Tuesday, April 5, 2022

Edmund Schlink and Everett Ferguson on the Apology of Aristides vs. Infant Baptism

On the evidence for infant baptism in early second century Christian writings, Lutheran Edmund Schlink, himself a defender of infant baptism, wrote that

 

we find no convincing support for the practice of infant Baptism. What is said about Baptism in the Didache and the first Apology of Justin makes no mention of infant Baptism, although it does not exclude it. The same is true of the remaining baptismal texts of the postapostolic and early patristic period. An exception is the Apology of Aristides, but from it we can gather with certainly only that children were baptized in an age when they could already be taught. (Edmund Schlink, The Doctrine of Baptism [trans. Herbert J. A. Bouman; Sant Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1972], 134)

 

In his Apology 15, Aristides writes:

 

And when a child has been born to one of them, they give thanks to God; and if moreover it happen to die in childhood, they give thanks to God the more, as for one who has passed through the world without sins. And further if they see that anyone of them dies in his ungodliness or in his sins, for him they grieve bitterly, and sorrow as for one who goes to meet his doom.

 

Everett Ferguson noted that

 

The early Christian feeling about the innocence of infants finds clear expression in second-century authors and in the writer who makes the first explicit reference to infant baptism in Christian history, Tertullian (V.1-10, 120. Innocence here meant sinlessness, or at least guiltlessness. The author who is the clearest is the apologist Aristides (V. 5); therefore his testimony has been much discussed. The presence of this passage in fourth-century Greek papyri testifies to its genuineness. The phrase about "passed through the world without sins" suggests that the child entered the world without sin and departed in the same condition. There is no suggestion of baptism as the reason for this sinless condition. Indeed, elsewhere Aristides (Apology 15.6) speaks of the Christians using persuasion in making disciples of children:

 

If they should have bondmen and bondwomen or children, they persuade them to become Christians in order that they might be friends, and when they have become such, they call them brethren without distinction. (Everett Ferguson, "The Beginning of Infant Baptism," 57)

 

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