Infant Baptism Is Demanded By Christianity’s Relationship To Judaism

Infant Baptism Is Demanded By Christianity’s Relationship To Judaism




Infant Baptism Is Demanded By Christianity’s Relationship To Judaism
Michael Ferrebee Sadler (1819-1895)


Michael Ferrebee Sadler (1819-1895), was Rector of St Paul’s Honiton (pictured). © John Salmon (geograph.org.uk), used under licence.

Those on the Reformed side reject Baptismal regeneration, holding that we are "born again" when we first believe. Sadler held that this runs counter to Anglican doctrine, to Scripture, and to the Apostolic tradition.

THE Book of the Acts of the Apostles is all the inspired record we have of the Church's missionary work. The first notice of Baptism there is in the sermon of St. Peter on the day of Pentecost. "Repent, and be baptized every one of you ... for the promise is to you, and to your children."

They were to be baptized Because of the promise; but the promise belonged to their children, as well as to them, consequently Baptism, the seal of the promise, would equally belong to their children; at least, they, being brought up in a religion, the first principle of which was that children should be admitted into a covenant of promise on their eighth day, would assuredly understand it so, if not expressly forbidden.

After the first Baptism on Pentecost, very few other actual administrations of it are mentioned. Two of these, that of the Ethiopian eunuch and that of Cornelius, are recorded for a specific purpose, viz. to mark the development of God's design with respect to the conversion of the Gentiles; the sole reason for their Baptism being alluded to at all being, that they were baptized as Gentiles. In the case of two others, Lydia and the jailor at Philippi, the Baptism of their households is expressly mentioned.

But in addition to all this, it must ever be borne in mind that the Christian was by no means a new religion. Neither the ideas that it had to deal with, nor the language in which it expressed them, were new. Its germs, and far more than its germs, were all contained in the system it superseded. The God was the same, and His moral law was the same.

There were the same ideas of atonement and sacrifice, only in the new all centred in the Divine Antitype. The Incarnation, the sacrifice for all sin, the coming down of the Spirit, His work both in miracles and in the heart, were all foretold, in most express terms, in the book of the Old Covenant.

Even the two Sacraments, the especial badges of Christianity, were not new. The Lord's Supper was a part of the Paschal solemnity, sanctified by our Lord to higher purposes; and so with Baptism. It was the practice, at the admission of a proselyte, to baptize both himself and all that belonged to him with water.

But in the Old Covenant it was a fundamental principle to admit children to its blessings, and a rite was ordained for the purpose. This rite was superseded as the form of entrance into the blessings of the New Covenant, and another took its place.

This latter rite, then, would naturally be administered to infants, because those first converted were accustomed to, nay, educated in and under the religious principle, that infancy, so far from being a disqualification, was the qualification for covenant blessings.

If there was to be a difference between the Old Covenant and that which superseded it, on what was in the Old so fundamental a point, we should certainly have heard of it. We should certainly have been told, for instance, that in the three households, of the Baptism of which we have the record, there were no children, or that the children in them had their Baptism deferred.

We should have been told this, because the New Testament is written for those who are expected to be acquainted with the principles of the Old, and amongst them the principle of infant membership. If Infant Baptism is practised at all, it must, of necessity, soon supersede, in a Christian community, the practice of Adult Baptism.