Theology: What Is Baptism?

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Infant baptism is under fire. The most recent attack on this traditional Christian practice comes from West Germany, where 350 Evangelical (Lutheran) churchmen have petitioned the Rhineland synod to abandon the rubric requiring infant baptism and let parents decide when their children should undergo the ceremony. To give the demand more weight, 50 pastors in Germany have publicly indicated that they will not baptize their own children.

Some of the protesters merely object to the abuses of infant baptism, but oth ers go much farther, saying that baptism is only meaningful when the in dividual involved understands the significance of the ritual—a viewpoint that has lately been adopted by a number of other Protestant and even Catholic thinkers. In the Roman Catholic Church —which requires parents to have their children baptized as soon as possible—several progressive theologians have seriously suggested that the ceremony be postponed until puberty, when a youth presumably is mature enough to accept or reject his faith. Perhaps the most formidable challenge to infant baptism was made recently by Switzerland's venerable Karl Earth, in Part 4 of Volume IV of his ever expanding masterwork, Church Dogmatics. In his latest book, Barth argues that there is no Biblical basis for infant baptism and that the ritual is not an act of God's grace but a human response to it—which means that the individual must be mature enough to understand the meaning of such a decision. The traditional under standing of the sacrament, he says, is simply "an old error of the church."

Limbo-Bound. Error or not, infant baptism has its roots in antiquity. St. Irenaeus in the 2nd century referred to the practice, and it apparently had become the norm of the Church by the year 400. St. Augustine articulated the gloomy theology of baptism that was to remain current in the Church for nearly 1,000 years: that the ritual was necessary to cleanse an individual of the stain of original sin, and that the unbaptized were doomed to hell. Somewhat more merciful in his thinking, Thomas Aquinas later suggested that the unbaptized would go not to hell but to limbo, though original sin would still deny them heaven. During the 16th century, the radical reformers known as Anabaptists returned on Biblical grounds to the primitive Christian practice of baptizing only adult believers. But Luther, Calvin and the majority of Protestant leaders stood largely by tradition.

The modern challenge to infant baptism stems from several different arguments. A growing number of Roman Catholic thinkers now look on original sin as the universal weakness of man rather than a damning individual fault—which cuts the ground out completely from the need for infant baptism. Still others object to the "magical" implications of the baptism ceremony—namely, that a spiritual cleansing is achieved by the physical act of pouring a few drops of water on the infant's head. Many clerics argue that baptism has in effect been made a mockery by unchurched parents who want their child baptized as a matter of form but have no intention whatsoever of raising the infant as a Christian.