Love your work, David. This is Elvis Isaacs. Love your work, David. Huge fan. Why do you reject infant baptism? Bible has no example of second generation believers. Why not follow what the early Christians unanimously did? Okay, well, yeah, I think if they all followed that, it might be a strong argument. The problem is we don't really have any clear teaching on infant baptism. I mean, the clearest thing you get is around the year 200 in Tertullian's writings, and he is against it.
He doesn't say it's heretical, but he doesn't think it's a good idea at all. And then Cyprian is probably the strongest advocate. He's writing about the year 250. And yeah, he's in the same city, Carthage. So in Carthage, we see from Tertullian that some were baptizing infants. And then again, from Cyprian, we don't know if it was universal in Carthage. It obviously wasn't in Tertullian's day. And we certainly don't know what it was throughout the whole ancient world.
So, yeah, we can't say this was a universal practice. And since the New Testament gives us no, it never talks about what age ones were baptized. I think last week I commented," I'm slow to judge people on that issue, but I don't think it's a very good practice just because of the history of too many people I've known who were baptized as infants and never knew anything about Christ. And then they've committed horrible sins and everything.
When they come to a knowledge of the New Testament, it's like," Wait a minute. Is that a valid baptism?" So unless we're going to treat them all as valid and then all these people are now in a serious situation, I feel a lot more comfortable treating them all as invalid and that they're not baptized. Otherwise, I say there's a lot of people who are in second and third marriages and just a lot of bad situations that you know they supposedly did as a baptized Christian.
The other thing is Justin Martyr, in his first apology, he gives a description of baptism. And in there he makes a comment. That to me was very, I guess, decisive for me in rejecting infant baptism. And he says," In our natural conception, in our original birth, we had no say in the matter. That was our parents coming together and we had no say. But in the new birth, we get to decide that we want to be born. We didn't get any say in the first birth, but we do in the new birth.
And so I'm thinking, now if infant baptism was common, would he be making that statement? That doesn't sound to me very likely. And he was right there in Rome, in the largest church in the world, the largest city and the largest church. So, yeah, I'm not convinced at all that infant baptism was the norm in the pre-Nicene church, and certainly before the year 200. So, yeah, those are my reasons for not choosing to practice that myself or to advocate it.
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