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What has infant baptism done to baptism?

Disaster at the font?

WHAT HAS INFANT BAPTISM DONE TO BAPTISM?
An enquiry at the end of Christendom
By David F. Wright
Paternoster. 118 pages. £9.99
ISBN 1 84227 357 4

This slim, large format paperback is made up of the Didsbury lectures for 2003. Though the author belongs to a church which practices paedo-baptism and still wishes to somehow maintain this himself, the book adds up to a damning indictment of baptising babies.

The book barely looks at NT texts but is mainly concerned with what the church has practised down the centuries in which, by and large, infant baptism has dominated, more or less monopolising the theology of baptism.

We know that the post-apostolic church took as its norm a rite for the baptism of believers who were able themselves to respond to questions. This rite was awkwardly adapted to include infants with parents responding on their behalf — ventriloquism, Wright calls it. The gate to baptism had been ‘strictly guarded’ with pre-baptism discipleship courses, the intention of which was to thoroughly ‘remake the person’ from a pagan to a Christian. There is much reference to exorcism in these historical texts. However, with the prevalence of infant baptism, ‘Christianity became a matter of heredity not decision’. With all agreeing that the NT teaches baptism as initiation into the church, the body of Christ, this led to a radical makeover of the idea of the composition of the church.

Though, according to Professor Wright, the Westminster Confession of Faith must be read as teaching baptismal regeneration (p.99) the embarrassing fact is that ‘millions of infant baptisms…have not led to those recipients being verifiably members of the church of Jesus Christ…The price of continuing to dispense baby baptism is not to believe much about it.’

So it has led to a devaluing of baptism and an undermining of the church and its ordinances in the eyes of the on-looking world. Wright therefore calls for a rethink of the whole subject. It has to be said that, in his book The Twilight of Atheism, Alister McGrath expresses the contention that atheism is now most rampant in countries which in the past have fostered state churches. The state church goes historically hand in hand with infant baptism.

John Benton