Tradition
and Scripture
There may be significance in the
Reformers’ reading of Origen, Augustine and other Fathers as demonstrating the
primitive antiquity rather than the strict apostolicity of paedobaptism.
Perhaps it enabled them to cope with the awkward question of non-biblical
tradition. In his Refutation of the Tricks of the Baptists, Zwingli
comments as follows after invoking Origen and Augustine as witnesses that the
church received infant baptism from the apostles. Quo testes non in hoc
adduco, ut eis autoritatem tribuam scripturae, sed propter historiae fidem
(Origenes enim post centum et quinquaginta annos ab ascensione Christi
floruit), ne vetustatem baptismi infantium ignoramus sinulque possimus adsequi
indubitatum esse, quod apostoli citra omnem controversiam infantes
baptizaverint (Zwingli, Catabaptistarum Strophas Elenchus [1527]).
Zwingli’s conclusion—that the apostles themselves baptized infants—cannot
conceal his discomfort at having to rely on non-apostolic attestation of
apostolic practice.
The Reformers found themselves
permanently impaled on the horns of a dilemma. They deployed a range of
arguments based on the Bible in favour of baptizing infants. But none, to my
knowledge, claimed that the Bible provided an express warrant for the practice
(though Calvin held that the intention of baptism is no less appropriate for
children than for adults [Calvin, Institutes, 4:16:18]), and none could
avoid resort to patristic testimony to help out. Yet miserrimum asylum foret,
says Calvin, si prop defensione paedobaptismi ad nudam Ecclesiae
authoritatem suffugere cogeremur (Calvin, Institutes 4:8:16).
So for Calvin, to credit the
testimony of Origen and Augustine is not to rely on nuda Ecclesiae
authoritas. Indeed, it is worth noticing that the testimonia of
these two Fathers in particular—affirming the apostolic institution of
paedobaptism—stand in a class of their own among the patristic evidence
commonly cited in the debate. Their force lies not so much in what they attest
at the church’s observance in their own day (although Origen is early enough
for his report not to be insignificant in this respect), as in their claiming
the observance to be apostolic. Yet this is not vindicated by their quoting apostolic
scripture, because it is not available.
As Martin Bucer admits in an open
letter to Bernard Rothmann: Hoc ergo vobis concedimus, baptisma infantium
non esse inter εγγραφα
Christi instituta, at inter αγραφα
numerandum certo credimus (Martin Bucer, Quid de
Baptismate Infantium . . . [Strasbourg, 1553], sigs. Aiiiv -Avr;).
But although Bucer reckons that Rothmann will acknowledge pleraque Christi αγραφα Bucer can cite nothing remotely
as important as infant baptism.
So these two Father’s testimonia
belong to an intermediate category: they are neither expositions of
scripture—and hence in principle acceptable to the Reformers, like, for
example, the doctrine of the Trinity—nor independent post-apostolic traditions.
They remain unparalleled, I suggest, in sixteenth-century controversy, in
regard to both the fundamental centrality of the observance they sustain and
the Reformers’ readiness to believe and defend their assertion of the apostolic
origin of an unwritten tradition.
The appeal to the Fathers on the
baptism of infants was inseparable from the appeal to scripture, which in this
case sought to prove, or disprove, the congruity of the practice with the
explicit teaching of scripture. Bucer tells Rothmann that discerniculum [of
the αγραφα] in eo situm
est, esse iis, quae scriptura exprimit, consentaneaum vel dissentaneum
(Bucer, Quid de Baptismate Infantium . . ., sigs. Aiiiv -Avr).
(David F. Wright, “George Cassander and the Appeal to the Fathers in
Sixteenth-Century Debates about Infant Baptism,” in Infant Baptism in
Historical Perspective: Collected Studies [Studies in Christian History and
Thought; Milton Keynes, U.K.: Paternoster, 2007], 186-88)
