Why baptize babies

And today we celebrate Prayer for this morning. Daily meditation. Prayer for this evening. Top Get Aleteia delivered to your inbox. Subscribe here. Yes, I would like to receive information from Aleteia partners. That was the pattern God established for his people. Circumcision was not just a physical ritual for a certain ethnic group. It had spiritual meaning, and it could include people who were not born Israelites. If a man grew up as a foreigner to the covenant community and wished to join it and serve the Lord, he was circumcised as an adult, and all males in his household were also circumcised Exodus From then on, any male born into that covenant family was circumcised as an infant, marking him as a member of the covenant.

God's covenant with Abraham was "an everlasting covenant," not a temporary one. That everlasting covenant remains in effect to this day. God doesn't change. The Lord who made promises to Abraham is the same Lord Jesus who embraced babies brought by believing parents, and still today this same Lord promises to be the God of believers and their children.

God doesn't just decide one day to dump his covenant and come up with something entirely different. He remains faithful to the same covenant. But he has brought that covenant into a new and better era, and he seals it with a new and better sign. In the old era, God promised a Savior. In the new era, the promise has been fulfilled. Jesus' perfect life and bloody death and glorious resurrection fulfill everything necessary for salvation by faith. God "announced the gospel in advance to Abraham" Galatians , but now that Christ has come, the gospel is clearer than it was in Abraham's day, and the blessings are poured out more abundantly.

In this new and better covenant era, God gives a new and better covenant sign. Now that Jesus has suffered and poured out his blood, God no longer calls for the bloody, painful sign of circumcision. Instead he gives the sign of baptism. This better sign of baptism is without blood or pain. This better sign of baptism is not limited to males as circumcision was but is applied to females as well. The new covenant era and the new covenant sign are better than the old, so it would be a shocking letdown if the God who included children of believers in the old era excluded them in the new era.

How could babies from covenant families, circumcised in the old era, not be baptized in the new era? The Bible links the meaning of circumcision with baptism in Colossians There Scripture speaks of "the circumcision done by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism and raised with him through your faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead.

Circumcision was the sign of becoming part of God's covenant community; so is baptism. Circumcision called for a heart in tune with God Deuteronomy ; ; so does baptism. The spiritual meaning of circumcision is fulfilled in the new covenant sign of baptism. On the day of Pentecost, the Lord poured out his Holy Spirit to launch the new covenant era. The apostle Peter told the people, "Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins.

And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children" Acts Those words of Peter echoed God's promise to Abraham, to be a faithful God to him and his children.

About 3, people were baptized that day. After Pentecost, the Holy Spirit kept adding to the church, and not just one individual at a time. The Spirit added whole families. Entire households were baptized. When the Lord opened the heart of a woman named Lydia, the result was not just an individual baptism. When a suicidal jailer asked the apostle Paul, "What must I do to be saved? A synagogue ruler named Crispus "and his entire household" came to Christ and were baptized Acts In one of Paul's letters, he wrote, "I also baptized the household of Stephanas" 1 Corinthians Did any of these family baptisms include babies?

Probably so, but there's no way to prove it--and there's no need to prove it. Whether there were babies or not, the principle of family solidarity is clear. When an adult was baptized, whether a father or mother, so were the children in the household. When lost sheep went into God's fold, their lambs went with them.

The gospel addresses households, and it's biblical to respond as households. Biblical faith declares, "As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord" Joshua In the Old Testament, when the head of a household was circumcised, his boys were also circumcised.

In the New Testament, when the head of a household was baptized, the rest of the household was also baptized. Today, too, churches should baptize individual converts and the children under their care.

A gospel that speaks only of a personal relationship to God but not a family relationship to God is missing something. Our culture is extremely individualistic, and that makes it harder for us to see how babies too young to think for themselves could be included in God's covenant. So let's ask ourselves: are we marbles or branches? The Bible speaks of Christ and his church as a grapevine. One way God's vine gets more branches is to grow them.

Another way is for branches to be grafted in from outside. Either way, whether a branch grows from the vine or is grafted into it, any twigs on the branch are included as well.

When a child is born to someone who is already part of the church, the child is part of the church. When parents from outside the church of Christ become part of it, their children become part of it too. And baptism is the sign of belonging. In our individualistic culture, says author Douglas Wilson, we'd rather be marbles than branches. We picture Christ not as a vine but as a marble box where individual marbles are placed one by one for safekeeping. No marble is connected to any other marble.

Each is on its own. This is why the Church encourages baptism of even the smallest infants, for it is by being baptized into the Church that we are able to fully receive grace in the time afterward. Baptism is thus the necessary precursor to all other sacraments. Since Catholics believe that all mankind has been stained with original sin through the sin of Adam and Eve, it is necessary to remove this original sin through the grace of baptism even in the case of those who have not been able to commit actual sin.

Why did Christ, then, place such great importance on His own baptism even though there was no sin to wash away? The answer involves the foundation of Catholicism, namely the reason that Christ became man, died and then rose from the dead.

Christ chose to be baptized not out of personal necessity, but rather because He thought it fitting to be baptized on behalf of the humanity whose sins He was choosing to take on. His baptism was a fulfillment of righteousness, but not of His own; in the baptism in the Jordan, Christ fulfilled the righteousness of everyone who would ever be born.

We can remember the importance of baptizing infants specifically by remembering the importance of the sacrament as we understand it: baptism is not a mere symbol of gaining a new life in Christ, but rather is the actual conferral of grace by which mankind is able to be a part of the Body of Christ.

These two ideas are, in a sense, two sides of the same coin. On the one side, the innocence of a newborn child shows to us the goodness that is still present in the world despite the fall of Adam and Eve. On the other side, the sacrament itself shows to us the possibilities that come into existence when we unite ourselves to Christ and ready ourselves to accept His grace, even in spite of the fall.