Introduction
Many conflicting views, including academic ones, regarding birth and parenting differ radically on what practices should be considered the best and most effective. Traditional community views dictate that families must implement nurturing practices that may seem unethical or wrong from the perspective of today’s progressive society.
One such practice is infant baptism, a process in Christianity in which children are subjected to baptism at an early age. Strictly speaking, baptism should be understood as dipping infants in holy water, which enrolls the child in Christianity and creates spiritual protection for them (Salza, 2023). However, with the development of humanistic notions of freedom of choice and the inviolability of an individual’s privacy, this practice creates several doubts about religious imposition. This paper proposes to critically examine the phenomenon of Christian infant baptism and discuss aspects of the problem, including through academic discourse.
Overview of Baptism
Before subjecting infant baptism to critical analysis, it is helpful to outline the scope of this ritual practice and provide an overview. According to Salza (2023), infant baptism bestows saving grace on the child, so the earlier the child is exposed to communion with Christianity, the safer their life will be. The core of baptism is that the child, who has no cognitive or physical capacity to resist or exercise their choice, is exposed to the objects of parental will that spread their Christian faith. In baptism, the child is either dipped or sprinkled with holy water in the building of Christian temples or churches under the supervision of a priest, followed by receiving spiritual protection, according to the sacred texts of the Bible. To put it another way, infant baptism is a religious ritual of the communion of a child to Christianity, realized through the parents’ will to spread their faith.
Scholar Perspectives on Baptism
The academic community has varied views on the practice of infant baptism. For example, Faber (2021) examines various academic sources and sacred texts to answer the question of the key meaning of modern infant baptism. This article focuses on determining whether the meaning of Christian baptism has been transformed at the current level of Christianity’s development concerning parents’ promises when performing the ritual.
The author concludes that in the traditional practice of baptism, parents were asked more existential questions to recall God’s immutability and the divine protection of the child, whereas, in modern rituals, the focus is predominantly on parental promises. As Faber (2021) points out, parents assume God’s function is to provide spiritual protection for their children and spread the faith. To put it another way, the modern practice of baptism has become nominal and has lost its initial religious function, and it is conducted only for the personal purposes of the parents and not the fundamental liturgical meanings.
There are other angles to consider the phenomenon of infant baptism in academic discourse. Oppong et al. (2017) attempt to explore the problematization of baptism in terms of its relevance to biblical values and, significantly, the freedom of choice of infants baptized without their consent. Methodologically, the paper critically reviews existing evidence, predominantly biblical texts, to answer the questions above. The authors reach two key conclusions.
On the one hand, infant baptism is not a biblical practice because, according to sacred texts, only those who have been believers before should be baptized. On the other hand, the authors suggest that those baptized as infants should be baptized again if desired to conform to biblical values. In other words, infant baptism is not biblical, and the authors condemn the practice.
Conclusion
The analysis conducted on the two sources demonstrated that infant baptism is controversial and creates many ethical issues, mainly related to conformity to biblical values and freedom of choice. Both sources demonstrated that infant baptism has fundamental problems in its current practice despite different approaches to conducting research. In my social circle, many peers whose families are Christian have been baptized since infancy, but some have self-expressed the will to be baptized in adolescence. In my personal life, the findings of this analysis can be used to raise children more effectively and ethically and to spread the knowledge that earlier baptism does not correspond to the meanings and symbols outlined in the Bible.
References
Faber, R. L. (2021). Infant baptism: God’s promise or ours?Studia Liturgica, 51(1), 31-45. Web.
Oppong, K., Ogouma, T., & Manu, P. O. (2017). An evaluation of infant baptism. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 22(7), 19-27. Web.
Salza, J. (2023). Why does the church baptize babies? Simply Catholic. Web.
Loading...
