Wilken on Baptism in the Early Church

In Robert Louis Wilken’s The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity (Yale, 2012), he offers an interesting description of the development of early Christian practices, like baptism. He draws upon the descriptions of baptism in the Apostolic Tradition, an early third century treatise. Wilkin notes:

After a long period of instruction and moral formation, those who had been accepted for baptism were to bathe, fast, and present themselves to the bishop…. Baptism took place at daybreak. A tank or pool would be filled with water, and the catechumens (those who had been instructed) would take off their clothes to prepare for immersion.

At this period of Christian history most people who were baptized were adults. But in the midst of the description of baptism the Apostolic Tradition inserts the surprising sentence: “You are to baptize the little ones first.” Apparently infant baptism was permissible—though not conventional—and parents or guardians would speak for the children. Then came the men, followed by the women, who were to let down their hair and take off any jewelry. Nothing could be taken down into the pool. First, the bishop would anoint each person with oil, “hand over” the trinitarian rule of faith, immerse the catechumen three times, and anoint him or her with oil a second time. Then the newly baptized were clothed, and the celebration of the Eucharist followed (176).

I was interested in the fact that Wilken affirms both that baptism was practiced by the mode of immersion and that the baptismal candidates were typically adults. We see the practice of infant baptism developing, but, according to Wilkin, it was not “conventional.” Paedobaptist Protestants not only have to explain the lack of warrant for infant baptism in the NT but also in the predominant practice of Christianity in the opening centuries of its existence.

JTR

Wilken on the early Christian redefinition of "religion"

This semester, I’m having one section of NT students read Robert Louis Wilken’s The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, Second Ed. (Yale University Press, 2003).  Wilken traces the views of various Romans (including Pliny, Galen, Celsus, Porphyry, and Julian the Apostate).  Wilken stresses the fact that the Romans were a religious people (contra those who see them as irreligious and thus something of easy pickings for a movement like Christianity) but that their understanding of religion was fundamentally different than that of the early Christians.  One example of this was the Christian view of their religion as distinct from their national or ethnic identity.  Here are some of comments from his discussion of how Celsus viewed the early Christians:

Celsus sensed that Christians had severed the traditional bond between religion and a “nation” or people.  The ancients took for granted that religion was indissolubly linked to a particular city or people. Indeed there was no term for religion in the sense we now use it to refer to beliefs and practices of a specific group or people or of a voluntary association divorced from ethnic or national identity….  The idea of an association of people bound together by a religious allegiance with its own traditions and beliefs, its own history, and its own way of life independent of a particular city or nation was foreign to the ancients.  Religion belonged to a people, and it was bestowed on an individual by the people or nation from which one came or in which one lived… (pp. 124-125).

I am struck at how Christianity not only introduced a religion that transcended culture but that it was based on personal, individual beliefs and practices.  It teaches the necessity of conversion, repentance, and faith.  For those in the Western world, influenced by the success of the Christian movement, we take it for granted that this is the way religion works.  This was not, however, the way pre-Christian, pagan Romans viewed religion, and this is likely not the way people in cultures not influenced by Christianity see it.