A number of years ago I was invited to speak at a Pentecostal seminary in Germany and make the best case I could for infant baptism, which was, as you might well imagine, not just unfaithful but downright unintelligible to my audience. The fact that I represented Lutheranism did not make my task any easier, since they were acutely aware of the historic Lutheran church’s dislike of “free churches” — though I can’t say that, as an American, I felt much inclined to admire state Protestantism politically or theologically anyway.
But by this time I had learned a thing or two about voluntary or “believer’s baptism” in the churches that espouse it, so I began my talk by asking how many of the people present had been baptized in water. All of them raised their hands. Hardly surprising.
Then I asked how many had been baptized in water twice. Result: fully half of the crowd of over 100 students raised their hands.
Then I asked how many had been baptized in water three times. Four or five people raised their hands.
Four times? Just one person — who promptly explained it was because she’d “been living in America at the time.” So much for my illusion that escaping the state church/free church tension solves sacramental problems. Read More
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