One thing he said last week was that the proto-Anabaptists rejected infant baptism but they had not yet come to embrace believer’s baptism. What did he mean by this? To me rejecting infant baptism necessarily means accepting believer’s baptism (unless you go Quaker and reject baptism altogether). It was apparently necessary to them as well since they came to accept believer’s baptism.
Maybe he meant that they rejected infant baptism (I think he said they stopped having their infants baptized) but simply hadn’t worked through all the implications of this yet? But that seems like a backwards way of approaching the question to me. I (and I think most of us) approach it this way: 1. Who should be baptized? Those who believe. 2. Can babies believe? No; therefore they should not be baptized. As opposed to noting that there aren’t any examples of babies being baptized in the Bible and working from there.
Maybe the sense is that they just noticed that babies weren’t being baptized in the Bible and when they eventually worked through the implications of this they stumbled on the central pillar of the Anabaptist movement: believers should be baptized, the church is made up of those who believe, etc.
Re: Anabaptist History Series - 2024
Posted: Wed Apr 03, 2024 8:46 pm
by barnhart
Thanks for bumping this, I had forgotten about it.