Baptism

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Baptism

Baptism and the Lord's Supper are the two most enduring rituals of the Christian Church. While they are symbols of the church's unity, they have also produced some of its most significant divisions. Jesus himself received baptism at the hands of John the Baptizer in the Jordan River (Matthew 3:13–16). The earliest Christians followed Jesus' example, receiving baptism as an outward and visible sign of their faith in Christ and their union with his body, the church. Adult immersion was generally the norm until the fourth and fifth centuries, when Augustine and others developed a theology that required the baptism of infants to cleanse them of the curse of original sin. During the Middle Ages, the Christianization of Europe created a link between infant baptism and citizenship. To be born into a Catholic state was to be baptized into the Christian Church. The Protestant reformers challenged Roman Catholic theological and political hegemony but retained the union of citizenship and infant baptism. The Wiedertaufer or Anabaptists of the sixteenth century rejected infant baptism, rebaptizing adults after their profession of faith in Christ. Their refusal to baptize infants meant that Protestants and Catholics often persecuted Anabaptists (Mennonites and others) as both heretics to the church and traitors to the state. In England, Anglicans and Puritans practiced infant baptism, the latter insisting that it was a "sign of the covenant," the Christian equivalent of Jewish circumcision, given to the elect "and their seed." These ideas were repudiated by the Baptists, a seventeenth-century sect who, like the Anabaptists, insisted on the baptism of adult believers. Their earliest method was affusion, pouring water on the head three times in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. During the 1640s Baptists began to observe baptism by dipping, or immersion.

Infant baptism was the normative mode for those English settlers who came to America in the seventeenth century. Religious establishments in Puritan New England and Anglican Virginia fostered persecution against those groups such as Quakers, Mennonites, and Baptists that refused to baptize infants. With disestablishment and religious liberty, debates over baptism merely increased as new denominations competed with each other. During the nineteenth century, especially on the American frontier, baptism was a major topic of discussion and division. Presbyterians, Methodists, and other "pedobaptist" (infant baptism) traditions debated Baptists and Restorationists (the Stone-Campbell tradition) over the proper candidate and the proper mode of baptism. Questions concerned the marks of the true church, admission of the nonimmersed to communion and church membership, and the process of conversion requisite for a valid baptism. The relationship of faith and baptism was also an unending point of controversy. Was baptism necessary for salvation, or did it simply accompany it? Was it sacrament or symbol? Should persons who received baptism as infants be "rebaptized" in adulthood, particularly after joining an immersionist communion? Baptist Landmarkists, for example, believed that Baptist churches alone had maintained the true baptism since New Testament times. Restorationists suggested that they alone had reconstituted baptism after it had been lost to all other churchly groups. Pedobaptists maintained that their tradition of baptism and confirmation had been administered since the earliest Christian era.

These debates continued throughout the twentieth century, with varying theological emphases and assorted revisions. First, many Christian communions continue to baptize infants, welcoming them into the world with an outward sign of God's grace. Such a pledge of faith is then renewed at a time of confirmation, usually in late childhood or early adolescence. Confirmation is the time when baptized individuals make the faith their own, confirming for themselves the faith that was pledged for them in infancy. Some communions, such as Roman Catholics, have extended the confirmation age from early to later childhood, with the average age around ten to fifteen or so.

Second, those who practice immersion continued to revisit questions raised when persons baptized in infancy join their churches. Mobility, intermarriage, and changing religious preferences brought many persons with varying baptismal histories into immersionist churches. In such instances, some Baptist churches require all persons to receive Baptist immersion before they can be admitted to full church membership. Other congregations admit as members all who have received immersion in any Christian tradition. Still others accept all those who have received baptism, whatever the mode, with no rebaptism required. Baptist groups themselves divide over the practice of open or closed baptismal policies. Some immersionist congregations (especially among the Baptists) refuse the Lord's Supper to any who have not received Baptist immersion. Other traditions (e.g., the United Methodists) repudiate any efforts to perform "rebaptisms" of persons who have received the rite in infancy.

Third, the growth of nondenominational congregations, many of them large "megachurches," created a pluralism of baptismal practices in one church. Some of these congregations administer baptism in multiple forms, to infants, children, and adults, by sprinkling, pouring, or immersion. Many permit families or individuals to choose the particular method of baptism that best reflects their own needs and traditions. In some contexts, an emphasis on personal religious experience has led certain congregations to minimize the role of baptism for the church and the individual.

Fourth, the mode of baptism remains diverse among many churches and denominations. In most communions that practice infant baptism, the mode of baptism involves sprinkling water on the head of the child. Churches of the Eastern Orthodox tradition continue their centuries-old practice of immersing naked infants three times in the name of the Trinity. While Roman Catholic churches retain infant baptism as normative for entrance into the church, many have added baptismal pools for use in total immersion of adults. Most immersionist churches construct indoor, heated baptisteries in their houses of worship. Some rural churches continue to perform baptisms outdoors in rivers, lakes, or creeks.

During the 1980s, a document produced by the World Council of Churches titled Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry engaged many American churches in a discussion of the unifying elements of that most Christian rite. It facilitated ecumenical discussion regarding the classic biblical confession of "one Lord, one faith, one baptism" (Ephesians 4:5) for all the church.