Selene03
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Proponents of infant baptism assume that there were children in Cornelius’ house, Lydia’s family, the Philippian jailer’s house, and Stephanas’ house, and that the infants were baptized. Since there is no mention of infants in any of these passages, those who use these passages to justify infant baptism base their claims upon two assumptions: (1) infants were present in the households; and (2) the contexts of Acts 10 and 16 allow for the baptism of infants as part of “household baptisms.”
The context of these following verses suggest that the jailer's household were baptized by the Holy Spirit before the jailer brought Paul and Silas into his house.
Acts 16:32-34 (New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition ~ NRSVCE)
32 They spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house.
33 At the same hour of the night he took them and washed their wounds; then he and his entire family were baptized without delay.
34 He brought them up into the house and set food before them; and he and his entire household rejoiced that he had become a believer in God.
There are other examples of household conversions, whose contexts attest to the fact that, when “households” of people were baptized, infants were not baptized. When the inspired writers mentioned the so-called “household baptisms,” they said that all believers in the households were baptized. To assert otherwise is to put an unnecessary strain on the text, and to teach that which contradicts unambiguous, definitive Bible teaching (see Mark 16:16; Acts 8:37-38; Romans 10:10-11).
The fact that infants were not mentioned in "household" does not mean there were no infants. If everyone in the entire household were baptized, that means "everyone"....including any infants who were there. After all, baptism replaced circumcision.
Furthermore, Paul notes that baptism has replaced circumcision (Col. 2:11–12). In that passage, he refers to baptism as “the circumcision of Christ” and “the circumcision made without hands.” Of course, usually only infants were circumcised under the Old Law; circumcision of adults was rare, since there were few converts to Judaism. If Paul meant to exclude infants, he would not have chosen circumcision as a parallel for baptism.
Also, the Early Christians practiced infant baptism, and one can find those evidence in the writings of the Early Christians. Origen, for instance, wrote in the third century that “according to the usage of the Church, baptism is given even to infants” (Holilies on Leviticus, 8:3:11 [A.D. 244]). The Council of Carthage, in 253, condemned the opinion that baptism should be withheld from infants until the eighth day after birth. Later, Augustine taught, “The custom of Mother Church in baptizing infants is certainly not to be scorned . . . nor is it to be believed that its tradition is anything except apostolic” (Literal Interpretation of Genesis 10:23:39 [A.D. 408]).
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