When credobaptists say “We don’t baptize infants and children because they do not or cannot have faith” what do they mean?
Are they saying infants and small children do not have the capacity for faith?
Or more specifically, can it be said: Infants are seen as incomplete creatures of God and don’t become complete creatures of God until the Age of Accountability, at which point they can have faith.
If true, how old must a child be, before it can be said the child fully belongs to the human race?
Furthermore, what about the adult severely mentally ill? When baptism is denied to them, are credobaptists saying they will always be incomplete creatures of God? Can church membership and the Lord’s supper be denied to them because baptism was denied to them?
Paedobaptists believe there is no moment in life when a person is more human than another. All humans born have the built in capacity for faith.
This I think is a technical problem with credobaptist sacramental theology. I really feel there is a need to promote the baptism and communion of infants, which requires changes to most Western churches, where communion of infants does not happen, for example, in the Latin Rite, until children are seven, owing to a Scholastic misunderstanding of the discernment of the Body of Christ being intellectual rather than noetic. We have to promote the concept of the nous, basically, the soul, which can discern and interact with God regardless of intellectual functioning. While Baptists get some things right, like full immersion (although triple immersion in the Trinitarian formula is ideal), the overall Baptist and credobaptist approach to baptism can be seen as an extension of the error of the Western intellectualism of Sacramental Theology from the Eucharist to Baptism.
This does not negate the great accomplishments of Baptists in terms of moral theology, for example, the current thought leader in this field seems to be the Calvinist Baptist Dr. Albert Mohler, who I regard as the foremost successor in this area to Dr. James Kennedy and Pope John Paul II.* I do not believe the triumph of reversing Roe vs. Wade, which was the among most extreme and liberal abortion laws in the world, treated by the left with Constitutional reverence despite being a product of judicial activism, would have been possible without the help of Baptists.
I also think that Christians, misunderstanding the sacrament of Confession and also the fact that while we are only baptized once, we can remember our Baptism by immersing ourselves in blessed water, which is common in Eastern Orthodox countries on the Feast of Epiphany, or Theophany as they call it (which unlike in the West, always focused on the Baptism of our Lord rather than the Visitation of the Three Magi, something which has been restored in recent years in Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism, and other Protestant churches, but in some the emphasis of Epiphany is still on the Magi, who might better be commemorated on the Sunday before Epiphany).
The other flaw in Credobaptist sacramental theology is that they tend to view the sacraments not as the early church and traditional churches today, such as Lutheranism, Anglicanism, Catholicism, Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy, even traditional Presbyterian/Continental Reformed Calvinism (as opposed to the hybrid of Calvinism and credobaptism we see in Particular Baptists and in Dr. Albert Mohler and many in the SBC), understand them as sacred mysteries by which God the Holy Spirit conveys grace to us by allowing us to recapitulate the Baptism of Christ in the Jordan, thus being baptized in Christ and putting on Christ, and also in the Sacrifice of Christ through recapitulation of and participation in the Last Supper, wherein our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ provided His body and blood as the medicine of immortality, the Baptists instead believe these to be “ordinances”, going beyond Zwinglian symbolism to a full-on memorialism, in which Holy Communion at least is understood merely as a “remembrance” rather than as Calvin, Luther and the early Church Fathers understood it, a mysterious means of grace through which we partake in the Divine Nature, as St. Peter writes, a requirement imposed by our Lord in John 6. Water baptism seems to be differientated in credobaptism from the actual “conversion event”, when someone resolves to be Christian, as opposed to being the culimination of the process of conversion of adults which traditionally involved catechesis and extensive preparation for baptism, which represented the final washing away of hereditary sin and also the sins one had committed in life up to that point.
Confession was understood by Martin Luther, and even the majority of Anglicans, to be the process which combined with Holy Communion to facilitate the remission of sins, with a surprising number of Protestant churches including but not limited to Lutherans and Anglicans offering auricular confession to individual penitents as well as general confessions by the entire Congregation. In a sense, the Altar Call and the Sinner’s Prayer seem to serve a similar purpose to Confession in those Credobaptist churches which adhere to it.
The real problem with the memorialist sacramental theology of Credobaptists is that it seems to be logically incomplete: how could Baptism and the Eucharist be both divine Ordinances and yet not required for Salvation? What happens if one does not engage in them? It lacks the consistency of Patristic and Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox and Assyrian (and increasingly, Continuing Anglicanism in the US), Roman Catholic Scholastic, Calvinist, Lutheran, and Cranmerian Anglican sacramental theology, and suffers from the same problem of requiring a non-literal interpretation of the words of our Lord as Zwinglianism, in which the sacraments are symbols of received grace. Zwinglianism is arguably the worst of the two, since it highly contradicts John 6 and requires us to interpret the Last Supper as Christ saying “This is a symbol of my body” rather than “This is my body,” which is why it is probably less common among clergy at least (but probably fairly common among poorly catechized laity in evangelical non-denominational and Pentecostal churches, even those which baptize infants). Rather, the Baptists focus on a misinterpretation of “do this in remembrance of me”; the word remembrance is, like many English words, less than ideal for understanding the full range of meaning of the original Greek word anamnesis. But this still requires a non-literal interpreration of the words of our Lord at the Last Supper as recorded in the Synoptics and in 1 Corinthians 11, the words of our Lord as recorded in John 6, and indeed the entire Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians, which is primarily an exposition of the theology of Baptism and the Eucharist.
This becomes particularly problematic in denominations which insist on extremely literal interpretation of a subset of the Old Testament, especially the Pentateuch but generally the 22 books the Masoretes decided were canonical in the 8th or 9th century, as opposed to the broader range of Old Testament books historically used by Orthodox, Catholics and Protestants (even John Calvin, who regarded Baruch as fully canonical), and historically interpreted both literally and as typological Christological prophecy, in a fusion of the ancient theological schools of Antioch and Alexandria (the former favoring a literal interpretation, the latter favoring a Christological interpretation, but the best Patristic and theological discourse always approaches the Old Testament as both/and, rejecting the false dichotomy; Credobaptism and memorialism, and even some early Anglican theologians such as Richard Hooker, have not been able to explain in a consistent way why the words of our Lord, which we commonly regard as being so important as to rubricate (printing in red letters; rubrics were originally used in liturgical manuscripts for instructions whereas prayers and hymns were printed in black ink; a few centuries ago as multicolor printing became possible it occurred to printers to use the same technique of rubrication to highlight the Words of Christ, himself the Word, hence Red Letter Bibles; indeed the words spoken by our Lord in the New Testament are considered by most to be of such extreme importance that there is even a heresy called “Jesus Words Only” which rejects all scriptural texts except for those spoken by Christ, and a related cult which emigrated from Russia to Canada at the expense of Leo Tolstoy, who paid for their migration, the Doukhobors, or Unitarians, who seem to regard only the Sermon on the Mount as important).
So given how important the words of Christ are, when He tells us we must be born again through baptism which involves the Holy Spirit descending on us as it did on Him in the waters of the Jordan, and when He says “This is my body, broken for you and for many for the remission of sins,” I can only fully appreciate those theological models which interpret these statements in a literal and consistent manner, specifically the models I mentioned earlier, my own preference being Early Church/Eastern Orthodox/Oriental Orthodox/Assyrian and now increasingly American Continuing Anglicanism of the high church variety, such as that espoused by my friend
@Shane R , although I can also appreciate Roman Catholic Scholastic sacramental theology, Lutheran sacramental theology and Calvinist sacramental theology. I have to disagree with Credobaptist, Zwinglian, Quaker, and possibly even Salvation Army sacramental theology, and I might even disagree slightly with John Wesley on sacramental theology; his Eucharistic theology stressing a revival of weekly communion was two centuries ahead of its time, but I am not clear on what his baptismal theology was based on edits he made to the Book of Common Prayer for use by Methodists in North America which omitted references to Baptismal Regeneration, but his sacramental theology is at worst only slightly off and he is among the Protestant Reformers I regard as a saint. Even some of the Early Church Fathers made errors; Assyrians such as St. Isaac the Syrian consistently tended to believe in Apokatastasis as a certainty, as did Origen and St. Gregory of Nyssa, while the majority of the early church rejected this. We humans are fallible.
Thus, I can respect the moral leadership of someone like Dr. Albert Mohler and commend the Southern Baptist Convention for its hardline stance against abortion and sexual deviance, because we can make theological errors, without wanting to come across as a Pietist, a movement I somewhat respect but disagree with, as I think correct doctrine is extremely important and beneficial in providing a stable, consistent and defensible faith and the schisms which are mostly the result of the Roman Catholic Church breaking away from the Eastern Orthodox and the Protestant Reformation occurring in reaction to certain Roman Catholic doctrines that the Orthodox churches never believed, resulting in a multiplicity of competing erroneous doctrines taught by different denominations which are less consistent than the faith of the Early Church particularly as expressed by the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, the Assyrians, and the Anglo Catholic Anglicans, particularly those American Continuing Anglican churches which are now doctrinally almost identical to Eastern Orthodoxy. But still, I am grateful for the work of Credobaptist Evangelicals and Baptists, especially the SBC, which has become embroiled in a scandal and needs our prayers; any church can fall victim to abusive leaders, and the devil does attack and try to corrupt church leaders. The Roman church was badly hurt by the sex abuse scandal, and people have tried to exploit that to attack their core doctrine, which is nonsensical, and the SBC is essentially experiencing the same thing now. So I am not keen to particularly criticize the Southern Baptist Convention given all the good work they are doing. There is a demonic element to these abuse scandals, in that those churches which become most vocal about the evils of our society like sexual depravity and abortion seem to have incidents like this occurring, which feels like a devilish act of sabotage intended to depict them wrongly as hypocrites (the Eucharistic liturgy of the Roman Catholic church in all of its rites (Roman, Ambrosian, Dominican, Byzantine, Coptic, Maronite, East Syriac, etc..
) I am aware of makes a point of having the priest declare his unworthiness to celebrate the Eucharist, and good Baptist ministers traditionally have an obvious humility.
* In due course I think the next thought leader in moral theology will be an Eastern Orthodox priest who converted after graduating a Calvinist seminary and spending a year in the Reformed Episcopal Church, whose well respected bishop at the time ordained some priests who were trying to decide between Calvinism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
