Wednesday, April 27, 2022

"One Baptism for the Remission of Sins" in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed being Interpreted by Early Christians as Teaching Baptismal Regeneration

  

‘One baptism for the remissions of sins’—and there again the specification of the purpose of baptism is important—declares that the washing away of sins in baptism may be received only once. This is how Cyril of Jerusalem explains the words in his Procatechesis:

 

A person cannot be baptized a second or third time. Otherwise, he could say: ‘I failed once; the second time I shall succeed’. Fail once and there is no putting it right. For [there is] ‘one Lord, one faith, one baptism’. It is only heretics who are rebaptized, and then because the first [baptism] was no baptism.

 

Thus Cyril interprets the phrase in a manner that explicitly denies that it debars the rebaptism of those baptized at the hands of heretics. Speaking to neophytes Chrysostom warns them to ‘be alert to prevent any second conduct [i.e., the debt from post-baptismal sins]. For there is no second cross, nor a second remission by the bath of regeneration. There is remission, but not a second remission by baptism’ (Instr. 3.23). On other occasions he also denies that there is any second baptism to cancel sins committed after baptism (De Petecoste 1 [PG 50, col. 463]; Homil. in Eph. 11:1 [PG 62, cols. 79-80). Theodore likewise insists that, ‘As we will not receive a second renewal, so we should not expect a second baptism, just as we hope or but a single resurrection’ (Catech. Homil. 14:13). (David F. Wright, “The Meaning and Reference of ‘One Baptism for the Remission of Sins’ in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed,” in Infant Baptism in Historical Perspective: Collected Studies [Studies in Christian History and Thought; Milton Keynes, U.K.: Paternoster, 2007], 58-59)