it must be pointed out that this is not greatly different to the case of those who, having been baptized as adults, go on to abandon their faith. A tragedy, a mystery, a worry; but it doesn’t stop us baptizing.

On the other side, a poem

On the other side of the mountain,
The fog began to clear.
And as the rain eased off,
I could see a little further
The way to go from here.

On the other side of the forest,
The gum trees dropped away
And only a little scrub and sand
Divided me from the magnitude
Of where the ocean lay.

Underneath the surface,
The world was all transformed
By silence and filtered light
And fish, which cautiously avoided,
But, curious, also swarmed.

On the other side of the fog and rain
That block my way from view,
The doubts and fears that threaten
To undo my self, and ridicule
The things I thought I knew,

I know there will be space and light,
Clarity and peace.
The world filled again with light
And beauty, letting
Belief come with ease.

Yet at the edge there’s trouble,
Confusion and regret.
The in-between lingers stubbornly,
And the staggerings remind me:
I am not at the other side yet.

Mid-Term Break, by Seamus Heaney

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o’clock our neighbours drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying—
He had always taken funerals in his stride—
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were ’sorry for my trouble’;
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

From Death of a Naturalist (1966).

Diary of a ministry trainee

My friend Guan has written a “Diary of a Ministry Trainee”. It’s published in The Briefing and you can get the first installment here. Guan’s a great writer and I reckon this will be helpful for anyone at this stage, or thinking about it.

p.s. Sorry I've been offline for a while. Lots has been happening.
I will hopeful recommence blogging regularly soon. Love A.

Dots and strokes — zeal for whom?

The accounts in Joshua of the destruction and massacre of the inhabitants of Canaan (e.g. Joshua 8 ) are pretty difficult, as are the commandments to Israel to do so in the Law (e.g. Deuteronomy 7). They’re very hard to understand, and are, of course, picked on frequently by opponents of Christianity.

I’m not going to pretend to answer all the questions about these, but I do think we need to understand them rightly. One passage that has an interesting bearing on this issue is 2 Samuel 21:1–2:

“Now there was a famine in the days of David for three years, year after year; and David inquired of the Lord. The Lord said, ‘There is blood-guilt on Saul and on his house, because he put the Gibeonites to death.’ So the king called the Gibeonites and spoke to them. (Now the Gibeonites were not of the people of Israel, but of the remnant of the Amorites; although the people of Israel had sworn to spare them, Saul had tried to wipe them out in his zeal for the people of Israel and Judah.)”

The story of the Gibeonites’ deception of Israel, resulting in the treaty that saved them, is recorded in Joshua 9. What’s interesting here, though, is the mention that Saul’s attempted genocide of them was (a) immoral, at least partly because of the treaty, and (b) motivated by nationalistic fervour — “zeal for the people of Israel and Judah”.

I think this is important to notice, because it reminds us that the devastations of Joshua etc. were not simply a matter of ethnic cleansing or nationalistic zeal (and so can never be taken as any kind of mandate for nationalistic expansion — in fact, Saul’s doing precisely that led to the famine). The “ban” on the inhabitants of Canaan was not really about Israel at all (cf. Deuteronomy 9:5). If we get that wrong, I don’t think we have a hope of making sense of them.

David Bentley Hart on the sadness of paganism

Another highlight from Hart’s book, Atheist Delusions, is his discussion of how Christianity brought a message of joy and life to a world shaped by a profound sense of melancholy, what Hart calls paganism’s “glorious sadness”.

“[T]he Christianity of the early centuries did not invade a world of noonday joy, vitality, mirth, and cheerful earthiness, and darken it with malicious slanders of the senses, or chill it with a severe and bloodless otherworldliness. Rather, it entered into a twilight world of pervasive spiritual despondency and religious yearning, not as a cult of cosmic renunciation (pagan religious and philosophical culture required no tutelage in that) but as a religion of glad tidings, of new life, and that in all abundance. It was pagan society that had become ever more otherworldly and joyless, ever wearier of the burden of itself, and ever more resentful of the soul’s incarceration in the closed system of a universe governed by fate. It was pagan society that seemed unable to conceive of any spiritual aspiration higher than escape—higher, that is, than the emancipation of a few select spirits from the toils of an otherwise irredeemable world—and that could imagine no philosophical virtue more impressive than resignation to the impossibility of escape. The church, by contrast, was obliged to preach a gospel of salvation that somehow embraced the entire created order.” (143–44)

“Pervasive spiritual despondency and religious yearning”—sounds like Nick Cave. Bring on the glad tidings!

like an evening gone?

The poem I began this blog with is kind of about how our experience of this life will connect with that of the age to come. I recently came across a passage in the novel Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, which floats around the same questions. The narratorial “I” is the dying Reverend John Ames writing to his son.

“I have always wondered what relationship this present reality bears to an ultimate reality.
A thousand ages in Thy sight
Are like an evening gone…
No doubt that is true.Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, All that fear and all that grief were about nothing. But that cannot be true. I can’t believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life. For example, at this very moment I feel a kind of loving grief for you as you read this, because I do not know you, and because you have grown up fatherless, you poor child, lying on your belly now in the sun with Soapy [the cat] asleep on the small of your back. You are drawing those terrible little pictures that you will bring me to admires, and which I will admire because I have not the heart to say one word that you might remember against me.” (118–19)

Contra Miroslav Volf!

Biblical narrative and artful sermons

Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative (Basic Books, 1981), which I have only just belatedly read, thanks to Chris’ recommendations, is stunning. Alter compellingly describes biblical narrative as historical prose fiction, and outlines numerous techniques and styles used by the biblical authors to create their accounts. Even more interestingly, Alter shows how the literary style of the Bible is of a piece with the underlying theological convictions of the Hebrew faith. Here’s an example:

“The underlying biblical conception of character as often unpredictable, in some ways impenetrable, constantly emerging from and slipping back into a penumbra of ambiguity, in fact has greater affinity with dominant modern notions than do the habits of conceiving character typical of the Greek epics. The monotheistic revolution in consciousness profoundly altered the ways in which man as well as God was imagined, and the effects of that revolution probably still determine certain aspects of our conceptual world more than we suspect. This altered consciousness was of course expressed ideologically in the legislative and prophetic impulses of the Bible, but in biblical narrative it was also realized through the bold and subtle articulation of an innovative literary form. The narrative art of the Bible, then, is more than an aesthetic enterprise, and learning to read its fine calibrations may bring us closer than the broad-gauge concepts of intellectual history and comparative religion to a structure of imagination in whose shadow we still stand.”

To my mind, Alter convincingly shows that the biblical narratives are carefully constructed stories, with deliberate and stylized arrangement; and that this is not at all in conflict with their status as theological works.

This, to me, suggests an application for preaching on narratives: sermons split up unified stories into “points” to their peril. Biblical narratives are narratives, designed to be read as such. This means they do not simply make “points”. The truths they seek to communicate are reducible to propositions only at the cost of their generic presentation. This is not to say they cannot be explained in terms of propositions; but their value is not equivalent to these propositional explications. They teach us as stories. They are not simply ideas expanded into story form, which we can then unpick and restate simply. If we will be taught through these parts of Scripture, we need to experience them as stories. Perhaps this will make preaching more difficult; but perhaps it will also make it better.

Interesting things

Meredith posts a great quote and reflection on Australian spiritual temperament.

Matt posts a great quote about Christianity and politics (I think Andrew Goddard has been reading O’Donovan).

Byron is absurd. Happy Birthday Byron!

And Chris has just finished a dense and interesting series on the relevance of Jesus.

Articulating the heart of the gospel

When I am giving a talk in which I am seeking to explain what Jesus has done and how he has saved us, I often find the hardest bit is talking about his work on the cross. This does not surprise me, of course—the cross is a deep mystery before which all my words are pathetically inadequate. However, I work hard on these sections of talks.

I thought I’d post the key paragraph from my latest attempt. See what you think.

The Christian belief is that through his life, death and resurrection, Jesus has won eternal life for human beings. Jesus lived the life human beings were made to live. He loved God, and he loved other people, deeply, completely, and without failure. Jesus won the battle that every other human being fails, the battle against sin. And this victory, his perfection, enabled him then to do something no other human being could do: to give his life as what the Bible calls a “sacrifice of atonement”, that is, an offering to God that dealt with the problem of sin. In Jesus’ death, he, the perfect man, took upon himself all the consequences of humanity’s rebellion against God that have distorted creation. On the cross he, the only one who did not deserve it, suffered God’s righteous judgment upon sin. And the teaching of the Bible, the astonishing teaching of the Bible, is that he did it for us. He did it on our behalf. He died the death you and I deserved. But precisely because of this, because of his righteousness, because he gave himself freely up to death in love for us and for his Father, the power of sin and death was broken in this amazing act. And so he did not remain dead but was raised to life again by his Father and is now alive forever and ever. In Jesus’ cross and resurrection, therefore, the terrible stranglehold that sin and death had on the world were broken. In him there is life.