Word: baptisme
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Some of the protesters merely object to the abuses of infant baptism, but oth ers go much farther, saying that baptism is only meaningful when the in dividual involved understands the significance of the ritual-a viewpoint that has lately been adopted by a number of other Protestant and even Catholic thinkers. In the Roman Catholic Church -which requires parents to have their children baptized as soon as possible-several progressive theologians have seriously suggested that the ceremony be postponed until puberty, when a youth presumably is mature enough to accept or reject his faith. Perhaps the most formidable challenge...
Limbo-Bound. Error or not, infant baptism has its roots in antiquity. St. Irenaeus in the 2nd century referred to the practice, and it apparently had become the norm of the Church by the year 400. St. Augustine articulated the gloomy theology of baptism that was to remain current in the Church for nearly 1,000 years: that the ritual was necessary to cleanse an individual of the stain of original sin, and that the unbaptized were doomed to hell. Somewhat more merciful in his thinking, Thomas Aquinas later suggested that the unbaptized would go not to hell...
...modern challenge to infant baptism stems from several different arguments. A growing number of Roman Catholic thinkers now look on original sin as the universal weakness of man rather than a damning individual fault-which cuts the ground out completely from the need for infant baptism. Still others object to the "magical" implications of the baptism ceremony-namely, that a spiritual cleansing is achieved by the physical act of pouring a few drops of water on the infant's head. Many clerics argue that baptism has in effect been made a mockery by unchurched parents who want their child...
Into the Community. Instead of automatically baptizing children in infancy, Jesuit Theologian Joseph Powers of California's Alma College would postpone the ceremony until the age of ten or twelve. "The whole meaning of baptism," he says, "is not to make a Christian out of a child but to incorporate the individual, at some time in life, into the community of the church." Thus he believes it makes more sense for a child raised in a Christian home to undergo baptism at an age when he can really start believing in the church. This procedure would effectively answer...
Nonetheless, there are some serious objections to total abolition of infant baptism. Philip Hefner of Chicago's Lutheran School of Theology argues that the ceremony marks the entrance of the Christian into the community of faith, and that by baptizing infants the church shows that he is acceptable even when defenseless before...