Can someone cite a Patristic text denying baptismal regeneration?
I’ve not heard of one, but maybe they exist.
Discussion
3 comments
-
Actually, some of the earliest church fathers, men like Clement of Rome and Polycarp, repeatedly discussed salvation in their writings without ever mentioning baptism. Clement of Rome even says that salvation through faith, apart from works, is how all men have always been saved (First Clement, 32). Obviously, men such as Abraham and David weren’t water baptized, so baptismal regeneration would necessarily be excluded. Tertullian, a church father of the late second and early third centuries, wrote the first treatise advocating baptismal regeneration, and the treatise was a response to people who were denying the doctrine in favor of salvation through faith alone. Obviously, Tertullian wouldn’t have responded to people who were denying baptismal regeneration if nobody had denied it before the Reformation. Anybody interested in other examples of people opposing baptismal regeneration before the time of the Protestant reformers can read a book such as Leonard Verduin’s The Reformers and Their Stepchildren (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1964). The claim that nobody opposed salvation through baptism before the Reformation is false. The majority of professing Christians between the time of the apostles and the Reformation believed in baptismal regeneration, but not all of them did.
Even if everybody had believed in justification through baptism after the time of the apostles, that wouldn’t make the doctrine correct. Worshipping at the high places was popular during the Old Testament era, even among some of Israel’s best kings (1 Kings 15:14), but that didn’t make it an acceptable practice. Even those who deny the Bible’s sufficiency as a rule of faith can’t deny that the Bible is at least sufficient in regard to salvation (2 Timothy 3:15). John wrote a gospel for the purpose of leading people to salvation (John 20:30-31). Paul wrote about salvation in detail in numerous epistles (Romans, Galatians, etc.). Any suggestion that we need to consult the writings of post-apostolic men in order to know how to be saved is untenable. As we’ll see as this article progresses, salvation through faith alone is undeniable from the Biblical evidence. It’s understandable, then, why the advocate of baptismal regeneration would want to appeal to post-apostolic documents.
One of the problems with appealing to the church fathers and other post-apostolic men on the issue of salvation is that they erred and contradicted one another. Hermas and Tertullian, for example, taught that Christians can be lost forever, without any chance of salvation, if they commit a particular number of sins, a view that most of us would reject today. Some church fathers, such as Clement of Alexandria, denied original sin. Some of the popular views of the atonement during the early centuries of Christianity, such as the “ransom to Satan” view, are rejected by all of us today. Even among those who have believed in baptismal regeneration over the centuries, there have been disagreements about when baptism is to be done, how it’s to be done, under which circumstances it’s effective, etc. If we’re to look to post-apostolic men for the gospel, which of those men do we look to? They often erred and contradicted one another, even on these fundamental doctrines related to salvation.
-
[…] Can someone cite a Patristic text denying baptismal regeneration? I’ve… […]
Comments