Baptism

We must remember that man was necessarily created subject to change (to better or to worse). Moral beauty was to be the direction in which his free will was to move; but then he was deceived, to his ruin, by an illusion of that beauty. After we had thus freely sold ourselves to the deceiver, He who of His goodness sought to restore us to liberty could not, because He was just too, for this end have recourse to measures of arbitrary violence. It was necessary therefore that a ransom should be paid, which should exceed in value that which was to be ransomed; and hence it was necessary that the Son of God should surrender Himself to the power of death. God’s justice then impelled Him to choose a method of exchange, as His wisdom was seen in executing it.

Is it the mission of the church to lead those who are within its fold to accept Christ, or is the church a body of believers whose mission field is the world? Shall the church and the world be united or separated? Is the church essentially a hierarchy, or is it a body of believers? These are the questions which lay at the bottom of the great controversy on infant baptism.

John Calvin, the founder of the Presbyterian and some of the Reformed churches, based his principal argument for infant baptism on God’s covenant of grace in which he believed the children of Christian parents to be in a sense included.

To baptize before that which is required for baptism, namely faith, is found is as if one would place the cart before the horse, to sow before plowing, to build before the lumber is at hand, or to seal the letter before it is written.

In short, I let you all be highly learned, as you boast, but I have spoken in simplicity and my speech is and shall be and must be thus; for the carpenter’s Son who never went to any school, has bidden me so to speak and he himself has hewed my pen with his carpenter’s axe. May God have mercy on us all. Amen.

The argument that the abolishment of infant baptism is contrary to Christian love was based principally on the fact that it led to separation from the state-church. Frequently the reformers condemned the dissent and separation of the Anabaptists. But if the separation in itself was wrong, what right had the state-church reformers to enter upon a course which led to separation from the Roman Catholic Church?

Bucer, upon the suggestion of Schwenckfeld, decided that Confirmation should be practised. In connection with this rite the young people should confess their faith and make the vow which others were supposed to have made for them when baptism was administered to them in their infancy. Later Confirmation was generally practised among the Lutherans and Zwinglians. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a number of religious denominations arose which retained infant baptism but advanced the new idea that baptism is not the rite of initiation into the Christian church and does not convey the right of membership, a thought that is foreign to Scripture teaching.

For the first step is to make disciples, as you express it. Now disciples are made by teaching. Secondly, those who accept the teaching, and who believe and desire to be henceforth Christ’s disciples, are baptized and through baptism they accept the duty to better their lives and follow Christ, as you yourself have said above. Thirdly, since imperfection of faith remains and shall remain unto death, it is necessary, never to cease teaching after baptism, that faith may be increased and grow as a grain of mustard seed.

Hubmaier was the ablest defender of believers’ baptism. “In point of scholarship and concentrativeness he surpassed his opponents, such as Zwingli, by far,” says the Protestant historian Loserth and Hegler recognizes that “in Scripture proof and partly also in formal consequence Hubmaier was Zwingli’s superior.”

Zwingli defended his position on baptism against the Anabaptists principally in three books, namely his Book on Baptism, his Reply to Hubmaier’s first defence of believers’ baptism and a treatise published in Latin, the Refutation of Anabaptist Tricks.

The Anabaptists desired a public debate in which they would have permission to present their arguments and speak freely without being interrupted and hindered by their opponents. They complained that they were refused the right to publish books or tracts and in the public discussions Zwingli had all liberty to interrupt them and prevent the full presentation of their argument.

While Zwingli was for a time of the opinion that it were better to abandon the baptism of infants, he became in the course of a few years, as pointed out elsewhere, one of the foremost opponents of the practice of believers’ baptism.

This opinion of the faith of infants was zealously defended by Luther, Melanchthon and their friends as well as by the Lutheran theologians of later centuries. In his Refutation of Some Unchristian Articles which the Anabaptists hold, Melanchthon says: “That the Anabaptists say. The infants have no faith, is a human imagination.”

They decided that the battle of the church should be largely fought by the state and an exclusive state-church be established; hence they forsook their former position on the points of religious liberty and infant baptism.

He held that baptism should be considered “free,” hence the baptism of infants would not be invalid. “But if someone would desire to put off baptism [instead of baptizing the infants] and if he could do this without destroying the love and unity of those among whom he lives, we would not for this cause withdraw from him or condemn him.”

“I do not know, what to make of it,” says Hans Hottinger concerning Zwingli, “today he preaches one thing and tomorrow he recants it. And particularly he has preached years ago that the infants should not be baptized, but now he says, they should be baptized.”

We baptize infants and we also baptize adults. We comply with the wishes of those who do not desire to have their infants baptized, but we present them to Christ our Mediator and Redeemer by the laying on of hands and the prayer of the church. The Council of Carthage [in the fifth century] has decided that it shall be left to the liberty of every one whether or not he would have infants baptized. This is also our position.

If you put any trust in your own deeds, or in the deeds of any other man, even of a saint, then you diminish the truth, mercy, and goodness of God. For if God looks to your works, or to the works of any other man, or to the goodness of the saint, then he does not do all things of pure mercy and of his goodness, and for the truth’s sake which he has sworn in Christ. Now Paul says, it is “not for the righteous deeds we did, but by his mercy he saved us.”

We, who are the children of God and the sons of peace, do preach the holy and right word of piety, and declare one only God, the Lord of the law and of the prophets, the Maker of the world, the Father of Christ; not a being that caused Himself, or begot Himself, as they suppose, but eternal, and without original, and inhabiting light inaccessible; not two or three, or manifold, but eternally one only; not a being that cannot be known or spoken of, but who was preached by the law and the prophets.

Let him that is to be baptized be free from all iniquity; one that has left off to work sin, the friend of God, the enemy of the devil, the heir of God the Father, the fellow-heir of His Son; one that has renounced Satan, and the demons, and Satan’s deceits; chaste, pure, holy, beloved of God, the son of God.

Taste and see that the Lord is good, blessed is the man that hopes in Him. In that sacrament is Christ, because it is the Body of Christ, it is therefore not bodily food but spiritual. Whence the Apostle says of its type: Our fathers ate spiritual food and drank spiritual drink, for the Body of God is a spiritual body; the Body of Christ is the Body of the Divine Spirit.

Neither in Dalmatia nor in Cappadocia, neither in Rome, nor in Africa, was it then imperative on Christian parents, as it is now, to give baptism to their young children.

Confirmation is thus a term which in Christian history covers a diversity of practice, for neither in the manner of administration nor in the conceptions associated with it, does it stand for a fixed and uniform rite. There is no consistent tradition either in the form or in the matter of the rite while the minister may sometimes be a presbyter and on other occasions a bishop.

For, impelled by the desire of the eternal and pure life, we seek the abode that is with God, the Father and Creator of all, and hasten to confess our faith, persuaded and convinced as we are that they who have proved to God by their works that they followed Him, and loved to abide with Him where there is no sin to cause disturbance, can obtain these things.