As we turn our attention this week to the ongoing ministerial work of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA), it is important to realize that this contemporary course of welcoming people into the church is not an entirely modern development.
For the first few centuries after Christ’s life, death and resurrection, baptism primarily served as the sacramental sign of conversion for people intentionally choosing to follow the creed. In fact, many people waited not only until adulthood, but even until their deathbed to receive baptism. This very likely even included the first Christian Emperor Constantine, though both Rome and Byzantium have competing traditions about where he was baptized, in either case as an adult. The theory was that since baptism washed away all previous sins, the best chance of eternal life would result from doing it as late as possible, in the hopes one could avoid falling again. In some ways, this type of thinking influenced the later practice of viaticum, receiving the Eucharist in life’s closing moments as “food for the journey” to the afterlife.
Many scholars believe that infant baptism was a development that was not particularly common early on, though it’s also sometimes referred to as a “practice seeking a theology.” Irenaeus and Tertullian mention the baptism of children, but this is well after the composition of the New Testament. Neither the Gospels nor the epistles have any explicit reference to the baptism of babies or the young (though the New Testament does speak of baptizing “households”). The descriptions of John the Baptist’s ministry in the Jordan River valley almost certainly refer at least primarily to those voluntarily committing themselves to an intentional process of repentance or metanoia — which literally means “changing one’s mind” or “one’s thinking,” with the implication of also changing one’s practice and habitual activities in the world. All of this is difficult to imagine having much relevance for a child of a few days or months, who doesn’t have a great quantity of life experience or thinking to change from.
But Christian doctrine is a process that develops through time, circumstance and history. The church’s teaching does not drop out of heaven unsullied by the human condition. John Henry Newman is one of the greatest authors in tracing this reality through the centuries. Doctrines like the Trinity and certain Mariological titles as we currently know them came to be recognized as implicitly contained or at least in accord with the Scriptures over slow and careful (and oftentimes disputed!) reflection throughout the last two millennia.
Thus, as the church collectively began to ponder the situation of inherited brokenness into which we are all born through no direct fault of our own, which theologians came to term “original sin,” the idea that baptism could prove regenerative even to infants and welcome them to the mysteries of the faith as early in life as possible gained widespread appeal. No single author influences this development more than Saint Augustine of Hippo, the most important voice in the Mediterranean world in the 4th century. While he does claim that this practice is already in use in his day, at the very least in cases in extremis and perhaps even much more widely in various communities, it is his thought that most undergirds what becomes our current theology of baptism, both for infants and for those coming to the faith later in their life’s journey.
Whether receiving the sacrament as a child or an adult, baptism prepares one for the fuller experiences of graced communion with the divine made present in the Eucharist, which is the “source and summit” of the whole Christian life. The great commandment to bring the Good News to all the ends of the earth is being embodied 20 centuries later by all those engaged in the ministry of both of these formative processes.
Originally from Collingswood, Michael M. Canaris, Ph.D., teaches at Loyola University, Chicago.
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