Infant Baptism

Moroni chapter 8 is Mormon’s epistle to his son Moroni on the salvation of little children. For more on this doctrine, see Robert L. Millet,s paper entitled Alive in Christ: The Salvations of Little Children.”₁

Pelagius (354-418 AD) was a Christian thinker who opposed Augustine in the 5th-century. Most of his life in Rome was spent among the Roman Christian aristocracy who supported him. Once the barbarians invaded Rome, he went to North Africa and then to Jerusalem where he worked to lead a monastic life, but his ideas on free will and his condemnation of ideas about “original sin” and the Fall of Adam forced him into eventual exile.

Two theological principles informed the whole of Pelagius’ teachings and views on the gospel of Christ: the goodness of creation and the freedom of our will. He stressed the idea that humans are essentially good and the importance of free will or agency. He did not believe in strict determinism: that God has predetermined what man will be. Rather, he viewed the agency of man as paramount to the kind of individuals that we become. Pelagius was also concerned about the slack moral standards among Christians, and he hoped to improve their conduct by his teachings, urging Christians to repent and follow Christ. Rejecting the arguments of those who claimed that they sinned because of human weakness, he insisted that God made human beings free to choose between good and evil and that sin is a voluntary act committed by a person against God’s law.

There is overwhelming evidence that Pelagius was against the practice of infant baptism.₂ Several individuals known as Pelagians held to ideas that were unlike Augustine’s. These men were optimistic about the nature of human beings and saw them as essentially good. People like Pelagius, Vitalis, Rufinus the Syrian, Caelestius, Julian of Eclanum, Cassian, and ascetic monks from Gaul and Caesarius, all worked to promote ideas in the fifth and sixth centuries that demonstrated hope in mankind and his ability to choose for himself.₃

Brent Schmidt made this observation about Pelagius and those called “Pelagians”:

Since the Pelagians were eventually deemed heretical, they have usually been misunderstood, rarely studied, and have generally been the victims of misrepresentation by their enemies throughout the centuries. It is therefore difficult to find extant ancient sources, especially impartial ones, to explore their theological positions. Despite the relative lack of their writings, surviving only through quotes in the writings of their rivals like Augustine, scholars usually agree that Pelagians strove to reform the passive, decadent, and mediocre state of Christianity in the late Roman Empire.₄

I find it interesting that there is a question about infant baptism in the Americas right about the time infant baptism starts to appear in the Old World, with the Pelagian controversy brought to the fore with the Council of Carthage in 412 AD with discussion of both Augustine’s and Pelagius’ divergent views of Romans 5.12.₅

In Moroni 8.7 we see that Mormon, in writing to his son Moroni, reports that he went directly to the Lord about infant baptism and received instruction.

From Glenn Hinson’s article in Ferguson’s Encyclopedia of Early Christianity we read the following effort to lay out the historical sequence of events from the extant evidence:

Christian custom of baptizing infants or very young children, ordinarily in the early history of the practice by immersion in water. Whether infant baptism was practiced in the earliest period of Christian history has been debated since the sixteenth century.

The first explicit evidence for baptism of very young children appears in Tertullian’s On Baptism, composed before his conversion to Montanism ca. 206. In this instruction, Tertullian objected to the practice, asking why “the innocent period of life” should cause haste to obtain “remission of sins.” Building a case, he warned that it could put the sponsors in danger should they fail to fulfill their promises by dying themselves in persecution or by the infants’ failure to hold to their baptismal vow. Hence, he urged, “Let them ‘come,’ while they are growing up; let them ‘come’ while they are learning, while they are learning where to come; let them become Christians when they have become able to know Christ” (On Baptism, 18).

By the mid-third century, baptism of infants was being viewed as a well-established tradition dating from the earliest period of Christian history. Although Origen left no comment on the matter that can be attributed to his Alexandrian period (202-232), in Caesarea (232-254/5) he remarked in a Commentary on Romans (5.9) that “the church has received a tradition from the apostles to give baptism even to little children.” In sermons, he cited this tradition to prove that infants inherited sin and guilt. Commenting on Leviticus 12:2 (Homiliae in Leviticus 8.3), he demanded to know why infants should be baptized “according to church custom,” since, “if there were nothing in infants that required forgiveness and pardon, the grace of baptism would seem superfluous” (Homiliae in Lucan 14). At about the same time, Cyprian, bishop of Carthage (d. 258), reported the consensus of an African council of bishops that swept aside arguments of bishop Fidus for delay of baptism until the eighth day with the contention that, although infants have not committed willful acts of sin, as descendants of Adam they have “contracted the contagion of the ancient death” at the instant of birth and thus must receive forgiveness not of their own but of Adam’s sin (Cyprian, Letter 58.5).

From the mid-third century on, baptism of infants was standard practice in both east and west. Deferral of baptisms in the fourth century has sometimes been cited as evidence that the custom developed late and with opposition, but these cases may have been mentioned because they were exceptional. Other motives, often not worthy ones, were frequently at work. The strongest of these was probably the reluctance pagans felt about surrendering to the demands made by the Christian faith, particularly under some duress. “If baptism washed away all past sins,” many reasoned, “why not delay it until the end and thus ensure direct entrance into heaven?”

Whether Christians baptized infants prior to the third century depends on indirect evidence. The scholar Joachim Jeremias has set forth the following arguments: (1) References in early Christian writings to baptism of “households” (1 Cor. 1: 16; Acts 11: 14; 16: 15, 33; 18:8) would probably include children, for family solidarity was strong in the ancient world. (2) Christian baptism paralleled proselyte baptism and circumcision  (Col. 2: 11), in which it was taken for granted that even the smallest children would enter the covenant along with their parents. (3) Acts 2:38f. extends the invitation for baptism directly to the hearers and their children. (4) Several passages in the New Testament imply that children born to Christian parents received baptism. Since baptism replaced circumcision, it is probable that prohibition of circumcision of children by parents of Jewish descent, according to Acts 21 :21, necessitated baptism of the children. In the early Christian churches, moreover, the story about Jesus’ rebuking of the disciples for “hindering” the little children from coming to him (Mark 10:13-16) may allude to the baptism of children, for the word “hinder” belonged to a baptismal formula. (5) A few references in the second-century church fathers allow one to infer the practice. Justin alluded to “many men and women of the age of sixty and seventy years who have been disciples of Christ from childhood” (I Apol 15.6). Polycarp of Smyrna claimed to have served Christ “eighty-six years,” surely meaning from infancy (M. Polyc.18.3). Clement of Alexandria, soon after 195, spoke in an allegorical figure of “children being drawn up out of the water” (Str. 3.59.2).

Jeremias supplemented these data with several arguments from silence: (1) If infants had not been baptized, there would be evidence of two kinds of Christians-baptized and unbaptized-but there is none. (2) There is “no information about the introduction of a practice deviating from previous custom.” (3) No special rite was introduced for the baptism of children. (4) The custom nowhere appears “as the special doctrine of a party or sect.” (5) Both east and west agreed in tracing the custom back to apostolic times.

Kurt Aland, although accepting infant baptism on theological grounds, contested Jeremias’s argument on all other points, forcing him to admit the uncertainty of the crucial prop-the baptism of “households.” The New Testament evidence neither confirms nor denies whether “households” necessarily included children.

In the absence of conclusive evidence for infant baptism prior to the early third century, other scholars have based their case for the practice on theological reasons. According to Oscar Cullmann, for instance, Christ procured “a general baptism” for all persons in his death and resurrection. By grace, God enables all to partake of that once-for-all saving event through baptism. The decisive thing is faith “as response to this grace.” By its very nature, baptism completes proselyte baptism and circumcision.

Roman Catholics have stressed the need to accept developments in the life of the church beyond the apostolic era. Although most Protestants have done the same in fact, they have hesitated to acknowledge this in theory, since it weakens the means by which they propose to maintain a continuous reform of the church, that is, testing by scriptures. If infant baptism was a later development, one can only speculate as to the reasons for it. These may have included pressure from parents anxious about their children’s salvation, the intensity of Christian efforts to win adherents, a shift in theological perceptions from childhood innocence to inheritance of sin and guilt, and the influence of Judaism or other competitors.₆

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Notes

1. Robert Millet, Alive in Christ: The Salvation of Little Children, Fourth Nephi, From Zion to Destruction, eds. Monte S. Nyman and Charles D. Tate Jr. (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center at Brigham Young University, 1995), 1–17.
2. Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity, volume 3, Edited by James Hoover, Angelo Di Beradino, Thomas Oden and Joel Elowsky, IVP Academic – Intervarsity Press, 1994, p. 125-129. In this entry we read the following: In fact, the Pelagians, placing the choices of freedom at the foundation of everything, denied that humanity was born into “original” sin and refused to acknowledge that each person stood in need of Christ’s *redemption from the moment of birth. They therefore opposed the practice of infant baptism in remissionem peccatorum, explaining that the practice was only a consecration. Moreover, they understood the grace of God to be both a natural endowment (the gift of free will/the freedom granted through creation) and God’s revelation of what one must do (the sacred Scriptures in the category of revealed law), i.e., grace serves both as an external aid to freedom and as a good example to be imitated—i.e., Christ’s example in distinction from Adam’s, which instead provided a bad example. Pelagius had a clear and precise notion of sin. As Craig St. Clair writes, “While there may have been discussions taking place on the possibilities of sin being passed from person to person or being inherited, Pelagius would have none of this. He saw sin exclusively as an action of the will. A specific concern was to guard against a tendency to see sin as a substance or a thing that could be passed on, as the tradux peccati discussion directly implied.” See Craig St. Clair, A Heretic Reconsidered: Pelagius, Augustin, and “Original Sin,” College of Saint Benedict/Saint John’s University, School of Theology Graduate papers, 12.15.2004, p. 8.
3. Donato Ogliari, Gratia Et Certamen: The Relationship Between Grace and Free Will in the Discussion of Augustine with the So-Called Semipelagians (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2003), 230-1; See also B. Rees, Pelagius. A Reluctant Heretic (Woodbridge, 1988), xi. Rufinus the Syrian was adamantly against the idea of hereditary sin. “What Rufinus of Syria objected to in the traducianist view was the notion of hereditary sin associated with it: the belief that the whole human race inherits the sin of the first human beings, and that on account of this inherited sin unbaptized infants are damned. To him it was a contradiction of the justice and omnipotence of God, and of free will and accountability of each human being, to assert that because of the sin of Adam and Eve all people are guilty of sin.” See: Pelagius, Pelagius’s commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: Translated with Introduction and Notes, Theodore De Bruyn, trans. (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1993) 19.
4. Brent Schmidt, Relational Faith: Pistis’ Theological and Linguistic History from a Restoration Perspective, unpublished manuscript, p. 110. See also: Gerald Bonner St. Augustine of Hippo: Life and Controversies (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1986), 352-354.
5. Pelagius, who was not actually at the council, was still present in spirit, as his views were the being discussed by a letter written by Augustine (also not at the council) which said the following: “You tell me in your letter, that they endeavor to twist into some new sense the passage of the apostle, in which he says: “By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin;” yet you have not informed me what they suppose to be the meaning of these words. But so far as I have discovered from others, they think that the death which is here mentioned is not the death of the body, which they will not allow Adam to have deserved by his sin, but that of the soul, which takes place in actual sin; and that this actual sin has not been transmitted from the first man to other persons by natural descent, but by imitation. Hence, likewise, they refuse to believe that in infants original sin is remitted through baptism, for they contend that no such original sin exists at all in people by their birth.” See: Augustine, On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins, and on the Baptism of Infants, Book I, Ch. 9.
6. E. Glenn Hinson, in Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, second edition, edited by Everett Ferguson, Routledge, 1999, p. 571-573.