Church history is a great study. All Christians should endeavor to study it. It will be a rebuke to some of the newer positions (dispensationalism) and an encouragement to others and is by no means authoritative in itself since everything is in subjection to the Word of God. It is indeed helpful and important.
I find it an oddity that many paedobaptists will not venture to go far beyond the sixteenth century when discussing the subject of baptism. Some certainly have, I think, because they were convinced that paedobaptism was the normal position in the early church. As has been documented they have misinterpreted and misrepresented the writings of the early Church Fathers. Other paedobaptists sometimes behave as if the history of the Church began with the Reformation. I have often heard that Baptists or in their words "Anabaptists" have departed from orthodox Christianity in our rejection of the inclusion of infants in the covenant. Yet when we examine church history we will find that paedobaptists before the Reformation would most likely consider many of today's paedobaptists as departing from orthodox Christianity in that they reject baptismal regeneration (or something very close to it) and paedocommunion. Both positions were the dominant view prior to the covenantal view of Zwingli in the Reformation. I would think if Augustine were still around he would think the prevalent view of Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian paedobaptism "unorthodox."
If Baptists have departed from orthodoxy so then have covenantal paedobaptists. Of course that all depends on a person's definition of "orthodox." It seems to me that paedobaptists have fit that term around what they believe for they define it around what was theologically sound around the sixteenth century. If they just go back before that time frame they should see that the very grounds that they accuse "Anabaptists" of unorthodoxy, condemns them as well.
Paul Jewett demonstrates this:
Doubts about the historical argument for infant baptism are due not only to the silence of the earliest witnesses but also to the way in which the evidence for infant baptism is related to the evidence for infant communion. Early Christian sources from the Didache onward reflect the unity of the sacraments; they were always celebrated together. Hence the first act of the baptized, following his baptism, was to partake of the Eucharist. If, then, evidence for infant communion appears only a short time after the first clear evidence for infant baptism, to repudiate the former as a post-apostolic superstition, as most Paedobaptists do, is to threaten the latter with the same odious pedigree.
To see that this is the case, one need only recall that the earliest express mention of infant baptism is found in Tertullian's De baptismo (A.D. 200-206), a document in which the author entertains reservations about giving baptism to infants. But Cyprian, on whose shoulders his mantle fell, speaks not only of infant baptism but also of infant communion as a custom which provoked no scruples. Barely fifty years separates these two witnesses. Obviously, therefore, the initial evidence for infant baptism and infant communion shows a proximity in time (A.D. 205-250) and place (North Africa) which makes it difficult to see why the former usage should be accepted while the latter is rejected.
These two practices, moreover, share a democratic exegetical pedigree. Understanding John 3:5, "Except a man be born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God," to make baptism essential to salvation, the Fathers concluded - naturally - that it should be given to infants. In like manner, understanding John 6:53, "Except you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in yourselves," to make the Eucharist essential, they argued, in a similar vein, that it should be given to infants (so Augustine against Pelagius, A.D. 412). It is true that Augustine is the first expressly to conjoin an argument from John 3 for infant baptism with a similar one from John 6 for infant communion; however, Cyprian argued for infant baptism in a similar manner in his Letter to Fidus (A.D. 251-253) and likewise approved the communication of infants in his admonition against apostasy. It seems difficult, therefore, to suppose that infant communion stems from a later misunderstanding of Scripture, while infant baptism altogether escapes this difficulty.
Nor did it ever occur to anyone in the ancient church to question the right of infants to the Eucharist once the right to embrace them in the church by baptism had been established. The theory that infants are to be baptized but not given communion rests on medieval dogmatic developments in the Western church that had nothing to do with an evangelical view of the sacraments. This has given some Paedobaptists pause, and in the past there have been those who have questioned the propriety of withholding communion from infants. Wall, for example, considering the antiquity of infant communion - that it was recognized by the church universal for six hundred years and that it is still practiced by Eastern Orthodox Christendom - questioned whether it was an error or a duty to bring infants to the communion table . Other Paedobaptists have been outspoken in favor of the practice. But the great majority have been inclined to remand infant communion to the limbo of pious abuse, or, more frequently, to pass over the matter in discreet silence.*It is not enough for covenantal paedobaptists to emphatically claim that the majority reject paedocommunion. That may be the case now but it wasn't the case for the earliest (or very shortly thereafter) documented defenses of paedobaptism all the way until the Reformation. The position was baptismal regeneration and paedocommunion. History, my friends, is not on their side. Hopefully you can see why credobaptists consistently say that "infant baptism is a practice in search of a theology."
Soli Deo Gloria!
For His Glory,
Fernando
*Mr. Paul K. Jewett. Infant Baptism and the Covenant of Grace (pp. 41-43). Kindle Edition.
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