Systematic Theology (Volume 3 of 3)

by Augustus Hopkins Strong

(b) Infant baptism is expressly contradicted.

First,—by the Scriptural prerequisites of faith and repentance, as signs of regeneration. In the great commission, Matthew speaks of baptizing disciples, and Mark of baptizing believers; but infants are neither of these. Secondly,—by the Scriptural symbolism of the ordinance. As we should not bury a person before his death, so we should not symbolically bury a person by baptism until he has in spirit died to sin. Thirdly,—by the Scriptural constitution of the church. The church is a company of persons whose union with one another presupposes and expresses a previous conscious and voluntary union of each with Jesus Christ. But of this conscious and voluntary union with Christ infants are not capable. Fourthly,—by the Scriptural prerequisites for participation in the Lord's Supper. Participation in the Lord's Supper is the right only of those who can discern the Lord's body (1 Cor. 11:29). No reason can be assigned for restricting to intelligent communicants the ordinance of the Supper, which would not equally restrict to intelligent believers the ordinance of Baptism.

Infant baptism has accordingly led in the Greek church to infant communion. This course seems logically consistent. If baptism is administered to unconscious babes, they should participate in the Lord's Supper also. But if confirmation or any intelligent profession of faith is thought necessary before communion, why should not such confirmation or profession be thought necessary before baptism? On Jonathan Edwards and the Halfway Covenant, see New Englander, Sept. 1884:601-614; G. L. Walker, Aspects of Religious Life of New England, 61-82; Dexter, Congregationalism, 487, note—“It has been often intimated that President Edwards opposed and destroyed [pg 953]the Halfway Covenant. He did oppose Stoddardism, or the doctrine that the Lord's Supper is a converting ordinance, and that unconverted men, because they are such, should be encouraged to partake of it.” The tendency of his system was adverse to it; but, for all that appears in his published writings, he could have approved and administered that form of the Halfway Covenant then current among the churches. John Fiske says of Jonathan Edwards's preaching: “The prominence he gave to spiritual conversion, or what was called ‘change of heart,’ brought about the overthrow of the doctrine of the Halfway Covenant. It also weakened the logical basis of infant baptism, and led to the winning of hosts of converts by the Baptists.”

Other pedobaptist bodies than the Greek Church save part of the truth, at the expense of consistency, by denying participation in the Lord's Supper to those baptized in infancy until they have reached years of understanding and have made a public profession of faith. Dr. Charles E. Jefferson, at the International Congregational Council of Boston, September, 1899, urged that the children of believers are already church members, and that as such they are entitled, not only to baptism, but also to the Lord's Supper—“an assertion that started much thought”! Baptists may well commend Congregationalists to the teaching of their own Increase Mather, The Order of the Gospel (1700), 11—“The Congregational Church discipline is not suited for a worldly interest or for a formal generation of professors. It will stand or fall as godliness in the power of it does prevail, or otherwise.... If the begun Apostacy should proceed as fast the next thirty years as it has done these last, surely it will come that in New England (except the gospel itself depart with the order of it) that the most conscientious people therein will think themselves concerned to gather churches out of churches.”

How much of Judaistic externalism may linger among nominal Christians is shown by the fact that in the Armenian Church animal sacrifices survived, or were permitted to converted heathen priests, in order they might not lose their livelihood. These sacrifices continued in other regions of Christendom, particularly in the Greek church, and Pope Gregory the Great permitted them; see Conybeare, in Am. Jour. Theology, Jan. 1893:62-90. In The Key of Truth, a manual of the Paulician Church of Armenia, whose date in its present form is between the seventh and the ninth centuries, we have the Adoptianist view of Christ's person, and of the subjects and the mode of baptism: “Thus also the Lord, having learned from the Father, proceeded to teach us to perform baptism and all other commandments at the age of full growth and at no other time.... For some have broken and destroyed the holy and precious canons which by the Father Almighty were delivered to our Lord Jesus Christ, and have trodden them underfoot with their devilish teaching, ... baptizing those who are irrational, and communicating the unbelieving.”

Minority is legally divided into three septennates: 1. From the first to the seventh year, the age of complete irresponsibility, in which the child cannot commit a crime; 2. from the seventh to the fourteenth year, the age of partial responsibility, in which intelligent consciousness of the consequences of actions is not assumed to exist, but may be proved in individual instances; 3. from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year, the age of discretion, in which the person is responsible for criminal action, may choose a guardian, make a will, marry with consent of parents, make business contracts not wholly void, but is not yet permitted fully to assume the free man's position in the State. The church however is not bound by these hard and fast rules. Wherever it has evidence of conversion and of Christian character, it may admit to baptism and church membership, even at a very tender age.

(c) The rise of infant baptism in the history of the church.

The rise of infant baptism in the history of the church is due to sacramental conceptions of Christianity, so that all arguments in its favor from the writings of the first three centuries are equally arguments for baptismal regeneration.