Wednesday, April 27, 2022

David F. Wright on the Magisterial Reformers and their Followers Appealing to "Tradition" to Support Infant Baptism

  

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)