I Accepted, then Rejected, Infant Baptism Because of Early Church Writings - David Bercot

He is saying, "In our natural birth we had no choice in the matter, but in our new birth we have a choice. We didn't make that decision. It isn't put on us by necessity." Now, and when I read that and reread it and reread it, I cannot believe that if infant baptism was the normal practice and people were being baptized as infants, that he would make that argument. I mean, someone could immediately say, "What are you talking about? I mean, there's hundreds of you getting baptized as little babies. They don't have any say in it." It just doesn't make sense.

David Burceau, we had you on the podcast about, I'm going to say, two years ago, and you told the story of how you were once an Anglican priest. And I know as part of that story, you became convinced that infant baptism was correct or a practice that Christians should do. I'd like to hear what initially convinced you that it was correct, and then what changed your mind? Because you no longer believe that, you're no longer an Anglican priest, and people can go watch that other episode. Let's just start off with that. What convinced you that it was correct, and then how did you change your mind? Okay, so the story would begin, I would have grown up definitely knowing only believers' baptism and being taught infant baptism was something the Catholic Church invented, and it was one of the really terrible things that came into church history.

So that would have been my background. And so when I was 35, I've probably related this in other interviews, but I was very interested in seeing what the historic faith was, what did they believe in the beginning. And I bought a set of The Ancient Icing Fathers, it's 10 volumes, and I spent a year reading the whole thing.

And oh man, there were so many things I discovered that I never thought it was like it really turned my belief system upside down, but it also turned my spiritual life upside down. I mean, and that's if it had only affected my theology, I don't know that it would have been any great thing. It really woke me up that I was living a mediocre, lukewarm kind of spiritual life, which was acceptable where I was. But reading the early church, I realized, man, this I would have been considered a spiritually strong person in the church I was in, a Sunday school teacher and all that. And I realized if I had lived back there in the second, third century, they would have looked at me as a backslidden, weak little Christian.

And I realized, man, there's a lot in my life that's just got to change. I'm just too caught up in this world, too caught up in I was a lawyer, just too caught up trying to earn money, be important, all of that kind of stuff. I mean, it really God got hold of me and got my attention, and my life has my walk has been totally different since then. But like I say, there were a lot of theological things that were surprises. And one of them was when I got into the third-century writers, I see that there's infant baptism. Now, I'd always been told that was something the Catholic Church had done in the Middle Ages or something.

I didn't expect it to find it so early. And it wasn't controversial. That's the other thing that surprised me. I would have thought, well, there's a big fight about it and all of that. We've talked in other podcasts with you that they were not real dogmatic, the early Christians, and things that we fight to the death over often just weren't that big of an issue to them. Now, this one surprised me because it's really drummed into me pretty deep on that. But it did help me to see maybe it isn't the most evil thing that I ever thought of. And I had to think some of my favorite people in Christian history were people whose only baptism was as an infant, like John Wesley, William Laws.

Yeah, William Law is my favorite Christian writer outside the early Christians. That was his only baptism, was as an infant. St. Francis, in my mind, one of the greatest Christians who'd ever lived. He was only baptized as an infant.

So I did realize, okay, maybe, yeah, everyone isn't lost who's baptized as an infant. It doesn't mean it's necessarily what God wants us to do. And today I'm a very strong Anabaptist, and we would not practice infant baptism. But I'm a lot slower to have to judge somebody else.

We wouldn't accept an infant baptism as valid if someone wanted to join our church. But yeah, someone who doesn't join my church, typically someone who's dead, I'm not going to judge them. I mean, obviously these people were able to live godly lives. So maybe when they came to their own personal faith, God validated their infant baptism. I don't know. I don't have to sort all that out about other people. That's not my responsibility. But yeah, it surprised me. It didn't make me want to necessarily practice it because I also saw I mean, the earliest reference I saw at that time, and we'll be talking about one that is often cited as earlier, but the earliest one that I noticed was from Tertullian.

And it's about the year 200, and he discusses it, and he's actually discussing small children. The word he uses, it maybe could include infants, but it's normally translated as small children, something like that. But he is against it. But it obviously was present there in the year 200. And what was interesting, what caught my attention is Tertullian, he doesn't mince words. I mean, that guy, I like his writings. He's easy to understand, and he covers a lot of topics. I don't like his spirit at all. Well, he's got a grumpy spirit, and he doesn't mince words. He's not slow to hold back on calling someone down and all that. And I was surprised on this because he's against it, but he doesn't call them heretics or just like, yeah, you're perverting the gospel or anything like that.

He just said, okay, you're quoting Jesus' words, let the little children come. He says, okay, let them come when they're old enough to come on their own, when they have an understanding of what they're doing and request it themselves, rather than it's the parents who are bringing them, whatever age. These, like I say, may have been three-year-olds, two-year-olds, newborns.

That surprised me. It's like, wow, for this guy not to be condemning it, that's interesting. So I thought, well, yeah, I don't have to be as quick to judge everyone, but it doesn't mean I have to practice. I agree with Tertullian, the reasons he gives even. Now, I don't agree I mean, he saw too many people falling into sin during their teen years. So I mean, he recommends putting it off until after you're married. And I would not agree with that. But I know of Christians who kind of think his advice is good, so that's fine.

But yeah, that was interesting. But then as I read, after I finished The Ancient Icing Fathers, I went into The Nicene Fathers, and I saw in the fourth century that it seems to be the other way around, that too many people are putting it off until their deathbed. And I mean, that seems to be a real problem. And so you have the opposite of infant baptism. You have people, well, I'll just keep waiting until my sinful life is mainly behind me, and then I'll get baptized.

And so you have sermons telling people not to do that and such and such. So yeah, you see a variety of practices. Certainly nothing will just Tertullian's thing shows you had the choice. You could be baptized as an infant or small child, whatever it is, or as an older child or as an adult even. There was the freedom, which I like. You see that so much in the early church. There is a lot of freedom that was later taken away, both freedom on theological issues that are not crystal clear in scripture and freedom on some of the practices that aren't laid out just absolutely without question in scripture. Now, a lot of people might be surprised at that statement because all of the people being baptized in scripture that we read are all believers.

And it's one reason I embrace believers' baptism, that. This is part of what changes your mind then, right? Because you're initially being like, okay, I think I could believe in infant baptism. But over time, that changes then. Yeah. So I'm just saying I wasn't inclined to adopt it because of yeah, the ones we see in the New Testament are adult. But the unanswered question, the unanswered question in the New Testament is, what age did Christians baptize their children? Because there are no descriptions of the children of believers getting baptized.

I mean, it doesn't mean they didn't do it. Obviously, they did. But what age? There's not any discussion in any of the epistles. Acts doesn't talk about it. I've actually never thought of that. But now that you bring that up, it's like, wait, yeah, why didn't they talk about that? Yeah, it is. It's one of those omissions I don't fully understand. So I thought, okay, I maybe don't need to be dogmatic. I can't prove that they waited until their children were in their 20s or their teens before they baptized them. I can make arguments. I can make, I think, very good arguments, but I can't prove that. So it just opened my mind maybe not to be quite as condemning as I had been, but I wasn't ready to embrace it, like I say.

Now, it was like, where do I go from here? Once I read the early Christians and it changed my views on a lot of subjects, I didn't feel comfortable in the Evangelical Church. When I joined it, there was a statement of faith, and you had to say you were in general agreement with it. And I could say that at the time I joined the church that I was in general agreement. There were a few things I didn't. Now, yeah, there were so many things I wouldn't have agreed with. I didn't feel right there. I felt a little dishonest.

So then it was a long journey. Where do I fit in? And in the course of that, I looked into the ancient churches, the Roman Catholic, the Eastern Orthodox, the Coptic, the Church of the East, just a number of them, a little bit into the Anglican. It's not quite as ancient.

It does if you follow it from the Reformation, the Catholic Church, and before the Catholic Church, the Catholic Church wasn't always the Roman Catholic Church wasn't always in Britain. There was an independent church in Britain before England became Roman Catholic or before it was even England. It was Britain. And it was just the Celtic Church that was there at that time, and it was independent of Rome, okay? And so the Anglicans would argue there's always been a British Church.

It was independent of Rome originally. We joined with Rome, and we broke with Rome, but still the same church all the way back. Okay, so that's why I think they can fairly be included among the ancient ones. But I visited the people and talked to them because I was interested in the things I was reading in the early church that were new to me. Yeah, what do you guys how do you explain that the Trinity? Definitely, their presentation of the Trinity was different than anything I'd heard.

Their understanding of a lot of different things, the Atonement. We've talked on that. So yeah, I would go and visit these churches and then talk to the priests afterwards. Or sometimes I would be able to make an appointment with the bishop or even archbishop sometimes.

Some of them I was able to go up to a pretty high level and yeah, just ask them questions and things. I was trying to learn, yeah, where did all these teachings go and all of that? And so in the course of that, and by this time, there were others on this journey with me, and we were looking at different possibilities. And we looked at the Roman Catholic, the Eastern Orthodox, and I don't want to get way off topic here, but there were reasons why we chose not to go that route, things we felt like were not early Christian. And I know some of the ones listening to this, they're going to be mad because.

They are, yes. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But it made me feel I'm certainly it took away a lot of my prejudice against both. I mean, we're used to that. Man, they weren't even Christian. That was off the map. Oh, it brought me to a much better understanding of both the Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox.

And I had some very good interchanges with them, very, very friendly ones too. Now, anyway, so we were with a group. Dean Taylor was with us at that time. We've talked about him. And we looked, like I say, visited these different churches. Now, it wasn't just me. It was a group of people. And we were trying to make a joint decision. And Dean said, you know there's a group called the Continuing Anglicans because we didn't think about the Anglican Church because it's so liberal. And I mean, now they've got a female archbishop of Canterbury, and some of them are marrying same-sex marriages. And just it's just one of the more liberal churches. So we didn't consider that.

But he said, you know there's a group called the Continuing Anglicans. They're the conservatives who left both the Episcopal and the Church of England when they got so liberal. And it turned out that they had a congregation just like 30 miles from us. So yeah, we looked into them, and we thought, well, this is kind of neat because one of their articles of faith is no one will be required to believe anything unless it can be proven in the Bible. And I thought, hey, amen.

I can join a church that won't require anything than that. So we ended up looking into them and eventually deciding to join. Now, here's where the rub came in was for me to get ordained. I was at that time leading the group. But if we're going to join, we wanted to kind of keep our own little congregation because we were living like our lifestyle was Anabaptist, okay? So we had the women were wearing head coverings. Anyone looking at us, we would have thought we were Anabaptist.

We believed all the lifestyle of the Anabaptists, Two Kingdoms, non-resistance, everything. But we also were drawn maybe more to sacramental worship and some things like that. But anyway, for me to get ordained, then I would have to be willing to baptize the infants of the people in our church.

And it's like, ooh, I was hoping to avoid that. But yeah, so I had to do some thinking. Now, it's before I had compiled the Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs. And so yeah, I didn't have any good handy reference works. The only one I had was one put together by the Roman Catholics that had quotes on different topics.

It wasn't as comprehensive as the Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs, and where I made the dictionary non-it's not affiliated with any kind of sectarian view. I mean, I just put every quote in there, whether I like the quote, whether I agree with it. I was not going to let my belief system or anyone else's affect it. I wanted it to be neutral. This was anything but neutral, and it didn't claim to be neutral. I mean, it presented Roman Catholic teaching. And so the quotes from the early church were they could prove text, they're quotes, okay? So we went and looked at that. A bunch of us had copies of that. And yeah, they had quotes on infant baptism that weren't in the Ancient Icing Fathers, okay, like from Origen and that.

So yeah, when I looked at that, I thought, okay, it was there. I had known that from the beginning. And maybe there are some reasons for this. I read their arguments. I read arguments put out by Anglicans and all of that. And so I felt like, okay, I can do this with a good conscience. I never felt dogmatic about it. We would have never forced anyone to baptize their children. But most of the ones actually wanted to. And so I got ordained, and yeah, we did that. What changed my view was when I started working on the Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs, okay? Interesting. The very thing that's supposed to be the convincing piece, at least when I engage with people from those faith traditions, they're like, oh, but if you would just read the early church, you would become convinced of this position.

So that's interesting because that's the very thing that's supposed to convince you that this is right, right? Well, it will show you that it was around. I mean, that's true. But it also shows you the other was around too. You see both believers' baptism and infant baptism and all that. So I'm compiling these quotes as I go. Now, this is now, again, I am not I'm an Anglican priest, so I'm in favor of infant baptism. Okay, so if I had any bias, it was towards infant baptism, okay, at that point. But I wasn't dogmatic, so I wasn't going to hide any quotes. Just whatever, just baptism. I'm just going through. And I had read this quote before, but it had never whatever just sat the significance of it.

And this is from Justin Martyr. So I'm just I'm going chronological order. I'm in volume one. And this is about 150, 160 AD. Okay, so very early then. Yeah, very, very early. And he says this when he's describing baptism. This is in his apologetic work. I think it's his first apology. So he's explaining Christianity to non-believers, okay? He says, "As many as are persuaded and believe that what we teach and say is true and undertake to be able to live accordingly," undertake meaning they agreed to live accordingly, "are instructed to pray and to entreat God with fasting for the remission of their sins that are past, we praying and fasting with them. Then they are brought by us where there is water and are regenerated in the same manner in which we ourselves were regenerated," okay?

So he's obviously thinks in baptism in terms of believers because he says, those who are persuaded and believe that what we teach is true. Oh. Okay. And I noticed in the DDK and all that, it's always presuming a believer and an adult. None of those early ones have any instructions about take your infant and do this or that. You don't start seeing that until you get to the apostolic tradition of Hippolytus, which is in the third century. Now, of course, we had that, and we use that a lot in becoming Anglicans, like, okay, it was around in the early third century, okay? But this is the quote that really, really made me change my position on infant baptism.

And you'll be putting these up online so people I want them to be able to yeah. Yeah, we'll put links or at least references because that's the thing that's, I think, really important. It's like people go and dig into it themselves. And I want them to. Go read the books. Read the whole context there. Then I'm not taking this out of context. It's chapter 61 in his I believe this is his first apology. Now, listen to this. "At our birth," and I've condensed this, but nothing has been left out. I mean, just go and look at the quote. I'm not doing anything dishonest here. "At our birth, we were born without our knowledge or choice, but by our parents coming together," okay?

So our natural birth, you and I had no say in it whatsoever, okay? That was a decision made by our parents. We got to say nothing about it. We were born whether we want to be here on Earth or not, okay?

He goes on, "In order that we may not remain the children of necessity and of ignorance," in other words, necessity, it was forced on us, and ignorance that we didn't know anything about it. We were born. We don't even remember it. "But may become the children of choice and knowledge," okay? So that all right, our natural birth, we had no say in it. We don't even remember it. But now that we don't remain children of necessity and ignorance, but children of choice where we make a decision and knowledge, he says, "And may obtain in the water the remission of sins formerly committed. There is pronounced over him who chooses to be born again and has repented of his sins, the name of God the Father and Lord of the universe, and in the name of Jesus Christ and the name of the Holy Spirit."

So his whole argument is that in the second birth, and they tied this in with baptism. Some of our viewers will see, no, it actually happens before baptism. But as Anabaptists, we recognize that the two are closely linked.

But anyway, for them, they are immediately linked, okay? He is saying, in our natural birth, we had no choice in the matter. But in our new birth, we have a choice. We didn't make that decision. It isn't put on us by necessity. Now, when I read that and reread it and reread it, I thought, I cannot believe and I believe he was in the church in Rome at the time when he would have written this. I cannot believe that if infant baptism was the normal practice and people were being baptized as infants, that he would make that argument. I mean, someone could immediately say, what are you talking about? I mean, there's hundreds of you getting baptized, little babies.

They don't have any say in it. It just doesn't make sense that someone who would be witnessing infant baptism around him would make the argument that, well, the new birth, we make the decision. It's not something our parents make for us. So you're here this must have felt a bit disorienting because here you are as an Anglican priest. You're compiling this dictionary, the Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs, and you're finding this stuff. Did that feel like, wait a minute, what do I do now? What do I do with this? I mean, it must have felt disorienting. It exactly did. It exactly did. Well, I kept going, working on this.

And then the other thing was, yeah, just when I was reading the list of quotes in that Roman Catholic, when you're just pulling out proof quotes, it looked like, yeah, yeah, there's all these quotes in infant baptism. But yeah, then when you're going through I was going through 10 volumes.

And it's like, man, there is so little said. In my mind, it was all over, but it's just because I was reading those key quotes. It's very different when you're reading the whole thing. It doesn't just keep jumping out at you. And that's why I say, don't think you know what they say just because you've read some proof text quotes. So I think that is important, and especially for people that are listening and not watching. But right there on the shelf is the set of the Ananicine Fathers. It's like a small encyclopedia set. I mean, there's a large volume of material to go through. And Ananicine just being pre-Nicene council, basically, right? So before 325, right?

That's the section we're referring to because if you go after that, you start finding a lot more material, right, on infant baptism. Am I correct on that? I think you'd said that earlier. Is that right? It's surprising what you find because in the fourth century, after Nicaea, you find that it seems very clear the majority of people are getting baptized as adults. And the problem they're having is people waiting until they're 60 or something. It's like, okay, I'm going to live this sinful life and then right before I die. And that's what Constantine did.

Yeah, very famously, which is just really weird. Very famously. Now, I will give him credit. He recognized, I can't do all the things that a Roman emperor does and still be a Christian. I'll give him credit that, unfortunately, the ones who came after him didn't have any problem with that. But he did see this is not consistent with Christianity. So he did wait and got baptized right before he died.

But. Well, yeah. So if you're going through all this and saying, huh, this case isn't as strong as I thought it was, right, for infant baptism, what was the final piece that you're like, okay, decision point, I actually don't believe this anymore? I mean, you'd have to leave the Anglican Church or not be an Anglican priest, for one thing. Yeah, tell me about that. Yeah. So I didn't reach the point that I don't believe this anymore.

I agree with Justin, and I agree with Tertullian. I don't think it's a good practice. And I think it's better that children that we all make that decision ourselves in the new birth. That is not something put on us by our parents, okay? I didn't necessarily feel that it was wicked or that, but I did not feel comfortable doing it anymore. Now, thankfully, at that point, another brother had joined us who got ordained as well. And so I was able to just step in the background. And he did all of the baptisms after that. And we left the Anglican Church over a different reason, okay? Okay. So this is not the reason you left. It's not the reason we left, but it had a lot to do with my leaving the priesthood.

So when you get ordained, it's forever, okay? And so then they wanted me when our church left, they wanted me to start serving other places. And I knew, yeah, this had bothered me enough that, no, I didn't want to continue on this track. So I first took a one-year leave of absence, and then I just dropped off the scene. I said, I'm leaving. So then our church continued on kind of Anglican worship, but just as an independent congregation. We didn't call ourselves Anglican, but we were just an independent church. But most of them still believed in infant baptism, okay? So I tried to share what I had found and why I had changed my mind.

And the brother who was now the officiating minister, he felt very strongly in favor of infant baptism. And so I came under quite a bit of flack at that point in time. And that was fine. Okay, I'll just step in the background. That's what I did. When you take, like I say, the totality, the evidence isn't quite as strong as it looks like when you just pick out proof text. But it's still there. I mean, there's no denying. I had seen it when I first read them that, okay, at least by the year 200, infant baptism had come in the church. The question is, was it a corruption that had come in, or was it there from the beginning?

No one can prove that one way or the other. You can make arguments. I would not even now say I can prove that it was not there, that that's a corruption that came in. I don't know. It's still an open question in my mind. The other question is that we don't know is what percentage of when it was there for sure in the second century or third century, rather, what percentage of children were baptized as infants? We don't know. And see, that's the problem I would have with the Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox. Now, I will say this.

In all of those years of dialogue and all the years I mean, I read a lot of I use the Orthodox Study Bible from my Bible, and I read a lot of Roman Catholic authors, okay? So yeah, they're not people I view as my enemies or anything like that. I will say, and I know this is going to you might get some comments, irritate some people. I would say the Roman Catholics are more intellectually honest as a rule than the Eastern Orthodox. So okay, a Roman Catholic is a lot more to admit, yeah, you're right on some of these things, like on infant baptism, okay? I have the book right there at home. I got it at the Catacombs in there in Rome when I visited the Catacombs 25 years ago.

And it's run by the Vatican. I mean, it's owned by the Catholic Church, and the bookstore is owned by the Catholic Church anyway. So I bought this book there on the Catacombs. And it's a Catholic professor teaches at a Catholic university who is writing in there. And he says, yeah, back then, usually, they didn't baptize their infants. And he's talking about the year 200 and stuff. And he'd done all this research on these inscriptions that they'd found on tombstones of Christians, okay?

And it almost always mentions their age. And it was very common that and there was a very high mortality rate of infants and then of also juveniles up to, say, age 21. So you have a lot of people dying very, very young. And the common practice, at least by 200, and I'm going to guess it predated that, was when someone was going to die, infant, small child, whatever, if they weren't baptized yet, then you baptized them to just put the mark, the seal that this is a Christian, not a pagan.

Nothing is ever said. In fact, there's so many quotes I could produce that they all believed in the innocence of children, okay? So none of them were saying if the child isn't baptized, it's lost. It's just to identify it as a Christian, okay? And that's very key.

I've got the quotes if you want it, but I don't know that we want to go there today. But yeah, there's a lot of quotes on the innocence of children, which is important because that was one of the things the Anabaptists made a big point about, that children are innocent. They're not lost if they're unbaptized. And so you can wait until they're older. And that teaching didn't come in until Augustine, that an unbaptized child is going to be eternally damned, will not get into heaven, will not go to hell, but will never get into heaven either, middle place or something.

So here's this book. And yeah, it's got all the inscriptions. I mean, just pages that and sometimes they're three months old. Sometimes they're six months. Sometimes there's one year. Sometimes they're four years old. Sometimes they're nine years old. Sometimes they're 15.

Yeah, it's obvious. If they're all getting baptized as newborn infants, you wouldn't have that. They were already baptized. You wouldn't even have to say when they got baptized because they would have already been baptized as an infant. It wouldn't have been anything to particularly say. You just had the day they were born, and that was it because that also would pretty much match the day they were baptized. And yeah, the professor says, yeah, that they got baptized at different ages. But this is a Catholic. This is a Catholic. But see, that's what I'm saying. You'll see Catholics who will make admissions like that. Now, he didn't feel like infant baptism was wrong. He was just being honest.

It was not a universal practice or even maybe a majority practice back then at that time. Now, he felt when the church did order it, then the church had that authority. And that's one of the teachings of the Catholic Church, that God gives continuing revelation to the church to develop the faith. And so they would see that as a legitimate development. So that helps them to be intellectually honest because it doesn't unturn their belief system. It's just like, okay, we came to a better understanding later on. That's how they would look at it.

So whereas Eastern Orthodox would claim, no, what we practice is what's always been practiced, even when the evidence would go against them. And so yeah, it's very hard for them to make those kind of admissions. That's my observation. But I'm not here to slam one or praise the other or anything like that. But I'm just saying that was very interesting. But anyway, even when we have infant baptism present, we don't know what percentage of people got baptized as infants. We don't see any enforced infant baptism. Everyone has to be. The closest you would get to that would be a quotation from Cyprian or about the year 250.

But we don't know the setting of the quotation. Now, it sounded like all of the infants there were getting baptized, and then it was assumed you would get baptized. Yeah. I was wondering if we could actually just get into some of those quotes that would be used because when we interviewed you on your story being an Anglican priest and then why you joined, why you left, some of that. And you mentioned just briefly this on infant baptism, didn't go into detail. And we got piles of comments about that saying, here's all these quotes from the early church. So we're like, well, we should have you back on, and let's look at those quotes. So I'm going to.

Fair enough. Yeah. Yeah. Let's pull up a couple. One of them would be from Irenaeus in his book Against Heresies. So this is volume one, actually, of the Ananicene Fathers.

There's context here that we won't go into, but this is the quote that I've heard different people use. And he's talking about Jesus here, "For he came to save all through means of himself, all I say, who through him are born again to God, infants and children and boys and youth and old men." There's even a footnote put in here saying, this is a valuable statement to the fact that baptism of infants was in the early church. That's a footnote. That's not what Irenaeus wrote. It doesn't say baptism, but it says infants there. That was one people used quite a bit. I'm curious. Would you want to comment on that one? Okay. Before I do, I do want to add one clarification because I can see somebody listening to this and saying, oh, so that quote from Justin, you changed your whole belief system based on one quote.

That's what got me rethinking. Now, of course, you've got all the testimony of the New Testament and my knowledge that, yeah, other than that quote from Irenaeus in the second century, there's no quotes. In the second century. In the second century. That's actually interesting because I was digging through some different articles from Catholics and this, that, and people leaving all these comments. And I also couldn't find any that they were very clearly, this is from second century. I'm pretty sure if there is someone, please put it in the notes. We'd love to see it because I. There's not. I can guarantee you there's not. There is one in 215 approximately. I don't know the quite date.

There's a new document that they published not that long ago. It's not in the Ananicene Fathers that talks about baptism of infants. But that's. Yeah. It's third century, 215. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So it's not in second century. I think that was the closest one I could find. Yeah. Or Tertullian's is, I don't know what year they put on it because we don't they think it's like 210 or something like that. So it's pretty early. But again, second century, you just. Did not find anything as far as you know.

Except this one. Yeah. That one. And I did now, I read that when I first read the early Christians. And I knew by then that when they talked about the rebirth, that was connected with baptism. So I saw that. That, to me, it never convinced me as being a very, very strong evidence of infant baptism. It wasn't until I got to the Tertullian quote.

But I became aware that, yeah, the Catholics and Anglicans, everyone was using this, the Orthodox. And in my dictionary, Verdi Christian Beliefs, I do put this under infant baptism. Again, I was, like I say, trying to be absolutely fair and neutral on everything.

That's not an unreasonable conclusion. It could point to that. If it does, it's an outlier. I mean, like I say, you have the second century with all of this other stuff. You have a quote just 20 years or maybe 10 years before this from Justin Martyr that he seems to know nothing about infant baptism.

It's a little odd. The thing is, the passage it's quoted from isn't a passage about baptism. I mean, it is a passing comment that he makes that doesn't undo it. I mean, don't misunderstand me. Right. But it's not like he's writing a chapter on baptism. Right. Or giving instructions or anything like that.

It's in his book Against Heresies. He's writing against one of the Gnostic heresies that, big deal, they claim that Jesus's ministry was only one year. Okay? I say big deal. I mean, there were worse things. It's really weird. Well, Irenaeus, but this was the mindset back then. I've mentioned in a previous interview, they didn't feel like they had to tie all loose ends together. That's part of the Greek mind. The other part of it is they like to go into detail, oh man, on all kinds of stuff, not dogmatically or anything. But when he discusses the heresies, he's got to go through every last point. It nearly killed me when I was reading these. I would read Irenaeus for a while, and I had to switch to Tertullian or something.

It's like I couldn't read. There's seven books of it makes up maybe a half or a third of that first volume is all just that one. Against All Heresies. And these are heresies that aren't around today. So you're studying, this Gnostic group did this and that. And yet you say, well, you skip all that. But often in the middle of there, yeah, there's some really important thing.

And so yeah, so I had to read it all. But I couldn't just read the seven books straight. I had to skip around a little bit. So he's talking about that, and he uses that to go into his theory of recapitulation, which was maybe the first articulated view of the atonement, except that he doesn't believe that his view of recapitulation encompasses all the atonement because he talks about Christus Victor and some of these other motifs in other places. So it's not like, oh, well, he said the atonement is this. But he felt the incarnation in itself was part of the atonement, that by becoming man, Jesus introduced something into the human race.

It's interesting. His arguments are very interesting. I mean, they make sense. I'm on the sideline on it. Yeah, maybe true, maybe not. It doesn't particularly matter. So anyway, that's what he's discussing. His thing is. But not baptism necessarily. Yeah. He's discussing the recapitulation and why he mentions Jesus went through every age. And then he goes on from there to talk about Jesus and his life as a thing, okay? So it's just that little comment, okay? So is he saying that all infants were being baptized at that point? Is he even talking about baptism? Because he doesn't say baptism. He says regeneration. Now, normally, like I say, the two are connected together, but not always.

So I found several quotes from his. He says, "The word of the Father and the Spirit of God had become united with the ancient substance of Adam's formation." This is still, it sounds like his recapitulation, that when Jesus became human and then became kind of the second Adam, just like we're all affected by Adam, well, we're all affected by the second Adam for good. "So it rendered man living and perfect, receptive of the perfect Father, in order that as in the natural Adam, we were all dead. So in the spiritual Adam, we may all be made alive." So he's saying that we're made anew, made alive.

I don't remember the Greek word there. Very close to reborn. Okay? But he's not talking about baptism here. He's just talking about being made into a new person through the incarnation. He's not talking about our regeneration when we're born again.

He's talking about we're made anew just from Jesus being incarnated, okay? Like I say, it's his kind of unique teaching. You would see traces of it in other early Christians. It's not only him. I think he's the first one to present this, and he's maybe the only one that early who presents. I mean, it's pages and pages and pages. He really goes into a lot of detail about this recapitulation. But so when he's talking about us being made alive, he's not talking about where most people would think it's when you are born again that you're made alive in Christ, which they, again, would have identified with baptism. But he's saying something new. We're made alive in Christ because of the incarnation, okay?

All right. And then here's another quote, which is a lot more to the point. "Having been born the first begotten of the dead and receiving into his bosom the ancient fathers." It's all about Jesus. And when he was in paradise, he received Abraham, the ancient patriarchs. "The Lord has regenerated them into the life of God." So now he's talking about people who lived before him who were dead. And it says he regenerated them, okay? "For he himself has been made the origin of those who live, just as Adam became the origin of those who die. For this reason, commencing the genealogy with the Lord, Luke carried it back to Adam. He thereby indicated that it was Jesus who regenerated them into the gospel of life and not they him."

So he's talking about regeneration, that Jesus being born as the second Adam, that Luke begins his genealogy with Jesus, and he goes back to Adam. So it's like Jesus is the Father, and all of these are regenerated, born into Jesus, okay? So he uses that word when he's not talking about baptism, okay? This is all in the same work, okay? I'm not quoting from different works, okay? But it's not in the same passage, okay? Like I say, it's a big thing. So I'm just saying we need to be a little slow because he uses the word regenerate, particularly when he's talking about recapitulation, that he's talking about baptism, okay?

All right. Most early Christians, when they're using it, they're talking about when we come to salvation. But he's using it to talk about the incarnation and, like I say, the whole human race then being regenerated into Jesus as the second Adam, okay? Now, just for full disclosure, okay, I've shared this before on messages, and I got pushback from the Orthodox. And they said, well, the Orthodox Church teaches that they do baptisms in Hades, okay? And so this Irenaeus could be talking about baptism here if you believe that. And actually, I found Hermes teaches that. I honestly don't think he's talking about that here because he's talking about the genealogy all the way back to Adam.

I don't think he would no one would believe he baptized everybody who died before him. If so, well, then they all get a free pass, basically. I honestly don't think that's what he's using it. Interesting. Well, yeah, this stuff gets kind of okay. Well. It can get deep. That's the thing. It can get really deep really fast. See, that's the thing that's we're looking for that really clear cut. Like, it did this. This was the it's a little hard to find. Now, here's another one as I was digging. Can I just finish with one quote? Because now, this is the one on that one that really, wow, swung my view because I've always seen that as personally, it didn't seem like it's all about baptism.

But I always felt like, okay, I'm out on a limb, and I need to be really careful here. Okay. So then someone brought this to my attention, okay, Kurt Allen. The name may not mean anything to you. He's dead now, but he was like the foremost textual critic of the Bible. So the critical text that most churches use at the NIV and the New American Standard and the ESV, all of that, the text that they use would have been put together by Kurt Allen and his wife, okay?

Or they were the main ones. So yeah, he's a very well-known name. He's Lutheran. He's a strong believer in infant baptism, okay? This is what makes this very interesting, okay? Yeah. When someone says something that fits them, well, yeah, they're going to follow their prejudice. But his prejudice and in this book, he even argues why infant baptism is the best thing. But in this same book, where he argues for infant baptism, he says this. He's talking about the Irenaeus quote that we just read. "It does not seem apparent to me that Irenaeus has baptism in view here. And certainly, there is no thought of infant baptism. He is concerned solely with the fact that Jesus sanctified all humanity and that he was made like all, that he lived through all ages of life and was an example to all.