Infant Baptism: Do We Really Need It?

If you were asked to come up with a quick summary of the Church’s teaching on the sacraments, how long would it take you? Could you boil it all down into a single sentence? Yes, I think you could do it. Quite easily, actually. In fact, it was nicely done five centuries ago at the Council of Trent, the happy outcome of which has given us nine perfectly simple words: an outward sign instituted by Christ to give grace. 

Since then, however, it has given no little grief to heaps of people who, alas, do not share our persuasion. They are rightly called Protestants because, well, that’s pretty much what they do. At least from the time of Luther and Calvin, Cranmer and Knox, their whole outlook has been one of sheer uninterrupted protest. Against the idea, most especially, that this finite world can become not just the setting for but the point of mediation between ourselves and the infinite God. And, not infrequently, in accents both shrill and intolerant. 

In other words, they became experts early on at the science of subtraction, which is the art of removing whatever gets in the way of their scrubbed down version of faith and the moral life inspired by it. Let us excise all that we object to in the Catholic Church, they cry, and thus they set about depleting the very fullness which has always been the distinctive mark of Catholic Christianity.

C.S. Lewis, for example, who enjoyed high standing among Christians of all stripes, beginning with a series of radio broadcasts back in the 1940s that soon became a bestseller called Mere Christianity, felt it necessary, in order to appeal to a broad swath of believers, to leave out whole areas of long held Catholic belief and practice. Three cornerstone convictions in particular—i.e., the Eucharist, the Blessed Mother, and the Petrine Office—were at one stroke eliminated from an otherwise complete compilation of what Christians everywhere have always believed.  

A series of amputations, you might say, that for all the good his work has undoubtedly done, pretty much eviscerated the patient. Have we been on life support ever since and don’t even know it? What does such forgetfulness tell us about the state of our denatured souls? This has been especially the case concerning the sacraments, the celebration of which has, from the beginning, been the place where the proverbial rubber meets the road.

What actually survives, however, when the order of sacrament is seen through a Protestant lens? Nothing less than an evacuation of the sign, to quote a sacramentalist like Walker Percy, for whom words on paper signify things compact of meaning, much like the facts laid out in Holy Scripture reveal one or another divine mystery. Or Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz, who reminds us in his poem “Veni Creator”:

I am only a man: I need visible signs.
I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction.  

But if you circumvent the material world, preferring direct and immediate means of storming the precincts of Heaven, you are saying to God that His way of reaching us by and through the senses is simply not good enough. Let us dismantle the signs, they say, and instead build “stairways of abstraction.” When that happens, when material and sensible things are sundered from the spiritual world they are meant to signify, the whole structure of religion falls apart, leading to an inevitable dissolution of belief and sensibility.

What exactly had Jesus in mind when, under cover of darkness, Nicodemus came to ask what must he do to obtain eternal life? Evidently, the words of Torah were not enough; he was looking for a sign, a sacrament able to encompass both head and heart. What does Jesus tell him? “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God.” 

Is Jesus proposing a spiritual solution to the problem of salvation? Yes, He is, but not at the expense of the physical, through which the most high and august God will harness the powers of Heaven to bring it about. The grace of God does not bypass nature, any more than God’s divinity shows the least disdain for our humanity by becoming one of us.  

If such condescension is shown on God’s part for our sake, even to the extent of using the things of nature to impart His redeeming grace, who are we to dismiss so elemental a thing as water, with all its symbolism of renewed life, by refusing to be baptized with it? “The final mutation,” Pope Benedict XVI has called it, “in the evolution of the human species.” Why would anyone shrink from so transformative an event? Or, and this is perhaps yet more baffling, deny it to a child whose sin God longs to remit even as He yearns no less for the child’s membership in His Mystical Body the Church? Who are we to dismiss so elemental a thing as water, with all its symbolism of renewed life, by refusing to be baptized with it?Tweet This

Grace, to invoke an immemorial Catholic principle, does not abolish nature but completes and perfects it. By first entering into the medium of water, it sets about supernaturalizing it, enabling it to become the conduit for new and eternal life. 

How, then, are we to respond when a young couple, fresh from the hospital with their brand-new baby in tow, refuse to have the child baptized? When asked why, they may say something along these lines: We’ve decided the best thing to do is wait till Sarah’s old enough to make up her own mind. 

Are they likewise inclined to defer teaching young Sarah how to read and write, or even to walk and talk, until she decides such skills are worth having? As for baptizing the little darling, how do we persuade people that it is not really a good idea to put it off, pending the day she’s old enough to decide for herself? Indeed, that it is positively perilous both for the child deprived of the saving grace of Jesus Christ and for the parents who will someday stand before God Himself to explain why they withheld the one gift without which no one gets into Heaven? What could be more loving or generous, more solicitous of the child’s eternal welfare, than to allow the Church, Christ’s very own Bride, to welcome the child into the company of the saints and angels?

It is a question which, more and more in a post-Christian world, we need to ask ourselves for the sake of the children and grandchildren we love.