Wednesday, June 1, 2022

Richard Bauckham on the Earliest Christians Affirming Baptismal Regeneration

In the following, we have another admission from a critic of baptismal regeneration (here, Richard Bauckham) who admits that the earliest post-NT Christians explicitly affirmed baptismal regeneration:  


Since baptism was the rite of admission to the new community of life it was easy to set it as including in its symbolism the divine act of giving new life to believers. So it is not surprising that John 3:5, which undoubtedly refers to that divine act, seems, like 1 Peter 1:3, 23 and Titus 3:5-6, to have been universally understood as referring to baptism in the early centuries, from Justin Martyr (1 Apol. 61.3-5), Irenaeus (Dem. 41), and Clement of Alexandria (Eclog. 7-8) onwards (many examples in Ferguson [Baptism in the Early Church, Eerdmans] 2009). These three New Testament texts were often associated in discussions of baptism. In this light we might say that John 3:5 was open to a baptismal reading, which we could understand as the sensus plenior, properly discerned in the church’s reception of the text. (Richard Bauckham, “Sacraments and the Gospel of John,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology, ed. Hans Boersma and Matthew Levering [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015], 89)

 

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