Baptism Among The Protestant Reformers

Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin all believed baptism could properly be administered to infants. Yet, whereas Luther emphasized baptism as a sign of God's promise to bring about faith in conjunction with the infant's inchoate faith, Zwingli and Calvin saw it as a Christian equivalent to circumcision in the Hebrew Scriptures, the mark of inclusion in God's covenant people. Adherents of the Radical Reformation rejected the baptism of infants entirely, arguing that infants cannot have faith in Christ, since faith comes by hearing and understanding the Word of God. They repudiated their own baptisms as infants and had themselves rebaptized. Hence they became known as Anabaptists, or rebaptizers.

No deeper chasm separated the various Protestant Reformers than their understanding of baptism; nor have their descendants nearly half a millennium later bridged the gap. All of the Reformers reacted strongly to medieval abuses that seemed to make infant baptism an escape hatch from the consequences of a sin inherited from Adam and Eve. One group recoiled so strongly as to insist that medieval baptism was null and void and that true baptism could be administered only to persons capable of expressing their own faith. Adherents to this view were scornfully dubbed Anabaptists (rebaptizers), or even Catabaptists (opposed to baptism), by those who accepted medieval practice while insisting it be accompanied by a new understanding of its meaning. Luther on Baptism In 1519, Luther wrote a treatise on baptism in which he argued for the submersion of infants as the best way of signifying that the old nature is drowned by God's grace. That understanding does not mean an end to sin within us, but rather signifies the beginning of a continuing victorious war against sin. The battle continues until death; since the drowning of sin signified in baptism lasts as long as we live. The sacrament is a dynamic process, not a momentary event; the sign and the reality signified endure to the end of our days. In 1520, Luther expanded his view of baptism in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, stressing baptism as a sign attached to a divine promise and attacking the current understanding of penance as debilitating to baptismal theology. Anabaptist Attacks on Infant Baptism For some who wish to reform the church, Luther (and Zwingli also) did not go far enough in simply reinterpreting baptism. Reacting strongly against the medieval necessity to baptize immediately after birth in order to escape limbo or hell, these more radical (or left-wing) thinkers insisted on an alternative understanding: Baptism is an enacted testimony made by individual believers to their personal faith in Christ in obedience to his command, and in imitation of the adult baptism reported in the New Testament. Believers are the consciously converted who together form a religious community zealous for righteous living and radical social reform to the point of perfectionism. Hence baptism is a mark of sanctification, though not the cause of it. Thus between 1522 and 1525, a radical movement sprang up around Zurich, led by Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz, Michael Sattler, Balthasar Hubmaier, and others. Between 1525 and 1536, similar movements arose in Germany, Austria (including areas of present-day Italy), Moravia, and the Low Countries. (From the name of one of its leaders, Menno Simons, adherents of the movement in the Netherlands became known as Mennonites.) Although Zwingli was initially attracted by the arguments of his former disciples, by the end of 1526 the city council of Zurich had condemned Anabaptism as a heresy punishable by drowning—a cruel parody of the sect's advocacy of adult baptism. Zwingli's Defense of Infant Baptism In the same year, Zwingli published a treatise on baptism, consisting of four parts. He rejected the notion of original guilt and instead defended infant baptism on the basis of covenant theology, with the rite being a kind of corollary to circumcision, an initiation into the new covenant. He argued that, while articulated faith is necessary for the mature Christian life, it need not precede baptism. He rightly renounced the too close an identification of sign with the thing signified that had made baptism magical in the medieval church; but in reaction, he turned the sign into a vague symbol rather than into something with effective power to proclaim the gospel truth of redemption. In this, he went well beyond Luther (as he did also in defining the Lord's Supper as an ordinance, and not a sacrament). In response to Anabaptist objections that the New Testament nowhere explicitly warrants infant baptism, Zwingli cleverly replied that neither does it warrant the admission of women to Communion at the Lord's Table; yet the church has never rejected a narrow biblicism on the latter issue. He also corrected misconceptions among his opponents about the historical development of infant baptism. Zwingli saw clearly the link between baptism and ecclesiology and perceived that the Anabaptist position on initiation inexorably carried with it a sectarian view of the church. Contrary to the parables found in Matthew 13, the Anabaptists insisted that the tares should be separated from the wheat in the present age and by human discernment. When his initial work did not convince his opponents, but only produced a countertreatise by Hubmaier, Zwingli in 1531 issued a work bearing a caustic title that revealed his exasperation: Refutation of the Tricks of the Catabaptists. The Role of Faith in Baptism Luther was determined that baptism remain a sacrament—a sure sign with power to affect what it signifies. He understood as well as Zwingli did the medieval abuses. But Luther held firmly to the dictum, Abusus non tollit usum (abuse does not abrogate use), and he set about giving sacramental baptism the clear force of gospel proclamation. Thus according to Luther, baptism is God's word to us; it can work faith within us, and not merely express the already developed faith of the individual (as in the Anabaptists) or of the church corporately (as in Zwingli). Illustrative of the power Luther saw in the sacrament, he taught Lutherans to gain confidence in the graciousness of God by reminding themselves daily—and particularly in times of great distress—"?I have been baptized.?" Although not resting the case for the infant baptism primarily thereon, Luther asserted that infants indeed can have faith—not the mature faith of adults, but a faith which nevertheless is a trust recognized by God. To this extent, he moved away from what often was to be a weakness in later Protestantism—the tendency to equate faith with reason. That very tendency changed confirmation, which had been a sacramental act of a bishop theologically integral to baptism, to a nonepiscopal act that signaled completed catechesis and had no clear connection with baptism. A part of this change barred unconfirmed persons from the Lord's Table until the Supper could be explained to them in the catechesis process (in distinction from the Orthodox practice of communicating infants and the Roman practice of granting children first Communion before confirmation). In 1523, Luther translated the traditional Latin baptismal rite into German with only minor adjustments; but by 1526, he produced a significantly revised rite that dropped most subsidiary ceremonies (e.g., the exorcistic application of salt, the opening of the ears, and the presentation of a candle), thereby giving the water ceremony undisputed centrality. An unknown catechetical hymn written by Luther in 1541 is "?Christ unser Herr zum Jordan kam?" ("?Christ, our Lord, Came to Jordan?"). Zwingli based the retention of infant baptism on the covenant principal, and Luther saw baptism as a great covenant for our comfort through which God continually assures us of divine grace. Among the Protestant Reformers, however, baptismal covenant theology reached its apogee in the more extended and systematic treatment of Calvin, particularly in The Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559 edition; IV:14–16). With Luther and against Zwingli, Calvin defended baptism as a sacrament affecting what it signifies. But with all the Reformers, Calvin denied that baptism affects the remission of inherited sin at the moment of administration. What is affected (as also in Luther) is a continuing proclamation of God's saving love and an assurance of God's incorporation of us into the covenant of grace. Specifically, for Calvin, baptism attests to the forgiveness of sins in the future as well as from the past; assures us of being engrafted into Christ for newness of life; and teaches us that we are united with Christ and thereby are recipients of all his blessings. As for Luther, for Calvinist baptism is a sacrament that cannot be repeated, for it is God's incontestable and utterly dependable promise to us. To this promise we must respond in faith, if the dynamic of the covenant is to be fulfilled. But it is God who initiates and God who, through the work of Jesus Christ, saves. The lack of baptism is not, for Calvin, a barrier to salvation (as in the medieval church). Nor is baptism magical. Some may indeed receive it idly, and thus to no advantage. But to those who correctly accept the sign, the administration of baptism is an effective seal or pledge of divine promise to be relied upon with great thanksgiving to confirm and increase our faith. Calvin made significant use of the Old Testament, not only to defend infant baptism as a corollary to circumcision, but also to connect the church's journey with Christ to Israel's crossing of the sea and following of the cloud in the wilderness. Thus Calvin explicated themes popular in the patristic and medieval literature on baptism more fully than other Reformers. Still, in many ways, Luther's brief treatise of 1519 and his discussion in Babylonian Captivity are the most balanced theological considerations of baptism, primarily because they are free of the defensive polemics that necessarily invaded writings once the Anabaptist controversy emerged. In varying proportions, the sacramental views of Luther and Calvin and the ordinantial views of Zwingli coalesced to preserve infant baptism in the Lutheran and Reformed churches and in the Anglican Church, where Cranmer embedded sacramental teaching in his prayer book liturgies and in the Articles of Religion. The Anabaptist view prevailed among the left-wing groups on the continent and in the seventeenth century greatly affected the Baptist movement as it emerged in and radiated from England.