Sermon - Baptism: More From Church History

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00:17

It happens to be one of my favorite songs. I'm very glad we're going to start working on that one.

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It's a beautiful, beautiful song. You shouldn't start a sermon like this, but I'm going to do so anyways because I won't remember otherwise.

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Public service announcement. These up front here are only for the communion glasses.

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They are not for Starbucks glasses. Last Sunday, I had to fish two

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Starbucks glasses out of this, so there wouldn't have been any way to put anything in it at all. So please, I'm not sure we're supposed to have

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Starbucks glasses in here anyways, but please do not put anything else in these so that we can use them for what we need to use them for.

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That's just crossed my mind. And once you get to my age, you better say it while you're thinking about it because you're not going to remember it after a very short period of time.

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Long -term memory is great. Short -term memory, not so much. Why are we here again? Oh, yeah. OK. So funny to be teaching on history when you can't remember why you were supposed to be up here in the first place.

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But anyway, as I mentioned earlier, we are continuing our series on baptism, and we are in the church history section.

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It's a dangerous section for me to be in. I teach church history, and therefore, I have to be extremely disciplined today because, as I mentioned last week, there are entire tomes, huge, massive volumes that go through so many different aspects of this that the danger is that by trying to go as quickly as we need to go, that you're going to skip things and miss things.

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But I want to try to give you at least a framework of information before we then turn to some of the key arguments that we, as Reformed Baptists, have to face in regards to the subject of baptism.

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Obviously, many of you have probably spent many hours in Facebook chat groups and everything else going around and around this particular subject, as have

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I in years past. I don't so much these days. And by the way, I have done two full debates on this particular subject, three technically.

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The first one was a long, long time ago and was actually in this room, come to think of it.

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But two, specifically on this subject, just myself with one particular individual that I'm debating,

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I would refer you to them if you want to hear both sides and things like that.

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I think that would be very useful. And as I mentioned, asking for your prayers for a debate on April 22nd up in Moscow, Idaho.

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Doug Wilson and I will be debating paedo -communion. Doug put out a video just this week, basically summarizing his arguments in favor of paedo -baptism.

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I would recommend that you listen to it, because I will certainly be using it in my preparations and in my responses that I will be giving when

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I go up to Idaho. And so it's good to hear the other side. I will be perfectly honest with you.

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I think we listen to the other side better than the other side listens to us. That's been my experience down through the ages.

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Ages, get it? But Luke was just recently saying something along the lines of, given how many centuries

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I've been alive, that I should be able to do certain things. So that sort of fits together. But listen and learn, and we want to be able to engage with our dear

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Presbyterian brothers in a proper, appropriate way. Now, from last week, remember that history must be done carefully.

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We must ask the right questions and recognize that we must let those who came before us be the people they were, not the people we want them to be.

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One of the greatest problems that I see as people handle church history is that we, for some reason, have the idea that if we're looking at Christians in the past, that we need to turn them into a mirror image of ourselves.

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There is no need to do that. There is no reason to do that. I am old enough to remember what church looked like 50 years plus ago.

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And it did not look like what we're doing here right now. There were many similarities. But there are differences even in this day.

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Today, people have met all across our nation and our world. And they have worshipped

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Christ in a way that was pleasing to him that did not look exactly the way that we were doing things.

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And they were dressed a little bit differently. And they may have used different music and all sorts of things like that. There is no reason to try to turn everyone in the past into a mirror image of ourselves.

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And the fact of the matter is, when we do that, we are twisting history. We do not want people 100 years from now to be trying to change us into something we were not.

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And so we need to recognize that the questions that we ask of church history, very often, we are simply seeking to affirm our own perspectives.

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And that is not a good thing when it comes to the subject of baptism. And that's why you have major tomes by great scholars that will come out.

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And five years later, another great scholar, equally credentialed, will write a complete refutation of the first guy.

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And then somebody else will come along and say, actually, the truth is in between the two of them. So that's a good thing.

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I'm glad we have the freedom today for people to be able to make those arguments. And we can be blessed by all the information that comes out from that.

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But we need to avoid the idea that we need to turn everyone who came before us into our own mirror image.

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I remember last week, we looked at the Didache. Some of you may still have that bulletin stuck in the back of your

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Bible someplace. We had a quote from the Didache, where you have probably the earliest extra -biblical description of baptism.

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And it's very simple. It is baptism by immersion. It is credo -baptism.

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That is credo, profession, I believe. So it is someone who is making a profession of faith in Jesus Christ who is being baptized.

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And it's very straightforward. There is nothing in the Didache that could possibly be stretched into the idea that there was a practice, an apostolic practice at that time, of infant baptism.

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Now, you could argue, well, he just didn't talk about that. If you want to go with an argument from silence, you can do that.

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But that's what we saw in the Didache. And then we read from Justin, where baptism was for believers.

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It was done by immersion. Neither one of them made any reference to the baptism of infants.

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But there was always a profession of faith. And Justin began to use language that would eventually evolve into a full -on doctrine of baptismal regeneration, where baptism becomes the mechanism whereby regeneration takes place.

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This develops over time. This develops in a way that, as we will see later on, had something to do with the diminishment of an emphasis upon sola scriptura as well as a rise in an emphasis upon a sacramental system.

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And we will say a little bit more about that. But let's quickly put a few issues to bed immediately.

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Immersion as the primary meaning of the term baptize. Now, we already saw this many, many months ago when we began this study.

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We saw that from the lexical sources, the sources that define language, baptizo and its related terms refer to immersion.

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But immersion as the primary meaning of that term is admitted throughout church history.

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Let's just list some of those who plainly indicated that this was the meaning of the term. I do not have time to go read all the references.

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There are, again, numerous sources out there. There's an individual who works with me remotely with Alpha Omega Ministries, Chris Wisenant.

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You can look up his material. He's put a lot of this stuff online and it's accessible. And if you want, if you can't find that, just contact me at the email address in the bulletin and I can give you those

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URLs. But where do we have this defined for us? We have the Didache. We have the author of the

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Epistle of Barnabas. We have Justin Martyr. Tertullian, Cyprian, the Bishop of Carthage.

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We have Basil. We have Cyril. We have Gregory of Nyssa. We have Sozomen. And then all the way up into the modern period, modern in the sense of no longer the ancient world, the

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Reformation period. Martin Luther in 1519 made it very clear that he understood that the original meaning of this term was to immerse.

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The Martin Luther, remember, there is two Martin Luthers. There's the

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Martin Luther up to 1525 and there's a Martin Luther after 1525. I've given a whole presentation on this in 2017 in Washington, DC, the same conference that Summer spoke at.

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If you want to look that up, I spoke about the two Luthers at that point. And Luther recognized that immersion would be the best way to do things.

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That would change later on with him. Calvin admitted that the term to baptize meant to immerse.

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Even Turretin, second generation, so his Institutes of Atlantic Theology, massive work of Reformed scholasticism, recognizes that this is what the term baptize meant.

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But we need to be aware of the fact that while immersion was plainly seen as the meaning of the act itself, there were many interesting ideas attached to baptism very early on.

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Some who believed baptism to be by immersion believed that infants should be immersed as well once the subject of infant baptism became a part of the experience of the church.

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Now what's interesting, what you need to remember is most common of the things attached to the idea of baptism was trine baptism, trine baptism.

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And so what you would see with trine baptism would be I baptize you in the name of the

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Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

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So you would be immersed three times. Trine baptism, this was extremely common and I'll give you a quotation on that in just a moment.

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Interestingly enough, some baptisms were done forward. So if you're facing this way, face down, done three times as well.

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I'm not sure how that would work because it's tough enough, and by the way, you want a little inside information here?

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You wanna, I am perfectly confident that I could baptize a 400 pound man.

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I've seen it done, I've seen it done. It's because of the water. There's one little thing you have to tell everybody.

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Once you start pushing back, bend your knees. If you don't wanna be that person on YouTube who is upside down with their feet flailing around in the baptistry, bend your knees.

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Because if you bend your knees, like I said, I could baptize because the water's gonna hold you up, okay? And I'm gonna be able to get you back out of there and you're not gonna be flailing around and do all the rest of that stuff.

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So just remember, bend your knees. Now, everyone got baptized last week, so a little bit too late for that, but anyways, just a little something for you to remember.

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But I don't know how that works if you're going forward. I think that didn't last very long because everyone realized it was just really impractical and didn't work so well.

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In the fourth century, so that would be the 300s, we have the canons, it's called the Canons of the

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Apostles. Now, obviously, the apostles didn't have anything to do with this, but this is what it's called. And many of the, for example, the

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Council of Nicaea, the major church councils would have the creeds that they would put out, but then they would also have canons, which were lesser issues that were, they were dealing with matters within the church.

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And it's fascinating to me, there's a lot of Protestants who wanna run around going, oh, yes, I follow all the ecumenical councils.

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And I don't know a single Protestant that actually believes almost any of the canons from almost any of those particular councils.

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So, you know, be honest about it and say, well, the creeds, yeah, but the canon stuff, yeah, not so much.

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So listen to this one, this is one of the canons. Immerse thrice or forsake the bishopric.

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If any bishop or presbyter does not perform the three immersions of the one admission, but one immersion, which is given into the death of Christ, let him be deprived, that is, deprived of his position.

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You're outta there, you ain't a bishop anymore, you ain't a presbyter anymore, if you only do one baptism, one immersion, rather than three.

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For the Lord did not say, baptize into my death, but go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the

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Father and the Son of the Holy Ghost. Therefore, O bishops, baptize thrice into one

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Father and Son and Holy Ghost, according to the will of Christ and our constitution by the

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Spirit. So here you have at least one section of the church in the fourth century, so this would be the 300s, saying if you only baptized once, you're outta here.

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Now what does that tell you? There were people that were baptizing only once. Okay, so it was a matter of dispute, but here is a group that said, nope, you do that, and that's all there is to it.

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In some places, you just need to be aware of this, this is the historical reality, in some places, one removed one's clothing, was baptized unclothed, and then put on clean clothes after coming up outta the water, all to symbolize putting off the old and putting on the new.

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Very often, fasting was associated with baptism, we saw that with the

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Didache and with Justin. Fasting was very often associated with baptism, both by the one being baptized, as well as by the one doing the baptism, and then very often, other people in the congregation were encouraged to come alongside and to fast with these individuals prior to the baptism as well.

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Now, variations from doing baptism by immersion of believers were, at first, limited to issues relating to having sufficient water, or due to illness.

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And so as we look at the early documents, as we look at early writers, there is a recognition, for example, that there could be people who desire to be baptized, but they simply, they can no longer walk, they have diseases that would prohibit that from taking place, and as we saw with the

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Didache, if you don't have enough water, and I mentioned last week, individuals doing missionary work in the

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Sahara Desert, where finding water is a daily challenge, that were baptizing in tarps.

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So those were the variations initially that were allowed but eventually, with the rise of infant baptism, immersion was replaced with sprinkling in some areas and certainly in the

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Western church that became much more of the standard. But how many of you have seen video of Eastern Orthodox infant baptisms?

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Anyone ever seen any Eastern Orthodox infant baptisms? Just a few of you. One sort of went a little viral on Twitter a couple of months ago.

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And when I watched it, I was like, nah. And then I checked it out, and it's quite common.

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It's quite common. So literally, you've got, you don't have the little font that you'll see in a lot of Western churches, where you're just getting a little of water out and doing this little thing.

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It's about yay big, I would say. And this priest takes this buck naked little baby and the look on the kid's face is what catches everybody.

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But this is how he did it. Now, sometimes what they will do is they'll put the baby down into the water and then take water up and then pour it and basically splash it over their heads.

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Sometimes they'll do like a chrismation with oil where you'll put a cross on their forehead, sometimes on their back.

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There's a number of things that can be done in regards to using, it's almost like a sacred Q -tip type thing where you put the oil on it and do stuff like that.

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And so that's one way of doing it. That's not how this priest did it. Oh no, no. He takes that baby and it's, and a one, and a two, and a three, and a four.

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And the kid's just like. And so he does the top half of the body and then the bottom half of the body and then the top and the bottom and the top and the bottom.

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Three times. And that kid comes out of there, he is a charismatic orthodox right there.

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I'm gonna tell you, wow. I'm glad that's not his earliest memory, that poor thing.

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It's like, okay, all right. And that's how it's done in a lot of places even today.

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In Eastern Orthodoxy. And it's, that's a form of immersion. It's trying immersion and it's infant baptism and there you go.

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So that's really, really, really interesting to watch that. You can just put

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Eastern Orthodox baptism in YouTube. Don't do it now. I'm seeing some of you. Put those phones down because you're gonna start watching and going, whoa.

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And you're gonna forget that everyone's around you watching you doing that. So now, the big question for all of us is, all right, if in the earliest documents you have baptism of professing believers, where does infant baptism come from?

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Because there are gonna be some, we're gonna mention that once infant baptism becomes a central aspect of what's taking place, then people are gonna start claiming that they got it from the apostles.

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And so we'll look at that in just a moment. But fundamentally, what we must recognize when we look at all of church history, when we look at the

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New Testament, there are two ordinances given to the church. Baptism and the

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Lord's Supper. Baptism and the Lord's Supper. Now those of you who are former Roman Catholics, how many sacraments does

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Rome have? Seven, seven. So obviously there has been a tremendous amount of growth and even within those seven sacraments, all sorts of development and practices and traditions developed over time.

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So that within the large umbrella of Roman Catholicism, you'll likewise have different practices in different places.

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You have Eastern right Roman Catholics and things like that. To be a Roman Catholic is fundamentally to be in submission to the papacy.

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That's the division between Eastern and Western churches is in regards to the authority of the

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Bishop of Rome. And so when we look at the sacramental system, when we look at what

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Luther responded to in the early 16th century in regards to indulgences, in regards to the whole concept of purgatory and the buying of indulgences and the distribution of grace through what's called the thesaurus meritorium, the treasury of merit and all of these things that we

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New Testament Christians go, what, where, there has to be a mechanism of development.

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And that mechanism of development historically involved the diminishment over time of an emphasis upon sola scriptura with the concomitant rise in the idea of apostolic tradition, traditions passed down from the apostles.

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The problem of course with this is that even to this day, Rome cannot tell you what apostolic traditions are.

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What more did the apostles pass down? If you've ever watched the debate that I did with Father Mitchell Pacwa in 1999 in San Diego, San Diego.

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And I didn't have tacos beforehand either. But anyways, in San Diego, I asked

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Dr. Pacwa who is a brilliant man. He speaks 12 languages.

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He's a brilliant man. And I enjoyed all the debates that he and I did. But I asked him during that debate, is there any word, anything that Jesus ever taught or said or did that Rome has dogmatically defined that is not found in the pages of scripture?

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And he was, I think, a little taken back by that. And he said, well, no.

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Is there anything that the apostles taught or did or said that has been dogmatically defined by the

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Roman Catholic Church that is not found in scripture? Well, no. So it's all there.

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And yet, Rome draws from this nebulous concept of tradition and has defined as dogma all sorts of things that they have now added to the gospel itself.

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And so you have a diminishment of the centrality of scripture, sola scriptura, and you have the rise of this concept of tradition.

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And this is taking place from, really, from the second century on.

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So that's the first thing. Second thing, the book of Galatians, if it teaches you anything, should teach you that mankind chafes against sovereign grace.

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Mankind chafes against sovereign grace. What do I mean by that? We want to be in control of our own salvation.

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I'm not saying that we wanna do 100%. I'm not saying that we want to do 50%. But when you boil it all down, man's religion is always a matter of us saying we need

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God's help, but when it comes to the final decision, we're in control.

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The entire issue of the Reformation was the fact that in Roman Catholicism, you have a sacramental system, and that sacramental system assumes, oh yes,

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God gives prevenient grace, whatever in the world that is. There's nothing like that in the Bible. But God gives prevenient grace.

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He helps you along, but you are the one doing the work of working those sacraments and getting that grace.

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That's what the Reformation was about, was going back to what the New Testament teaches, that Jesus is a powerful

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Savior, and he's not limited to saving through these man -made sacraments that require us to be able to make them successful.

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And so it should not surprise us. In fact, we should expect, while the apostles are still on earth,

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Paul has to write an epistle to a bunch of churches in an entire area and say to them, look, there are people who've come in amongst you, and they're not denying the deity of Christ, they're not denying the resurrection, they're not denying the necessity of grace, but they are telling you that there is something that you can do, that you must do, that fundamentally controls the whole system.

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They are saying there's something you must do first. Man chafes against sovereign grace.

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The idea that I am utterly helpless before God, unless he, by his spirit, takes out that heart of stone and gives a heart of flesh.

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It's astonishing to me how many times I've seen Christians, people who call themselves Christians, they profess to be

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Christians, but oh, they hate that idea that God must be the one that raises me from spiritual death.

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I don't know what they do with John 8. He who sins is a slave of sin unless the Son sets you free.

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You're in slavery. But no, they don't come up with that idea.

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They have some way of saying, oh, I'm so thankful for the grace of God, but were it not for me, that grace would fail to save me.

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That's the essence of man's rebellion. And so it should not surprise us that with that decline in emphasis upon the centrality of Scripture, you have an increase in emphasis upon the works of man, you have a multiplication of the ordinances or sacraments of the church, and early on, you get the idea, because this was common in the religions of man.

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There were all sorts of baptisms and washings in the religions of man. Every Greek religion, every

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Roman imitation of a Greek religion had washings and anointings.

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And so at the same time that you have the rise of the priest class, there is no such thing as a sacerdotal priest in the

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New Testament. There's one high priest, Jesus. We are a royal priesthood, but there is no such office as a priest.

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See my debate with Mitch Packel on that one as well. But at the same time, that is happening.

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Now you start getting the idea that baptism by the very act is the method by which grace is conferred upon an individual.

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And here's the important part. And it's the means by which cleansing of sin takes place.

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What it was meant to picture becomes something that it now controls. And so what that results in is that you have two different directions happening at the same time toward the end of the second century.

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Toward the end of the second century, and into the third and fourth centuries. You have competing streams.

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The first that you see is the delay of baptism. So you have people who make a profession of faith, but they will not be baptized, which means they cannot partake of the supper.

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They become sort of a second class group within the church. And why are they delaying baptism?

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Because if it cleanses you from all your sins, and there were some who believed that was it, there's no repentance after that.

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Hebrews 6, they would then apply to that. If it cleanses you from all your sins, then you wait until it looks like you're about to croak.

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Then you get baptized, and now you've got a chance to make it through the rest of however days you got left, and straight into glory because you just, you got everything taken care of right there at the end.

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And so, most people know, the most famous example of this, Emperor Constantine, and whatever you believe about whether you believe he was really converted or not, and all the rest of this stuff in regards to the council, and I see in all this stuff, he holds off on that baptism until the end of his life.

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And that was not uncommon at the time. But at the very same time that's happening, you have instances of infant baptism, infant baptism.

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So, let's look really quickly at one of the most important people. He was the first person to write a book on baptism.

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His name is Tertullian. He is the father of Latin, Ecclesiastical Latin.

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He is the father of the Western Church. He's not considered a church father by Roman Catholics because he ended his life outside of communion with the

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Catholic Church. He, not the Roman Catholic Church, that's a different thing in those days.

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That's one of the big confusions people have. He joined a group called the Montanists, which were basically the ancient version of TBN, to be honest with you.

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And because he found the organized church to be spiritually dry, in essence.

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But he wrote an entire book on the subject of baptism. Let me read you a section from Tertullian.

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This would be around between 197 and 200, okay? End of the second century, right before the beginning of the third.

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And so, according to circumstances and disposition and even age of each individual, the delay of baptism is preferable, principally, however, in the case of little children.

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For why is it necessary, if baptism itself is not so necessary, that the sponsors likewise should be thrust into danger?

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So you would have sponsors who would bring the children and they would pledge themselves to bring them up and so on and so forth.

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Who both themselves, by reason of mortality, may fail to fulfill their promises and may be disappointed by the development of an evil disposition in those for whom they stood.

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Oh, you mean sometimes infants that get baptized as infants turn out to be real rascals? Yeah. The Lord does indeed say, forbid them not to come unto me.

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Let them come then while they are growing up. Let them come while they are learning, while they are learning whither to come.

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Let them become Christians when they have become able to know Christ. Why does the innocent period of life hasten to the remission of sins?

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More caution will be exercised in worldly matters so that one who is not trusted with early substance is trusted with divine.

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Let them know how to ask for salvation. This is Tertullian, around 200, saying no, don't do it super early.

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Let them learn how to ask for salvation that you may seem at least to have given to him that asks.

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For no less cause must the unwedded also be deferred in whom the ground of temptation is prepared alike in such as never were wedded by means of their maturity and in the widowed by means of their freedom until they either marry or else be more fully strengthened for continence.

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In other words, there is a real concern about people falling into temptation. If any understand the weighty import of baptism, they will fear its reception more than its delay.

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Sound faith is secure of salvation. So here is an individual,

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Cyprian, the Bishop of Carthage, who was martyred in 254, off the top of my head, I think it was, off the top of my head.

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He was martyred by having his head cut off. That was really not what I was thinking of, but he would read

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Tertullian every day. He would read portions from Tertullian every day. So Tertullian had a huge impact.

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And here he is saying, no, let them be old enough to ask for salvation.

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What's missing here, folks? If you know Calvin's argument, it's not even being talked about here.

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They don't even, it's not even, that's not even relevant. The issue is remission of sins. The issue is baptism regeneration, things like that.

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There is nothing about Calvin's argument at this particular point in time. Now, I mentioned to you last time,

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I didn't bring it this week, but I showed you a book that I highly recommend to you by Stander and Lowe, Baptism in the

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Early Church. There's a really neat chapter in there. It's not very long.

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I'm gonna quote you a few sections from it, where we have inscriptions from tombstones, tombs, things like that written in stone that give us some insight into the development of these ideas as well.

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So listen to some of these and keep something in mind. We live in a day of medicine and hospitals and all sorts of things like that.

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Having children was really dangerous for the vast majority of the history of the human race.

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You read about most of the reformers and they were married more than once, not because of divorce, because they lost their spouses.

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And infant mortality was huge. In many places in Europe, a woman would have to have 10 live births to get one child through to maturity.

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There was disease everywhere. The plague would keep coming into various towns and cities and people before our day had to deal with death all the time.

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And so looking at how they dealt with that can be very helpful to us. So for example, and many of these are fragmentary because they're on gravestones that are 15, 16, 17, 1800 years old.

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Here, whoever this was, name's not there, obtained the grace of God on December 5th and lived in this world after the day of obtaining until December 7th and died.

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So here was someone, we don't know how old this particular individual was, who would have been baptized two days before they died.

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So their baptism was in light of the fact that they were very sick and it looked like they were about to pass from this earth.

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That's important. Number two, here is laid Fortunia who lived more or less four years.

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The parents set this up for their dearest daughter. She obtained grace on July 25th and died on July 27th.

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So another instance, only two days, four years of age. And you can hear the language, obtained grace on July 25th and died on July 27th.

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So what was the reason for this? This was not infant baptism based upon covenant theology or anything like that at all.

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The child was four years old, but the child was dying. The child had become sick.

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They did not have antibiotics. You didn't run to the local CVS and get the amoxicillin and everything else.

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You didn't have that. Number three, her parents set this up for Julia Fortentina, their dearest and most innocent infant who was made a believer.

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She was born a pagan on the day before the nuns of March before dawn when

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Zolos was censor of the province. She lived 18 months and 22 days and was made a believer in the eighth hour of the night, almost drawing her last breath.

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So here, 18 months, and hence is baptized right before she passes away.

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What's the connection? The connection is the growing idea that this is the mechanism of receiving the grace of salvation, not what we deal with in regards to infant baptism amongst the

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Reformed. Sacred to the divine dead, Florentius made this monument for his well -deserving son,

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Apronianus, who lived one year, nine months, and five days. Since he was dearly loved by his grandmother and she saw that he was going to die, she asked from the church that he might depart from the world a believer.

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Baptism. Pastor Titiana, Marciana, and Cresta made this for Marcianus, a well -deserving son in Christ the

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Lord. He lived 12 years, two months, and unknown number of days because there was damage.

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He received grace on September 20th when the consuls were Marianus and Paternus the second time.

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He gave up his soul on September 21st, so the next day. May you live among the saints in eternity.

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One more, sweet Tyche lived one year, 10 months, 15 days, received grace on the eighth day after the calends, gave up her soul on the same day.

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There are lots of inscriptions like this. And what do all of them tell us? That the issue was for infant baptism, for young person baptism, the coming of death.

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As it really was for someone who would delay their baptism as well, I suppose. Now, you know how dangerous that is?

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You don't know. Some people are taken out of this world like that. You may not be able to see it coming, but that was the situation that they were facing.

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Now, as I mentioned earlier, it's very, very important that we recognize that early on, there were numerous practices in the church where apostolic tradition was claimed.

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When you didn't have a biblical reference, you did not have biblical teaching. You would claim this came from the apostles.

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And I think I've mentioned to you before, the earliest example we have of this is from a man by the name of Irenaeus. And when

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Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon, the end of the second century, well, actually, 170s, 180s, that time period, when he was fighting against the

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Gnostics, and much of what we know about Gnosticism is because Irenaeus recorded that information for us.

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When he was fighting against the Gnostics, he fought against their understanding of the atonement of Christ.

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And he had a view of the atonement which is called the recapitulation theory. And that is that Christ lived through each of the ages of man to redeem each of those ages of man.

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As a result, Irenaeus believed that Jesus was more than 50 years of age when he died. Remember, back in those days, that's getting up there.

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And he claimed that his belief that Jesus was more than 50 years of age was an apostolic tradition passed down from generation to generation.

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From the apostles themselves. Now, the Gnostics were also claiming to have apostolic traditions, too.

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And so maybe he was just doing that in response to what the Gnostics were doing.

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But almost nobody today believes that Irenaeus actually possessed teachings from the apostles that Jesus was more than 50 years of age when he died.

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But that's the earliest example we have of any Christian claiming to have apostolic tradition.

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Which sort of makes you go, hmm, if the first example of it is not something anyone believes, should someone 50 years later, 100 years later, 200 years later be given more weight when they make the same claim about apostolic tradition?

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In the early third century, Hippolytus claimed, and even wrote a book on apostolic tradition, claimed to possess apostolic traditions.

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And these are primarily, they weren't primarily saying that we have extra -biblical revelation.

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What they were saying is, this is how the apostles did stuff. They baptized three times, or they baptized forward or backwards or whatever.

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At sunset, sunrise, whatever. It was more practices than it was the idea that, well, here's a whole teaching about some doctrine or something along those lines.

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Let me read you what Hippolytus wrote, and then ask, as you're listening, ask yourself a question.

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Does anyone still do all these things? And especially in our context, as we are preparing to deal with the best arguments of our dear brothers in the

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Lord, they're our fellow Christians, we disagree about this, and we share so much in common, but when it comes to this issue, they're gonna tell us, well,

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Abraham, Abrahamic covenant, a sign is given to the young person, and that's gonna, that's supposed to continue,

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Colossians chapter two, into our experience in the church, and there's no evidence that, there's nothing, the apostles didn't say, oh, yes, your children used to be in the covenant, but now they're not, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

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Like I said, go listen to the video just put out a couple days ago, by Doug Wilson, whom

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I love as my brother in the Lord, but with whom I have a lot of disagreements, and we deal with them, hopefully in a way that's a blessing to other people at the same time.

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Listen to what they have to say. That's not what we're, ask, as I read this, ask yourself the question, is this the infant baptism that is being presented to us today within the

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Reformed camp? Quote, at the hour in which the cock crows, they shall first pray over the water.

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When they come to the water, the water shall be pure and flowing, that is water of a spring or a flowing body of water.

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I just stopped for a moment. You do realize why that was important. They didn't have chlorine, and you look at almost any water that sits around for a while, and you're gonna know why they didn't wanna baptize in non -moving water.

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It makes perfect sense. Then they shall take off all their clothes.

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The children shall be baptized first. All of the children who can answer for themselves, let them answer.

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So these aren't infants, they're children. If there are any children who cannot answer for themselves, how young is that?

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We're not told. If there are any children who cannot answer for themselves, let their parents answer for them or someone else from their family.

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After this, the men will be baptized. Finally, the women. After they have unbound their hair and removed their jewelry, no one shall take any foreign object with themselves down into the water.

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At the time determined for baptism, the bishop shall give thanks over some oil, which he puts in a vessel.

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It is called the oil of thanksgiving. Remember, this is all allegedly apostolic tradition. He shall take some more oil and exercise it.

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It is called the oil of exorcism. A deacon shall hold the oil of exorcism and stand on the left.

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Another deacon shall hold the oil of thanksgiving and stand on the right. When the elder takes hold of each of them who are to receive baptism, he shall tell each of them to renounce, saying,

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I renounce you, Satan, all your services and all your works. After he has said this, he shall anoint each with the oil of exorcism, saying, let every spirit depart from you.

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I stop for a moment. Personally, I think what this means is that the infants, the children who could not answer themselves could not answer these questions.

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But I don't see that they were like eight days old, but there are people who disagree. I continue. Then after these things, the bishop passes each of them on nude to the elder who stands at the water.

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They shall stand in the water naked. A deacon likewise will go down with them into the water.

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When each of them to be baptized has gone down into the water, the one baptizing shall lay hands on each of them, asking, do you believe in God the

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Father Almighty? And the one being baptized shall answer, I believe. He shall then baptize each of them once, laying his hand upon each of their heads.

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Then he shall ask, do you believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate and died and rose on the third day, living from the dead and ascended into heaven and sat down at the right hand of the

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Father, the one coming to judge the living and the dead. I just stopped for a moment. What's every bit of that language?

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Where does it come from? Scripture. It came straight out of scripture. Every bit of it.

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When each has answered, I believe, he shall baptize a second time.

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Then he shall ask, do you believe in the Holy Spirit and the Holy Church and the resurrection of the flesh?

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Then each being baptized shall answer, I believe, and thus let him baptize the third time.

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So, here's Hippolytus. We can ask all sorts of questions about many of the aspects of what we just heard.

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But one thing that should be straightforward is that John Calvin knew this stuff.

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John Calvin was a great patristic scholar. The first book that he wrote was a commentary from the ancient world on literature from the ancient world.

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So, he knew this kind of literature and this kind of material existed. He knew all about it.

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So, whatever argument you wanna put forward, you have to recognize that our

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Reformed and Presbyterian brothers, if they're going to make an argument of apostolic tradition, and many of them do not, and I'm thankful for that, but some do, if they're gonna make an argument from something like Hippolytus, they have to explain how they can differentiate between what part of this is actually apostolic and what they themselves recognize is not apostolic at all.

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And that's a challenge. That is very, very hard to do. Gregory Nazianzen in 381, so now we've gone basically a century farther, he says, be it so, some will say, in the case of those who ask for baptism, that it is better to wait to baptize children.

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What have you to say about those who are still children and conscious neither of the loss nor of the grace?

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Are we to baptize them too? Certainly, listen, if any danger presses.

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Do you hear that? This is 381, okay? This is 150 years, 150 years.

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Do math, no, I can't do math at all. 381 is 350 years after baptism.

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After the time of Christ, 350 years. And what's still being said?

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Yes, baptize the infants if any danger presses. What does that mean?

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If they're sick unto death, of course. For it is better that they should be unconsciously sanctified than that they should depart unsealed and uninitiated.

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Then, now listen, this is fascinating because you're gonna see why this is important. A proof of this is found in the circumcision on the eighth day.

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Oh, so here we got the covenant theology, right? No. A proof of this is found in the circumcision on the eighth day, which was a sort of typical seal and was confirmed on children, conferred on children, before they had the use of reason.

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And so is the anointing of the doorposts, Exodus 12, 22, which preserved the firstborn, though applied to things which had no consciousness.

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But in respect of others, I give my advice to wait till the end of the third year, or a little more or less, when they may be able to listen and to answer something about the sacrament that even though they do not perfectly understand it, yet at any rate, they may know the outlines, and then to sanctify them in soul and body with the great sacrament of our consecration.

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For this is how the matter stands. At that time, they begin to be responsible for their lives when reason is matured and they learn the mystery of life of sins, of ignorance, owing to their tender years they have no account to give, and it is far more profitable on all accounts to be fortified by the font because of the sudden assaults of danger that befall us stronger than our helpers.

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There's Gregory Natsianzen, 381. What are you seeing here? First of all, that wasn't covenant theology, though he did make reference to circumcision.

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He does not connect it to the Abrahamic covenant or anything like that. And what's the concern?

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Sudden death, the cleansing of sin. Sudden death, the cleansing of sin.

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So we've got flux, we've got development for hundreds of years, and there's still multiple different perspectives being presented.

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And then comes along Augustine. Not our little

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Augustine in the back, obviously. But the big guy. Augustine, likewise, will claim apostolic authority for his views in the early fifth century.

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Now, very briefly, very, very quickly. Augustine we have great respect for in so many ways.

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But when you read him, you also discover there are many things that you disagree with him about. And one of the most important things to learn about Augustine is this.

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Augustine had two major controversies in his life that he dealt with. The first was the

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Donatist controversy, the second was the Pelagian controversy. And because of the natures of those controversies,

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Augustine had contradictions in his theology. And if someone that smart can have contradictions in their theology because of the controversies they deal with, so can we.

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So we need to take that lesson and learn from that lesson, and that's something I've been teaching about for decades.

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But Augustine emphasizes the concept of original sin. Now, some people amazingly, stunningly, actually say he originated this idea.

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Origen, nearly 200 years earlier, had said the same thing about baptism and sin, and original sin.

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Didn't use the term original, but that's what he was talking about. So this was not something new. He formalizes it, and he defends it in regards to Pelagius, yes.

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But he doesn't come up with it. Anybody who thinks that just has no idea what they're talking about. Pretty much from the days of Augustine and his defense of infant baptism as a means of removing the stain of original sin that he defends against Pelagius.

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Pretty much from that time forward, this becomes, in the West, the primary understanding.

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Augustine is not greatly, the vast majority of Eastern folks do not have a lot of respect for Augustine.

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There are some who do, small number. They are out there, but most do not. And so, in the

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West, this understanding of baptism as a means of washing away original sin becomes the standard.

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So that by the time you get to an Augustinian monk, 1100 years later, by the name of Martin Luther, 1100 years later, no one really has almost any, there's no recollection of when anything has been any different than it is now.

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This is how we've always done it. This is how the church has done it for over 1 ,000 years.

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And hence, you can understand why, when the Anabaptist movement begins, and people begin questioning the idea of infant baptism, you people are insane.

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You are against the whole of the church. You want to destroy the church. And very few of the reformers,

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Luther, Zwingli had the most interaction with people who questioned the issue of infant baptism, because they were his disciples.

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It did not take him long. It was a matter of years between when the schism took place between Zwingli and his own disciples, and when the first of those disciples were executed in Zurich under Zwingli's command.

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Gotta keep that in mind. Now, the Zwickau prophets were the people who soured

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Luther on much of this kind of thinking as well. And then you must understand,

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Calvin is a second -generation reformer. He's not a first -generation reformer. He comes along well after Luther and Zwingli.

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In fact, Zwingli's dead before, well, we're not exactly sure when Calvin's converted, but Calvin's converted right around the time of Zwingli's death.

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You must remember what happened in Europe in 1534, 1535.

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I've mentioned to you before, I spent two episodes on the theologians laying all of this out, but this is important to the concept of why the reformers took the views that they did.

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You have the Munster Rebellion, and you have Anabaptists taking over Munster.

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What happens in that city is absolutely astonishing, but the point is this.

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There was not gonna be any opportunity for anyone to question infant baptism in Europe after what happened in Munster for a very, very long time.

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Oh, there are still people who did, but they were persecuted. They had to absolutely be in secrecy, and there was no opportunity that they're gonna have to sit down with someone like John Calvin and explain to him their understanding of these issues, not after Munster, not for a long, long time.

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And so you look at what the Reformed, when they are themselves forming their own theology, the ideas that we would hold on these subjects were not even part of the discussion.

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Couldn't have been. Too radical, too wild, too insane. Keep something in mind. The baptism roles of the church were the tax roles of the state.

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Think about that for a second. The baptism roles of the church doubled as the tax roles of the state.

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Because your baptism, by that time, was how you entered into both the church and into citizenship in the state.

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Can you see why the state would not like to have people not baptizing their children? That's taking people off of the tax roles.

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That was considered treason, and many people died.

01:00:00

If you've seen the little video I did about Fritz Erba, let me just ask, how many of you know who

01:00:07

Fritz Erba was? One, two, well, you were there. My wife knows.

01:00:15

Fritz Erba, the Anabaptist who was thrown into the deep 40 -foot -tall cell at the

01:00:26

Wartburg Castle, the same castle where Luther hid from Charles and where he translated the

01:00:32

New Testament into German. Only a decade later, Fritz Erba reads

01:00:38

Luther's New Testament, comes to the conclusion that baptism is for believers from reading the

01:00:43

New Testament, which is the conclusion we've come to as well, and as a result, he's arrested, and he's thrown into a cell in the center of one of the spires of the

01:01:00

Wartburg Castle. You need to understand, it's 40 feet down. There are no windows, there are no doors.

01:01:05

There is one small little square hole at the top, and at first,

01:01:16

Lutheran ministers would come and would sit at the hole and preach to Fritz Erba down there, and they'd lower him food, but can you imagine how cold it is in Germany in January in a place like that, or how hot it can be during the summer?

01:01:34

No windows, no doors, never being brought out of that place. You know what stuns me the most?

01:01:41

You know how long he survived down there? Seven years, seven years.

01:01:51

They believe, I think in 2006, they found his skeleton buried outside of the castle.

01:01:59

Luther knew he was there, would not intercede on his behalf. He believed it was the right thing because that's a dangerous thing to do, to preach against infant baptism, and that's what causes so many people.

01:02:14

When I did the video at the castle and talked about this, there were people in our group that were like, we've been talking all about Luther.

01:02:22

He couldn't have been a believer and known about this, and my response was, be careful. You take that perspective, you're not gonna have any

01:02:29

Christians for a long, long time in church history. We have to be aware of these things, but what was the reason?

01:02:40

What was going on? What was the background? Luther was desperately afraid that someone like Fritz Erba would destroy all of Christian civilization.

01:02:51

The result would be absolute anarchy, death in the streets, right, left, and center. What was the history?

01:03:00

1 ,100 years, we've been doing the same thing. How can we change now? How can we change now?

01:03:07

So, here's where we finish for today. Calvin's doctrine of infant baptism based upon the concept of the

01:03:18

Abrahamic covenant and the signs of that covenant being transferred and continued into, not without change, as we will notice, because circumcision was only for half of the people in the covenant, but that assertion has become the central claim of our dear

01:03:41

Presbyterian Reformed brothers, but that was not what was believed in the early church when infant baptism began, and it began with Calvin, and it grew out of the fact that as a second -generation

01:03:59

Reformer, Luther and Zwingli had already made the decision we are not gonna break with the state.

01:04:05

We need the support of the princes, and Calvin continued that sacral understanding, and I think that's vital to understand as to why he comes to conclusions that he does, vital to understand.

01:04:23

Now, that's a lot of stuff, and that's a lot of time that we covered very, very quickly, and there's so much more.

01:04:29

I do understand that, but whenever it is, and I don't know when it's going to be, the next time we continue in our study, we're going back into the

01:04:38

Scriptures, and we're going to deal with the arguments. We already dealt with Colossians 2, but we will need to bring that information back in, and we're gonna deal with the arguments, and this is what we've been faulted for up to this point in time.

01:04:55

Almost everything that I've seen online is, well, you haven't gotten to the real arguments yet, and I'm like, yeah, I said that at the start.

01:05:01

You gotta lay the foundation. That's the problem. Most of the online interaction we have doesn't deal with any of this stuff, doesn't deal with the meaning of the word, doesn't deal with all the passages in the

01:05:12

New Testament, doesn't deal with the history, just jumps into it as if the Westminster Confession of Faith and the

01:05:17

London Baptist Confession of Faith have just always existed. No, they have a history. They have a background. They have a context.

01:05:23

Needs to be understood. Needs to be understood, and so next time that I have the opportunity of doing this particular series, that's what we will be diving into, and that is what's going to get all the conversation going.

01:05:37

I am certain, but hopefully for us anyways, we now have a very firm foundation upon which to approach that subject.

01:05:44

Let's pray together and celebrate the Lord's Supper. Father, once again, we do thank you for this time.

01:05:50

We thank you for the opportunity of looking back into history. Father, help us to recognize that we also will be looked back upon by those who will come after us, and therefore let us handle history as accurately as we can with grace, recognizing that we will want to be treated with grace as well, and Father, in this particular subject, we ask that even as we have conversations with others, that we will do so with your glory and the edification of your church first and foremost in mind, not to win a battle, not to win a debate, but to actually draw everyone into a better understanding of what your word teaches.

01:06:35

do thank you for that word. We thank you for this time you've given to us. We pray all these things in Christ's name. Amen.