The unintentional yet damaging institutional sin of infant baptism.
A fascinating article put out by the BBC (no, that's not Bethlehem Baptist Church) shows that the lack of church discipline in some churches is seen as ludicrous to unbelievers. And its all tied to infant baptism.
John Hunt was baptised in the parish church of St Jude with St Aidan in Thornton Heath in south-east London. But 50 years later he stands outside and regards its brick facade without much affection....
Now Mr Hunt has become the pioneer in a rejuvenated campaign for a way of cancelling baptisms given to children too young to decide for themselves whether they wanted this formal initiation into Christianity.
However, baptism is proving a difficult thing to undo....
A letter from the the Archbishops' Council said that the Church of England did not regard baptism as a sign of membership, so any amendment to the record would be unnecessary.
The problems are multiple:
1) baptism is seen as having nothing to do with church membership. And when there is no church membership, church discipline becomes impossible.
2) infant baptism itself tends to separate baptism from church membership and discipline. One doesn't want to publicly disicpline a 2 year old for poking his sister in the eye and showing no signs of repentance. All paedobaptists I know rightly recognise that such matters are better dealt with within the family.
But, what do you then do with those who have received the sign of baptism, never come into church membership and therefore never come under church discipline. How is to be made clear that this person should by no means see the sign of the covenant as a sign that they are a Christian?
Thankfully some people, like John Hunt, recognise themselves that they are not Christians. My fear is that in the last UK census 71% of people still identified themselves as being Christian, yet less than 10% would be in church on any given Sunday. Very few of these are asking to be "de-baptised".
Is infant baptism a serious sin, even though unintentional? I'm totally with Mark that it is done in good faith, and perhaps the damage done to genuine Christians is limited by inconsistency. However, institutionally throughout Anglican Britain, and even more so throughout Roman Catholic Europe it has, in my opinion been one of the most damaging institutional sins in giving people a sense of assurance, even as they are walking towards hell.
HT: Dean and Kris Dryden for showing me the article.
It seems to me the sin is not so much the paedobaptism as it is the failure to disciple and/or discipline the recipients of paedobaptism.
In other words, the problem isn't baptizing babies, but rather failing to follow through on what that baptism requires of the parents and the church.
Posted by: Richard Okimoto | Mar 20, 2009 7:27:42 AM
Whatever statistics might say, credo-baptist practices can lead to the same issues if the baptized one is similarly not discipled in the word. The parables of the sower and of the wheat and the tares, for example, are written ostensibly to the baptized as warnings to the church that not all that are baptized are members of the invisible church.
So if a church practices paedo-baptism or credo-, the charge is the same to preach the word to the assumed believer to the affect that they are assured of their belief or not. No one who professes Christ raised in the Scriptures should look to their baptism as proof that their name is written in the Lamb's Book of Life. It's painfully obvious here in the States that there are millions of unbelieving Baptists out there who have no idea that they're not saved. Who sinned baptizing these people?
Posted by: Bill L | Mar 20, 2009 8:27:11 AM
Are the covenant promises for me and my children or not? And am I the one who makes the covenant with God for Him to agree with? Of course not. Anyway, the point being I think the error of this post at its core is a misunderstanding of the covenant promises.
Posted by: Mark J | Mar 20, 2009 8:51:46 AM
i think this is how the IFB's got started :)
Posted by: junior | Mar 20, 2009 9:58:24 AM
"And when there is no church membership, church discipline becomes impossible."
That presumes a mandate for formal church membership in the New Testament, a mandate which is absent in the text and found only in tradition.
There is plenty that is in serious error when it comes to infant baptism, but inefficient and incorrectly applied church discipline is a problem in paedo and credo churches alike.
Posted by: Arthur Sido | Mar 20, 2009 9:59:44 AM
Well put, Mike. A faithful response, I believe, to Rick Phillips' incredulity at Ref 21.
Arthur, brother, seriously? Formal association with a local church (i.e., "membership") is about as absent as the Trinity in the text. It is so assumed that we cannot help but see it.
For whom will elders "give an account" (Heb 13:17)? When "none of the rest dared to associate with them" (Acts 5:13), who was the "them"?
What about all the "one another"'s of the NT? Who is "one another"? You cannot begin to be obedient to NT Christianity without formal association in a local assembly (aka, membership to a local church). Keep poking around 9marks.org...
Posted by: Steve | Mar 20, 2009 12:39:24 PM
Steve,
Where exactly are we commanded or given an example of formal church membership? It may be traditional, and it may be pragmatic but it is nowhere in the Bible. We have taken a church tradition and forced the text to defend it where the text makes no such demands.
Seriously.
Posted by: Arthur SIdo | Mar 20, 2009 6:07:45 PM
Come now, surely the straw man at work here is obvious. The list of genuinely reformed people who view the modern day Church of England as a true church (with, as the Belgic confession puts it, the pure preaching of the Gospel, the pure administration of the sacraments and the exercise of Church Discipline) must be extremely short. Even the reformed people who remain within it are functionally congregationalist.
The problem with the church of England is most likely to do with the fact that it is 1) a state Church 2)where fewer than half the ministers believe Jesus is the only way to the Father 3) and it is easier to get ordained if you don't believe God actually exists than that women shouldn't be Pastors; the archbishop of York stated this winter that the Church aught to be an essentially non religious body, where religous people (without any necessary committment to Christianity as such) can vicariously practise religion on behalf of the nation. There's a C of E priest in the diocese of Bath and Wells who is a priest to the Hindu Snake God in the summer break, and the bishops are mostly fine with that. You're a good deal closer to genuine Christianity with the Mormons than in the C of E. The fact that they also dampen babies as a form of cultural memory is neither here nor there.
If we're making arguments about polity based on the State of Brittish Christianity, there's just as much nominalism in the Baptist Union, and you could just as easily argue that their emphasis on making your own personal choice has a lot to do with why most of their children don't embrace the Christian faith, but may well get baptisted as a social rite.
This kind of charicature which compares Apples to Oranges is ludicrous, and a good deal below this blog's learned and thoughtful contributors.
Posted by: Ed Yates | Mar 21, 2009 6:56:32 AM
Thank you all for your comments.
Let me first make clear my deep love for fellow believers within the Church of England. I grew up within it; I served on staff at a C of E church, I went to a (reformed) C of E seminary. The majority of my respected friends and colleagues in ministry in the UK are Anglicans. I am delighted to continue to partner for the gospel with gospel preaching Anglicans, and do so regularly, but I wish that they would abandon infant baptism.
Ed, I shall leave it up to the reader to decide whether my post is ludicrous, stupid and thoughtless, but let me at least reply to some of your substantial objections.
1) The problem you suggest is that the Church of England is a state church, not that it is a paedobaptist. The two ideas are not at all unrelated. I would argue that the whole reason that the reformed churches of Europe were so keen to maintain infant baptism was that it was the only way in which to maintain a state church. The idea of abandoning the establishment of the church would have seemed anarchic to Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and Cramner. Even after the Puritans land in New England, the congregational church is established there. It is an accident of history that you end up with paedobapsits in America today who like the idea of the separation of church and state. Their politics have been influenced by credobaptists in ways they do not understand.
2) Though I admit that church discipline has been abandoned in many baptistic churches to their shame, I continue to maintain that infant baptism, under which you deliberately accept as covenant members the unregenerate, makes church discipline incredibly difficult. It is difficult to lovingly discipline those who have never voluntarily submitted to that discipline.
It is to the greater shame of baptists who have credobaptism, designed to protect a regenerate church membership, that we are so lax in maintaining it through faithful loving discipline.
3)You suggest that the problem is that the C of E is largely apostate, not that it is paedobaptist. This is certainly a major problem, which the faithful within the C of E would not deny. However, I feel that paedobaptism, though by no means the only factor, is a significant factor in the degeneration of the Church of England. Those who have an outward affection for the C of E (for reasons of hatch match and dispatch) and do not outwardly reject the faith but remain utterly unregenerate, are likely to appoint leaders who will not challenge them. It will then only take a few generations before you have unbelieving bishops prejudiced against gospel preaching ministers.
Posted by: Mike Gilbart-Smith | Mar 24, 2009 5:23:20 AM