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For most of the Christians of the earliest centuries, as Ferguson's book exhaustively illustrates, baptism was understood as nothing less than a personal rebellion against the cosmic, political, and spiritual order of ancient paganism. As pagan culture slowly disappeared and was replaced by a Christian culture, the baptismal rite's explicit transfer of a new Christian's allegiance from the old gods to the risen Lord became less necessary and, ultimately, largely unintelligible. The gradual introduction of infant baptism reflected the transformation of the ancient religious milieu, as the understanding of baptism as renunciation of evil gods and demons gave way to a concern to nurture souls from birth until death within the Christian community. Changes in baptismal meaning and practice in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages suggest that further developments lie ahead, as late modern Christianity confronts a post-Christian future in the developed world.
One of the recurrent themes of Everett Ferguson's immense, magisterial study, as well as one of the principal conclusions he takes pains to reiterate in its closing pages, is that the widespread practice of infant baptism developed only very slowly, over the better part of two centuries. This seems to me to be an altogether incontestable claim, and it is one upon which I want to reflect in what follows, if only very briefly. My interest in the matter, however, is not theological, at least not in the fullest sense. Infant baptism no doubt raises a number of genuinely theological questions, and it has certainly had some fairly conspicuous ramifications in theological history, encouraging Augustine, for instance, to adhere yet more firmly to his disastrous misreading of Paul on the nature of sin and the workings of grace, or encouraging later generations of Christians to view baptism as a purely extrinsic transaction, meant merely to secure the minimal conditions for salvation. But I do not think that the fact of the practice's gradual evolution has any great bearing on how Christians ought to view baptism, or on which form of baptismal practice they should view as most "correct." Even if we were able to determine with absolute certainty what the baptismal practices of the apostolic era were-which we are not-there would be no reason to regard them as more...