Meta Chestnutt Sager's Letter to Eva Heiliger, February 11, 1945 (5)

It appears that much of what Sager wrote to Heiliger was in response to a Methodist pamphlet Heiliger had sent as a way of explaining and defending her beliefs and practices.[1] It is impossible to know which pamphlet Heiliger had sent, but it certainly taught the same things found in the 1944 edition of Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Church: "We hold that all children, by virtue of the unconditional benefits of the atonement, are members of the Kingdom of God, and therefore graciously entitled to Baptism."[2] The same manual begins its discussion of the administration of the sacrament by saying, "Let every adult person, and the parents of every child to be baptized, to have the choice of sprinkling, pouring, or immersion."[3]

Notes

[1] "Your little pamphlet is good in so far as it goes," wrote Sager, "but your Methodist friends always stay short of baptism." Meta Chestnutt Sager to Eva Heiliger, February 11, 1945.

[2] Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Church (New York: Methodist Publishing House, 1944), 40. See also Frank S. Mead, Handbook of Denominations in the United States (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1951), 131-32.

[3] Ibid., 448.

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.