Baptism, Why Bother? Sacramental Infighting and Clues to Original Meanings

This past Sunday, my son, Jonah Gregory, was baptized. But, "Whatever for?" you might ask. Well I've wondered this myself.

Everyone knows Christians get baptized. Few of us, even if we call ourselves Christians, think about why we were baptized, or why we should baptize anyone else.

Baptism is just one of those things. People don't want to talk about it or think about it because either A.) It's just what every Christian does, so who cares, and/or B.) Talking about it too much will lead to differences of opinion, disagreements between individuals or even divisions between churches, so it's better to leave well enough alone.

Baptism is central to Christianity so discussing its meaning is a shortcut to delving into the heart of the gospel itself. No wonder then about the disagreement. While the divisions we persist in are lamentable (let alone the violence perpetrated in the past by those willing to take just about any division as sufficient excuse), I subscribe to the theory that theological disagreements should be addressed and hashed out instead of ignored in favor of a race to the lowest common denominator. If the teaching of Christianity is worth thinking about, then it's worth arguing about. So we should maintain civility, but let's keep talking. Baptism is worth exploring.

I find it useful to address what baptism itself is from the angle of these divisions internal to Christianity. The basic split is between those who baptize babies and young children, and those who do not. The former group includes the majority of Protestants as well as Anglicans, Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians. This position represents what is called technically paedo-baptism (child baptism). The latter group practices believer's baptism or credo-baptism, holding that one must affirm belief before being baptized. They are commonly referred to just as Baptists (from Anabaptists, meaning re-baptizers because, since they do not recognize the validity of infant baptism, they re-baptize in their own manner those already baptized as infants in another Christian Church).

Now I am obviously a paedo-baptist. Both John Calvin, the founding father of my own Reformed tradition, and Luther, the original reformer, taught paedo-baptism. But, though I am personally persuaded by the reasons given in the tradition for baptizing infants, I fully recognize that the tradition of credo-baptism arises out of a sincere desire to be faithful to certain genuine aspects of the Christian life.

At its most basic, credo-baptism stresses the truth of human free will that is both the beautiful gift and terrible responsibility of every human creature. It also underlines the God-given integrity we have as individuals and the way in which God seeks us out often as individuals.

Another thing that can be said for believer's baptism is that it portrays a very clear grasp on the truth that "God has not willed the church to be reproduced through biology but through witness and conversion." [1] In other words, Christianity is not simply a hereditary religion. Rather, following Christ as a disciple is something all are called to regardless of parentage.

As I said, while I find the above elements attractive and the arguments offered in favor of them to be sincere, I am not persuaded. First of all, I have this sense that everything attractive about credo-baptism is covered just as well in paedo-baptist tradition; we do, for instance, obviously seek out and baptize adult converts.

Second, and more importantly, I just don't feel that denying the sacrament of baptism to children fits with my larger understanding of the faith, most especially in its insistence upon the absolute centrality and primacy of grace, even while affirming human free will.

My basic take on why elements of Baptist tradition are attractive despite my overall disagreement is that, like most theological mistakes and even outright heresies, credo-baptism arises not so much out of originating something opposed to Christian teaching as it does from an over-emphasizing of one strand of Christian teaching at the expense of the corresponding part of the paradox.

So just as the ancient heresies fought by the Church fathers were erroneous because they overly stressed, for example, either the humanity or divinity of Christ and ended up denying the incarnation. I would allege that credo-baptism (though probably not tantamount to heresy) has mistakenly over-stressed the role of human free will in conversion and at the very least muddied up a proper understanding of grace.

By way of caveat, I should say that being a Calvinist, the way I would navigate this mystery might be entirely predictable because, in the words of Richard Mouw, "When Calvinists get around to attempting to explain the relationship between God's sovereignty and human freedom, we are so concerned to protect the former that we are willing to risk sounding like we are waffling on the latter rather than to imply in any way that God's power is limited." [2]

So any potential disputant could just allege that their position occupies the center of the paradox and it is the Calvinist who has erred too far to the side of denying human free will. This has certainly been alleged before. But, as I've already said, on the issue of baptism, Calvinists happen to be in agreement with the broadest and deepest streams of the Christian tradition. I've never even heard anyone argue for an early historical precedent of anti-paedo-baptism, excepting, of course, the highly disputed interpretations over baptismal precedent in the New Testament itself, which is an issue I can't address here. In general though, I would be suspicious of any major Christian teaching that is claimed to have been completely suppressed for 1400 years or so only to pop up again in the 16th century.

Because baptism is our entrance into full membership of the Church, our understanding of it will have a direct impact on our understanding of grace. If we want to keep grace in the center of our picture of the Christian life, it should be important not only to see grace at work in the sacrament of baptism, but to be unwilling to compromise on its working there in any way. Lyle Bierma writes, summarizing paedo-baptism in the Reformed confessions, that:

"Whether one is an adult being baptized after conversion or an infant being baptized before conversion, the situation is basically the same. Christ has shed his blood no less for washing the little children of believers than he did for adults. (BC) As the HC* says, both belong to God's covenant and community and . . . are promised forgiveness of sin . . . and the Holy Spirit, who produces faith. Both are called to embrace those promises by faith, the adult immediately and the infant as he or she grows older. Both are saved not by their baptism but by God's grace as they live in faith and obedience as members of the covenant community." [3]*

But it is not just a matter of technical freedom of will, the overall sense of the grace at work in a church that celebrates infant baptism and one that bars it, seems to me to be reversed in terms of who is in the driver's seat in the conversion of the sinner. Bierma again writes that, "baptism is primarily God's speaking to us, not our speaking to him. It is there that he signifies and seals an operation of grace that he performs in the context of a community that he has established. How can this salvation sola gratia (by grace alone) be any more graphically demonstrated than in the baptism of a tiny covenant child, helpless, uncomprehending, and wholly incapable of any meritorious work? Infant baptism sets before the church in sacramental shorthand the entire doctrine of God's sovereignty in the salvation of the elect." [4]

If you say that one can't be baptized as an infant, then you're saying that one can't become a Christian without a certain level of maturity, whether intellectual or moral. It seems to me that if you do this, you are making conversion to Christianity and the salvation it is all about, far too much a result of one's own effort and abilities. I believe, not just that one is saved through grace, but also that one is converted to the faith that affirms this truth through grace. (If one wanted to be dismissive, this would be the place to start throwing that dirty word 'predestination' around!) For me, one always and only enters the Church, whose threshold is baptism, through grace, with the relative understanding of a child, regardless of one's age or maturity. Affirming that we should baptize infants is a line in the sand that reminds us that our conversion, let alone our salvation, is not of our making.

The objection could be raised here that the boots-on-the-ground difference between most baptistic and Reformed churches, for example, is actually very slight because the former often practice infant dedication with adult baptism; the latter, infant baptism and adult profession of faith. This might be true. The pastor and writer Douglas Wilson wrote recently of the idea of a "wet dedication" as opposed to full covenantal baptism. To the extent that this distinction has been lost, the fault is probably that of insufficient doctrinal education in paedo-baptist circles. If Reformed believers know what they are about, then they will always understand the relative importance of infant baptism and adult profession.

The difference between the two might just be a matter of emphasis, but for me, the distinction of where the line for full Church membership lies is very important. I believe that my 5 month old son is just as much a member of Christ's church as his (hopefully) much more mature, obsessively analytical father.

Finally and in conclusion, I can't help squeezing in the following quote on baptism. It's from the mouth of the fictional pastor who narrates the story in Marilynne Robinson's exquisite novel Gilead.

"There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn't enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is power in that. I have felt it pass through me, so to speak. The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time." [5]

The very beauty and power contained in baptism, signaled to here, probably makes it nearly inevitable that it will be misused. Baptism requires, like every other creaturely gift we enjoy in this life, certain boundaries to keep it from eroding rather than contributing to the dignity of human beings. For me those boundaries are one baptism in the name of the one triune God.

_____

Notes.

1. Hauerwas, Stanley. The Radical Hope in The Hauerwas Reader. p. 512
Hauerwas here is not discussing baptism but the validity of singleness as a Christian vocation. The point stands as a possible asset for credo-baptism.
2. Mouw, Richard. Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport. p. 27
3. Bierma, Lyle. Infant Baptism in the Reformed Confessions. Collected in, The Case for Covenanental Infant Baptism, edited by Gregg Strawbridge. Accessed on 1-16-08 at http://paedobaptism.com/bierma.doc
* "BC" & "HC" refer to the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism respectively.
4. ibid.
5. Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. p. 23

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Atheism & Agnosticism Defined or, Why Christians are Agnostic, & Atheists Should be Too (With Diagrams!)

Atheism and agnosticism are both terms that are thrown around quite loosely and sometimes even interchangeably. Because of this, discussions between professed members of either group, or between theists and members of either, can be remarkably unfruitful.

One sadly typical battle between theists and atheists is that fought over which position requires more faith. This interaction usually features the atheist deriding the theist for holding beliefs without sufficient evidence and the defensive believer replying that the atheist requires even more faith because an atheist is alleged to be someone who claims to know so much about the universe that they are able to confidently rule out the existence of a God or gods.

First off, this is a bad tack to take because the theist here is granting the premise that faith has something inherent about it to be avoided. Not a good strategy for a believer to take in the long run. Second, and more importantly, hardly any atheists really occupy this rather sophomorically rejected position. (Some of our crop of 'new atheists' might be exceptions, but we'll leave that alone for now.)

To properly define these terms would require a lot of background definitions like, for example, of belief, knowledge, faith and doubt etc. etc. Upon these definitions rest those for the isms for atheists, theists and agnostics. Since I must here skip over that background work I will begin by provisionally defining theism as the holding of a belief in God or many gods who in some meaningful way transcend the created universe, including - essentially here - human ways of knowing. (In most of what follows, though I will discuss theism generally, I am primarily concerned with Christian theism. That Christian beliefs about the God revealed in Christ.)

Based on this definition, I take atheism to mean simply someone who lacks such a belief. So atheism's definition is purely negative, saying only what the atheist does not believe, and nothing about what they actually do believe. In other words, to be precise: an atheist doesn't believe there is no god, they just don't believe there is a god. The difference is subtle but important.

It seems here that the very language we speak expresses the assumtion that most people hold some kind of belief in a god such that the exception is denoted by negation. This fact is also recognized by the rather silly spin campaign of Dawkins, Dennett and others to rename people who share their perspective, 'brights' in a self-conscious imitation of the homosexual community's appropriation of the term gay. (I say the campaign is silly because of how fatuous the term 'bright' is in itself and of how unlikely any change in useage actually is, given the aforementioned preponderance of believers.)

The lines thus far, though sometimes treated sloppily are fairly clear. We can still talk about what counts as a theistic belief - what kind of G/god is needed to be the subject of the belief - but we know ahead of time that an atheist won't believe that that god exists.

Agnosticism, being the new kid on the block, is where things get really muddy.

The term agnosticism didn't even exist until it was coined in the 19th century by the famed bulldog of Darwin and debater of Bishop Wilberforce, T.H. Huxley. By his own description, Huxley intended agnosticism to denote something opposed to the certainty with which others seemed to hold their metaphysical views. In other words, to Huxley, believers and atheists seemed to be claiming to know a lot more than they could reasonably be expected to.

The problem with this opposition is in the implicit assumption that the only knowledge that counts is certain knowledge such that anything that can be doubted is not really knowledge. There is a huge philosophical conversation behind this, but suffice it to say that this is to set the bar for what counts as knowledge incredibly high. (Just to note in passing another thread this could follow, I believe part of the reason knowledge had become almost equivalent with certainty was an essential change in philosophical assumptions in the modern period.)

So in the world as sketched out by the Huxleyan agnostic, there would seem to be basically three options on the table based upon one's answer to two basic questions. (See Fig. 1) For the agnostic one must first decide if knowledge (taken to be certainty) of something like God is possible, then if it is, come to a conclusion about whether there is or is not something actually in existence to be named God. If agnosticism, as Huxley seems to set it up, is a live option, one who answers "no" to the first question is labeled agnostic, one who answers "yes", becomes either an atheist or a theist based on their answer to question number two.

Being skeptical about our ability to answer big questions like the existence of God wasn't invented in the 19th century. What Huxley really did was define a firm position wherein decision is withheld indefinitely on any serious question, the answer to which can be doubted.

Agnosticism is often described as the position that certain questions are undecidable. What I want to question is the degree to which belief one way or the other can just be withheld because one feels like it. So what if you've decided that knowledge of the divine is undecidable! Does that somehow free you from having any opinions leading you one way or the other, just an inkling perhaps? Maybe opinions and inklings don't count as beliefs, but how strong of an inkling would a Huxleyan agnostic have to have to be counted as actually believing or disbelieving that there is a god?

Since I have already discussed why most atheists are actually atheistic-agnostics. I'll now briefly discuss why the Christian variety of theists are really theistic-agnostics. (Again, a similar argument could be made for theists generically but I am less interested in that grouping, and further am less able to characterize the nature of any god other than the Christian God.)

There are basically two reasons why the orthodox Christian position should be recognized as agnostic. Most basically, we could just rest our argument on the simple assertion that for the Christian believer faith is always part of the mix. If faith is involved in one's belief, and the Huxleyan definition of agnosticism as being a lacking in certainty is granted, then clearly the Christian is an agnostic. Christians seek assurance, they cannot attain certainty the way Huxley thought of it. If you try to believe what a Christian believes, then you will inevitably have your doubts. Jesus certainly did.

Another way of putting this is to say that for the Christian, belief in God is also recognized as undecidable. The difference is that the Christian recognizes that a decision must be made on a matter that is at the same time undecidable. Christians, despite all evidence to the contrary, are not primarily about believing in God but in following Christ. Christ called us to follow him and the problem with a callinlg is that one does not first decide that a call should be responded to, one just responds, even if the response is to ignore the call. The disciple called by Jesus cannot wait for all the data to come in before deciding, he either follows or he does not.

This is why faith is a leap not a conclusion. If beliefs were easily decidable, the results would be as obvious as two plus two equals four. Arithmetic sums are not decisions, they are calculations and inevitably reached. For something to even count as a decision in the first place there must be some element of risking making the wrong decision. Anytime a decision is made, faith is there. If faith is there, then doubt is too. Faith, it must be said, is never inevitable.

The second point is just to point out that in simple historical terms the orthodox Church Fathers were those specifically opposed to the varieties of groups who called themselves, or were called by others, gnostics. As before, we should expect that those lacking what one group claims to have could be safely labeled using an alpha privative. Thus the orthodox believers opposed to gnosticism become: agnostics.

Now note, that this is all granting Huxley's characterization of a kind of binary choice between certainty and non-certainty. When I say that Christians are agnostic I only mean on these terms and in no way imply that Christian faith imparts nothing that could be called knowledge. I believe there is much that counts as knowledge that falls short of certainty, including specifically Christian beliefs. The gnostic opponents of orthodoxy weren't just advocating that Christians know things in the everyday way we use the word. Gnostics were those who presented the possibility of a kind of direct, unmediated experience or certain knowledge of God.

(This is as true now as it was then as the temptation to discard faith is constantly with us. Philip Lee wrote a very fascinating book, Against the Protestant Gnostics, that is both entirely engrossing and at times quite chilling. In it he writes about the areas contemporary protestants, especially evangelicals, share many emphases with the gnostics and are in danger of repeating the mistakes of those ancient heretics. This area of the interaction of modern philosophy, Protestantism and gnosticism is just crying out for more attention.)

Because I believe that both Christians and those we would usually call atheists share a sense of agnosticism, I would argue for keeping four options on the table, with a possible fifth for the really faint of heart. In my mapping (see fig. 2), the two questions are the same as before. If one answers "no" to question number one, thinking that certainty is not attainable in these matters, one might try to cling to position number five by not thinking about it at all, but one who is honest with oneself must admit that they either tend to believe there is no god or that there is. They are thus either an atheist, simply lacking belief in a god, or a theist, a believer who has their doubts at times. If one answers "yes" to being able to know about the existence of God with certainty, one is labeled, depending on their answer to question number two, either an incredibly (scarily) confident atheist or just some nutty sort of theist strongly resembling a gnostic. This last option could only be called heresy in a Christian light.

In short, agnosticism is either a position of epistemological false humility when presented as a distinct option or else it is already just a part of the make-up of the majority of your average red-blooded atheists and theists and most certainly what any reflective Christian should recognize themselves as.

I'm afraid that agnosticism as a stand-alone term causes much more confusion than it is worth. My apologies Thomas, you'll always have that debate to be remembered by.

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