Archive: The Infant Baptism Controversy

Part II

By Ben Husted

In the July/August issue Dr. Ben Husted examined infant baptism from a historical perspective in order to answer some of today’s controversial questions: Is infant baptism biblical? Is rebaptism wrong? Is infant dedication heresy? In the following article Husted continues his study of infant baptism, asking what is the purpose of baptism in our church today. Is baptism a sacrament of birth or rebirth?

The water of Oolagah Lake was warm as I stepped into it the Sunday afternoon before Labor Day. We were there for a baptism service and had not expected a crowd of vacationers as witnesses.

I had shared from the Bible the meaning of baptism: We are buried with Christ and rise to live a new life; we are washed clean from our sins; it is a witness to our faith in Jesus; it is an act of obedience to Him. The time had come to examine and baptize the candidates.

Tom was the first to follow me into the water. In his mid-thirties, Tom was a draftsman and a fisherman on the pro bass circuit. He had been converted through the witness of friends at work, his children in Vacation Bible School and other influences. He had then led his whole family into the faith, so I had asked him to be the first baptized and then to assist me in baptizing his wife and four daughters.

“Tom, do you have faith in Jesus Christ?” I asked.

His answer was a strong “Yes, I do!”

“Have you asked Him to forgive your sins, to be your Savior and Lord?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Do you intend to live for Jesus from now on, with the help of the Holy Spirit?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Tom, I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son, Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

With my left hand under his heavily muscled shoulders and our right hands clasped, I lowered him into the water and then quickly brought him up again. That simple, human act, complete with blowing water out of his nose and mopping it out of his eyes, held such significance; it initiated him into the kingdom of God.

What a time of grace, fun, joy, witness and fellowship for the entire church! Baptism! There is nothing quite like it in all the universe, initiating those who were “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1, KJV) into the life of the kingdom.

As I think back over these exciting times I am shocked, saddened and grieved to read this statement in the semiofficial Companion to the Book of Worship: “While infant baptism is normative for Methodists, it is not exclusive. Baptism of youths and adult is fully acceptable when it is desired.”[1]

The first time I read that statement I wrote in the margin, “Gasp!” That is still my response. The statement indicates that United Methodists expect to baptize infants but do not expect to baptize adult converts.

Clearly, though, the opinion expressed in the above statement is not isolated. Indeed, the Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church (1988) treats baptism almost exclusively as the baptism of infants. One phrase of one sentence of one paragraph (216.1) clearly (though almost parenthetically) refers to the baptism of adults, but the baptism of infants claims paragraphs 221-225 under membership, and in paragraph 439.1, dealing with the duties of the pastor, subparagraph b deals exclusively with infant baptism. The 1988 Discipline, in an improvement over 1984, gives pastors the responsibility to “win persons on profession of faith” (439.1), though nothing is said specifically of baptism there. The Discipline does not seem to expect us to win converts from the world!

I do not intend to denigrate infant baptism. The question we must ask is what is normative? And, prior to that, what does it mean to be normative?

One way to understand this use of normative is to say it means “Methodists have always been people who have believed in infant baptism.” While that statement is true of Methodists it is not true of United Methodists. Our denomination arose from the union of the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren (EUB) Church, and neither the EUB Church nor either of its parents, the Evangelical Church and the United Brethren in Christ Church, practiced infant baptism to the exclusion of rebaptism or infant dedication and believer baptism; there was always an option. So infant baptism is not normative for United Methodists in the sense of “always having believed in it.”

This, however, is not the meaning of the word normative in the above quoted statement. Rather, it means “infant baptism is the standard of baptism for Methodists.” This is the assertion from which I recoil in dismay.

To be sure, infant baptism can be said to be normal, widely practiced, most common, a doctrinally sound part of our tradition and many other things, but it is not normative in this sense. Saying it is normative is saying it sets the norm; it determines the standard against which all other practices are measured. Making infant baptism normative makes other types of baptism unusual, though “fully acceptable when desired.”

This is not a trivial point, for it has important implications for evangelism and church growth. Making infant baptism normative is, in church-growth terms, making biological growth normative and conversion growth unusual. “Biological growth is good growth,” points out Donald McGavran, “yet this type of growth will never bring the nations to faith and obedience since the non-Christian part of the world’s population is growing faster than the Christian and seems destined to continue to do so.”[2]

Considering infant baptism and biological growth normative tends to limit evangelism to the annual confirmation class; this is, in fact, what seems to be indicated by the Discipline in the paragraphs noted above. If we were to take the “Number of Persons Baptized” statistic from our conference journals and break it down into “Infants Baptized,” “Church Youth Baptized” and “Formerly Unchurched Baptized,” I expect we would find that, in practice at least, most United Methodist churches and pastors find the last category fully acceptable but very unusual.

To be sure, there are valid historical reasons why infant baptism has been considered normative for Methodists. In Wesley’s England few unbaptized pagans presented themselves as candidates for evangelism. Hundreds of thousands of baptized pagans did, however, and they were added to the kingdom through conversion and discipleship.

This is not true today, however. Millions of unchurched people in America were not baptized as infants. Some of them have never even been inside a church.

Lyle Schaller quotes one survey that states 13 percent of Americans born between 1957 and 1965 claim no religious affiliation.[3] It is probably safe to assume that many of them are unbaptized, along with many of their peers who claim some loose affiliation with a church.

Clearly, something needs to be done, and that something is evangelism. Nothing has yet moved us to seriously evangelize these masses. In fact, nothing has yet moved us beyond our membership list for evangelistic prospects. One reason may be that our theology of baptism tells us that such evangelism is unusual and uncommon.

Even as I write these words I realize that I have not been especially adept at winning converts from the world. But I feel no pressure to do so from my peers, some of whom have never baptized a convert from the world. When we gather at district meetings we talk, appropriately, of our confirmation classes. Sadly, however, we do not talk about winning the unchurched and baptizing them.

If we as pastors and churches come to understand that the baptism of formerly unchurched converts is normative, it may move us to evangelize them. It may put a certain measure of discomfort into our hearts to know that a “normal” church is one which wins people from the world, not just from Christian families, to the kingdom.

I believe, then, it is time to make some clear changes in our Discipline, attitudes and practices. We have allowed baptism to be the sacrament of birth, which may (or may not) have been acceptable in another age. In this age, however, I believe we United Methodists need, for the sake of the kingdom, to reclaim baptism as the sacrament of evangelism.

Dr. Ben Husted is pastor of First United Methodist Church in Coalgate, Oklahoma.

[1] Dunkle. William F. Jr. and Quillian. Joseph D. Jr. Companion to the Book of Worship (Nashville: Abingdon, 1970). p. 48.

[2] McGavran, Donald. Understanding Church Growth (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1970), p. 88.

[3] Schaller, Lyle. It’s A New World (Nashville: Abingdon, 1987), p. 82.