For the present we can only observe that to say with the Augsburg Confession that baptism "is necessary to salvation," or with the Anglican Book of Common Prayer that a child is "by baptism regenerate and grafted into the body of Christ's church," seems to us to be playing the part of Lot's wife in furtively looking back toward the medieval doctrine of sacramental efficacy (ex opere operato). When the ancient Fathers began seriously to frame a reason for baptizing infants, they wrote the prologue to this medieval sacramentalism by saying that baptism is the divinely appointed instrument for mediating the grace of cleansing from original sin and renewal in the image of Christ. The position of the Lutheran and Anglican confessions is but the epilogue to this same position. Though in the latter communions, as in the early Fathers, the ties between the outward sign and the inward grace are looser than in the Roman Church, yet cleansing from sin and inward renewal are still tied to the waters of baptism.
At the time of the Reformation a new thing occurred. Like the river of Eden, the argument for infant baptism was parted and a genuinely evangelical defense of Paedobaptism emerged, a defense that viewed the sacrament of baptism simply as "a washing with water, signifying and sealing our engrafting into Christ and partaking of the benefits of the covenant of grace." The interminable debate over infant baptism and believer baptism has tended to obscure this significant fact. It is commonly acknowledged that there were essentially two points of view on baptism at the Reformation: that of the Reformers, which was infant baptism; and that of the sectarian Anabaptists, which was adult baptism. But a closer examination reveals that the thinking of the Paedobaptists themselves, from the very beginning of the Reformation, is further split by a difference of opinion which goes far deeper than the question of whether or not infants should be baptized. This fundamental difference involves the whole theology of the sacrament of initiation. Whereas Luther could thank God that the sacrament of baptism had been preserved unimpaired, Zwingli could only conclude that ever since the apostles, all the doctors in the church had been in error in this matter. In this latter statement we have the beginning of a radical break with the past and the appearance of a new constellation of ideas in the theological heavens. To perceive that this is so, one has only to turn to the confessional literature of the major Reformed communions, read with a theologically critical eye, and he will at once perceive that in this area the Reformed confessions differ significantly not only from the teaching of the medieval Schoolmen but also from their Lutheran and Anglican counterparts quoted above.
In none of the Reformed confessions is there a reference to the necessity of baptizing infants in order that they may be saved. Whereas Lutherans "condemn the doctrine that children are saved without baptism," the Reformed tradition repudiates with abhorrence the thought that unbaptized children may be forever lost as a "cruel judgment against infants departing without the sacrament."Furthermore, there is nothing in the Reformed confessions about being "born of water," which is so prominent in the Lutheran and Anglican confessions. Rather, there is the express statement that baptism is a washing of regeneration only in the sense of a "divine pledge and token ... that we are really washed from our sins spiritually. ..." It should be noted further that in the Reformed view the children presented for baptism are not regarded as needing cleansing and as outside the church prior to their baptism. Instead, it is because they are heirs of God's covenant promise and numbered by him as among his people and members of his church that they are to be baptized. "Why should they [covenant children] not be consecrated by holy baptism, who are God's peculiar people and are in the church of God?"
How different is this from the prayer that God will grant to this child, being baptized with water, that he may thereby be received into Christ's holy church and made a lively member of the same! The one perspective moves in a dimension of evangelical propriety; the other echoes sacramental necessity. In Lutheran and Anglican theology, baptism is to be administered privately, even by laymen and laywomen, if death impend. By contrast, in Reformed theology, though baptism is not to be unduly delayed, "it is not to be administered in any case by any private person, but by a minister of Christ.... Nor is it to be administered in private places or privately, but in the place of public worship and in the face of the congregation..."
The whole difference that we are noting here was succinctly put in the Saxon Visitation Articles (A.D. 1592). Though never of ecumenical authority in Lutheran circles, these articles are nonetheless a clear statement of the orthodox Lutheran position in contrast to that of the Calvinists. In repudiating the allegedly false doctrine of the Calvinists on baptism, the Articles accuse the latter of teaching that baptism merely signifies inward ablution; that it does not work regeneration, faith, and grace, but only signifies and seals them; that salvation does not depend on baptism, so that when a minister of the church is not available, the infant should be permitted to die without baptism; and that infants of Christians are already holy before baptism, being received into the covenant of life, otherwise baptism could not be conferred on them (I-VI).,
Now if one views the sacraments evangelically as outward signs and seals of an inward grace secured to those who worthily receive them by the efficacious working of the Spirit, and not as guaranteeing, in themselves, the grace which they signify, then the traditional reason for baptizing infants - that they be cleansed from the guilt of original sin, regenerated, and thus made members of Christ's church - is deprived of all force. But then why should infants be baptized, if it does not secure their salvation? It was Zwingli who first pioneered the answer to this question. Caught between the sacramentalism of the Roman Catholics, who made the baptism of infants necessary for salvation, and the innovations of the Anabaptists, who refused even to allow infants to be baptized, he sought a via media. He decided to walk with the Fathers and contrary to the Anabaptists in retaining the usage of infant baptism, but at the same time to walk with the Anabaptists and contrary to the Fathers by denying the necessity of infant baptism.
We can thus appreciate the significance of a sentence from the opening paragraph of Zwingli's treatise on baptism. Having observed that the doctors "have erred from the time of the apostles, by ascribing a power to the waters of baptism which they do not possess," he concludes that "at many points we shall have to tread a different path from that taken either by ancient or more modern writers or by our own contemporaries." " This new path, says the Reformer, opens up before one when he perceives that Christ has transformed the blood of circumcision into the water of baptism. By this Zwingli meant that infant circumcision, as the mark of the covenant between God and the seed of Abraham, is the final raison d'etre for infant baptism. As circumcision was the sign between God and the seed of Abraham, so now baptism is the sign between God and the seed of Christians who are the true heirs of the covenant made with Abraham. Of course, the great Swiss Reformer marshaled many supporting arguments from the testimony of the Fathers and the practice of the apostles, but this "argument from circumcision" was destined to cast all its confreres into the shadows.
The argument, to be sure, was not absolutely new. As we have already seen, the opinion that infants should be baptized because they were circumcised is of ancient pedigree, having been mentioned by Cyprian in his letter to Fidus. Prior to Zwingli, however, it had enjoyed only an ancillary place in giving propriety to infant baptism. But with the Swiss Reformer it became a full-orbed theological principle, moving into the center of the argument, a position which the centripetal pressures of the subsequent debate -especially in the Reformed tradition - entrenched and fortified. Calvin called it, very candidly, the sum of the matter.To the question, "Are infants also to be baptized?" the Heidelberg Catechism answers, "Yes, for since they, as well as their parents, belong to the covenant and people of God ... they also are to be baptized as a sign of the covenant, to be ingrafted into the Christian church and distinguished from the children of unbelievers, as was done in the Old Testament by circumcision, in place of which in the New Testament baptism is appointed." Besides Calvin and the authors of the Heidelberg Catechism, many another illustrious theologian has followed Zwingli down this path, smoothing, widening, straightening the argument, until the concept of "children of the covenant" has become the main highway connecting an evangelical view of the sacraments with the practice of infant baptism.*Quite a lengthy read. I know but well worth it for serious study on the subject.
Soli Deo Gloria!
For His Glory,
Fernando
*Mr. Paul K. Jewett. Infant Baptism and the Covenant of Grace (p. 77-81). Kindle Edition.
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