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)
