How
Might a Protestant Respond?
Broadly speaking, Protestants who
reject baptismal regeneration handle the evidence of early Christianity in one
of two ways: by arguing that the early Christians (or at least the earliest of
those early Christians) don’t really believe in baptismal regeneration,
despite what they appear to say, or by arguing that the early Christians were
all wrong.
In this first category, Timothy
Kauffman at White Horse Blog maintains, despite all of the above evidence and
much more, that “the early Church did not teach baptismal regeneration” (Timothy
Kauffman “That He Might Purify the Water, part 1,” White Horse Blog, August 17,
2014, available at whitehorseblog.com). He takes a text like Barnabas saying “that
we indeed descend into the water full of sins and defilement, but come up,
bearing fruit in our heart, having the fear [of God] and trust in Jesus in our
spirit (Ibid.) and comes away claiming that Barnabas actually “understood that
eternal life comes by faith, and faith comes by the preaching of the word, and
it is they who have already received eternal life by faith in the preached word
who ‘go down into the water,’” even though Barnabas explicitly describes trust
in Jesus as following (rather than causing) baptism. He’s doing this not
because the texts themselves, or the scholarship analyzing them, point in this
direction. Neither does. He’s doing this because he’s committed to the belief
that “Roman Catholicism was formed out of a great apostasy that took place in
the late 4th century” (Ibid.). He simply cannot concede that the
Christians of the first centuries believe what Catholics today believe about
baptism because his theological biases don’t allow it.
The most egregious example of Kauffman’s
treatment of early Christian sources is Tertullian (c. 155-220). Slightly after
the pre-200 period we’re looking at, Tertullian writes an entire treatise on
baptism, called On Baptism. Kauffman even admits that “Tertullian spends
twenty chapters defending the merits of baptism, its divine origin, the
significance of the water, the power to sanctify, remit sins, grant life and secure
eternal salvation’” (Timothy Kauffman, “That He Might Purify the Water, Part 3,”
White Horse Blog, August 31, 2014, available at whitehorseblog.com). It almost
seems as if Kauffman will have to give up his presupposition. But Tertullian
also describes martyrdom as “a second font” of baptism (Tertullian, On
Baptism 16, ANF 3:677). He actually has a good argument for it: when Jesus says,
“I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how I am constrained until it is
accomplished!” (Luke 12:50), he's referencing not water baptism (which he had
already undergone), but his upcoming death on the cross. And so Tertullian
explains that “this is the baptism which both stands in lieu of the fontal
bathing when that has not been received, and restores it when lost” (Ibid.). At
the time Tertullian is writing, those who wanted to enter the Church underwent
a three-year catechumenate before being baptized, (See Clement of
Alexandria, Stromata, book 2, ch. 18, ANF 2:368) and Christianity was
often persecuted, and so the idea of an unbaptized martyr isn’t as strange as
it may sound. Tertullian’s point is basically, don’t worry: the martyr who died
without baptism is still saved through this “second font.” Likewise, the
baptized martyr will find in martyrdom a restoration to the spiritual purity
that he possessed on the day of his (water) baptism.
But that’s not how Kauffman reads
things. He claims that Tertullian “states plainly that the baptism of blood is
that of faith in the cross.” He doesn’t, and it would make no sense to read
Luke 12:50 as a way of saying Jesus was preparing himself to have “faith in the
cross.” But on the basis of misreading this one passage in Tertullian’s
treatise, Kauffman throws out the rest, saying, “Tertullian is tipping his
hand, and showing that his own soaring rhetoric is hyperbolic, and he hints at
this conviction (which he elsewhere states explicitly) that the water of the
baptismal font is merely a signification of the actual baptism that takes place
in the heart” (Kauffman, “That He Might Purify the Water, Part 3”). But no such
thing is occurring. Indeed, Tertullian devotes several chapters of his treatise
to responding to the objection “how foolish and impossible it is to be formed
anew by water. In what respect, pray, has this material substance merited an
office of so high dignity?” (Tertullian, On Baptism 3, ANF 3:670) He
does this, among other ways, by pointing to the Spirit hovering of the waters
(Gen. 1:2) as a prefigurement of baptism and the washing in the pool of Siloam
as an instance in which “the spirit is corporeally washed in the waters, and
the flesh is in the same spiritually cleansed” (that is, in which spiritual
cleaning happened through bodily washing) (Tertullian, On Baptism 5, ANF
3:670-71). None of these answers makes sense if Tertullian’s real response is
that “the water of the baptismal font is merely a signification of the actual
baptism that takes place in the heart.”
I mention this incident because it’s
egregious. If an author had left behind a few words on baptism, reasonable
people could certainly disagree over what those words meant. But Kauffman isn’t
even trying to understand Tertullian, or the twenty chapters he devotes to
baptismal theology, which read nothing like what a Baptist would write.
Instead, he isolates a passage, reinterprets it contrary to how everyone else
reads it, and uses his own novel interpretation to write off the rest as
metaphor. That’s just not serious work, or good-faith exegesis, and it suggests
that there’s literally no amount of evidence that Kauffman (and those playing a
similar game) won’t simply wave away as a metaphor for faith. (Joe Heschmeyer, The
Early Church was the Catholic Church: The Catholic Witness of the Fathers in
Christianity’s First Two Centuries [El Cajon, Calif.: Catholic Answers
Press, 2021], 55-58)
Further Reading
David Waltz, Baptismal
regeneration and the early Church Fathers: introduction and Justin Martyr
Idem, Baptismal
regeneration and the early Church Fathers: Tertullian
See my book (*), “Born of Water and of the Spirit”: The Biblical Evidence for Baptismal Regeneration (2021) for a full-length discussion of the biblical evidence for this doctrine (as well as responses to common "proof-texts" against it, such as Eph 2:8-10 and 1 Cor 1:17)
(*) for those who want a free PDF of this book, email me at
ScripturalMormonismATgmailDOTcom)