Alexander Campbell on Infant Baptism

According to historian Douglas A. Foster, the birth of Alexander Campbell's first child in 1812 made the hotly-debated issue of infant baptism a personal matter. Campbell had been brought up in the home of a Seceder Presbyterian minister and certainly had been sprinkled as an infant. With the question now pressing, he threw himself into deep study of the Bible on the topic and at the end of several weeks of investigation "concluded that he could accept only immersion of penitent believers as legitimate baptism."[1] As Campbell came to understand the New Testament, especially passages like Acts 2:37-38, baptism was only for believers and brought the remission of sins. Infants obviously could not understand and believe the gospel. Moreover, since baptism was for the remission of sins, it made no sense to baptize infants because they had not yet committed any sins and could not make a profession of faith.[2] Campbell never taught that those who failed to understand this aspect of biblical teaching were lost. "I cannot . . . in my heart regard all who have been sprinkled in infancy without their knowledge and consent as aliens from Christ and the well-grounded hope of heaven."[3] Nevertheless, the New Testament taught believers' baptism, by immersion, for the forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit, and so would Campbell.[4]

It is worth noting that as early as 1820, in his debate with Presbyterian minister John Walker, Campbell had developed and was enunciating several arguments against infant baptism. These arguments went far beyond an interpretation of the conversion stories in the Book of Acts, according to which the approved examples did not depict infant baptism, but did, rather, suggest inferential evidence against the practice.[5]

Notes

[1] Douglas A. Foster, A Life of Alexander Campbell, Library of Religious Biography (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020), 53.

[2] Ibid., 71.

[3] Alexander Campbell, "Any Christians among Protestant Parties," Millennial Harbinger, September 1837, 412. See also Foster, Life of Alexander Campbell, 160-61.

[4] Campbell preferred to avoid theological words that could not be found in the Bible. Yet, his mature view of baptism pictures the ordinance as a "sacrament," a divinely-appointed means of grace. See, for example, the entry for "sacrament," in Donald K. McKim, Westminster Dictionary of Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 245. See also Millard J. Erickson, The Concise Dictionary of Christian Theology, rev. ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001), 174, who defines "Sacramentalism" as "The view that grace is conveyed through certain religious rites."

[5] See, especially, Alexander Campbell, "Evils of Infant Baptism," Millennial Harbinger (September 1848), 481-92, in which Campbell reprints the arguments he put forward in his 1820 debate with John Walker. See also the brief but helpful discussion in Royal Humbert, ed., A Compend of Alexander Campbell's Theology (St. Louis, MO: Bethany Press, 1961), 201, n. 16.