First baptism. Alex and Sarah Martin, and there was one other, but I wasn't sure if the name should be added. So what are the thoughts on the age of baptism? Can a child be baptized too young? Should it be as early as the age of accountability? Is there any precedent from the early church that was recorded? Okay, that's a good question that a lot of people are asking these days. And there's not a clear answer from the early church. Now, I'm going to give you my personal opinion, but that's all it is.
It is my personal opinion. And other people would have different thoughts. And that's perfectly fine as well. So I think personally, I like the age of accountability as being maybe the ideal age as a floor that I wouldn't personally encourage somebody younger than that to get baptized. Now, the age of accountability seems to have been among the Jews, the early Christians, something around like age 12 or 13, something like that, the beginning of adolescence.
Of course, each parent, I think, is in the best position to be able to discern the spiritual maturity of their children. I mean, you have some children who are very spiritual at a young age and are able to make a commitment to Christ. My wife was baptized. She wasn't quite 11 years old. And it was a commitment she made and that she has stuck with all of her life and has never doubted that she was old enough to be baptized. I was 14 myself.
And again, never been a question in my mind that the commitment I made to Christ at that age was very real. I understood completely what I was doing. And then you meet other people. I mean, they might be 18 and they're not ready to get baptized. They're not ready to give their life to Christ. Not because perhaps they're not old enough, but. Maybe they're not spiritually mature enough or their love of Christ hasn't reached that stage where they're really able to make a total commitment to Him.
So I think each person is different, and I think parents hopefully would be in the best position. Parents and the elders in the local church of examining whether somebody is old enough or not. Now, as far as the early Christians, you find complete gamut. I couldn't tell you what the normal age was. It's very hard to discern from their writings. Of course, the period of the early church was still largely a period of. New conversions. And so you're dealing a lot with adults.
But you know as you get to around the year 200, you now have quite a lot of children of Christians who are being baptized. And they don't talk about, they talk about catechumen classes, you know classes for learners, but they don't you know give an age that you know at a certain age that they're allowed to get in these classes. So we don't know what age churches put on that. And then you mainly see this around the beginning of the third century. And it's hard to know how widespread it was, but of infant baptism.
At the same time, as you had some advocating infant baptism, you had others like Tertullian in the early third century advocating that a person wait until they're married. Or if they're going to stay celibate until at least they're old enough to be married or old enough to make a legal will or something like that under Roman law. And then it's particularly common in the fourth century that people put off baptism until they thought death was near. They'd go their whole adult life as a catechumen.
And then they would try to time it to get baptized towards the end of their life, hopefully arranging it to do it before they actually did die. Now, most of these considerations that I've talked about all centered on theology. The ones who advocated infant baptism, and I've been a lifelong foe of infant baptism in case you've wondered, I have tried to look at it with an honest heart. I think I can definitely say I've tried to see that side of things, even tried to embrace it for a short period.
And I'm very convinced in believers baptism as being the best route to go. And I belong to a church that does not accept infant baptism. If you came to join our church and that was your only baptism was as an infant, we would require you to get rebaptized. But the theology behind that was Jesus said, unless you were born again of water and the Spirit, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. And the early Christians universally understood this to be talking about baptism of water and baptism of the Holy Spirit.
And in an age where maybe, I don't know, a third, perhaps, of children did not reach adulthood who died as children. And maybe a fourth of all babies died in infancy. That was a very scary proposition. Also, it's particularly pronounced in the third century. You see a theology of inheriting a fallen nature from Adam, not inheriting his guilt, but inheriting a nature that's imperfect, fallen from Adam. And I would tend to support that view. It's not the only view out there, but I would lean to that myself.
And so like Cyprian, he felt like it's in baptism that the stain from Adam is washed away and you start with a new slate. And so you want an infant to start life with that stain being washed away. That was the argument from that perspective. Now, Tertullian, who, like I say. Argued for waiting until you were married or after. The theology there that affected that view was Tertullian believed and a lot of other Christians did too that after baptism, you can only stumble in a major way one time.
And if you commit, you can commit a serious sin like adultery, maybe denouncing Christ in persecution, reverting to idolatry. I'm not sure what all the sins would be included in that topic of a major sin. But you could commit one. So why Tertullian didn't want people being baptized at, say, age 12 or 13 or younger is they're going to go through their adolescent years, which particularly in Roman society was a time of a lot of immorality. And so he felt like, you know, wait until you're married.
Wait till you're safely past that age where you might fall into sexual immorality. I mean, you still could after marriage, but it was less likely. And so that was his primary concern behind that. Now, later, when he joined the Montanists and they taught that there is not even one extra chance after baptism. If you commit a major sin, that's it. You're lost forever. But that was the Montanists. The church as a whole never taught that.
And then, of course, because they all taught that when you're baptized, all your prior sins are washed away, but not your future sins, then this idea, well, just put it off and keep putting it off. And then you know when you're like my age, hopefully there's not a whole lot of serious sins left in your life. I guess there could be. And so then maybe you can safely be baptized when you're 70. Of course, you might get killed by a runaway horse or something. So you're taking quite a chance in that.
I think that's a very wrong stance to take. And I can't imagine anyone who loved Christ doing that. And yet there were some godly people in the fourth century who had just saintly lives who waited until their deathbed to get baptized. So that's the gamut, you know like I'm saying that was there. And my personal preference is waiting until the age of accountability, you know allowing for exceptions in that.
And then once a person is really ready spiritually to surrender their life to Christ and make a lifelong commitment. Now, one of the auxiliary questions was, how in the earth did the early Christians make such a mistake as infant baptism? Well, as I said, I mean, I grew up you know as Jehovah's Witness who, I mean, infant baptism was just one of those, one of a long list of heresies that if you practice that, you're not a Christian. That puts you outside of you know any claim to be a real Christian.
And now I'm an Anabaptist that have generally held somewhat the same view. So like I say, I'm not soft on infant baptism. But you know I look at Christian history and there have been just hundreds I'm sure tens of thousands of very godly Christians that that was their only baptism was as an infant. I mean, people in recent times like John Wesley, William Law, people I look up to a lot, Francis of Assisi, who I know my life will never even come close to walking in the footsteps of Jesus the way that He did.
Even more significantly, you had whole movements like the Waldensians. As near as I can tell from looking at the scant writings we have that they practiced infant baptism. I mean, I feel 99% sure of that. The same with the Moravians, the Czech brethren, they went by different names. They later joined with Count Zinzendorf. We know him as the Moravians now, but they were a persecuted small group there in Bohemia and Czechoslovakia. And they practice infant baptism.
So yeah, I'm very slow to just write everybody off who did that, including the early Christians, like, oh, they fell into some horrible heresy. What makes me maybe slow to be judgmental? In other words, I've got my own strong views and I belong to a church that has strong views on it as well. But because you hold strong views on something, doesn't mean you have to be judgmental towards everyone else who holds a different view.
But the two things I think we should recognize, every Christian should recognize that we absolutely do not know. And we're not going to know on this side of paradise because it's not revealed in Scripture and it's not revealed in the early Christian writings. And that is, in Acts, you see so often whole households being baptized. What was the age of the youngest children in those households? We do not know. Nothing is said about that.
I mean, you can come up with things to offer a theory, but it's not really discussed. And then the other thing is, during the New Testament period, Christians had children. What age were those children baptized? We don't have a single clue. There is not anything said in the New Testament about that. So even though I'm a strong advocate of believers' baptism and would like to say want somebody coming to our church who was baptized as an infant to be rebaptized.
I don't have to judge those in the past where they stand with God. I think he can make, he can give a later validation to an infant who was baptized or rather a person who was only baptized as an infant.
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