Do
References to baptism in the Apostolic Fathers throw any light on the inclusion
of infants among its recipients?
The directions for baptism
in the Didache envisage responsible participants as its subjects. There
is no provision for young children, but nor are they explicitly excluded. If we
recall that only one small paragraph betrays the place for infants in the
lengthy baptismal order in the Hippolytan Apostolic Tradition, such that
most questions about their inclusion are left unanswered, we should hesitate to
regard the Didache as debarring them. Its text does contribute, however, to the
general picture which emerges from all the patristic sources, that the rite of
baptism developed throughout the era as a rite for believing respondents, into
which non-responding babies when they came to be baptized were accommodated
with adaptation minimal to the point of being often near invisible.
The Epistle to Barnabas
also furnishes an explicit discussion of baptism, from the perspective of its
Old Testament foreshadowing. Not only does the writer with unmistakable
purposefulness trace no connection between baptism and circumcision (see
section 7 below), but what he does say about baptism clearly has responsible
agents in view. They go down into the water (καταβαινω, 11. 8, 11) ‘with their
hopes set on the cross’ (11. 8), and ascend out of it ‘bearing the fruit of
fear in [their] hearts and having hope in Jesus in [their] spirits’ (11. 11).
How instinctively Barnabas avoided envisaging infants as subjects of Christian
initiation appears earlier in his work.
So we are the ones whom
[God] brought into the good land. What then do ‘milk and honey’ mean [in Exod.
33. 3]? That a child is brought to life first by honey and then by milk. So
accordingly we too are brought to life by faith in the promise and by the word,
and will then go on to live possessing the earth. (6. 16–17)
When Ignatius through
Polycarp exhorts the Smyrnaean Christians, ‘Let your baptism remain as your
weapons, your faith as a helmet, your love as a spear, your endurance as your
panoply’ (Ign. Pol. 6. 2), is it fair comment that baptism Its better
with faith, love, and endurance in this context as a recognizable feature of
their conscious Christian experience? The assumption would be similar to that
made by Paul in Rom. 6. 3– 4.
Hermas was given the
explanation of the stones which fell away from the tower near water, yet could
not be rolled into the water: ‘These are those who have heard the word and wish
to be baptized into the name of the Lord,’ but subsequently return to their
former wickedness (Vis. 3. 7. 3). The author’s preoccupation with
repentance as the prerequisite for baptism is writ large throughout the work,
as is the necessity of baptism (‘water’) for salvation (Vis. 3. 3. 5; Sim.
9. 16. 2– 4). Yet in all of Hermas’s elaborate symbolism, no category appears
which might specifically accommodate those originally baptized in early
infancy.
2 Clement’s interest
in baptism is restricted to keeping it ‘pure and undefiled (6. 9). Twice ‘seal’
is used of the baptism to be preserved at all costs. (2 Clem. 7. 6; 8.
6). Nothing can be confidently inferred from these references. (David F.
Wright, “The Apostolic Fathers and Infant Baptism: Any Advance on the Obscurity
of the New Testament,” in Trajectories through the New Testament and the Apostolic
Fathers, Andrew F. Gregory and Christopher M. Tuckett [Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005], 126-27)
Do
note that Wright is a proponent of infant baptism.
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