DAY 76
CHALLENGE
“Infant baptism is an invention of men not practiced by the early Christians.”
DEFENSE
Infant baptism was practiced from the beginning of Church history. The principles behind it are articulated in the New Testament, and we have explicit documentation of it from the second century on.
We observe elsewhere the biblical principles behind infant baptism (see Day 75).
One is that baptism is the Christian initiation ritual and its equivalent of circumcision. This led some in the early Church to discuss whether baptism should be performed on the eighth day after birth— the time circumcision was performed (Lev. 12:2–3).
Around A.D. 253, Cyprian of Carthage reported the results of a council that held that baptism should not be delayed until the eighth day but given even sooner: “But in respect of the case of the infants, which you [Fidus] say ought not to be baptized within the second or third day after their birth, and that the law of ancient circumcision should be followed, so that one who is just born should not be baptized and sanctified within the eighth day, we all thought very differently in our council. For no one agreed with the course you thought should be taken; rather we all judge that the mercy and grace of God is not to be refused to anyone born of man” (Letters 58:2).
Other records show infant baptism was performed in the second century. St. Irenaeus of Lyons was clear that being regenerated or “born again” happened in baptism: “As we are lepers in sin, we are made clean of our old transgressions by means of the sacred water and the invocation of the Lord; we are spiritually regenerated” (Fragments from the Lost Writings of Irenaeus 34 [c. A.D. 190]).
Irenaeus further indicated that this was done for infants when he wrote: “For [Jesus] came to save all through himself—all, I say, who through him are born again to God—infants, and children, and boys, and youths, and old men” (Against Heresies 2:22:4 [c. A.D. 189]). As someone who grew up in a Christian home, Irenaeus himself was likely baptized as an infant around the year A.D. 140, less than fifty years from the apostolic age.