More honest Reformed Protestant apologists will admit that the doctrine of baptismal regeneration was the teaching of the early Christian church. Indeed, one Reformed Baptist author, William Webster, himself a critic of the doctrine, admitted that it was the unanimous consensus of the early Christians who, when commenting on the topic, wrote:
The doctrine of baptism is one of the few teachings within Roman Catholicism for which it can be said that there is a universal consent of the Fathers . . . From the early days of the Church, baptism was universally perceived as the means of receiving four basic gifts: the remission of sins, deliverance from death, regeneration, and the bestowal of the Holy Spirit." (William Webster, The Church of Rome at the Bar of History [Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1995], 95-96).
While not coming out as explicitly as Webster, Louis Berkhof (1873-1957), an American-Dutch Reformed theologian, wrote that:
Baptism was foremost among the sacraments as the rite of initiation into the Church. Even in the Apostolic Fathers we find the idea that it was instrumental in effecting the forgiveness of sins and in communicating the new life of regeneration. In a certain sense it may be said, therefore, that some of the early Fathers taught baptismal regeneration. (Louis Berkhof, The History of Christian Doctrines [London: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1969], 247-48)
While Berhkof tries to downplay the explicit witness of the early Church to baptismal regeneration by saying “some” held to such a doctrine (in reality, all those who commented on water baptism held to such, bar none, including the author of 1 Clement, one of the earliest texts we have outside the New Testament), and elsewhere (p. 248) in the same volume, even someone as biased towards the “symbolic” view like he and Webster are forced to admit such.
For a survey of early Christian authors commenting on John 3:3-5, perhaps the most commonly cited “proof-text” for baptismal regeneration, see:
