Tertullian Was A Cautious Paedobaptist (Part 1)

I was baptized as an infant. I was an adult when I wrestled with whether I should have been. Baptism has been a fairly controversial Christian issue for two thousand years if some are to be believed—or five hundred if others have their say. As a child, I worshipped with fellow Presbyterians on Sundays and studied at a majority Baptist private Christian school during the week. The fact that I had been baptized as an infant did not seem all that unusual until a fellow eighth-grader asked me why my church practiced infant baptism: “Isn’t that, like, Roman Catholic?” At the time, I did not really know how to answer. I just chalked it up to the fact that I was part of a Christian tradition that was, well, relatively weird compared to most American Evangelicals. But was it weird compared to the majority of Christians historically?

When I began to study the issue in earnest as a young adult, I began to see that the believer-only baptism position has a historical problem: there is no fossil record for the Baptist position in the first five centuries after the death of the apostles. To be clear, I had become convinced of paedobaptism on biblical grounds. I saw a substantial continuity between the old and new covenants—as a rule, whatever is not explicitly abdicated in the new covenant continues. But I was also troubled by the historical implications of the Baptist position. If children of adult believers are not considered members of the covenant community, and if the nature of the covenant community, with its divinely mandated symbols and signs, is governed and preserved by Christ, then we should expect a fossil record of the proper practice in church history. Surely Jewish converts would have had objections—rightly or wrongly—to a change in covenantal practice after thousands of years of their children being considered visible members of God’s people. There are plenty of examples throughout the New Testament and the early church of objections to other like practices (dietary laws, circumcision, etc.): party lines developed around whether one could enjoy a nice bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich on one’s day off. So, why is there no record of infant baptism being an issue?

I began asking my Baptist friends for historical evidence—perhaps I had missed something. More often than not, I was directed to certain remarks made by the church father Tertullian in his homily On Baptism (early 200’s). Apart from Origen, Tertullian is among the earliest historical reference we have objecting to infant baptism as a normative practice. In other words, the silence preceding Tertullian and Tertullian’s assumption that infant baptism had been normative reflects a practice that was widespread within 100–150 years of the apostle John’s death.

Yet, a different picture emerged of Tertullian when I began to read him for myself. Many of the popular conceptions of Tertullian’s objections to infant baptism stem from an incomplete reading. If we pay closer attention to Tertullian’s categories as developed in texts like On Baptism and Scorpiace, we see that his objections did not have to do with whether infants are covenant members. Rather, he was concerned that Christians of all ages approach the initiatory rite of baptism with sobriety.

Taxonomy of Views

There are a few different perspectives on Tertullian’s argument which scholars have put forward.1 Everett Ferguson grants that Tertullian’s remarks demonstrate paedobaptism was practiced in his day. Yet, he argues that the burden of proof rests on the shoulders of those who say it was and continues to be normative for all Christians: “This fact [that Tertullian makes mention of the practice] does not mean that it did not occur, but it does mean that supporters of the practice have a considerable chronological gap to account for.”2 Ferguson suggests infant baptism was a late and relatively controversial development. Jerald Brauer likewise allows that Tertullian mentions a practice that was increasingly common for the time. Drawing from Karl Barth’s essential thesis in The Teaching of the Church Regarding Baptism, he too argues that infant baptism was a late development.3 Ernest Evans and Jaroslav Pelikan believed that Tertullian objected to infant baptism based on his understanding that children are in a state of relative innocence and, therefore, are in no need of rebirth via baptism.4 Lastly, Gerald Bray argues that Tertullian rejected the legitimacy of infant baptism. Yet Bray believes that he does so critically, not because infants lack faith, but because baptism was a kind of “spiritual vaccination,” genuinely cleansing the individual from sin. They should, in Bray’s estimation of Tertullian’s thought process, wait to be baptized until they “get sin out of their system, so to speak.”5

You Can’t Handle the History

Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullianus (c. A.D. 160–220) was a man well acquainted with the joys of the Christian life—and of its peril. He was born into a family of some means and received an excellent education. Yet, he seems to have spent much of his youth as something of a profligate. As many have remarked, the strict asceticism of Tertullian’s teaching and preaching as an instructor of Carthaginian catechumens may have been born from a sense of the dangers of a licentious life. He, for instance, confesses that as a young man, he “drained the cup of lust to the dregs” and had turned from a passion for immoral plays and bloody spectacles in the arena.6

As a homily, On Baptism would have been delivered to a mixed assembly, believers and unbelievers, families and singles, doubtful and assured.7 It was evidently occasioned by a heretic, “a female viper from the Cainite sect,”8 who had been actively seeking to undermine the established understanding of baptism in the churches of her day. On Baptism was an attempt to refute these teachings and to offer encouragement of a positive, albeit sober, vision of the sacrament’s proper place within the Christian life.

It is important to understand that baptism was ordinarily administered during public occasions like Easter, where the convert—or, importantly, their sponsor(s)—would make a profession of faith, often in credal form. Baptism and profession of faith were distinct but joined activities. This did not preclude the possibility that children were converted at very young ages, nor does it mean children were not being baptized prior to their profession. Irenaeus (c. 120–203), for example, speaks of Christ’s salvation as being for people of all ages: “All, I say, who are through [Christ] are born again to God—infants, and children, and boys, and youths.”9 Tertullian, however, objected to infant baptism as it was evidently practiced in the early church, but he did so on very specific grounds.

This historical question has wide-reaching implications for how we frame these debates. In other words, would infant baptism have been weird to a second or third-century believer; or, would believer-only baptism have been the most unusual practice? If Tertullian did not object to infant baptism as a practice, but rather how it was practiced, then the Baptist has a greater burden of proof to explain why half of the sacraments which Christ instituted fell into such a state of disrepair so quickly, so quietly, and without any theological protest within less than two centuries of the death of the apostle John. As far as church controversies go, this would represent one of the most astonishingly fast theological transitions in church history, with scarcely any resistance or lasting debate in its wake. Whether this is so, I shall consider in the next installment.

Notes

  1. I attempt to summarize these briefly here. Since space is limited, I would recommend that the curious track down the original writings for themselves if they want to go deeper.
  2. Everett Ferguson, Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2009), 856.
  3. See Jerald C. Brauer, “Baptism,” in The Dictionary of Church History (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1971), 81–-3. See also Karl Barth, The Teaching of the Church Regarding Baptism (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2006).
  4. Jaroslav Pelikan, Development of Christian Doctrine: Some Historical Prolegomena (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1969), 88–90. See also Ernest Evans, Tertullian’s Homily on Baptism (London: SPCK Publishing, 1964), 101.
  5. Gerald Bray, God Has Spoken: A History of Christian Theology (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014), 414–5.
  6. W. Le Saint, “Tertullian” in New Catholic Encyclopedia, Second Edition, vol. 13, (Gale, 2003). See also Evans, Tertullian’s Homily On Baptism (S.P.C.K: London, 1964), ix.
  7. Evans, ibid.
  8. Evans, ibid.
  9. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, ii.4. See also “Baptism of Infants,” in New Catholic Encyclopedia, Second Edition, vol. 2, (Gale, 2003), 67.

©Isaac Fox. All Rights Reserved.

You can find part 2 here.


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    Post authored by:

  • Isaac Fox
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    Isaac Fox is pursuing an MA in Historical Theology at Westminster Seminary California. When he isn’t panicking about deadlines, he enjoys reading Dante and chatting with strangers at coffee shops. His writing has appeared in Modern Reformation, Core Christianity, and several seminary papers that he is confident his professors treasure.

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5 comments

  1. I really enjoyed this article by Isaac Fox. I appreciate his writing style. This is an article I can share with my Baptist friends — one that will not muddy them down into the theology they don’t understand yet. I truly look forward to the next installment — and I think Isaac should write a book on this topic. I would buy it 🙂

  2. Looking forward to this series! Back in my Baptist days, I was shown an out-of-context Tertullian quote from “de baptismo” to support the idea that infant baptism was a late development and/or a debate within the early church. I decided to read through the entire work and found that Tertullian was very much not a Baptist (and the only debates over paedobaptism seemed to be a matter of when, not if ). Having the context of the whole work defeated a lot of credo-baptistic church history arguments.
    Something else interesting to me was that baptists tend to argue that baptismal regeneration led to infant baptism, but as we see from Tertullian, it actually led to the opposite.
    Moral of the story, read your primary sources!

  3. Thank you for this article, it is very interesting! I am wondering at what point in church history that baptism became viewed as the means of regeneration? Some of the early works I’ve read appear to suggest this.

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