Baptism In The Modern Era

In today's churches the theology and practice of baptism continues to be shaped by the debates begun during the Protestant Reformation. Theological discussions continue about the nature of baptism and appropriate candidates for baptism. Liturgical discussions continue regarding the appropriate way to celebrate baptism. This article surveys the discussion of baptism in the contemporary church.

Until the twentieth century, baptismal practices in the Western churches persisted largely unchanged since the Reformation era. In the Roman Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran, and Anglican (including Methodist) traditions, the normal point of entry into the church continued to be baptism as an infant. In the Baptist, Anabaptist (Mennonite, Amish, Hutterite), and various free church traditions, formal entry into the church normally came with baptism administered in adolescence or early adulthood. Yet problems inherent in each approach slowly intensified. Infant baptism in an increasingly secularized society often meant that baptized children did not receive the postbaptismal Christian nurture that once had been part of growing up in a Christian culture. Churches that baptized only adolescents or adults, since they emphasized strongly committed adult membership, found it difficult to make room in their theology and practice for their own unbaptized children, who seemed to be growing into Christianity through family nurture. The age of baptism tended to creep downward toward early adolescence. Revivalism restored the clear-cut conversion experience that had once characterized these adult-baptizing believers' churches. Theological critique in both the infant-baptizing and adult-baptizing traditions led to changes and innovations: rites of child dedication; a renewed emphasis on catechizing both baptized children and unbaptized adults; the return to the Easter Vigil as the prime setting for baptism; and the restoration of symbols and rites that had once surrounded water baptism itself, but had been eliminated during the Protestant Reformation. The Eastern Orthodox churches constitute the main exception to the above patterns of change, since they had retained the baptismal practice of the early church largely intact. In these churches, in the twentieth century, baptism of children continues to include anointing with oil (chrism) and first Communion. The paragraphs that follow focus on the Western churches. Churches that Baptize Infants The infant-baptizing tradition emphasizes the continuity of the church as a community of faith. Through the church, the redemptive life is passed, as pledged by divine promise, to the children of believers; these children are surrounded and supported by a shared life of Christian teaching and commitment. Recognizing the interconnectedness of human lives and the subtlety of influence between the generations, infant baptism represents the faith of the adult church enclosing a new life and bearing a child in its own faith until the child can acquire a measure of independence and begin to make his or her adult contribution. A number of defenders of this tradition suggest that infant baptism represents God acting on behalf of a child before the child can act towards God—a sign of justification by grace through faith. As to practice, children in Western churches were brought to baptism a few days after birth. The ritual, since medieval times (not by necessity, but by custom), became quite individualistic and private; it was performed at a font in the church, with family and sponsors present. Sponsors were friends or relatives of the child who made the promises of baptism in the child's name and represented the commitment of the adult church to support the newly baptized. Where the faith of the adult community was genuine and intense, this baptismal practice could express a great spiritual reality. Adult faith did in fact carry a child and provide it a vital heritage into which to grow. But where the faith of the adult community was largely nominal, and yet infant baptism remained an expected social form, the redemptive meaning of baptism could be seriously qualified. The practice could seem like a device to perpetuate a folk-church—a Christian population for which baptism served as little more than a christening or a public recognition of birth. Doubtless, over the centuries, most infant baptisms in the West mingled the best and the worst of these social meanings. Because an infant being baptized is passive—being acted for or acted upon—there is (particularly in an individualistic society) a perceived inadequacy in the rite unless more is done. In the West, especially in Protestantism, a later personal avowal of faith and owning of baptism came to be expected as a person baptized in infancy approached adulthood. The objectivity of infant baptism means that the church is not shaped by human initiative, but by divine grace; yet adolescent confirmation means that the church, by intention at least, is comprised of responsible, committed members. In the churches of the West, again particularly in the Protestant churches, much pastoral and catechetical effort has been devoted to preparing young persons for confirmation. The rite has been variously understood—being regarded as virtually an occasion for conversion by some groups. As a rule, one was only admitted to the Holy Communion, and thus to full sacramental and legal standing in the church, after one was confirmed. Hence the regrettable popular understanding that one was "?joining the church.?" In the sixteenth century, some Christians broke with this prevailing initiatory practice. They were called Anabaptists, or rebaptizers, because they could not acknowledge the legitimacy of their own infant baptisms and baptized themselves again when they consciously believed. However, Anabaptists viewed this second baptism as their first. Baptism, they held, was a sign of one's faith; to baptize a person who had not given and could not give expression to this faith was to bring a Christian rite dangerously close to magic. To shape a faith community by this infancy rite lowered the level of dedication among its members. The church could neither judge nor redeem, for it and the general population had become indistinguishable. Rather than thinking of baptism as a mark of continuity in the redemptive community, the believers' baptism practices sought a gathered church or a believers' church—a church consisting of a voluntary association of persons who had believed and sought baptism. The church does not pass from generation to generation, but is always coming into being. The believers' church forms an elite group of those who stand apart from the general population by the personal summons of God. Since the Anabaptists' view of baptism and of the character of the church meant that they could not recognize the legitimacy of past baptism, this group had to make a new beginning—accomplished by the first Anabaptists who baptized themselves. Although there is a contradiction in this act, what else could they have done? This radical break in baptismal theology and practice is at its best a critique of a complacent use of infant baptism. When believer's baptism is the foundation of a church, it also develops weaknesses and contradictions. The believer's baptism pattern has had difficulty accounting for the place of children in the church. Children of believing parents are loved, taught to pray, and in many respects treated as part of the church; however they are not baptized, and they do not receive the Holy Communion. Children cannot be regarded as fit candidates for baptism until they are old enough to give an account of their own faith. This intrinsic problem has led some established populations in the believer's baptism tradition to permit baptism of very young children (not without protest from other Baptists). However, since children tend to grow up uncritically into the patterns expected of them by the adults who surround them, a child will typically experience a conversion if it is expected of them. Thus the adult faith which baptism is meant to represent is qualified. Protestant revivalism during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries represents one attempt to solve this problem, by encouraging crisis conversion experiences. The defenders of believer's baptism point justifiably to the statistics in past centers of Christian population where infant baptism had prevailed for many generations. Although a large portion of the population is baptized in infancy, only a small portion gives evidence of adult Christian practice. The system of infant baptism seemed discredited by statistics. This continuation of the initiatory customs of Christendom into the post-Christendom era in Europe and these disconcerting statistics (reported in many of the old centers of Christian population: France, Britain, Scandinavia, Holland, and others), led some theologians in the post-World War I years to question or repudiate infant baptism. Karl Barth and Emil Brunner are the best known of these questioners, but they were seconded by other concerned pastors and thinkers. Those who question infant baptism in the name of believer's baptism seem to imply that believers' baptism by its very character solves the problem of large baptized, but very secularized, populations. This alternative system of Christian initiation creates a church of informed, convinced members—persons who are not brought by others, but who come themselves, evidencing an interior work of God. This group should be almost one hundred percent loyal to its profession. Yet any Baptist congregation, which has been in continuous existence for several generations and will examine its register of baptisms, will report the same disappointments, lapses, and pastoral tears that other churches report. The point is not that the believer's baptism system does not produce the perfect church—that is beyond human power. The point is that the system seems to say that it will yield results that others do not; but it cannot deliver on such a promise. These two patterns, with their theological dignity and their practical strengths and weaknesses, continued through the modern period of the church with little change and little new arguments. Two innovations might be noted. One is the introduction in the nineteenth-century Roman Church of a first Communion in childhood, usually a few years prior to confirmation. This development is now under some question among Roman scholars. The second is that some believer's baptism churches introduced a rite of infant dedication to express the church-relatedness of children who are not regarded as proper candidates for baptism. Modern Critique Among the criticisms of prevailing patterns which have developed in recent generations was the awareness of the modernity of these patterns. Baptism has been a continuous practice of the Christian community, yet significant features of the modern initiatory policies have no long history. They seem to have developed on pragmatic grounds, rather than on the basis of theology or continuity. The earliest documents (the New Testament and the sources from several centuries following) provide no information on what Christians did to bring their own children into the church. The concern of these sources is exclusively with the introduction of adult converts into the faith community. Thus the sources to which Christians turn for a model for shaping the life of the community of grace support explicitly neither the withholding of baptism from the children of Christian parents until some age of accountability, nor the baptizing of infants of Christian parents followed by confirmation at adolescence. One looks in vain in a New Testament concordance for a heading Infants, baptism of; one also looks in vain for Accountability, age of. In addition to historical novelty, critics point to theological insecurity. Theologians have described both infant baptism and adolescent confirmation as rites in search of a theology. These rites seem to have originated more from pastoral needs of the community than from a grasp of the gospel itself. Yet baptismal policy did speak about the divine redemptive initiative expressed through the corporate life of the faith community. Believer's baptism, for its part, seems to build an ecclesiology around the single idea that baptism is a witness to faith—an idea appropriate to the first generation of the church, the time when the Christian message takes root in a new population and believers are sharply differentiated from society. However, Christian life comes from prior Christian life. Most people who now are or who ever have been Christians, are or have been so because their parents were Christians—clearly a fact of theological significance. Continuity is characteristic of the faith-formed society. The family is a unit in the economy of redemption. The children of believing parents do not begin where the children of unbelieving parents begin, and should not be treated, pastorally or sacramentally, as outside the church. Both systems have shortcomings which to some extent mirror one another. If infant baptism often sentimentalizes babyhood, believer's baptism centers emotion around a specific, datable crisis of conversion. Through much of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, various critiques were mounted of the prevailing practice, and alternatives, some of them quite radical, were proposed. The churches have been moving into a post-Christian society, yet they have continued to use initiatory rites and arguments used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Western Christendom was still a social reality. Public, Congregational Rites Several features mark the baptismal rites which have been authorized in the more liturgical churches in recent years. (Ritual changes may be taking place in the freer traditions as well, but since they are largely unwritten, they are more difficult to document.) For many centuries baptism in the West, Catholic and Protestant, had been quite individualistic and private, administered in a church (or at times in a home) with only family and friends attending. Such practice is a hold-over from a medieval development. Martin Bucer protested against it, but to little effect. However, baptism now takes place often in the midst of a large Sunday morning congregation gathered for Word and sacrament. This change in practice is witness that baptism is not just an event for the candidate, nor for the family, but for the church. Churchgoers have an opportunity not only to witness the baptism of someone else, but also to be reminded of their own baptism, to join in the promises and prayers for another, and to express the church's welcome. The Baptist churches' practice has been held ordinarily with a congregation present, although usually not in a context of a Sunday observance of the Lord's Supper. Baptist Openings Ecumenical discussion and the experience of religious pluralism have brought some modifications in the believer's baptism tradition also. The introduction of a service of infant dedication has been noted. Baptist church members observed that their neighbors of the infant-baptism traditions had a powerful gesture of inclusion for their children, along with at least a rudimentary theology of childhood. This ritual development among Baptists seems to open possibilities for conversation between the two traditions on the place of children in the church. Baptist theology traditionally has described baptism as a public act of witness to one's faith. Baptism belonged to the order of obedience, not to the order of salvation. However, in recent years, some Baptist theologians are asking whether or not this sharp distinction between God's initiative and our response is sustainable. Is not our very faith in Christ at work in us? Some Baptists are willing to speak of baptism as a performative sign "?for the forgiveness of sins.?" Baptism is a meeting point of grace and faith. The historic contention that to admit a divine gift into one's account of baptism opened the door to magic often now sounds simplistic, at least to some Baptist theologians. With respect to adults, some Baptist churches express misgivings—not about their own rites of initiation, but instead about the necessity for the rejection of the legitimacy of other churches' baptisms that their theology requires. Although infant baptism seems mistaken, many persons who have been baptized as infants indeed mature into courageous adult believers. Given such results, some Baptist churches seek ways in which to recognize true baptized Christians among those who have been baptized as infants and who give evidence of responsible adult commitment in later life. An Easter Setting The infant-baptizing traditions began to question the timing of baptism because it had come to be governed by when a child was born, rather than by the Paschal events or the central moments of the Christian year. Baptism in the early church was annual, and the Eucharist was weekly. This ancient pattern had been set aside, perhaps rashly. With the recovery of the Easter Vigil and the great Christocentric structures of the church year in many communions, it has become desirable to locate the initiation rites in ritual time so that they can interpret, and in turn be interpreted, by such occasions as Easter, Pentecost, or All Saints' Day. Many churches have commended such correlation between baptism and the kerygmatic year; however, resistance comes from persons whose attitudes and expectations were shaped by past practice. In this matter, most Baptist churches have paid little attention to the Christian year. Yet in the patristic tradition, there is no intrinsic reason for baptism to be unrelated to the ritual observance of Jesus' death and resurrection. However, if baptism at Easter or Pentecost would mean that a person who had given evidence of belief might have to wait until then for baptism, that delay might raise objections from those Baptists who believe that a convert should be baptized as soon as that person is converted. This trust in the stir of the Spirit is considered biblical by some. However, other traditions think this theology is founded more on confidence in untested, unreflective experience than is wise. Serious Preparation In the modern period, some churches (especially those with a folk church background) have become quite casual about admitting persons to baptism. The church has assumed that the persons making pledges at baptism understood what they were saying. Yet often they have not. It has been assumed that baptized children would come under strong Christian influence in family and congregation. But often they have not. Many clergy and congregations have come to insist that the parents of a child brought to baptism must themselves have a considerable amount of instruction in the faith and that they must take some responsible part in the congregation's worship and service. Unless such preconditions are met, the baptism will not proceed. The purpose is not to keep children from baptism, but to raise the intentionality of the persons and sponsors who come to it. The parents and sponsors should accept some discipline and understand and agree with the church's interpretation of baptism. Baptisms, or for that matter conversions, are of little significance if there is inadequate concern for the conservation of results. Such pastoral diligence is never wasted. However, the clergy and Christian educators should never feel that when families and individuals do not sustain the pledges they made at baptism that this failure is their fault. People may mean what they say at a baptism and for a period following; they may drift away, and they may return. Clergy and teachers may take credit for successes, but they should not blame themselves for losses and lapses. Rites Made Fuller In the sixteenth century, many of the leaders of Protestantism removed from their baptismal rites all of the supporting, interpreting acts—such as anointing with oil, the sign of the cross, the giving of a lighted candle—that had developed (with varying antiquity and authority) around baptism. The reforming groups were concerned with validity, and they went to essentials. They questioned, sometimes sarcastically, actions (in the case of the Reformed churches, questioned particularly those actions that involved physical things) which lacked express New Testament warrant. Thus attention came to focus quite exclusively on water baptism. The Roman Communion retained a postbaptismal anointing. The Anglican prayer books placed immediately after the baptism a reception of the newly baptized, a signing with the cross, and a commissioning of the baptized to fight under Christ's banner (actions and terms which some liturgical historians describe as an incomplete attempt to court Presbyterian approval). However, other churches dropped such rituals, lest they obscure the biblically-mandated water action. Clearly, water, with its complex meanings of life, death, and washing, is the central baptismal symbol, which should not be obscured. Symbolic clutter is not edifying, yet many of the revised liturgies of Christian initiation in the later half of the twentieth century are introducing (prescriptively or as choices) some postbaptismal actions into traditions which had not known them. This enrichment of the baptismal act does not come from aesthetic or antiquarian motives, nor from fussiness (a failing that liturgists do not always avoid). Rather, it demonstrates a coming to terms with the ancient ceremonial tradition and with the Catholic affirmation of images. Fullness of meaning is expressed in fullness of sign. In the ancient church (as to this day in the East), the sequence of initiatory events led to the Holy Communion. The new baptized members, after they were given the post-baptismal anointing, entered the eucharistic room, where they took part for the first time in the kiss of peace and the prayers of the faithful, and for the first time received the bread and wine, the body and blood of Christ—all gestures of incorporation. The baptism, signifying birth, was not repeated, but it led at once to the often-repeated Lord's Supper, which spoke of the continual need to be fed. For many generations, the churches of the West have separated these two great sacraments of the gospel. Persons who were baptized, including adults, as a rule, only received the Holy Communion later—in the case of infants, many years later. However, the revised baptismal rites of the second half of the twentieth century commend baptism in the setting of a service of Word and sacrament in which the whole ritual event will culminate in the celebration of the first Communion of the recently baptized. This sequence is observed in the Roman Catholic rite for baptizing adults, but not in the rite for baptizing infants. Some Roman liturgists are asking why. This union of the two evangelical sacraments is easy to accomplish in the case of adults, who after their baptism at once become full members of the eucharistic community. In the case of children, this combination of the rite of initiation and the rite of nourishment, while it is especially intelligible, requires some adjusting of attitudes, understandings, practice, and spirituality. Infant Communion is unfamiliar and to some extent uncongenial in the West. Yet any argument in favor of infant baptism is an argument in favor of infant Communion; any argument for postponing Communion is an argument for believers' baptism. The churches which are changing their initiatory rites are not all moving at the same time and in the same way to join baptism and Eucharist. Each group works from its own historic experience. Locally, pastoral reasons demand patience. Yet the idea is compelling, and the practical problems have been surmounted with considerable ease in the churches that have pioneered it. Emphasis on Adult Baptism The most significant event in the modern history of Christian initiation is the issuing, following the Second Vatican Council, of the Roman Church's The Rite for the Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA, first English edition, 1974), a substantial work which took a number of years to prepare. In the largest and oldest Christian traditions, baptism had for centuries meant infant baptism. Of course, all churches baptized adults when missionary work brought the faith to a new population. Although all Western churches had a steady but small number of adult converts, these converts were the exception. Rites essentially developed for infant baptism were adapted for these converts. The RCIA is not adapted from infant rites, but is a modern version of the initiatory process of the early church. Adults are prepared in a lengthy catechumenate, during which the catechumens attend church on Sundays, but only for the service of the Word; they receive instruction and share in the church's works of mercy. Their baptism is ordinarily at the Easter Vigil, followed at once by confirmation (by a bishop if a bishop is present, otherwise by presbyters) and by first Communion. This rite of the RCIA is not described as an exceptional observance, but as the norm for Christian initiation. That is not to say that there will be more adult baptisms than infant baptisms. Rather, it means that what baptism signifies is more adequately stated and enacted in the case of adults than it can be in the case of children. The infant rite is derived from the adult rite, not the reverse. If this adult rite, prepared for by careful catechesis, is to be the church's norm, it raises important issues. What are the proper expectations for membership in the Christian community? The RCIA clearly states that members should be informed about and responsible for matters of faith and practice. The rites and pastoral customs of Christian initiation should educate a person for this responsibility. In setting standards for new members, the church also asks hard questions of those already baptized. This rite has not taken hold equally everywhere in the Roman church, but where it has, it has proved revitalizing and revolutionary. The early church developed its processes of Christian initiation because it was an evangelizing church and needed them. In the modern church, this rite is not just a throwback to early centuries. It is a call to be once again a church engaged with society in the name of the gospel. The church's life should be a cycle of evangelizing, catechizing, baptizing, nurturing in Word and sacrament, then evangelizing again. The catechumenate must not be a program, but instead the church doing its essential business. The RCIA, and the understandings of initiation and community which have followed from it, have influenced other churches as well. Out of this ecumenical stir, some common ground may develop where it has not developed for four centuries. The infant baptism system and the believers' baptism system have grown up as separate configurations of understanding and practice. Representatives of one tradition could not hear what representatives of the other tradition were saying. Now, however, the RCIA seems to be opening churches in the infant-baptizing tradition to the centrality of the adult convert, and to the necessity that the church have a dedicated adult membership. Modern expositors of the RCIA are making some of the same points that were used by defenders of believer's baptism which were supposed to be uncongenial to the Catholic ethos. Even with this emphasis on adult conversion, the churches that practice infant baptism will continue to baptize the children of believers, for such children are not outside the church; their spiritual experience does not begin where a convert's spiritual experience begins, and their experience should not be expected to replicate a convert's ritual pattern. At the same time while some of the infant-baptizing churches are developing along this line, some of the believer's baptism churches are seeking ways of acknowledging that infant baptisms (at least where such baptisms have been validated by adult faith and profession) are real baptisms. It seems possible that out of new openness on both sides, there may be possibilities for the two systems to accept the strengths and tolerate the critiques of one another, and to coexist either within a single church or side by side. Fonts and Physical Arrangements With the renewed interest in adult baptism has come interest in baptismal space. Churches whose fonts had been small and rather out of sight are realizing that such minimal space does less than justice to the importance of the fundamental sacrament of Christian initiation. Churches which by custom had used in baptism a token amount of water are seeking ways of using more. As new churches are being designed, they often contain baptismal pools suitable for immersion and fonts in which running water is seen and heard. This renewed emphasis must be part of a total spatial statement. In some Baptist churches, a large, conspicuous baptismal pool had simply taken over the spatial design. The centers for baptism, preaching, the Eucharist, reading, prayer, and musical direction all must be in intelligible, expressive relation to one another. None must be ignored; and none must dominate.